Blood Rose

by Margie Orford

‘Why?’ said Clare.

  ‘Virginia wasn’t where she should have been.’ Myburgh must have crossed his Rubicon of doubt. When he spoke, his voice was quiet. ‘It was the only bit of her work recovered after the accident. Everything else was gone. No one would’ve found them if Spyt hadn’t come across them. She was on a side road out of the Kuiseb.’

  ‘What was she doing there?’

  ‘Virginia loved the Namib,’ said Myburgh, ‘and was enraged with the South African army and what they’d done to it. I always thought she was paranoid, seeing conspiracies everywhere. She was obsessed, Dr Hart, convinced that her beloved desert had been contaminated by the army. She kept on trying to expose what had happened, what she was convinced was happening again. She would’ve done anything to stop it.’

  ‘Contaminated with what?’ asked Clare. ‘The South Africans left more than ten years ago.’

  ‘They took their hardware,’ said Myburgh, ‘but they left some damaged people behind, as scarred and littered as the desert.’

  ‘What had they been testing?’ asked Clare.

  ‘Overtly, the usual heavy weapons,’ said Myburgh. ‘Virginia was convinced there had been covert bio-chemical testing. Diseases, viruses, poisons that had leached into the underground water, and driven the Topnaars from their own land. Just before the accident, she phoned me to say there was something else, something much worse. She was afraid to tell me over the phone.’ Myburgh looked away before continuing: ‘She said the water table would be contaminated because of what they’d done.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘Virginia was so paranoid, Dr Hart. It seemed easier at the time just to leave it.’

  Clare thought of Fritz Woestyn, his lifeless body propped on the water pipeline, the artery pumping water into Walvis Bay, the lifeblood of the marooned town. ‘Contaminated with what?’ she asked.

  ‘It didn’t make sense to me then, still doesn’t, because she said it in Afrikaans, but it stuck because she never spoke Afrikaans. She said it was the language of oppression.’ Myburgh paused. ‘She told me she was vasgetrap. Trapped fast. At least that is what I thought she said.’

  ‘Vasgetrap, vasgetrap,’ Clare repeated the syllables to herself. The word conjured up the quiet house in McGregor, the den with the elephant’s foot. Mrs Hofmeyr with her iron-grey hair talking about her dead husband, her years as an army wife. ‘She didn’t say Vastrap, did she?’ Clare asked.

  ‘Vastrap, yes, that was it.’ Myburgh looked at her. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It was a military base in South Africa, a secret weaponstesting site in the middle of the Kalahari Desert.’

  A horrible image was forming in Clare’s mind. She turned back to the last page of Virginia Meyer’s diary. The digits 2, 3 and 5 were ringed in red. Clare looked at Myburgh’s beaked profile.

  ‘Tertius,’ she asked, ‘what do the numbers 2, 3 and 5 mean?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  ‘Stop lying to me,’ said Clare.

  ‘Well, 235 is nothing on its own,’ said Myburgh, his voice a monotone, his eyes trained on the heaving sea. ‘Except with uranium. U-235 is an isotope. Highly enriched uranium. It’s what you use for a nuclear weapon.’

  Myburgh looked Clare in the eye for the first time, his knuckles were white on the steering wheel.

  ‘That’s what she meant about the desert being contaminated, Dr Hart. Those boys and Virginia Meyer, they were in the same place and now they’re all dead.’

  fifty

  The sound of the off-road bike was a flinty staccato across the plain. Riedwaan stopped to get his bearings. He had gone to find Karamata, but there had been no sign of him at his desk, and Riedwaan hadn’t looked for him for long. He preferred being alone. The sun bellied orange over the sea as he passed the place where Lazarus Beukes had been found, but the shallow valley was a dead end, blocked by a wall of sand. So he left the relative sanctuary of the dry Kuiseb River behind him, trusting that his cheap Chinese GPS would see him through the expanse of desert.

  The disused railway track, a spine from which the desert fell away, soft as a woman’s flesh, came from the north, running aground in an ocean of red sand. Riedwaan checked the coordinates against the GPS. They told him the same thing as his old survey map: he needed to be on the other side of this waterless strait. Out here, the temperature would strip a body of its cloak of skin, hair and flesh. In weeks, he’d be nothing but white bones and a skull staring up at the blue vault of the sky. Riedwaan calculated the descent of the first dune and the elevation of the second and pitched over the edge, opening the throttle to the full, praying that the momentum would carry him to the top. It did, but all he had in front of him was another dune, then another.

