‘I’m sorry, I know you’re off the case, but I really need your help.’
‘Any time,’ said Tamar. ‘What is it?’
Clare closed the door and told Tamar. The horror of it seeped through Tamar’s exhausted postpartum tranquillity like a poison. The baby’s face crumpled in distress, feeling its mother slipping away from it.
‘Pass me my phone. It’s in my bag.’ Tamar rocked the child and it settled again, lulled. Clare handed her the phone.
‘We’ll do a swap,’ said Tamar. ‘You take her.’
‘Who is she?’ asked Clare, taking the infant. ‘This new little person.’
The child was unbelievably light in her arms.
‘Rachel.’ Tamar ran a gentle finger over her baby’s plump cheek. ‘Rachel Damases.’
Clare looked at the child. ‘She’s beautiful.’
Clare watched Tamar’s features sharpen and her eyes focus as she made the calls Clare needed.
‘It’s done,’ Tamar said, snapping the phone closed. ‘Now you do what you have to.’
She held out her arms for her baby and Clare handed Rachel over.
‘Look in that drawer,’ said Tamar.
Clare walked to the bedside table and pulled open the drawer. It contained a tube of cream and a pistol.
‘You can leave me the hand cream,’ said Tamar.
fifty-three
Out in the desert, Riedwaan’s stomach had hollowed beneath his jeans, but the belt buckle stood clear of his skin. He could feel the place where the sun had bored heat through the metal to brand the tender skin. He tried to calculate how long he had been out, measuring the air in even packages of breath. In. Then out. Pacing himself.
He remembered the road, winding through the tamarisk trees. He had passed the no-entry sign where Lazarus Beukes had been found. He had gone on, his bike churning the virgin sand in the riverbed. He had found the place Darlene had told him about, the tree a dark-green sentinel, a couple of kilometres east of Spyt’s makeshift hideout. He could see the old railway tracks sinking into the heaped sand. The ruined roof of the huts, the rafters protruding like the ribs of a carcass picked clean by scavengers. The stationmaster’s house, the red sand curved through the windows, heaped like treasure in the front rooms. The track. The end of the track, the riverbed again, the ghost gum tree towering above him, the entrance to the hut. Then nothing. Except this blinding pain.
Riedwaan opened his eyes. The sun was dipping west. He closed his eyes against the searing light, the sand whirling in the wind. He made his mind work. Remember.
There had been tracks everywhere. He had gone into the building. A pick, shovels too, standing against the wall. New ones. A boy’s peaked cap, tossed in a corner. The pit, recently dug. A single drum standing against the wall, the hazard sign visible beneath the crusted sand. The others had been dug up and were no doubt now on the
‘You’re awake.’ A woman’s voice. Riedwaan could just make out her figure stacking a pile of wood into an ashy hearth. Her fire would be going in minutes. His eyes fluttered closed.
He opened them again and looked at the woman standing above him now, her hair gleaming in the angled light. Riedwaan tried to move his arms. They were tied tight around the trunk of a tree, the slender nylon rope cutting into his wrists. The ground was hard. Riedwaan’s cellphone was in his back pocket. It bit into his back. He shifted his weight and hoped it was on silent. His gun was gone.
‘Who are you?’ Riedwaan’s own voice sounded unfamiliar. It hurt his cracked lips when he spoke. The woman dropped to her knees beside him, fanning her cool fingertips over his hot skin. He concentrated on her face, trying to get his vision to stabilise.
‘Your guardian angel.’ Her voice was husky. ‘You’re going to need one. The Namib Desert’s not safe.’ She held out her hand. ‘Oh, you can’t shake. Sorry.’ She returned to the fire and turned the metal fence dropper she had placed in it. The tip glowed an ominous red.
‘Water,’ Riedwaan begged.
The woman turned to look at him, not a glimmer of compassion in her pale-blue eyes. ‘You must learn to ask nicely.’ A shadow passed over her face. Pure menace.
She pressed the dropper into the smooth skin on Riedwaan’s chest. The acrid smell of charred skin hit him before the pain convulsed his body. He bit down on his bottom lip, the taste of his own blood sharp on his tongue.
‘A perfect circle,’ the woman said, admiring the mark she had made. She lifted the rod to do it again.
‘Give me some water,’ croaked Riedwaan, watching her face, trying to judge how far she would go, how much he could take. ‘Please.’
‘You can do better than that,’ she laughed, the soft red dunes echoing the curves of her body, but she put the rod down.
Riedwaan felt like he was walking a tightrope in the dark. If he was sure-footed, he might rekindle some empathy in her. If he got it wrong, he would fall, triggering a release of cruelty.
He thought of Clare, the gentleness in her face when she thought no one was watching her. Yasmin, his daughter. She would be calling tomorrow at their usual time.
Riedwaan knew if he drifted, he was going to pass out. And if the woman drifted any further, the slender thread of empathy would snap and he would die. He fought off the siren call of unconsciousness.
Shift things.
That’s what he had learnt when he had trained as a hostage negotiator. Shift things and get them to talk, to trust you. Then the hostages have a chance of survival. It seemed like a rather fragile straw to cling to now that he was the hostage. Unlike Clare, he was a betting man, but he didn’t like to think of his odds.
‘Talk to me,’ said Riedwaan, watching the woman, ignoring the stabbing pain in his bound arms, his seared chest. She was so at home, preparing things. The fire, the rope, the gun. Riedwaan had not picked a winner in this charnel-house hostess. He had to bring her back to him.
‘Give me some water.’ He said the words with an authority he did not feel. His tongue was swelling in his throat.
The woman glided towards him and held the flask to his mouth, the liquid pouring in, hot and choking at the back of his throat. She was so close Riedwaan could feel the warmth of her body, smell the unsettling, feral mix of perfume and adrenaline. Her hair swung over her shoulder and brushed his skin. It was bleached and porous, the colour and texture of dried grass left from last year’s rain. The desert wind made it crackle with static.
‘Just swallow,’ she said, holding his chin expertly. Riedwaan choked, his lungs burned, but the alcohol gave him a kickstart. ‘It’s only the first time that’s really bad,’ she added.
Riedwaan looked at her face. Her cheekbones, the sweep of her eyebrows were sculpted, beautiful, but the eyes were blank. All he could see in them was his own reflection, twice in miniature.
‘Who taught you that?’ he asked. He could imagine. She had such a perfect mouth, full and red. Made for a certain kind of love.
The woman sat down opposite him, intrigued by his question.
‘A boyfriend?’ guessed Riedwaan. ‘A teacher?’
She clasped her slim arms around her knees, as if folding her forgotten vulnerability away from his prying gaze.
‘Your mother’s boyfriend?’
The woman said nothing, but she shivered. Riedwaan was on target. He had to keep her talking.
‘Your mother?’ The wind had dropped and Riedwaan’s words reverberated in the sudden lull. The pain in his arms was unbearable. He was glad of it. It distracted him from the charred skin on his chest. He inched himself higher up the tree.
‘Not my real mother,’ the woman spoke at last, though she did not look at Riedwaan. ‘The woman who took me after my mother died.’
