white T-shirt was snagged against the bole of the tree, sweat stains indelible under the arms. The Pesca-Marina logo was only half-hidden by the shovel lying on top of it. Riedwaan stood where the men must have stood, the image forming as crisp as a nightmare in his mind. The back door of a vehicle would have opened, releasing the men’s hurriedly collected human cargo – five boys, hired to harvest a deadly crop planted in another lifetime. Riedwaan lit a cigarette, imagining how their presence would have absorbed the vestiges of warmth from the night air.
The brandy, neat, burning down the throat of one man, then the other. Impossible to say how many, but Riedwaan would put his money on two. The men watching the activity below them would have been accustomed to the backs of others bending rhythmically to their wills.
For the boys, coming out here must have seemed safer than standing against a wall, legs astride, for a paunchy truck driver or a sailor with a knife. They wouldn’t question a hundred for the night. Sickness or fear might have tightened the chest of one boy, hot from digging. The youngest boy slipping off his shirt, the moon sculpting his slender torso, as he stopped to rest. But when he caught the man’s eye on him, as cold as a switchblade, he would have bent down again. And dug.
Riedwaan’s mouth was dry from the heat. He fetched his water from the bike and tried to phone Clare. No reception under the tree, so he walked towards the shelters. One bar, he noted. The door to the first hut was ajar. Two bars. He dialled, ducking inside to avoid the sun.
The blow came without warning. For a brief moment before silence blossomed from agony, Riedwaan heard it: the quiet crack of his own skull.
fifty-one
There was no one at the station when Clare got back from her meeting with Tertius Myburgh. She closed the door to the special ops room and sat down at her desk. She dialled Riedwaan’s number. Nothing. A flash on her screen told her she had a call waiting.
‘Dr Hart?’ It was Karamata.
‘Yes?’
‘George Meyer’s son is missing.’
‘Where from?’ Clare felt faint at the inevitability of it, her own failure to protect the child.
‘Kuisebmond beach.’ Clare knew the beach. It was a crescent of grey, littered sand near the harbour.
‘I’ll come over.’ Clare cut the connection, but not the image of cold water creeping over the face of a lonely, wide-eyed boy.
She drove fast along the beach road, which glistened like a strip of kelp stranded by a receding tide on the high-water mark. Karamata was there with a couple of uniformed officers. George Meyer stood with his hands thrust into his pockets, his shoulders hunched. The vehicles blocked off the area of beach where the boy had been. The wind was too strong for tape.
‘He must’ve been here,’ said Karamata, beckoning Clare over.
The yellow rod was wedged into the ground. Next to it was Oscar’s khaki bag. The bottle of water was still full. A half-eaten sandwich was wedged in next to his bait. Peanut butter and Marmite.
‘You didn’t see him again, did you?’ Meyer asked Clare. The question was framed around the hopes to which the parents of missing children cling. But with George Meyer, it was a formality. Hope was absent.
‘I didn’t see him,’ said Clare, her chest tight with sadness.
‘He was upset this morning after you were there. He was upset that Mara had left. I thought maybe he’d tried to find you.’ Meyer moved out of the way of a wave that reached up the beach. It retreated, leaving a fringe of foam. ‘He liked you, Dr Hart. He thought you’d be able to find Mara and bring her back.’
Clare saw Oscar’s face before her, eyes accusing at her inability to understand his mute explanations. ‘When did he disappear?’
‘When I got home at lunch time, he was gone. His rod was gone too, so I came looking for him at the beach. I found the bike and the rod. No Oscar.’
‘He wouldn’t have gone off somewhere?’
‘Not without his bike,’ Meyer said.
‘That taxi driver saw him here earlier.’ Karamata gestured towards a man leaning against a battered red Toyota, talking to a couple of uniformed officers.
‘The sea’s been rough today,’ said Meyer. ‘He couldn’t swim.’
Rough and cold, Clare thought. The Atlantic was not a place for a little boy alone.
‘They’re going to put a radio alert out,’ Meyer said.
‘And we’ll search the harbour,’ Karamata added. ‘Why don’t you go home, Mr Meyer? Maybe he’s been somewhere and he’ll turn up.’
‘Maybe.’ Meyer looked at the keys in his hand as if he had never seen them before.
‘I’ll take you back.’ Karamata pointed to the police car. Meyer walked towards it, obedient as a child.
‘Where was he?’ Clare asked Karamata.
‘At work all the time. I checked. They were doing an audit, so he was with the accountant. There will be a search, so there won’t be anyone at the station for a while.’
‘Did you speak to Captain Faizal?’ Clare asked. ‘I thought he’d arranged with you to take him to the Kuiseb Delta.’
‘He’s said nothing to me.’
‘I can’t get hold of him,’ said Clare.
‘I hope he doesn’t go out there alone,’ said Karamata. ‘It looks so easy on the map, but once you’re in the desert a map’s useless, especially with this east wind.’
‘Don’t count on it, Elias,’ said Clare. She knew Riedwaan too well to assume he’d do the sensible thing. She tried his number again. ‘Caller out of range,’ said the electronic voice. ‘Try again later.’
‘I have a sea search,’ said Karamata. ‘All I need is a desert search during a sandstorm.’
With an effort of will, Clare put her anxiety about Riedwaan on hold. ‘You’ve spoken to Gretchen, I presume?’ she asked.
‘I did,’ said Karamata. ‘On the phone. She said she was in the bath when Oscar left the house.’
‘That polite?’ Clare raised an eyebrow.
‘Not actually,’ said Karamata, with a rueful smile. ‘She told me to fuck off, that he wasn’t anything to do with her and that she was busy.’
‘Charming.’ Clare looked out at the choppy sea. ‘He was a little boy to be out fishing alone.’
‘Nobody’s child,’ said Karamata. ‘There are so many of them here, not all of them poor.’
‘Who uses this beach, Elias?’
‘The Chinese come and fish here. Couples with nowhere else to go. Kids come to fish. No one else really.’ Karamata’s phone was ringing. ‘I must go and speak to the divers. They’re here.’
Clare picked her way to the last rocks on the small headland that protected the harbour and looked back at the beach where Oscar had left his rod and his frugal picnic. Litter circled the small bay, nudging against the man-made promontory where she stood. The first diver splashed off the bobbing rescue vessel. If the boy had drowned, then his body would have been sucked down and flung up here, against these rocks. She worked her way back, her heart beating fast when she spotted a red smudge, but it was an old piece of T-shirt.
A wave ran high up the beach, obliterating all trace of Oscar and those who had been looking for him. Half an hour later and nobody would have known where he had stood and cast his line. Clare looked up the beach towards the road. The sand behind where Oscar’s things had been had not yet been smoothed by the water. She walked towards his last-known location. Several mussel shells lay crushed in the disturbed sand. It looked as though a vehicle had stopped right behind where Oscar had been standing. It had stopped and then reversed and gone back onto the road.
Clare picked up a fragment of shell.
Oscar wouldn’t have gone swimming and he hadn’t fallen in. They weren’t going to find Oscar’s body here. She felt it with chilling certainty. Someone had picked him up and taken him elsewhere. Someone he had had to obey.
