Blood Rose (34 page)

‘I’d say it’s something to do with the weapons they worked on during the war.’

‘What?’

‘You saw all that stuff, guerrilla fighters drugged and dropped from planes. People bleeding to death after being detained. Drugs that made your heart stop. Where do you think they practised?’

‘Where did they do this?’ asked Riedwaan.

‘First at Vastrap, then they had a place out in the Namib, in the Kuiseb Delta somewhere. I never went there.’

‘Would they have taken anyone else out there?’ asked Riedwaan. ‘Boys, maybe?’

She considered the possibility. ‘Not likely,’ she said, holding out her bruised hands. ‘It’s women he likes to see grovel and beg. He’s very old South Africa, so if he had boys out there it’s because there was hard labour to be done.’

‘Where would they go,’ said Riedwaan, ‘if they’ve come back? Tell me, Darlene. If they’ve come back for some of their old toys and you say nothing, you’ll have way more than a couple of homeless kids on your conscience.’

Darlene’s resistance crumbled. ‘There’s one place. I’ll show you.’ Riedwaan followed her as she walked down the passage. ‘Here.’ She pointed to an old survey map taped to the wall. ‘It’s a map of the Kuiseb before the big flood a few years ago. This was an old army site, before the river changed course after the flood.’ She pointed to a marking next to the old Kuiseb River. ‘It’s this area around the old railway line that caused all the trouble between the Topnaars and the army; it was full of !nara plants. Now it’s giving Goagab headaches. Maybe that’s where they tried to go. Some kind of sick reunion.’

‘Can I take this?’ Riedwaan asked.

Darlene nodded and Riedwaan rolled up the map.

He closed the front door behind him and heard the chain rattle as Darlene locked herself in. She must have slid down the
wall and crouched there, because he did not hear her footsteps recede.

Riedwaan’s bike surged to life. He made the short trip back to the station in record time. He closed the special ops room door and called Phiri, pleading with his acid-sounding secretary that she get him out of his weekly planning meeting. While he waited for Phiri to call back, he looked at Clare’s map of where the dead boys had been found. Two, three, five, the first one with nothing. He plotted possible trajectories, trying to figure out where they had been killed from where they had been dumped. Two of them in the east; two in the west. No-man’s-land in the middle.

‘Faizal?’ Phiri called back in five minutes.

‘Sir, I’m glad you—’

‘I had a call from someone called Van Wyk,’ Phiri cut him short. ‘He tells me that Captain Damases is off the case and that he’s in command and, thanks, but no thanks for the assistance. I then had a call from Town Councillor Goagab saying that, apart from apprehending the suspected serial killer, who seems to be some kind of desert bogeyman, the show’s over. What’ve you done this time?’

‘I’ve done my job,’ said Riedwaan.

‘That’s what I was afraid of,’ said Phiri.

‘Goagab and Van Wyk would like to see it as solved,’ said Riedwaan.

‘You and Clare don’t?’

‘No,’ said Riedwaan.

‘Despite the fact that the luminal showed positive for blood on the cart?’ Phiri asked.

‘The Topnaar could’ve moved the bodies when the boys were already dead,’ Riedwaan explained. ‘But I don’t think he killed them. You dump a body out here, and no one will find it. Vultures,
predators, heat. All you’ll have is bleached bones in a couple of weeks. I’d put money on that Topnaar moving these boys to draw attention to their murders.’

‘What for?’ asked Phiri, puzzled.

‘There’s a weapons test site that a special ops unit used to use,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Bang in the middle of the Topnaar land. I want to check it out.’

‘That’s it?’ said Phiri.

‘That, and the fact that a couple of old soldiers who used to be involved in covert stuff seem to have been around.’

‘That lot are finished, Faizal. They are all practising their golf swings in Wilderness.’

‘If your intelligence is correct, this little game is not about ideology,’ said Riedwaan. ‘This is about money.’

There was a long pause. Riedwaan waited it out. ‘What sort of weapons?’ asked Phiri. ‘What sort of money?’

‘The records are all gone,’ said Riedwaan, ‘but I’d say biochemical.’

‘I have one card left to keep you there,’ Phiri said reluctantly. ‘And that’s a bluff. You’ve got twenty-four hours.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Riedwaan, breathing a silent sigh.

‘This had better be good,’ warned Phiri. ‘If it’s not, there’s a post in Pofadder that needs filling.’

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Riedwaan cut in, ‘but I have a call waiting.’ He saw with relief that it was Clare.

‘What’ve you got?’ he asked as he switched calls.

‘Nothing yet,’ said Clare. ‘Myburgh hasn’t pitched.’

