Blood Rose

by Margie Orford

  There was the picture of Mara and Oscar together. Mara searching for a place to belong; the mute boy, yearning for affection. The image caught their fragility and isolation. Mara and Oscar. They had understood each other. The little boy knew that Mara would never leave her pictures, her memories.

  That is what he had been trying to make Clare understand.

  Clare put herself in the place of the silent, unnoticed boy. She pictured him opening the door off the kitchen. She saw him glide down the passage, a silent red-haired ghost, into Mara’s room. Oscar would have found her room emptied but for the photographs hidden in their secret place. He had given them to Clare, so that she would do something.

  Clare looked at them again. The last picture, the date in the corner six weeks earlier, was the photograph of Mara and her team. She had the triumphant smile of someone who has beaten the self-timer. She stood in the middle of the group, wiry-haired, boyish, wearing skinny jeans, with her arms around two boys who had turned up dead. The thought that the predator she was hunting had seen the same androgynous likeness in Mara goosefleshed Clare’s arms. She put the envelope back in her pocket.

  The water unfurled a fringe behind the boat until it came to a bobby halt next to the Alhantra. The ship was high in the water, its hold emptied of fish. A ladder lolled like a tongue down the side. At the top of it stood Ragnar Johansson. Clare swallowed the fear that had balled tight and cold in her stomach. She put her hands on the ladder and began to climb, thinking of Mara at the rubbish dump, playing soccer in the dust and broken glass. So needy of love, of acceptance. She thought of her twined around Juan Carlos and wondered if Mara had given everything of herself over to him, if he had made her pay the ultimate price to assuage his loneliness.

  Ragnar helped Clare aboard, his delight in seeing her obvious; his disappointment, when Clare told him the real purpose of her visit, equally apparent. He had half-hoped she had come to find him.

  ‘Wait here,’ said Ragnar, escorting Clare to the bridge. ‘I’ll fetch him for you.’

  Ragnar took the steps into the dim interior of the vessel. The metal door screeched when he pushed it open. ‘Juan Carlos,’ he called into the gloomy cabin. The Spaniard lay on the top bunk. He grunted, without looking down to see who it was. ‘You have a visitor.’

  Juan Carlos turned onto his back and punched the metal ceiling above him. He licked the blood welling red on his knuckles, then he swung his legs off the side of his bunk and dropped, agile as a cat, to the floor and followed Ragnar to the bridge. He stopped when he saw Clare Hart, pulling his rosary beads from his pocket and passing them through his fingers until the crucifix halted them. Mara had given them to him. If he held the wood to his nose, it whispered of the hot interior.

  ‘You know Dr Hart?’ asked Ragnar.

  Juan Carlos nodded.

  ‘Where is Mara Thomson?’ Clare dispensed with the formalities.

  ‘In London,’ said Juan Carlos, the vein at the base of his throat pulsing. He looked from Clare to Ragnar and back again. ‘She left yesterday.’

  ‘She never arrived,’ said Clare. The creak of the ship was loud in the silence that Clare let stretch between them.

  ‘Maybe she didn’t go to her mother’s house,’ Juan Carlos tried. ‘Her mother drive her crazy. So lonely.’

  ‘She didn’t check in at the airport.’ Clare stepped closer to him. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You were with her the night before she left.’ Clare kept her voice low, intimately aggressive. ‘You went home with her, made love to her, I imagine.’

  Juan Carlos shook his head. ‘No, no, I said goodbye and then I come back on board.’ He looked at Ragnar. ‘I had a pass. Twenty-four hours.’

  Clare took Juan Carlos’s hand in hers, tracing his bloodied knuckles, the scratch along his sinewy wrist, his signet ring, a silver skull and crossbones.

  ‘You didn’t take her to the airport?’

  ‘She didn’t want me to go with her,’ he said. ‘What’s happened to her? Why are you here?’ He snatched his hand back.

  ‘Why did you hit her?’ asked Clare.

  ‘I love her.’ Juan Carlos said the words with no trace of irony.

  Clare pictured the darkened parking lot. The hand raised. Mara’s smooth cheek. The ring tearing open her taut skin. The contusion that would be developing.

  ‘I was angry because she was leaving,’ Juan Carlos went on. ‘I was … I don’t know the word.’

