Blood Rose

‘How should I know?’ Nicolai said glibly. ‘I went outside and saw them in the parking lot. They’d both been drinking. She was crying. He looked angry. Same old, same old.’

‘Did they come back inside?’

‘Juan Carlos came back later. I didn’t see her again. He was upset and said that she’d walked home. Later he left with Ragnar Johansson. You know him, I think?’ Clare nodded. ‘Ask him. But the last time I checked there wasn’t a law that the barman has to know what his customers do in their spare time.’

‘There isn’t,’ said Clare, standing up. ‘But there’ll be consequences if you’re withholding information.’

Nicolai stood too. ‘If what I’ve heard is correct, Dr Hart, you’ve been paid by me and my fellow taxpayers to catch the motherfucker who’s been cleaning up Walvis Bay.’ Again, the suggestive smirk. It made his ratty features even less attractive. ‘She looked very like those boys of hers, Mara did. Let’s hope for her sake there hasn’t been a mix-up.’ Nicolai moved even closer to Clare. The implication of what he said, his breath rank in her face, made her shiver. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some housework to finish.’

Clare needed no further encouragement. She breathed a sigh of relief as she went down the stairs from Nicolai’s apartment. When she got to her car, she pulled out her phone and dialled Tamar’s number; she was going to need help getting to Juan Carlos.

‘Tamar.’ Clare was very happy to hear her voice. ‘Mara never arrived home.’

‘I got your message,’ said Tamar, concerned.

‘I’ve checked at the airport. She didn’t take her flight, but all her stuff’s gone from George Meyer’s house.’

‘You need to go out to the Alhantra to talk to Juan Carlos?’ Tamar guessed.

‘As soon as possible,’ said Clare.

‘I’ll organise you a motorboat. Give me a few minutes.’

‘Thanks. Any news about Spyt?’

‘I’m not holding my breath,’ said Tamar. ‘Spyt knows this desert too well. If he is found it’ll be because he wants to be caught. Van Wyk disappeared out that way early. The evidence that the boys could’ve been there is all Goagab needs to get his lynch mob going. At least it gives me a bit of breathing space.’

‘Did you look at that website I sent you?’ Clare had almost forgotten to ask.

‘I did. I’m working out what to do. I’m not sure if he’s done anything illegal. The site claims all the girls are over eighteen. If they are, my hands are tied.’ There was a beat of silence. ‘I’m also putting out fires here,’ Tamar added.

‘What?’ asked Clare. ‘Riedwaan?’

‘He and Goagab haven’t exactly hit it off,’ said Tamar. ‘I had Goagab in my office, raging that the reason we invited you here was to look for a killer, not for young Englishwomen who stir up trouble.’

‘I need to know if she was more than just their soccer coach,’ said Clare. ‘We need to find her.’

The skipper and speedboat were ready, the engine idling, when Clare got to the harbour. Five minutes later, the nose of the boat was chopping through the swell, to where the Alhantra and other ships were anchored, beyond the bay, where they could avoid harbour fees.

Clare plunged her hands into the front pocket of her jacket, her fingers wrapping around the envelope of Mara’s photographs. More precious than a passport, which could be replaced by enduring the supercilious smile of a British embassy official. She opened the envelope, sheltering it from the wind with her body, to look at Mara’s well- thumbed photos, the dainty drawings Oscar had done for her. The surreal whimsy of the drawing of a tree, ghostly against the endless dunes, hinted at the child’s strange inner world. It was a haunting image. Why had Mara left them?

There was the picture of Mara and Oscar together. Mara searching for a place to belong; the mute boy, yearning for affection. The image caught their fragility and isolation. Mara and Oscar. They had understood each other. The little boy knew that Mara would never leave her pictures, her memories.

That is what he had been trying to make Clare understand.