  Again Riedwaan took his bearings, trying not to picture his own demise. He made himself go on, following, more or less, the tracks of a vehicle that had preceded him. Three more dunes, and the railway reappeared, its ironwood sleepers scattered like matchsticks in the sand. A kilometre ahead was his destination. He could just make it out: some scrubby bushes and a gnarled eucalyptus tree next to two weathered huts. Riedwaan rode alongside the railway line, stopping under the tree, a ghostly sentinel in the dunes. Apart from the rattle of seeds feathered across the sand by the east wind, the place was silent.

  The ground fell away from the huts towards two concretecapped mounds. They could have been a century old, or a single decade. The tracks he had followed were neither, thought Riedwaan, bending down to get a closer look at the compacted earth. A heavy vehicle, a Land Rover perhaps, had passed through recently. An empty bottle of brandy lay discarded against the pale tree trunk. Scattered near it were a few cigarette butts. Riedwaan bent down to look. Two different brands.

  It was cooler in the shade, but that did not account for the chill that played over Riedwaan’s skin. A grimy white T-shirt was snagged against the bole of the tree, sweat stains indelible under the arms. The Pesca-Marina logo was only half-hidden by the shovel lying on top of it. Riedwaan stood where the men must have stood, the image forming as crisp as a nightmare in his mind. The back door of a vehicle would have opened, releasing the men’s hurriedly collected human cargo – five boys, hired to harvest a deadly crop planted in another lifetime. Riedwaan lit a cigarette, imagining how their presence would have absorbed the vestiges of warmth from the night air.

  The brandy, neat, burning down the throat of one man, then the other. Impossible to say how many, but Riedwaan would put his money on two. The men watching the activity below them would have been accustomed to the backs of others bending rhythmically to their wills.

  For the boys, coming out here must have seemed safer than standing against a wall, legs astride, for a paunchy truck driver or a sailor with a knife. They wouldn’t question a hundred for the night. Sickness or fear might have tightened the chest of one boy, hot from digging. The youngest boy slipping off his shirt, the moon sculpting his slender torso, as he stopped to rest. But when he caught the man’s eye on him, as cold as a switchblade, he would have bent down again. And dug.

  Riedwaan’s mouth was dry from the heat. He fetched his water from the bike and tried to phone Clare. No reception under the tree, so he walked towards the shelters. One bar, he noted. The door to the first hut was ajar. Two bars. He dialled, ducking inside to avoid the sun.

  The blow came without warning. For a brief moment before silence blossomed from agony, Riedwaan heard it: the quiet crack of his own skull.

  fifty-one

  There was no one at the station when Clare got back from her meeting with Tertius Myburgh. She closed the door to the special ops room and sat down at her desk. She dialled Riedwaan’s number. Nothing. A flash on her screen told her she had a call waiting.

  ‘Dr Hart?’ It was Karamata.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘George Meyer’s son is missing.’

  ‘Where from?’ Clare felt faint at the inevitability of it, her own failure to protect the child.

  ‘Kuisebmond beach.’ Clare knew the beach. It was a crescent of grey, litt
ered sand near the harbour.

  ‘I’ll come over.’ Clare cut the connection, but not the image of cold water creeping over the face of a lonely, wide-eyed boy.

  She drove fast along the beach road, which glistened like a strip of kelp stranded by a receding tide on the high-water mark. Karamata was there with a couple of uniformed officers. George Meyer stood with his hands thrust into his pockets, his shoulders hunched. The vehicles blocked off the area of beach where the boy had been. The wind was too strong for tape.

  ‘He must’ve been here,’ said Karamata, beckoning Clare over.

  The yellow rod was wedged into the ground. Next to it was Oscar’s khaki bag. The bottle of water was still full. A half-eaten sandwich was wedged in next to his bait. Peanut butter and Marmite.

  ‘You didn’t see him again, did you?’ Meyer asked Clare. The question was framed around the hopes to which the parents of missing children cling. But with George Meyer, it was a formality. Hope was absent.

