beyond.
Myburgh nodded.
‘That’s still a huge area.’ Clare turned to look at the ocean of sand, rolling far beyond the horizon.
‘Your needle in a haystack,’ said Myburgh. ‘I’ve got it for you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘
‘How sure are you that you’re right?’ asked Clare.
‘There’ll only be a couple of spots in the Namib with this combination of plants.’
‘So where do I start?’ said Clare.
‘With the gum, anywhere where there was human habitation,’ said Myburgh, unfolding an aerial photograph. ‘I looked and the only places I could find gum trees were these: two tourist camps and this old military area.’
Clare thought of Riedwaan’s proposed destination. ‘That’s in the middle of nowhere,’ she said, the puzzle pieces in her hand; the composite they made as shifting as the mirage dancing on the desert.
‘It’s the best I can do, I’m afraid,’ Myburgh said, ‘but there’s more.’ He handed Clare a slim journal, dark blue with embossed initials on it: VM.
Clare opened it. ‘Whose is this?’
‘Virginia Meyer’s,’ said Myburgh. ‘It’s all that was left of her work.’
Clare flipped through the book, glancing at the pages filled with spidery notes, the whimsical drawings of plants, birds and dunescapes so like her mute son’s. Outside, the rising wind moaned around the car.
‘I don’t understand.’ Clare looked up at Myburgh.
‘I tested her diary for pollen,’ he said, ‘and it was a match. They were in the same place, Virginia and those boys.’
Clare’s face remained expressionless.
‘She was on her way to see me when the accident happened,’ Myburgh explained. ‘She’d been dead twelve hours when Spyt found them. Oscar couldn’t loosen his seatbelt, so he was trapped, covered in her blood and flies. Spyt managed to resuscitate the child and get him help. And he brought me this.’ Myburgh gestured to the journal. ‘It had been hidden under Oscar’s seat.’
‘Why?’ said Clare.
‘Virginia wasn’t where she should have been.’ Myburgh must have crossed his Rubicon of doubt. When he spoke, his voice was quiet. ‘It was the only bit of her work recovered after the accident. Everything else was gone. No one would’ve found them if Spyt hadn’t come across them. She was on a side road out of the Kuiseb.’
‘What was she doing there?’
‘Virginia loved the Namib,’ said Myburgh, ‘and was enraged with the South African army and what they’d done to it. I always thought she was paranoid, seeing conspiracies everywhere. She was obsessed, Dr Hart, convinced that her beloved desert had been contaminated by the army. She kept on trying to expose what had happened, what she was convinced was happening again. She would’ve done anything to stop it.’
‘Contaminated with what?’ asked Clare. ‘The South Africans left more than ten years ago.’
‘They took their hardware,’ said Myburgh, ‘but they left some damaged people behind, as scarred and littered as the desert.’
‘What had they been testing?’ asked Clare.
‘Overtly, the usual heavy weapons,’ said Myburgh. ‘Virginia was convinced there had been covert bio-chemical testing. Diseases, viruses, poisons that had leached into the underground water, and driven the Topnaars from their own land. Just before the accident, she phoned me to say there was something else, something much worse. She was afraid to tell me over the phone.’ Myburgh looked away before continuing: ‘She said the water table would be contaminated because of what they’d done.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘Virginia was so paranoid, Dr Hart. It seemed easier at the time just to leave it.’
Clare thought of Fritz Woestyn, his lifeless body propped on the water pipeline, the artery pumping water into Walvis Bay, the lifeblood of the marooned town. ‘Contaminated with what?’ she asked.
‘It didn’t make sense to me then, still doesn’t, because she said it in Afrikaans, but it stuck because she never spoke Afrikaans. She said it was the language of oppression.’ Myburgh paused. ‘She told me she was
‘
‘Vastrap, yes, that was it.’ Myburgh looked at her. ‘What is it?’
‘It was a military base in South Africa, a secret weaponstesting site in the middle of the Kalahari Desert.’
A horrible image was forming in Clare’s mind. She turned back to the last page of Virginia Meyer’s diary. The digits 2, 3 and 5 were ringed in red. Clare looked at Myburgh’s beaked profile.
‘Tertius,’ she asked, ‘what do the numbers 2, 3 and 5 mean?’
‘Nothing,’ he said.
‘Stop lying to me,’ said Clare.
‘Well, 235 is nothing on its own,’ said Myburgh, his voice a monotone, his eyes trained on the heaving sea. ‘Except with uranium. U-235 is an isotope. Highly enriched uranium. It’s what you use for a nuclear weapon.’
Myburgh looked Clare in the eye for the first time, his knuckles were white on the steering wheel.
‘That’s what she meant about the desert being contaminated, Dr Hart. Those boys and Virginia Meyer, they were in the same place and now they’re all dead.’
fifty
The sound of the off-road bike was a flinty staccato across the plain. Riedwaan stopped to get his bearings. He had gone to find Karamata, but there had been no sign of him at his desk, and Riedwaan hadn’t looked for him for long. He preferred being alone. The sun bellied orange over the sea as he passed the place where Lazarus Beukes had been found, but the shallow valley was a dead end, blocked by a wall of sand. So he left the relative sanctuary of the dry Kuiseb River behind him, trusting that his cheap Chinese GPS would see him through the expanse of desert.
The disused railway track, a spine from which the desert fell away, soft as a woman’s flesh, came from the north, running aground in an ocean of red sand. Riedwaan checked the coordinates against the GPS. They told him the same thing as his old survey map: he needed to be on the other side of this waterless strait. Out here, the temperature would strip a body of its cloak of skin, hair and flesh. In weeks, he’d be nothing but white bones and a skull staring up at the blue vault of the sky. Riedwaan calculated the descent of the first dune and the elevation of the second and pitched over the edge, opening the throttle to the full, praying that the momentum would carry him to the top. It did, but all he had in front of him was another dune, then another.
Again Riedwaan took his bearings, trying not to picture his own demise. He made himself go on, following, more or less, the tracks of a vehicle that had preceded him. Three more dunes, and the railway reappeared, its ironwood sleepers scattered like matchsticks in the sand. A kilometre ahead was his destination. He could just make it out: some scrubby bushes and a gnarled eucalyptus tree next to two weathered huts. Riedwaan rode alongside the railway line, stopping under the tree, a ghostly sentinel in the dunes. Apart from the rattle of seeds feathered across the sand by the east wind, the place was silent.
The ground fell away from the huts towards two concretecapped mounds. They could have been a century old, or a single decade. The tracks he had followed were neither, thought Riedwaan, bending down to get a closer look at the compacted earth. A heavy vehicle, a Land Rover perhaps, had passed through recently. An empty bottle of brandy lay discarded against the pale tree trunk. Scattered near it were a few cigarette butts. Riedwaan bent down to look. Two different brands.
It was cooler in the shade, but that did not account for the chill that played over Riedwaan’s skin. A grimy
