Blood Rose

An hour later, he was through the border and driving through the emptiness of southern Namibia. Marooned in the desert, a thousand kilometres northwest, was Walvis Bay.

thirty-five

In the cool sanctuary of his laboratory, thirty kilometres north of Walvis Bay, Tertius Myburgh picked up a cloth and wiped down his microscope, though his equipment was immaculate. His prepared solutions waited for him, labelled, ordered. His heart beat faster. It always did before he plunged into the secret world of plants. He set to work on the pathetic bundles Clare Hart had brought. The dead boys’ shoes were covered in pollen. Invisible hieroglyphs that mapped the journeys they had made.

He prepared his first slide and placed it on the stage, leaning in to the eyepiece and adjusting the lens to bring the grains of pollen into focus. He exhaled. They floated before him, the cellulose grains that carried the fragile male plants to a waiting female, if there was one. More often, they were stranded on un-receptive surfaces. Like a murdered boy’s shoes. Myburgh prepared another slide, then another, and another. He matched the pollen grains against what he already had, checking off the species that flowered in response to the desert’s waterless spring.

No Sarcocornia. The humble, stubby-fingered plant grew in profusion in the shallow, saline water around the lagoon and in the river mouths along the coast. It occurred for about two kilometres inland. If there was none on the boy’s shoes, then it meant that their Calvary was further inland.

Plenty of Tamarix pollen. Not surprising, as tamarisks grew in profusion in the Kuiseb. They also grew from Cape Town to Jerusalem. He would need more.

There were traces of Acanthosicyos horridus, the seasonal!nara plant that crept from the Orange River in the south over the dunes to the Kuiseb. The spiny melons provided food for the Topnaars, the desert people, and their animals, and the inherited stands were as valuable as the secret sources of water in the desert. Myburgh paused to admire their distinctive pollen walls covered with exquisite striations, which, under his microscope, looked as if someone had drawn meditative fingers through sand.

He found Trianthema hereroensis pollen, a tough plant that occurred from the Kuiseb River for about a hundred and fifty kilometres to the north. The overlap of the plant distribution was bang on the Kuiseb Delta.

Myburgh was beginning to see the outline of a map for Clare Hart, but he needed more coordinates. One distinctive, triangular pollen pattern eluded him. There were traces of it on all four pairs of shoes. He checked back through Clare’s samples.

Nothing.

He picked up Mannheimer and Dreyer’s classic Plants and Pollens of the World and flicked through, finding the matching pattern that would help him place the pollen. Fear dry-tonguing his neck, Myburgh propped a ladder against the bookcase so that he could reach the top shelf, which held the stained, cloth- bound book that he had hidden months earlier and tried to forget. He opened Virginia Meyer’s blue journal. It was still filled with her detailed drawings, her cramped notes on ethno-botany, gleaned from Spyt, the wary old Topnaar man who had shared what he knew about the plants of the Namib, the desert’s secret treasure trove. Myburgh paged through it until he came to the last page of entries. Times, abbreviations, Latin names. He ignored those. Instead, he cracked the book open and swabbed the margin. He wiped what he had collected onto a glass slide. A thin yellow smear appeared down the centre of the pane. He placed this on the microscope’s stage, the eyepiece cold against his skin once more. His hands shook as he adjusted the lens. They appeared with magical precision, the distinctive triangular pollen grains, perfect equilateral triangles.

Myrtaceae: Eucalyptus. The ghost gum.

The scientist lifted his head and stared at the surf. He heard again Virginia Meyer’s soft voice, telling him of secrets too dirty, conspiracies too complex, which she had unearthed in the heat-raddled desert. He closed his eyes and pressed his palms against his lids, but he failed to block the memory of a car upturned, its wheels spinning against the blue sky.

In the back, the boy Oscar sits in wordless terror. In the front, his mother’s life trickles down her face, into her hair, the same colour as the boy’s halo of curls. It runs into her unblinking eyes, over her hands and pools on the floor. Eventually, it seeps into the orange sand at the base of a tall alien tree.

Myburgh shook off the memory with an effort and returned to his desk to type up his findings, the routine of recording method, results and conclusions soothing him. He printed the document and put it into a large envelope with the journal. He thought for a long time about what his discovery might mean for pretty Dr Hart; then he locked his laboratory and slipped away, taking care not to be seen.

thirty-six

Clare parked next to Tamar’s car when she got to the Walvis Bay police station on Monday morning. She was impatient to be busy after the town’s Sunday torpor. The constable at reception greeted her as though she had been gone for weeks. Clare could see a strip of light coming from Tamar Damases’s office. She knocked and went inside.

‘How was your Cape Town trip?’ Tamar asked, after offering Clare a cup of tea.

‘Interesting,’ said Clare.

‘Chinese interesting?’ Tamar gave her a sidelong glance.

‘Pretty much,’ said Clare, with a rueful smile. ‘Ballistics tracked that bullet we found in Lazarus Beukes.’

‘To the murder in McGregor. Peculiar,’ said Tamar. ‘I spoke to Captain Faizal.’

‘Same gun,’ said Clare, ‘doesn’t make it the same killer. Guns change hands so fast and for so little. How were the interviews about Lazarus?’

‘No family, so no one to break the news to,’ said Tamar. ‘Should have been a relief that, but it made me feel worse. The other kids told me he was in town on Wednesday, doing his usual trick, selling out-of-date newspapers. The little kids who were with him went back to the dump. They don’t get a meal if they’re late. Lazarus said he’d be along later. He wasn’t, but nobody thought much of that. He’s older, did his own thing anyway.’

‘Did they notice he was missing on Thursday?’ asked Clare.

‘They did. They were afraid.’

‘But nobody said anything?’

‘Habits don’t change that quickly,’ Tamar said. ‘They’re boys for one, so no telling tales. And second, the police give them a hard time. Particularly some of my own colleagues.’ She rose and picked up her jacket. ‘I’m going to the school. Mr Erasmus has asked me to talk to the Grade 1s. They all want to know what we did with the body, if we’re going to catch the murderer. If they’re safe. Would you like to come with me?’

‘I’ll come,’ said Clare, finishing her tea. ‘I want to see Darlene Ruyters anyway.’

Tamar picked up her keys and they walked out together. ‘You missed Mara Thomson’s farewell party, by the way,’ she told Clare. ‘The school hosted a little ceremony for her.’

‘How did it go?’

‘Sad, considering the circumstances. I think she felt that everything she’d worked for came to nothing.’

They arrived at the school at the end of first break. Tamar parked under the palm tree as the bell rang. Erasmus came out to welcome them while the older children drifted back to class. He directed them to the section of the school that overlooked the playground where Kaiser Apollis’s body had been found. The corridor that housed the youngest children was crowded with satchels and pungent lunchboxes. Solemn-faced six-year-olds dropping glass, paper and tins into recycling bins stared at them as they walked to Darlene Ruyters’s classroom. It had a clear view of the playground, the emptied yellow swings slow-moving in the breeze.

Darlene Ruyters sat at her desk, her right arm around a plump, pig-tailed girl. The child spun around when she saw Clare and Tamar at the door. Darlene patted the little girl on her bottom, despatching her back to her seat.