  ‘I didn’t see him,’ said Clare, her chest tight with sadness.

  ‘He was upset this morning after you were there. He was upset that Mara had left. I thought maybe he’d tried to find you.’ Meyer moved out of the way of a wave that reached up the beach. It retreated, leaving a fringe of foam. ‘He liked you, Dr Hart. He thought you’d be able to find Mara and bring her back.’

  Clare saw Oscar’s face before her, eyes accusing at her inability to understand his mute explanations. ‘When did he disappear?’

  ‘When I got home at lunch time, he was gone. His rod was gone too, so I came looking for him at the beach. I found the bike and the rod. No Oscar.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have gone off somewhere?’

  ‘Not without his bike,’ Meyer said.

  ‘That taxi driver saw him here earlier.’ Karamata gestured towards a man leaning against a battered red Toyota, talking to a couple of uniformed officers.

  ‘The sea’s been rough today,’ said Meyer. ‘He couldn’t swim.’

  Rough and cold, Clare thought. The Atlantic was not a place for a little boy alone.

  ‘They’re going to put a radio alert out,’ Meyer said.

  ‘And we’ll search the harbour,’ Karamata added. ‘Why don’t you go home, Mr Meyer? Maybe he’s been somewhere and he’ll turn up.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Meyer looked at the keys in his hand as if he had never seen them before.

  ‘I’ll take you back.’ Karamata pointed to the police car. Meyer walked towards it, obedient as a child.

  ‘Where was he?’ Clare asked Karamata.

  ‘At work all the time. I checked. They were doing an audit, so he was with the accountant. There will be a search, so there won’t be anyone at the station for a while.’

  ‘Did you speak to Captain Faizal?’ Clare asked. ‘I thought he’d arranged with you to take him to the Kuiseb Delta.’

  ‘He’s said nothing to me.’

  ‘I can’t get hold of him,’ said Clare.

  ‘I hope he doesn’t go out there alone,’ said Karamata. ‘It looks so easy on the map, but once you’re in the desert a map’s useless, especially with this east wind.’

  ‘Don’t count on it, Elias,’ said Clare. She knew Riedwaan too well to assume he’d do the sensible thing. She tried his number again. ‘Caller out of range,’ said the electronic voice. ‘Try again later.’

  ‘I have a sea search,’ said Karamata. ‘All I need is a desert search during a sandstorm.’

  With an effort of will, Clare put her anxiety about Riedwaan on hold. ‘You’ve spoken to Gretchen, I presume?’ she asked.

  ‘I did,’ said Karamata. ‘On the phone. She said she was in the bath when Oscar left the house.’

  ‘That polite?’ Clare raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Not actually,’ said Karamata, with a rueful smile. ‘She told me to fuck off, that he wasn’t anything to do with her and that she was busy.’

  ‘Charming.’ Clare looked out at the choppy sea. ‘He was a little boy to be out fishing alone.’

  ‘Nobody’s child,’ said Karamata. ‘There are so many of them here, not all of them poor.’

  ‘Who uses this beach, Elias?’

  ‘The Chinese come and fish here. Couples with nowhere else to go. Kids come to fish. No one else really.’ Karamata’s phone was ringing. ‘I must go and speak to the divers. They’re here.’

  Clare picked her way to the last rocks on the small headland that protected the harbour and looked back at the beach where Oscar had left his rod and his frugal picnic. Litter circled the small bay, nudging against the man-made promontory where she stood. The first diver splashed off the bobbing rescue vessel. If the boy had drowned, then his body would have been sucked down and flung up here, against these rocks. She worked her way back, her heart beating fast when she spotted a red smudge, but it was an old piece of T-shirt.

  A wave ran high up the beach, obliterating all trace of Oscar and those who had been looking for him. Half an hour later and nobody would have known where he had stood and cast his line. Clare looked up the beach towards the road. The sand behind where Oscar’s things had been had not yet been smoothed by the water. She walked towards his last-known location. Several mussel shells lay crushed in the disturbed sand. It looked as though a vehicle had stopped right behind where Oscar had been standing. It had stopped and then reversed and gone back onto the road.

  Clare picked up a fragment of shell.