‘Wait for him,’ said Riedwaan. ‘I’m going to check out an old military site. If Karamata’s around, I’ll get him to take me.’

‘Good plan,’ said Clare. ‘Elias knows the area well. What did Darlene tell you?’

‘That her ex-husband’s been back.’

‘Surprise, surprise,’ said Clare. ‘With those bruises, who else? You think he’s been killing these boys?’

‘Why come all the way to Walvis Bay to kill street children?’ said Riedwaan. ‘There are enough in Cape Town.’

‘Another coincidence?’ Clare asked.

‘That’s what’s bugging me. We’ll discuss it over dinner.’

Clare was watching the fishermen, their rods sticking up like insects’ feelers above the shoreline, when the battered red bakkie drew up next to her. She got out, the sand blowing off the desert stinging her calves. Tertius Myburgh unlocked the door and she slid in next to him, holding the door against the wind.

‘Here,’ said Myburgh, pushing an envelope across the cracked seat. He was tense; his hands were shaking.

Dr Clare Harriet Hart.
Her full name in black ink: like an accusation. Clare opened it. Five pages of Myburgh’s dense, looped cursive. Clare spread out the pollen report on her lap.

‘There’s the list,’ said Myburgh. ‘
Tamarix. Trianthema hereroensis
,
Acanthosicyos horridus.
’

‘What does that tell me?’ asked Clare.

‘The
Tamarix
and the
Hereroensis
grow in the Kuiseb River. This is where you’ll find them.’ He pulled out a map and sketched out two intersecting arcs. ‘This section is where they overlap.’

‘That’s a huge area,’ said Clare. The flicker of hope disappeared into the empty wastes that Myburgh’s long, tapering fingers indicated.

‘Well,’ said Myburgh, ‘you can cut out this bit. If they’d been near the mouth, you’d have found
Sarcocornia
, a stubby little succulent. You’ll have seen fields of it beyond the lagoon. Nothing on them. They didn’t even walk through it.’

‘So they could’ve been anywhere in this area, except for this two-kilometre sliver near the shore?’

‘No.’ Myburgh looked around the parking lot before continuing: ‘There’s the
Acanthosicyos horridus
, the !nara plants that the Topnaar harvest. These grow in restricted areas along the vegetative dunes. It looks like a melon. Sweet, nutritious, full of fluid. Just what you need in a desert, but they only grow a few kilometres inland.’

‘So that restricts us to this area, more or less?’ asked Clare, pointing to the area of the Kuiseb Delta and just beyond.

Myburgh nodded.

‘That’s still a huge area.’ Clare turned to look at the ocean of sand, rolling far beyond the horizon.

‘Your needle in a haystack,’ said Myburgh. ‘I’ve got it for you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘
Myrtaceae
:
Eucalyptus
.’ Myburgh’s dark eyes gleamed as he held out the branch to her: dark, pungent foliage, pale bark. ‘The ghost gum,’ he said. ‘An Australian, alien. It would’ve had to have been planted near a water source.’

‘How sure are you that you’re right?’ asked Clare.

‘There’ll only be a couple of spots in the Namib with this combination of plants.’

‘So where do I start?’ said Clare.

‘With the gum, anywhere where there was human habitation,’ said Myburgh, unfolding an aerial photograph. ‘I looked and the only places I could find gum trees were these: two tourist camps and this old military area.’

Clare thought of Riedwaan’s proposed destination. ‘That’s in the middle of nowhere,’ she said, the puzzle pieces in her hand; the composite they made as shifting as the mirage dancing on the desert.

‘It’s the best I can do, I’m afraid,’ Myburgh said, ‘but there’s more.’ He handed Clare a slim journal, dark blue with embossed initials on it: VM.

Clare opened it. ‘Whose is this?’

‘Virginia Meyer’s,’ said Myburgh. ‘It’s all that was left of her work.’

Clare flipped through the book, glancing at the pages filled with spidery notes, the whimsical drawings of plants, birds and dunescapes so like her mute son’s. Outside, the rising wind moaned around the car.

‘I don’t understand.’ Clare looked up at Myburgh.

‘I tested her diary for pollen,’ he said, ‘and it was a match. They were in the same place, Virginia and those boys.’

Clare’s face remained expressionless.

‘She was on her way to see me when the accident happened,’ Myburgh explained. ‘She’d been dead twelve hours when Spyt found them. Oscar couldn’t loosen his seatbelt, so he was trapped, covered in her blood and flies. Spyt managed to resuscitate the child and get him help. And he brought me this.’ Myburgh gestured to the journal. ‘It had been hidden under Oscar’s seat.’

‘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.’

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.