Clare put herself in the place of the silent, unnoticed boy. She pictured him opening the door off the kitchen. She saw him glide down the passage, a silent red-haired ghost, into Mara’s room. Oscar would have found her room emptied but for the photographs hidden in their secret place. He had given them to Clare, so that she would do something.

Clare looked at them again. The last picture, the date in the corner six weeks earlier, was the photograph of Mara and her team. She had the triumphant smile of someone who has beaten the self-timer. She stood in the middle of the group, wiry-haired, boyish, wearing skinny jeans, with her arms around two boys who had turned up dead. The thought that the predator she was hunting had seen the same androgynous likeness in Mara goosefleshed Clare’s arms. She put the envelope back in her pocket.

The water unfurled a fringe behind the boat until it came to a bobby halt next to the Alhantra. The ship was high in the water, its hold emptied of fish. A ladder lolled like a tongue down the side. At the top of it stood Ragnar Johansson. Clare swallowed the fear that had balled tight and cold in her stomach. She put her hands on the ladder and began to climb, thinking of Mara at the rubbish dump, playing soccer in the dust and broken glass. So needy of love, of acceptance. She thought of her twined around Juan Carlos and wondered if Mara had given everything of herself over to him, if he had made her pay the ultimate price to assuage his loneliness.

Ragnar helped Clare aboard, his delight in seeing her obvious; his disappointment, when Clare told him the real purpose of her visit, equally apparent. He had half-hoped she had come to find him.

‘Wait here,’ said Ragnar, escorting Clare to the bridge. ‘I’ll fetch him for you.’

Ragnar took the steps into the dim interior of the vessel. The metal door screeched when he pushed it open. ‘Juan Carlos,’ he called into the gloomy cabin. The Spaniard lay on the top bunk. He grunted, without looking down to see who it was. ‘You have a visitor.’

Juan Carlos turned onto his back and punched the metal ceiling above him. He licked the blood welling red on his knuckles, then he swung his legs off the side of his bunk and dropped, agile as a cat, to the floor and followed Ragnar to the bridge. He stopped when he saw Clare Hart, pulling his rosary beads from his pocket and passing them through his fingers until the crucifix halted them. Mara had given them to him. If he held the wood to his nose, it whispered of the hot interior.

‘You know Dr Hart?’ asked Ragnar.

Juan Carlos nodded.

‘Where is Mara Thomson?’ Clare dispensed with the formalities.

‘In London,’ said Juan Carlos, the vein at the base of his throat pulsing. He looked from Clare to Ragnar and back again. ‘She left yesterday.’

‘She never arrived,’ said Clare. The creak of the ship was loud in the silence that Clare let stretch between them.

‘Maybe she didn’t go to her mother’s house,’ Juan Carlos tried. ‘Her mother drive her crazy. So lonely.’

‘She didn’t check in at the airport.’ Clare stepped closer to him. ‘Where is she?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You were with her the night before she left.’ Clare kept her voice low, intimately aggressive. ‘You went home with her, made love to her, I imagine.’

Juan Carlos shook his head. ‘No, no, I said goodbye and then I come back on board.’ He looked at Ragnar. ‘I had a pass. Twenty-four hours.’

Clare took Juan Carlos’s hand in hers, tracing his bloodied knuckles, the scratch along his sinewy wrist, his signet ring, a silver skull and crossbones.

‘You didn’t take her to the airport?’

‘She didn’t want me to go with her,’ he said. ‘What’s happened to her? Why are you here?’ He snatched his hand back.

‘Why did you hit her?’ asked Clare.

‘I love her.’ Juan Carlos said the words with no trace of irony.

Clare pictured the darkened parking lot. The hand raised. Mara’s smooth cheek. The ring tearing open her taut skin. The contusion that would be developing.

‘I was angry because she was leaving,’ Juan Carlos went on. ‘I was… I don’t know the word.’

‘Upset?’ said Clare.

‘Yes, yes, upset. I was very upset. She was too. She was sad to go from Namibia; she loved it here, her work.