rubbish out with her and dropping it into the bin standing in the narrow strip of sand between her cottage and the next one. She froze, ignoring the gulls scrapping over a stolen fish head, riveted by tracks in the sand.
A single set of human footprints stopped at her bedroom window. Clare followed them to the entrance to the service alley, but the night wind had erased any marks except her own. She followed the prints back, stepping carefully so as not to disturb anything. Whoever it had been had stood there for a while. The sand was compressed, as the watcher had scuffed about to keep warm. Or get a better view. She had opened her curtains the night before, hoping that the moon would break through the fog for a while. How long had he stood there?
What had he wanted? She searched through the disturbed dreams she had had the previous night to see if one of them had been triggered by the proximity of a stranger. There were bars on the windows, but her bed was close. He could have put his hand through an opening and held it over her face, feeling her breath soft and trusting with sleep on his skin. Her throat closed at the thought of it.
Clare squatted down next to the footprints. Whoever had stood there had been wearing some kind of trainer, but, even in this sheltered spot, the dawn wind had blown a cover of sand over any detail. Clare could not even tell what size they were. There were a few old cigarette butts lying against the fence, but that would have woken her, surely, if he had smoked. She stood up and looked in at her own window, as a stranger had, at her dishevelled bed, at the book on the bedside table, at yesterday’s lace underwear abandoned on the floor.
Her breath came in a gasp, misting the glass and bringing to life the crude outline of a heart. He had stood here, breathing open-mouthed against the glass, looking in at her as she had slept, tracing with a lingering fingertip. She breathed out again, harder this time, to see if he had finished his drawing. He had. A sailor’s tattoo, it was scored through with a jagged arrow, and blood was pooled below the heart.
twenty
Mara Thomson picked up the photographs propped against her clock. Her team of homeless boys in their brand-new football kit, holding up a silver cup in triumph. The other picture was worn at the edges: Mara and her mum in the park next to the London council estate that she had survived by learning to be invisible. She pressed the photographs between her hands, bookending her journey to the point where she sat now – with Kaiser Apollis’s dead body bobbing on the periphery of her thoughts. It drove her to the kitchen in search of tea and company.
Oscar was at the kitchen table alone, uneaten cornflakes congealing in his plastic bowl.
‘You’re up early.’ Mara smiled at him.
A door slammed upstairs and the boy’s delicate throat constricted around the food. Oscar looked up. Mara did too, imagining George Meyer stepping from his other lodger’s bedroom into the chill passageway upstairs, closing the door on the woman inside: Gretchen, who always paid what she owed, exuding contempt for her landlord, for his lonely dribble of pleasure.
‘Go on,’ said Mara, breaking the spell, ‘eat your breakfast.’
Oscar, conditioned to obedience, picked up the spoon. The mournful wail of a ship’s siren came from the harbour.
‘The
Mara had taken Oscar on board once and he had seen Juan Carlos kiss her when they thought he wasn’t watching. But the boy was always watching, so he had seen Juan Carlos, Mara’s boyfriend, slip into her room in the middle of the night, and away again just before dawn.
George Meyer came into the kitchen, buttoning up his jacket. He greeted Mara and poured coffee, drinking in silence.
‘Come, Oscar,’ he said, putting down his mug and looking at his watch. Oscar reached out a tentative hand, but George thought he was reaching for his lunch and handed the boy two slices of cling-filmed white bread. The two of them stepped into the trails of fog hanging low over the desolate yard, the washing limp on the line, just as Clare Hart opened the gate.
‘Good morning, Dr Hart,’ said Meyer. ‘Can I help you?’
‘I’m here to see Mara Thomson,’ said Clare. ‘Is she in?’
‘In the kitchen,’ said Meyer, opening the door to his truck. ‘Get in, Oscar. You’re coming with me today. You can draw some more plant specimens for me. Your mother would’ve liked that.’
Oscar climbed in and placed his bag at his feet. He let his forehead rest against the cold glass. It could have been a nod.
The doorbell chimed, interrupting the tangled drift of Mara Thomson’s thoughts. She had been half-expecting Dr Hart, but seeing her on the doorstep gave her heart a little jolt.
‘Please, come in.’ She opened the door for Clare and led her down a dingy passage off the kitchen to her bedroom.
‘Sit here,’ said Mara, offering Clare the only chair and sitting on the unmade bed. A splash of sunlight framed her face, setting her apart from her anonymous bedroom. The only place that revealed any personality was the crowded table next to her bed.
‘Lazarus told me you were at the dump,’ said Mara.
Clare nodded, picking up a photograph. ‘You?’ she asked.
Mara nodded. ‘That was taken just before I came to Namibia. Me and my mum.’
You had to have a charitable eye to see the blood that linked them. Where Mara was all tawny shades and wild hair, her mother was pale, her lips as prim and pressed as her blue suit. But it was there, in both their narrow faces, the wide-set eyes.
‘My father was Jamaican,’ Mara explained. ‘But I never knew him. He was killed in a fight before I was born. So it was just me and my mum. It was hard for her when I left.’
‘And for you?’ Clare asked.
Mara sighed. ‘I expected a village of light and heat and throbbing cicadas. Instead, I got Walvis Bay. Somebody had to,’ she said, with a wry smile.
‘That bad?’ asked Clare.
‘Oh, it’s been okay. Till all this. I threw myself into my work, answered the kids’ questions, read to them and organised a soccer team. My mum clipped out the sports pages from the Sunday papers and taped soccer games and films.
There was a framed photograph of Mara with her arms entwined around a dark-haired man. ‘Your boyfriend?’ asked Clare.
‘Juan Carlos.’ Mara leant back against the wall. ‘You want me to tell you about Kaiser?’ she asked. ‘The others?’
‘Let’s start with Kaiser,’ Clare suggested.
‘What don’t you know?’ asked Mara.
Clare thought of his body on the mortuary table. No secrets there. She knew how much he weighed; that he still had a couple of milk teeth; that he had been violently sodomised, but that he had healed; that his back was covered in scars; that someone had stood so close to him that their breath had mingled. Someone had looked the bound child in the eye, cocked his gun, pulled a trigger and shot him in the face.
‘Tell me what he was like,’ said Clare. ‘What he did, where he went, who he hung out with, where he slept, what he ate.’
‘What he ate?’ repeated Mara, fiddling with the frayed hem of her hoodie. ‘He ate what he could scavenge. Meat, if he could find it.’
Clare thought of Lazarus throwing away the roll Mara had bought him, her hurt and disappointment clear in the set of her narrow shoulders. ‘Who were his friends?’ she prompted.
‘Lazarus, I suppose,’ said Mara. ‘Fritz Woestyn, too. They played soccer together, slept in a heap at the dump like stray dogs.’
‘What did he talk about?’
‘To me?’ asked Mara, looking Clare straight in the eye. ‘Not much. I know he loved his sister Sylvia and that he liked to draw.’ She was quiet. Around them, the silence of the house was overwhelming.
