Blood Rose (26 page)

‘Thanks for letting me know you were here,’ she said, with her mouth full.

‘I did try. Check your phone.’

Clare pulled it out of her pocket. ‘Damn. So you did. It’s been on silent.’

‘What are you doing here?’ asked Riedwaan.

‘I couldn’t sleep,’ said Clare.

‘You could’ve fooled me.’

‘In bed I couldn’t,’ she said.

‘So you came in here?’ asked Riedwaan. ‘Odd choice for soothing company.’

‘I’m going crazy with them.’ Clare gestured to the boys on the wall. ‘Just as I feel I have something, it vanishes like water on hot sand. Have you seen Captain Damases?’ she asked.

‘Not yet. Only Van Wyk, I think it is. He’s about as warm as a KGB agent.’

‘That’s Van Wyk for you,’ said Clare. ‘I don’t think South Africans are at the top of his hit parade. Did you meet Elias Karamata?’

‘Looks like a prizefighter? He said I’d find you in here.’

‘Oh God, I suppose everyone knows I’ve been sleeping here.’

‘Pretty much.’ Riedwaan walked over to the displays, concentrating in turn on each of the four clusters, absorbing what Clare and Tamar had set out.

‘I’m impressed,’ he said. ‘Fritz Woestyn, the one without a number carved on his chest, he was the first one?’

‘Yes. We’ve been thinking of him as Number 1. Head shot, but not as close as the others. No tattooing that the pathologist could see. So definitely more than two, three metres. The others are all close-up.’

‘Show me where he was found.’

Clare pointed to a red pin on the aerial map. ‘His body was
dumped here, but it wasn’t where he was shot.’ Riedwaan was standing close to her, raising the tiny hairs on her arms.

‘Some guys checking a fifty-kilometre stretch just happened to find him?’ asked Riedwaan.

Clare nodded. Riedwaan thought of the vast desert he had just passed through.

‘You could go missing in this desert and not be found for weeks,’ Clare said, reading his mind. ‘The chances of the boys’ discovery were so slim that whoever shot him probably calculated that he wouldn’t be found until he’d been reduced to just another heap of bones. Or they dumped him where they knew he’d be found.’

‘The others?’ asked Riedwaan. ‘Jones, Apollis, Beukes. Run me through them.’

‘The killings get more elaborate after that first one. Nicanor Jones with the 2; Kaiser Apollis had a 3 on his chest. Then a skip to Lazarus Beukes with a 5.’

‘Where’s your Number 4?’

‘Alive and well, I hope. No one’s been reported missing.’ Clare fanned out a series of close-ups: the faces, their mutilated chests, the missing finger joints on the left hands. ‘It’s the same person killing them,’ she said. ‘We don’t have a bullet from each scene, but it looks like the same calibre gun and the same rope – nylon washing line – on the wrists. Same victim profile, too. Marginal boy, fifteen or so, fey, small, nobody to look for him. Also, there’s a time thing. It looks like the murders were done on or around a Friday night, except for Lazarus. At least close to the weekend.’

‘And your man?’ asked Riedwaan. ‘Where does he hang out?’

‘This is the only place I can fix him,’ said Clare, pointing to the first red pin on the map.

‘The takeaway place at the lagoon?’ said Riedwaan.

‘Lover’s Hill. They went there. Well, I know for sure that Kaiser Apollis was there. The cook saw him on the Friday evening he was killed. He ordered some food and then got into a car a few metres down the road.’

‘Okay,’ said Riedwaan. ‘I’m with you. What happens?’

‘This guy picks them up somewhere, probably in town where it wouldn’t be noticed. Then he drives out, dropping them off to get something to eat. The cook noticed Kaiser because it was quiet, but otherwise the boys would be in and out. Invisible. Then they go outside, walk down the road a bit and get back into the car and they drive out into the desert.’

‘There’s no sign of recent sexual assault, is there?’ said Riedwaan, checking the post-mortem results.

‘No. Maybe he’s impotent. Maybe he’s a romantic. Maybe they laugh at him, threaten him. Maybe he gets his kicks in his own special way.’

‘By shooting them?’ asked Riedwaan.

‘Maybe.’

‘So who moves them?’

‘Maybe I’m looking at this all wrong …’ Clare’s voice trailed off as she stared at the accumulating bank of information. ‘Maybe he meets someone out there. They both do something together ...’

‘What’s he like, this romantic of yours?’

‘He’d have to be a loner, maybe a shift worker, so no one notices late comings and goings.’ Clare finished her coffee. ‘A textbook killer for a textbook case.’

Riedwaan walked over to the window and looked out over the flat, featureless town. ‘How do people get around this place?’ he asked.