  ‘Upset?’ said Clare.

  ‘Yes, yes, upset. I was very upset. She was too. She was sad to go from Namibia; she loved it here, her work. She was sad for saying goodbye to me too. So we fight. And then she go away.’ He looked Clare in the eye, shifting the balance of power away from her. ‘You never fight with someone before you go away?’

  ‘That is the last you saw of her?’ Clare shifted the control back. ‘In the parking lot? Where you hit her?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, leaning against the metal railing. ‘No.’

  ‘You were away from the bar a while.’ Clare listened to Juan Carlos’s beads clicking persistently in the quiet. ‘Nicolai says an hour. That’s a long time to spend in a parking lot.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ said Juan Carlos, lighting a cigarette. ‘She left. I was very angry to start with, but then I think, is she home? I want to tell her I am sorry, so I follow her. Nothing. She was walking fast when she left, so I go to her house. Her light is on and I knock on her window. She doesn’t answer. I call her phone. She doesn’t answer. I think she’s in the bath maybe. But she doesn’t want to speak to me. I leave her a message to call me, that I’m sorry. It’s cold and I don’t want to wake up the other people in the house. She’s angry. She’s still a woman, even if she looks like a boy. And I think, what more can I do? So I come back to the bar.’ He looked at Ragnar, who nodded.

  ‘What time was that?’ Clare asked.

  ‘About three, three-thirty, I suppose,’ Ragnar answered. ‘Just before I left.’

  ‘Then I get her text message to say sorry the next morning from the airport. Here, look.’ Juan Carlos pulled his phone out of his pocket, found the text message and shoved the screen in front of Clare. ‘I was already on board ship,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t see her again. I sent her a text, but nothing. It’s too late. She was on the plane already.’

  ‘You hit her because you were upset, and she forgave you that easily?’ asked Clare. ‘You’re lying, Juan Carlos.’

  ‘You see that?’ Juan Carlos flung his arm towards the desert. The wind whipped tongues of flame-coloured sand into the sky. The sandstorm was preparing to strike the bunkered town. ‘That is what we fought about,’ he spat.

  ‘I’m not following you,’ said Clare. ‘Explain.’

  ‘The east wind … it is on its way,’ Juan Carlos continued. His tone was resigned. ‘It was the same weather the weekend that we fight.’

  ‘What happened that weekend?’

  ‘She went out to the desert, and the east wind, it was blowing. She take her soccer boys – Kaiser Apollis, Lazarus Beukes, I can’t remember the other names – to camp in the Kuiseb River. It was a reward because they did well in some five-a-side tournament. We came in to port for the weekend and I phone her. She didn’t want to come back, because she always put them first. She say that’s what they needed to see: someone putting them first. But I tell her to leave them and come and see me. I say she should fetch them in the morning. I told her they were used to looking after themselves. That they would be fine. It was true.’

  Juan Carlos watched a gull turn on a column of air, mesmerised by its flight. ‘They were fine that weekend, except the one who got sick. That is what we fight about. She felt bad that she left them out there. She blames herself. We went back to fetch them the next day and they were not there. She found them later at the dump. They say they had walked back; that is why the young one, he got sick.’

  ‘And that’s why you hit her?’ asked Clare.

  �
��I didn’t want her to tell you.’ Juan Carlos looked down at his feet. ‘She wanted to come to you or the other lady cop and tell you that she had been with them all and that now they were all dead. She was crazy about it. I tell her it was just coincidence. I was saying, no, if she tells, then the police will want to question her and me. And the ship is sailing tomorrow. If the police want to ask questions, then I can’t go too and I won’t get my fishing bonus.’

  ‘How many boys did you say there were there?’ asked Clare.

  ‘Five. It was the five-a-side tournament.’

  Two. Three. Five. One with no marking. One unaccounted for. Clare calculated how long it would take to get to the dump when she was finished. Half an hour, she reckoned.

  ‘You’ll have to stay on board,’ said Clare. ‘Captain Johansson will keep you under guard.’

  ‘Why?’ Juan Carlos pleaded. ‘What have I done?’

  ‘You were the last person seen with her,’ said Clare. ‘If you’d prefer you can come ashore and go to the cells.’

