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.’
thirty-nine
‘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.
‘
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.’
‘Must’ve been why the military were always after him,’ said Karamata.
‘Were they?’ Riedwaan asked.
‘Oh yes.’ Karamata gestured at the sand sprawling into the horizon. ‘They made him work as a tracker for a while. They wanted to know everything about the desert, claim it, then own it and keep everything secret.’
‘Let’s look around,’ said Tamar, ‘but I don’t think he’s going to pitch.’
Clare went into the small cave shelter. It was narrow, dark beyond the splash of light at the entrance. There were few things inside, a sleeping roll, a leather bag, a pair of handmade shoes with pieces of tyre serving as the soles. Strips of cloth hung off a hook. Clare touched the fabric. It had perished from the heat, but the green stripe was still visible. The faint lettering too.
‘Looks like old army sheeting,’ said Riedwaan, following Clare into the cave. ‘SWATF. The letters make the
