pretended to drink his coffee and avoided her gaze.
‘Dr Hart, the protocol is new, the bureaucracy not quite in place and the Namibians are territorial. What Captain Faizal suggested was that you go and work with the investigation. We send him up next week when we have all the formalities sorted out.’
‘Where would I be based?’ asked Clare.
‘Walvis Bay,’ Faizal interrupted Phiri’s answer. There was a note of apology in his voice. As there should be. Clare had spent two godforsaken months there working on a documentary. The hot desert wind had whipped red sand off the dunes and ruined her camera.
‘Faizal tells me that you know the place,’ said Phiri.
Clare wondered what else Riedwaan had told the superintendent. ‘I know it a bit,’ she said.
‘Will you consider it?’
Clare shifted in her seat, repressing an uninvited flash of memory: stars hanging low as lamps in the sky, the desert’s nocturnal creatures calling, and her yielding to a man who had taken measure of her loneliness and her desire. She had given herself to him for a week, then flown home, edited her film and ignored his phone calls until they stopped.
‘Tell me more about the case,’ she said.
‘A dead child. Bizarre killing. The body displayed in a schoolyard. Bullet to the head, but ritual marks and other peculiarities on the corpse. Reminiscent of at least one other. Maybe more. Interested?’
Clare was intrigued and Phiri could see it. He knew how to play her and she wondered how much of that was thanks to Riedwaan. ‘I am,’ she confessed, despite her misgivings at being the subject of discussion. ‘But I need some more detail.’
‘Faizal has all the notes. He’ll brief you,’ said Phiri with a tone of finality. ‘There are the crime-scene photographs. No autopsy yet. They’re holding that up until you get there. A few preliminary interviews. She’s smart, this Damases. Organised.’ He picked up Riedwaan’s abandoned cup and put it on the tray on the counter behind him. He closed the file in front of him and stood up. The meeting was over.
Clare stood too. ‘Thank you, Superintendent Phiri.’
‘I watched you work the last time, Dr Hart. You were very… effective. Let me know what you decide and what you need. You’ll be working under Faizal.’ He straightened the immaculately arrayed files on his desk. ‘Not a position I’d have chosen. But not everyone has the same taste I suppose.’
No secrets in the force, thought Clare. Everyone knew that Phiri, at fifty, still lived with his mother and that she made his lunch every day.
So, no reason that they wouldn’t know that Riedwaan had been staying with her, although the breach in her hard-won privacy – secrecy, her sisters call it – rankled.
She followed Riedwaan to what he called his office. More a corner of chaos which his colleagues avoided like a domestic incident on a Saturday night.
‘You’ve got some explaining to do, Riedwaan,’ she said, closing the door. ‘I don’t for one minute imagine that Phiri thought this little scheme up by himself.’
‘It’s nearly lunch time. I need something to eat before we discuss this.’ Riedwaan picked up a file with Tamar Damases’s notes. ‘You going to feed me?’
six
‘What has Captain Damases got so far?’ asked Clare, carrying a tray of fresh bread, carpaccio and a salad onto her balcony.
‘Three dead boys. All in and around Walvis Bay. This boy, they found this morning.’ Riedwaan turned over the top page of the faxed docket. ‘And two others: Nicanor Jones and Fritz Woestyn. All found about a week apart.’
Clare stroked her cat, winding in and out between her ankles. ‘And?’
‘Same age, same cause of death. Vulnerable kids, easy targets. No one to report them missing. All the weird stuff with the binding, the risky display on the swing. It just said serial to her. She thought, rightly I imagine, that if she gets someone up there now there’s a better chance of cracking it before another body washes up.’
‘Sounds like a textbook case,’ said Clare. She rolled a piece of paper-thin fillet between her fingers and ate it. ‘What’s the new boy’s name?’
‘Waiting for a positive ID, but they have him as Kaiser Apollis. Looks fourteen, could be sixteen. Been living on the street like the other two victims. Aids orphan, apparently. There’s a sister around somewhere, but no interview yet. That’s scheduled for the day after tomorrow. With you,’ said Riedwaan. ‘Here, have a look at Captain Damases’s photographs.’
He pushed away their plates and spread out the pictures on the table. His phone rang. Not his usual ring tone, but one a little girl had recorded before she left for Canada with her mother. The child’s voice, sweet and plaintive, called him: ‘Daddy, Daddy, it’s me.’
‘Yasmin?’ asked Clare.
‘Yup.’ Riedwaan looked at his watch. ‘My biweekly father-hood ration.’ He stood up, phone already to his ear. ‘Hello, baby girl. How’s Canada?’ Clare heard him say as he closed the door so that he could speak privately to the seven-year-old daughter he had not seen for almost a year.
Clare turned her attention to the images in front of her. They were eerie; the body huddled like any child escaping on the finite flight of a swing. The image nudged a buried memory. The tug of that weightless second at the top of the arc before the free fall of return; the solemn face of Clare’s twin sister, watching her swing up higher, higher, higher. Away from her. Until Constance could stand it no longer and caught the swing, tumbling Clare out, dissolving Clare’s rage with tears. Their father had removed the swing after that. To keep Clare safe, is how he had explained it. Clare and her older sister Julia had seethed, knowing that the real reason was to keep Constance calm. Clare felt for the forgotten scar on her elbow. The smooth ridge of skin was still there.
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’ Clare had not heard Riedwaan return. He put his hand on her arm, drawing her back into the present.
‘This tyre swing. We had one when we were children. I loved it. It made me feel free.’ She turned to face him. ‘How are things with Yasmin?’
‘Fine,’ said Riedwaan. ‘She’s fine.’
‘Shazia?’
A shadow crossed Riedwaan’s face at the mention of his estranged wife. He shrugged and did not meet Clare’s gaze. ‘The same.’ He picked up the crime-scene pictures. ‘What do you think of this?’
‘So spiteful to kill a child on a swing,’ said Clare, leaving the painful subject of Riedwaan’s broken family.
‘It looks like he was killed elsewhere; no blood in situ.’ Riedwaan’s attention was focused back on the soluble problem in front of him. ‘He was dead a good couple of days before he was dumped at the school. Maybe kept out beyond the fog belt, in the heat. The body was starting to smell bad,’ said Riedwaan, scanning through the faxed notes.
‘Why in a playground?’ mused Clare.
‘That’s the thing with nuts. It makes no sense unless you get inside their heads. Why put him on show a couple of days after he’s dead? What were they doing together all that time?’
‘The other two, were they also found near schools?’
‘No. Tamar has linked them because they were all head-shot wounds, same calibre gun. Intermediate range and similar victim profile. Ligatures or remnants of ligatures. And the timing, too – looks to her like there’s a pattern. A killing, then a cooling-off period.’
‘You think you have me stitched up then?’ Clare asked. The image of the dead boy had sapped the tentative spring sun of warmth, but she could not be sure that he was the source of her unease. She packed away the photographs and ushered Riedwaan to the front door.
‘Come on, Clare. You’re not going to say no. I’ll be there next week, when Phiri gets the paperwork done.’ Riedwaan, as usual, was reluctant to leave.
‘I must phone Constance first,’ said Clare, distracted. On the far side of the bay was a ribbon of white beach