  Juan Carlos paled.

  ‘I’ll need your cellphone.’ Clare held out her hand.

  ‘For what?’ asked Juan Carlos. ‘I tell you already, she text me.’

  ‘I want to track all the calls on your phone,’ said Clare. ‘Calls in and out. You can choose: I take your phone and check, or you can come in with me and I put you in the cells for refusing to cooperate.’

  Clare was bluffing, but he was a foreigner, wanting to get home. It worked. Juan Carlos handed her the phone, the fight gone out of him.

  ‘Ragnar,’ she said, ‘can you keep him under guard?’

  ‘No problem,’ said Ragnar. ‘We’re out of here soon. If you want him longer, and you’ve got grounds, I’ll have to hand him over to the Namibian police.’

  Ragnar walked with Clare to the top of the ladder. ‘You think he did something to that girl?’ he asked.

  ‘The odds are against him.’

  ‘You’re not a gambler, Clare.’

  ‘No, I’m not. But I won’t take any more chances either. If Mara knew something about what happened to those boys, then Juan Carlos might too. I’d watch him. It might be for his own sake.’ Clare stepped onto the ladder to climb down to the speedboat waiting for her. ‘Where are you headed?’ she asked.

  ‘Luanda tomorrow, after the shareholders’ inspection,’ said Ragnar. ‘Then Spain. You can imagine that I need this like a hole in the head.’

  forty-six

  It was quiet at the rubbish dump. The first flurry of trucks had come and gone and the incinerator was pluming smoke into the sky. The boys who had been so eager to greet Clare the first time she had visited slunk away. She went to the lean-to where Kaiser Apollis and Fritz Woestyn had shared a mattress. The bed was untouched, as was their meagre assortment of garments. One of the braver boys hovered in the doorway, a younger child sheltering behind him.

  Clare called him over and showed him Mara’s team photograph. ‘Where is this boy?’ she asked.

  The boy’s expression closed down like a mask. ‘Ronaldo’s gone,’ he said, his voice low.

  ‘Where?’

  The boy shrugged. ‘Miss Mara took him.’

  ‘Mara took him? Where? Where did she take him?’ Clare’s voice wavered.

  ‘To the desert.’ Emotion flickered in the boy’s eyes, but Clare could not read it. ‘He never came back again.’

  ‘Okay, where did she take him?’ Clare softened her tone.

  ‘Ask Mr Meyer,’ the boy said. ‘He knows where they go.’

  The younger boy cupped his hands and looked at Clare, eyes wide, pleading. ‘You got some change for bread, madam?’ Clare fished in her bag for money.

  George Meyer was alone in his office, his hands folded on the empty desk. His tie, knotted too tight below the Adam’s apple, bulged a fold of skin onto his collar.

  ‘What do you want this time, Dr Hart?’ he asked when Clare appeared in the doorway.

  ‘These boys. Four are dead. Now Mara’s missing.’ Clare propped the photograph against his hands. ‘Where is this one?’

  Meyer picked up the photograph and looked at the frail boy. The child’s bony ribs tented the skin on his chest. ‘Ronaldo. I haven’t seen him for a while. He was sick.’ He handed the photograph back to Clare.

  ‘Where will I find him?’ said Clare. ‘If he isn’t dead yet.’ Clare leant close to Meyer. She kept the impatience from her voice.

  ‘The only place that would take him would be the Sisters of Mercy.’

  Clare remembered Lazarus’s fear of the nuns. ‘Where are they, these Sisters of Mercy?’

  ‘Out in the Kuiseb, past the delta. The road to Rooibank. You’ll see the turn-off there.’

  ‘A convent?’ asked Clare.

  ‘It’s a hospice now. The sisters take people who no one else wants.’

  ‘And it was Mara who took him there?’

  ‘Yes. Those boys on the dump are like a pack; they look after their own. But this child was the runt of the litter. Mara was attached to him. She has a thing for underdogs. Why do you think she liked Oscar?’ Meyer’s voice snagged in his throat. ‘Or me for that matter?’

