She was sad for saying goodbye to me too. So we fight. And then she go away.’ He looked Clare in the eye, shifting the balance of power away from her. ‘You never fight with someone before you go away?’
‘That is the last you saw of her?’ Clare shifted the control back. ‘In the parking lot? Where you hit her?’
‘Yes,’ he said, leaning against the metal railing. ‘No.’
‘You were away from the bar a while.’ Clare listened to Juan Carlos’s beads clicking persistently in the quiet. ‘Nicolai says an hour. That’s a long time to spend in a parking lot.’
‘Okay, okay,’ said Juan Carlos, lighting a cigarette. ‘She left. I was very angry to start with, but then I think, is she home? I want to tell her I am sorry, so I follow her. Nothing. She was walking fast when she left, so I go to her house. Her light is on and I knock on her window. She doesn’t answer. I call her phone. She doesn’t answer. I think she’s in the bath maybe. But she doesn’t want to speak to me. I leave her a message to call me, that I’m sorry. It’s cold and I don’t want to wake up the other people in the house. She’s angry. She’s still a woman, even if she looks like a boy. And I think, what more can I do? So I come back to the bar.’ He looked at Ragnar, who nodded.
‘What time was that?’ Clare asked.
‘About three, three-thirty, I suppose,’ Ragnar answered. ‘Just before I left.’
‘Then I get her text message to say sorry the next morning from the airport. Here, look.’ Juan Carlos pulled his phone out of his pocket, found the text message and shoved the screen in front of Clare. ‘I was already on board ship,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t see her again. I sent her a text, but nothing. It’s too late. She was on the plane already.’
‘You hit her because you were upset, and she forgave you that easily?’ asked Clare. ‘You’re lying, Juan Carlos.’
‘You see that?’ Juan Carlos flung his arm towards the desert. The wind whipped tongues of flame-coloured sand into the sky. The sandstorm was preparing to strike the bunkered town. ‘That is what we fought about,’ he spat.
‘I’m not following you,’ said Clare. ‘Explain.’
‘The east wind… it is on its way,’ Juan Carlos continued. His tone was resigned. ‘It was the same weather the weekend that we fight.’
‘What happened that weekend?’
‘She went out to the desert, and the east wind, it was blowing. She take her soccer boys – Kaiser Apollis, Lazarus Beukes, I can’t remember the other names – to camp in the Kuiseb River. It was a reward because they did well in some five-a-side tournament. We came in to port for the weekend and I phone her. She didn’t want to come back, because she always put them first. She say that’s what they needed to see: someone putting them first. But I tell her to leave them and come and see me. I say she should fetch them in the morning. I told her they were used to looking after themselves. That they would be fine. It was true.’
Juan Carlos watched a gull turn on a column of air, mesmerised by its flight. ‘They
‘And that’s why you hit her?’ asked Clare.
‘I didn’t want her to tell you.’ Juan Carlos looked down at his feet. ‘She wanted to come to you or the other lady cop and tell you that she had been with them all and that now they were all dead. She was crazy about it. I tell her it was just coincidence. I was saying, no, if she tells, then the police will want to question her and me. And the ship is sailing tomorrow. If the police want to ask questions, then I can’t go too and I won’t get my fishing bonus.’
‘How many boys did you say there were there?’ asked Clare.
‘Five. It was the five-a-side tournament.’
Two. Three. Five. One with no marking. One unaccounted for. Clare calculated how long it would take to get to the dump when she was finished. Half an hour, she reckoned.
‘You’ll have to stay on board,’ said Clare. ‘Captain Johansson will keep you under guard.’
‘Why?’ Juan Carlos pleaded. ‘What have I done?’
‘You were the last person seen with her,’ said Clare. ‘If you’d prefer you can come ashore and go to the cells.’
Juan Carlos paled.
‘I’ll need your cellphone.’ Clare held out her hand.
‘For what?’ asked Juan Carlos. ‘I tell you already, she text me.’
‘I want to track all the calls on your phone,’ said Clare. ‘Calls in and out. You can choose: I take your phone and check, or you can come in with me and I put you in the cells for refusing to cooperate.’
Clare was bluffing, but he was a foreigner, wanting to get home. It worked. Juan Carlos handed her the phone, the fight gone out of him.
‘Ragnar,’ she said, ‘can you keep him under guard?’
‘No problem,’ said Ragnar. ‘We’re out of here soon. If you want him longer, and you’ve got grounds, I’ll have to hand him over to the Namibian police.’
Ragnar walked with Clare to the top of the ladder. ‘You think he did something to that girl?’ he asked.
‘The odds are against him.’
‘You’re not a gambler, Clare.’
‘No, I’m not. But I won’t take any more chances either. If Mara knew something about what happened to those boys, then Juan Carlos might too. I’d watch him. It might be for his own sake.’ Clare stepped onto the ladder to climb down to the speedboat waiting for her. ‘Where are you headed?’ she asked.
‘Luanda tomorrow, after the shareholders’ inspection,’ said Ragnar. ‘Then Spain. You can imagine that I need this like a hole in the head.’
forty-six
It was quiet at the rubbish dump. The first flurry of trucks had come and gone and the incinerator was pluming smoke into the sky. The boys who had been so eager to greet Clare the first time she had visited slunk away. She went to the lean-to where Kaiser Apollis and Fritz Woestyn had shared a mattress. The bed was untouched, as was their meagre assortment of garments. One of the braver boys hovered in the doorway, a younger child sheltering behind him.
Clare called him over and showed him Mara’s team photograph. ‘Where is this boy?’ she asked.
The boy’s expression closed down like a mask. ‘Ronaldo’s gone,’ he said, his voice low.
‘Where?’
The boy shrugged. ‘Miss Mara took him.’
‘Mara took him? Where? Where did she take him?’ Clare’s voice wavered.
‘To the desert.’ Emotion flickered in the boy’s eyes, but Clare could not read it. ‘He never came back again.’
‘Okay, where did she take him?’ Clare softened her tone.
‘Ask Mr Meyer,’ the boy said. ‘He knows where they go.’
The younger boy cupped his hands and looked at Clare, eyes wide, pleading. ‘You got some change for bread, madam?’ Clare fished in her bag for money.
George Meyer was alone in his office, his hands folded on the empty desk. His tie, knotted too tight below the Adam’s apple, bulged a fold of skin onto his collar.
‘What do you want this time, Dr Hart?’ he asked when Clare appeared in the doorway.
‘These boys. Four are dead. Now Mara’s missing.’ Clare propped the photograph against his hands. ‘Where is this one?’
Meyer picked up the photograph and looked at the frail boy. The child’s bony ribs tented the skin on his chest. ‘Ronaldo. I haven’t seen him for a while. He was sick.’ He handed the photograph back to Clare.
‘Where will I find him?’ said Clare. ‘If he isn’t dead yet.’ Clare leant close to Meyer. She kept the impatience from her voice.