‘On foot or bike, if you’re poor,’ said Clare. ‘A 4x4 if you’re somebody.’ She cocked her head and looked at her display. ‘He’d
have a car, or access to a car. Enough money to lure these kids and then buy them food. Something to drink. I’d put his age at around thirty-five, forty. Maybe a bit more. He might be someone the kids think they could take advantage of, but they’d go with just about anyone with a bit of cash.’

‘Even after a couple of them have been killed?’ asked Riedwaan. ‘It must seem like someone they can trust, someone they don’t expect to be a danger.’

‘I agree,’ said Clare. ‘Someone they wouldn’t see as a threat. The car will also look like everyone else’s here.’

‘White double cab, if what I’ve seen is anything to go by,’ said Riedwaan. ‘What would’ve triggered this spree?’

‘Something unravels, the guy ropes of self-control snap,’ said Clare. ‘Stress does it usually. And there you go: a killer on the loose.’ She looked at the pictures of Lazarus’s bloodied face. ‘Whoever it is knows how to seduce. There’s no sign of a struggle and such an intimate death. Blood would splatter on your hands and face as you fire. Quite a sophisticated rush in a way, the symbolism of it: the union, the consummation. Weird.’

‘With you involved it’s going to be weird, Clare,’ said Riedwaan, looking at the pictures of a dismembered hand. ‘You’re sure it’s someone local?’

‘Whoever’s doing this knows this place very well. He wouldn’t be able to be invisible otherwise.’ She paced up and down in front of the pinboard, stopping in front of the photograph of Kaiser Apollis’s shrouded figure. ‘My profile’s still off-kilter,’ she said.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘The display aspect of the murders. Herman Shipanga went on about bodies being exhibited as a kind of warning. It’s not just the rush that comes with pulling the trigger. Our killer’s trying to communicate something too, through the bodies. Out in the Kuiseb, where Lazarus’s body was found, you had to ask how
he got to be there exactly, where Chanel would find him. I keep thinking: someone knows this place, knows where people will stop in this vast desert, knows its secrets and can work with them. I wonder—’ The door swung open, interrupting Clare. It was Tamar. ‘Did you sleep well, Riedwaan?’ she asked. ‘Comfortable where we put you?’

‘Good bar, good bed, good food. Thanks.’

Clare had hardly noticed Tamar come in. ‘What
is
this?’ she said, almost to herself. She was rifling through the photographs, pulling out the one Tamar had taken of the alleyway behind the schoolyard where Kaiser Apollis had been found. She spun around. ‘Riedwaan?’

‘Morning to you too, Clare,’ said Tamar.

Riedwaan peered at the photograph. ‘Looks like dirt to me,’ he said, puzzled, passing it to Tamar.

‘It’s shit,’ said Clare.

‘What did you say?’ Riedwaan looked at Clare, startled. She saved swearing for emergencies. A grainy crime-scene photo was not an emergency.

Clare strode over to the desk, opened the interview file and flipped through the transcripts. ‘Remember, what you asked me, Riedwaan?’

‘Which question?’ he said. ‘There were twenty or more.’

‘About how people get around?’

‘Yes, by bike, foot, car … it was just a check.’

‘Okay then,’ said Clare. ‘Look at this.’ She brandished a carefully typed page. ‘Tamar, remember, you said the recyclers use the alley behind the school.’

‘They do,’ said Tamar.

‘And that woman we talked to, the one hanging up her washing, said she heard nothing?’

‘I remember.’

Clare walked back to the pinboard. ‘When I came back with Helena Kotze after we found Lazarus, I saw a family going home on their donkey cart. I didn’t hear them until I was practically upon them. You wouldn’t really hear a cart if you were inside and the television was on.’ She pointed to a small heap of dung in the photograph. ‘Look here,’ she said. ‘A pile of donkey shit, right by the opening of the fence. They must’ve passed right here and we never thought to question them.’

Riedwaan was still confused. ‘Who uses donkey carts?’

‘The Topnaars,’ said Clare. ‘The desert people. Their settlements are marked on the aerial survey photos. Here.’ She gestured to a series of little black crosses. ‘If you look closely, you’ll see their shanties. Hot as hell they are. I just didn’t put recyclers and the Topnaars together. But of course it would be them, scavenging bits of scrap for the cash even they need to survive.’

‘It’s so risky,’ said Riedwaan.

Clare turned to look at him. ‘Not if you’ve got nothing left to lose.’

‘Your invisible man?’ Tamar said to Clare. ‘A Topnaar?’

‘Who else moves with such ease through the Namib?’

‘A desert nomad doesn’t fit with your profile,’ Riedwaan noted. ‘They’re as poor as the dead kids.’

