Blood Rose Read Free Page A

by the burly man’s tenderness.
    ‘He played soccer with my sons.’ There was a sheen in Karamata’sdark eyes when he stood up. ‘Be careful with him,’ he said as the two technicians picked the body up. The taller Willem sneered, but his swagger stopped at the hips and he picked up the boy without jolting him.
    ‘His name?’ Tamar asked.
    ‘Everyone called him Kaiser,’ Karamata replied.
    Tamar nodded. The pencil with the K was his then.
    The bang of the mortuary van’s doors seemed to release the crowd of onlookers. They pulled out cellphones to tell those who had been unlucky enough to miss the excitement what had happened: that there was another body; another boy was dead, another of those street children who wheedled money at every traffic light these days.
    ‘His surname?’ asked Tamar.
    ‘Apollis,’ said Van Wyk. ‘He has a sister. Sylvia. A whore, like he was. That’ll be why he’s in the van.’
    ‘You knew him too?’ asked Tamar.
    Van Wyk spat out the match he had been using to clean his teeth. ‘It’s a small town, Captain.’
    Captain Tamar Damases watched the vehicle bump down the road. Twice before this had happened and she had been unable to do a thing. Boys caught, killed, displayed, buried.
    The violent secrets encrypted on their bodies turned Tamar’s mind to Dr Clare Hart.

three
    Riedwaan Faizal pushed back the covers and went to the window, wrapping a towel around his waist. After a couple of minutes, Clare appeared in the distance, taking the curve of the Sea Point Boulevard in her stride. At this distance, in the thin September sunlight, she was a stranger to him, despite his intimate knowledge of her, gleaned in secret and hoarded. He watched her until she had disappeared, then he pushed his hands back through his hair. It had caused him a lot of trouble at high school, the way it grew straight up. He was always being sent to the headmaster to prove that he hadn’t gelled it. That was long ago now. Two decades, give or take a year or so. Now it showed careless streaks of grey in places.
    Riedwaan wandered through Clare’s flat, picking up her things, putting them down, running a finger along the alphabetically arranged spines of her books. Mainly hardbacks. Above the television were a couple of shelves of Clare’s documentaries, VHS copies of her broadcast investigative pieces, and an award for a film she’d done on human trafficking in the Congo. Putting the world to rights, that’s what her investigative work was about, her beliefs giving her the courage to go where there were no nets to catch her if she fell. It fitted with her profiling work, her conviction that she could find the source of evil and eliminate it. Riedwaan was less sure about that.
    He rifled through the heap of classical and acoustic CDs. ‘How much Moby can one person listen to?’ he asked Fritz. The cat flattened her ears and hissed in reply.
    In Clare’s bathroom, he opened one of the small pots of cream and held it to his nose. The jar carried the scent of her: tender, secret. Riedwaan put it down. He had done this so often in the homes of strangers. It had become second nature to look through the everyday artefacts of a woman’s life after her broken body had been found, searching for reasons why that woman stepped out for that minute and never returned to finish half-used jars of expensive cream or to serve the meal cooking in the oven.
    Clare was tired – he knew it – wrung out by the last case they had worked on together, profiling a killer whose refinements of cruelty had turned the stomachs of men who considered themselves inured to depravity. She needed to visit her reclusive twin, Constance. She needed to be alone, away. But Riedwaan didn’t want her to leave him. He liked to live with the woman he slept with. The patterns of a long marriage like his, even if it was broken, ran deep.
    He looked at himself in the mirror. He could get away without shaving. He showered and dressed,