  Clare turned off the tar road, leaving the row of pylons and phone lines that trudged on to the airport. There was nothing to see but the mesmerising expanse of gravel rolling up to meet the car, then fanning dust behind her. The outcrop of black rock reared above the red sand like the exposed skeleton of some ancient animal. Clare bumped down the track towards it, surprised by the alluring green cleft in the heat-cracked surface. The convent had been built into the cool overhangs and caves that formed the oasis.

  Clare parked and walked down the swept path that led into a perfect amphitheatre. A woman came towards her, her welcoming smile a startling splash of white against her dark skin. A loose wimple covered her head, her gnarled feet secured in sturdy sandals. A Sister of Mercy.

  ‘Welcome.’ The woman took Clare’s hand between her cool palms. ‘Come out of the sun.’ She led Clare to a shaded veranda. ‘Wait here. I’ll fetch the Mother Superior.’

  Clare sat on a bench and closed her eyes, the cloistered tranquillity of the oasis working its seductive magic on her.

  ‘My child.’ A gentle voice broke the spell.

  Clare opened her eyes. A tall woman stood before her. Her habit fell from broad shoulders which looked as if they carried the weight of the Lord with ease. The hand she offered Clare was muscular, calloused. Her face had been weathered down to its essence: a beaked nose, arched iron-grey eyebrows, a tapestry of lines and crevices on the tanned skin.

  ‘I’m Sister Rosa. You’re welcome here.’ Her accented English gave an old-fashioned lilt to her words.

  ‘Good morning, Sister. I’m Clare Hart.’

  ‘You have no bags with you. I presume that you want something specific from us?’

  ‘I wanted to ask you some questions about a child who was brought here,’ Clare explained.

  ‘Follow me.’ Sister Rosa’s habit swished wide, drawing Clare into its wake. Clare followed her into a cool study. On a low table was a pile of dog-eared pamphlets about prayer and meditation, healing and love, HIV/Aids and dying with dignity.

  ‘What is it that you are looking for?’ Sister Rosa asked, sitting down.

  ‘A boy,’ said Clare. ‘I’m hoping he is here with you, alive.’

  ‘His name?’ asked Sister Rosa.

  ‘Ronaldo. That’s all I know. He doesn’t seem to have a surname.’

  Sister Rosa opened a leather-bound ledger. She flicked through it until she found the page dedicated to him. ‘Here you are.’ She pushed it over to Clare. ‘All I have about him.’

  The notes were brief: the boy’s name. His age: barely fourteen. Parents: unknown. Previous address: none. Date of arrival: four weeks earlier, just before Fritz Woestyn was found dead by the pipeline.

  ‘A young English girl, Mara Thomson, brought him here,’ said Clare.

  ‘Poor child,’ said Sister Ros
a. ‘She lost her heart to this place.’

  ‘You knew her well?’

  Sister Rosa nodded. ‘She came out here a few times.’

  ‘Four of the boy’s friends are dead. And now Mara has disappeared,’ said Clare.

  ‘Where is she?’ Sister Rosa’s voice was full of concern.

  ‘I’m trying to find that out,’ said Clare. ‘When last did you see her?’

  ‘About a week ago. She came to see this boy you seek.’

  ‘I’d like to see him. Maybe he can help.’

  ‘Come this way then,’ said the nun after a moment’s hesitation. ‘He has some lucid moments.’

  Clare followed Sister Rosa down a path shaded by tamarisks. At the end of it was a sparse row of old stone-crossed graves. Alongside these was an abundance of new mounds, lozenge-shaped heaps with wooden crosses. The newest graves had posies of veld flowers on them. The rest were bare. Sister Rosa passed the graveyard and walked towards a stone building shaded by vivid green trees.

  The interior of the building was dim and cool. An old nun, her face wrinkled as a walnut, rose as they entered. ‘The sick boy?’ Sister Rosa asked the nun. The woman pointed to an open door and they went inside.

  ‘There he is, your Ronaldo.’

  A child, impossibly thin, lay on a narrow bed with a drip attached to his arm. His breathing was laboured; the lips were cracked and dry; his skin was a dull grey. There was a photograph on the bedside table. The same boy propped against plumped pillows, a toothy grin on his gaunt face.

  ‘Mara took that the last time she was here,’ said Sister Rosa. ‘He was so pleased with it.’ She moistened a cloth under the tap and wiped the boy’s face. Ronaldo’s eyes flickered open, then closed again.