His gaze slid away. He shook his head.
‘Okay,’ said Clare again. ‘But you find me if you hear anything. Just don’t knock me down again.’
‘There are people who won’t like you if you help us. Be careful, Miss.’
‘Who won’t like it?’ asked Clare. She looked at Lazarus, but it was too dark to read his expression.
‘I don’t know,’ he shrugged. ‘There are so many people who think we’re just trouble.’
‘Is that what happened with Kaiser?’ Clare asked a second time. Another car turned in to the parking lot. Clare put her hand up to shield her eyes. When she turned to Lazarus for an explanation, he had blended into the darkness cascading in from the desert. Like a ghost. The thought made her shiver.
She was glad she had left the lights on in her room; the yellow light made it seem like a haven amidst the unlit cottages. She let herself in, locking the door behind her before taking a shower.
When she was dry and dressed, she poured herself a glass of wine and made toast. Then she fanned the dockets around her on the bed and set to work. Monday’s Child: Kaiser Apollis. Nicanor Jones: Wednesday’s Child. Fritz Woestyn: Saturday’s Child. She was becoming accustomed to the unfamiliar names, but she had to reach behind the violence of their deaths to conjure an image of what they had been alive. She picked up a news clipping about the homeless soccer team. The key to the dead was in the living. To find their killer, Clare would have to resuscitate, if only for a moment, the laughing boys they had been, taking a shot at the goal posts at the end of a dusty soccer pitch.
twelve
It took Clare three cups of coffee to get going the following morning. Tamar arrived early to take her to the school. The streets were still empty, and wide – wide enough for an ox-wagon to turn. A hundred years ago, they would have been the only form of transport into the waterless interior. The dusty streets would have been the only way inland for the ingredients of civilisation – tea, coffee, sugar, alcohol, and later guns – and the route out for colonial spoils – copper, uranium, gold and diamonds. The only reason anyone would live here, Clare thought, is to take a cut of whatever passes through.
It was five past seven when Tamar stopped before the school’s locked gate. The caretaker eyed them warily, but waved when he recognised Tamar.
‘Herman Shipanga,’ Tamar said to Clare. ‘He found the body.’
‘When will the school re-open?’ Clare asked.
‘Maybe Thursday; otherwise next week. The headmaster Erasmus took it badly. I was surprised. He was such a tough guy when he was in the army.’
‘South African?’
‘Ja, he took Namibian citizenship and stayed on after they pulled out in ’94.’
‘Did many people do that?’
‘A few. Some said they loved this place. For others it was a good way of avoiding Bishop Tutu and his Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Us up north of the Orange River, we decided to just brush our little atrocities under the carpet.’
Tamar parked beneath a wind-ravaged palm tree. ‘Come this way. A path runs behind the school. This is how the boy got in.’
‘You think he was alive then?’
‘No, sorry. I’m sure not,’ said Tamar. ‘I meant the body, which Helena Kotze will confirm during the autopsy later.’
Clare picked her way down the path. It was strewn with chip packets and empty bottles. In places, used condoms had been snagged by the barbed-wire fences.
‘Prostitutes bring their clients here?’ she asked.
‘They do, but we don’t do anything unless there’s a complaint,’ said Tamar. ‘I’ve checked with the regulars. Nobody saw anything.’
‘You think that’s the truth?’
‘That I can’t say.’ Tamar stopped when the playground came into sight.
The houses had their backs to the alley. In the yards, dogs barked, chained to wires staked into the ground. Damp clothes hung on sagging lines. In the yard opposite the flapping strip of crime-scene tape, a faded-looking woman hung up her last item of washing and hitched the empty basket to her hip. A pudgy toddler tried to push his scooter through the sand.
‘Hello,’ greeted Clare, stopping at the fence.
‘What you want?’ The woman’s tone was belligerent.
‘These dogs always bark like this?’ Clare asked.
‘Only for strangers.’ The woman fished out a cigarette from her pocket.
‘Did you hear anything on Sunday night, Monday morning very early?’
‘She asked me already.’ The woman jerked her cigarette towards Tamar. ‘I was watching TV.’ She blew a smoke ring. ‘Then I was asleep.’
‘It’s important, anything unusual,’ said Clare. ‘A boy was murdered.’
‘Ja, the third one. You tell the police to do their job, so that our kids are safe instead of bothering innocent people.’ With that, the woman turned and went indoors, yelling at her child to follow her.
‘Who uses this alley?’ Clare asked Tamar.
‘People taking a short cut to the school,’ answered Tamar. ‘The rag-and-bone men used to come through here with their donkey carts.’
‘Not any more?’
‘Not as much,’ said Tamar. ‘Most of the recycling is done at the municipal site. The Topnaar carts were banned from coming into town. Hygiene reasons apparently, according to our CEO of cleansing. But they still come from time to time.’
‘My friend Goagab?’ asked Clare.
‘The very one.’
The playground stood at the top of a gentle incline. A new wooden fence sequestered the youngest children’s area. It had been decorated with a garish mural, the laughing Disney characters mocking in the childless silence.
‘That’s the swing?’ Clare pointed to the last tyre hanging from the yellow frame.
Tamar nodded. ‘And this is the gap in the fence where he got in.’
They walked together through the desolate playground. The bright-yellow paint had flaked off the links of the chain from which the seat was suspended. Clare sat down on the inverted tyre. The smell of the rubber, the metal sharp against the back of her legs, tipped her down a tunnel of memory again. It took her breath away, the immediacy of it. Herself a solemn six-year-old, swinging in the hot school playground, bare legs pushing time behind her, brown arms bending into the future. Willing herself older so that she could get away. Watched by Constance, her twin, whose face mirrored hers except in what it concealed, watching her, willing her to stay. Constance, a thought fox sniffing out Clare’s most secret desires to be the only one, whole in and of herself.
Clare stopped, aware that Tamar was looking at her. She steadied the swing and hopped off.
‘It’s got the best view,’ said Tamar. ‘That swing.’
‘You tried it?’ asked Clare, looking out at the expanse of sand circled by the dark arm of the Kuiseb River to the south.
‘I wanted to get a sense of him. Of his death. To see if there was anything left of the violence of it.’
‘And was there?’
Tamar blushed and shook her head. ‘There were some indentations in the sand, though,’ she remembered. ‘Like someone had poked it with a thin stick. Maybe a cane.’
Clare nodded and went over to the classroom block. A single window overlooked the playground. She peered into the dim classroom. The rows of miniature red desks and cheery yellow chairs were empty. A pile of marking lay abandoned on the teacher’s desk. The writing on the board caught her eye: Mrs Ruyters, Grade 1, Monday’s date.