  Oscar wouldn’t have gone swimming and he hadn’t fallen in. They weren’t going to find Oscar’s body here. She felt it with chilling certainty. Someone had picked him up and taken him elsewhere. Someone he had had to obey. Clare thought of the portraits hanging in her gallery. Each had slipped from life without a ripple.

  Fritz Woestyn.

  Nicanor Jones.

  Kaiser Apollis.

  Lazarus Beukes.

  Mara Thomson. A girl, but so similar. The slenderness of the limbs, the brown skin, the faces planed and angled.

  Now Oscar.

  The coda to this symphony of pain. Small, russet-haired, pale … he struck the wrong note.

  Clare dropped her head into her hands and imagined herself sliding under the translucent skin of the child, the silhouette of evil taking shape in her mind. She pictured him watching Mara pack, holding the break in his heart in, locking away this new loss with the loss of his mother. And then before the allotted, dreaded time of the taxi, before the final flurry of packing and goodbye, a gun in her back. The middle of the night. The shadow-man removing his last witness. Mara’s room brutally emptied of everything except the secret pictures that she and Oscar shared.

  Mara hurtling towards the desert, her life receding with the grey fishing village sinking behind the horizon. Oscar shrinking back, unheard, unseen, except for the crack in the upstairs curtain. And now he was gone, the witness. Like the others. Killed not for the way they looked, but for what they knew.

  Clare looked out to sea. A fishing ship, laden and low in the water, made her way between the buoys towards the quay where the Alhantra had docked to be loaded. One last shot, thought Clare, at finding where they had all connected.

  She parked outside the Pesca-Marina factory as the shiftchange siren went, the silver fish in the logo catching the light. She slipped in unnoticed through the stream of workers on their way out. On the wharf, front-end loaders scurried back and forth, heavy with stacked boxes. She went past the men concentrating on offloading the catch and slipped on board. There was no sign of Ragnar Johansson on the bridge, so she went below in search of Juan Carlos.

  The second-last cabin door was closed. There was no answer when she knocked, but, to her surprise, when she tried the handle it opened. She went in and sat down to wait. It didn’t take long for the door handle to turn again. Juan Carlos closed the door behind him, the expression on his handsome face unreadable.

  ‘Dr Hart,’ he said. ‘Again.’ The hum of the engines preparing to sail seemed to have restored his confidence.

  ‘You�
�re free to move about?’ Clare asked.

  ‘Change of command.’

  ‘I need to know where Mara went camping,’ said Clare.

  ‘You didn’t get a warrant?’ Clare’s beat of hesitation was enough for him. ‘What do you have to trade?’

  ‘You’re free to go,’ Clare bluffed. ‘No word to the police in Spain, so no trouble when you dock.’

  ‘I’m innocent?’

  ‘Not the word I’d have chosen,’ said Clare. She took out her map. The coordinates Myburgh had given her needed to be narrowed, and fast.

  She spread it out in front of Juan Carlos. ‘Show me.’ The tone of her voice brooked no argument.

  ‘Here. This is where Mara went.’ Juan Carlos took the pen from her hand and marked a place with a sure, black X alongside a railway line. An arc of dunes had moved across it, severing the dry tributary from the rest of the delta.

  Clare thought of Lazarus Beukes, the no-entry signs shining in the dark. She had been there, or near there, before. The hairs on her arms stood on end. ‘What happened there with Mara?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing. I’ve told you. She went with those street boys of hers. She loved them.’ He smiled a slow, smug smile. ‘But she loved me more. Once I show her how.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Clare did not like him so close to her. He made her skin crawl.

  ‘I told you, I got a pass, so I call her and tell her to meet me. She left them out there. Her boys. It was late. We met. We made love. She go back to fetch them, but they were gone. She found them at the dump again. They say they walked.’

  ‘All of them? Were they all there?’

  Juan Carlos looked down and said nothing. Clare waited.

  ‘Okay, okay, all except for one,’ he said at last. ‘He only turn up later … dead.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me earlier? Why didn’t Mara say anything?’

  ‘She was too ashamed. She was afraid. She say she should have stayed with them. Take your pick.’

  ‘Which one’s your choice?’ asked Clare.

  ‘It was me or them.’ His eyes glinted with the subtle charge of sexual power.