‘No,’ said Clare, ‘but surely they’d know who’s moving in and out of the Kuiseb. They’d see.’

‘Wouldn’t they tell?’ asked Riedwaan.

‘Not necessarily,’ said Tamar thoughtfully. ‘They’re a marginal people, pushed further and further out. Persecuted by the army, silenced by this administration that wants them all settled and schooled and controllable. The Topnaars have a couple of hundred years’ worth of knowing that the underdog gets the blame. If they found a body, they’d want it as far away from their land as possible.’

‘So they wouldn’t want to attract attention.’ Riedwaan was looking at the map.

‘Tertius Myburgh mentioned an old man called Spyt to me. Virginia Meyer used to work with him, because he knew the desert like the back of his hand. Do you know him?’ Clare asked Tamar.

‘I know of him,’ said Tamar. ‘He’s very secretive, avoids people like the plague. He doesn’t speak.’

‘Give me a straight-down-the-line gangster any day,’ muttered Riedwaan.

‘I think we should try to talk to him,’ said Clare. ‘Stupid of me, not to have gone out there before.’

‘We can give it a shot,’ said Tamar sceptically. ‘We’ve got to show Riedwaan around anyway, so we’ll kill two birds this way. I’ll get Van Wyk and Elias. Meet you outside in five minutes?’

Clare nodded.

‘Your profile doesn’t fit,’ Riedwaan said again as Tamar left the room.

‘What if there are two people involved?’ asked Clare. Her voice was very quiet.

Riedwaan pulled on his jacket, suddenly chilled. ‘Two?’ he prompted.

‘One who kills.’ Clare tapped her pen on the window as she stared towards the desert. ‘For whatever reason. And another who displays.’

‘Spyt’s going to hear us long before we’re even close,’ said Elias Karamata. ‘We won’t find him unless he wants to be found.’

Clare, Riedwaan, Tamar and Karamata had left Van Wyk at the station. Claiming that he wanted to see what else the South African experts had missed was his tactful way of putting it. After showing Riedwaan where the bodies had been found, they had gone from one Topnaar settlement in the Kuiseb to the next, each one drier and dustier than the last. An old woman, her weathered skin the same texture as her cloak, had said she knew where Spyt lived. She had led them through a lattice of desiccated tributaries to a desolate refuge.

‘It looks as if he lives here alone,’ said Clare. Unlike the other settlements, there were no dogs, no goats and no bug-eyed children staring at them from the inside of tin huts.

The camp was well hidden, backed up against a protrusion of black rock. Rusting lumps of metal and old tyres lay around between the little pyramids of bottles and old tins.

‘Bully beef,’ Tamar said, picking up an old tin. ‘Old army issue. This must be twenty years old.’

Nothing moved on the black rocks. High above them a lone vulture drifted in the wash of blue sky. The Namib’s eyes and ears, its silent witness. Like Spyt, Clare thought, hidden in a place that even his practised eyes would struggle to find.

‘
Eitsma miere
, Spyt,’ Tamar Damases called in Nama, the
ancient mother tongue that she and Spyt shared. Her voice echoed off the rocks, the only reply.

The old woman led them around the side of the rocky protrusion to a small cave. A ring of stones circled the shelter, demarcating the point at which the desert ended and Spyt’s dwelling began. A fireplace marked the epicentre of the domestic circle, the coals half-covered with sand.

‘Still hot,’ said Riedwaan, putting his hand close. The back of Clare’s neck prickled as if she were being watched. She looked about; there was nothing but a lizard sunning itself on a rock.

A shallow oval of bark had been abandoned alongside the cave. Karamata picked it up and moved it back and forth between his hands, winnowing the wild grass seed Spyt must have harvested from a termite heap. He blew away the husks, and the breeze caught them, dust-devilling them across the sand. The chaff landed in the fireplace, the coals flaring briefly. ‘You make pap with these,’ he explained to Clare and Riedwaan. ‘Spyt has to eat food that’s as soft as a baby’s because of his mouth.’

‘His name means regret in Afrikaans,’ said Riedwaan. ‘What happened to him?’

Tamar asked their wizened guide, who burst into an animated tale in Nama. Clare could not understand a word, but the lilt of the tonal language, punctuated by a complex series of clicks, carried her with the emotional flow of the tale.

Tamar translated: ‘She says that when he was a toddler his mother went to work on a farm on the edge of the Namib. Spyt ate caustic soda and it dissolved the inside of his mouth. That’s why his mother took him back into the Namib. They lived together, just the two of them until she died. Then he lived alone. It was his mother who taught him how to hunt, how to hide.’