Blood Rose by Margie Orford Page B

was a warning, the boy. Like a warning from the spirits. This is a bad place. I told you we used to see them left dead to warn us, telling us to keep our heads down, not see things, to leave. That boy was a warning. Like the old ones we had during the war.’
    ‘Who was the warning for?’ Clare asked.
    Shipanga shook his head. ‘There are many ghosts in this desert. The desert sees everything. All our secrets.’ He paused, waiting for a distant siren wail to cease. ‘It keeps secrets only as long as it feels like it. Then the sand moves and there are all the skeletons. It is a message.’
    ‘And what was the message?’
    ‘That I must go home to my village,’ said Shipanga. ‘I mustn’t die here.’ He traced a curved line in the sand: the river on whose verdant banks he had spent his boyhood.
    Clare stood up to go. Shipanga looked up at her. ‘Did you speak to Miss Mara?’
    ‘Not yet,’ said Clare.
    ‘Miss Mara knew that boy well. He was in her team. The other boys, too, the dead ones.’
    To the left of the house, a woman turned the corner, laden with old plastic shopping bags. She stopped when she saw Clare, her brow furrowed with concern. ‘Herman?’ she said as she approached.
    Shipanga stood up. ‘This is my wife. Magdalena, this is the police doctor.’ Clare took the woman’s plump hand. It was as soft and worn as an old glove. Magdalena looked at her husband.
    ‘He can’t sleep,’ she said to Clare. ‘Since he found the dead boy, he keeps us all awake with his nightmares or with walking about. He says the boy was there to call him home.’
    ‘What do you think?’ asked Clare.
    Magdalena shook her head. ‘I was born in the city. I see no ghosts. There are sailors here, truck drivers, and foreigners from everywhere. It’s one of them. Whoever did it is gone.’ She sat down beside her husband. ‘Gone, Herman.’
    Shipanga leant against the sturdy body of his wife, the strength drained from him. ‘You’ll excuse us.’ Magdalena pulled him to his feet, limp as a rag doll. Clare watched the little house swallow them. The radio crackled back to life.
    The children drifted away when she returned to her car. She sat for a minute, wishing she still smoked. The caretaker had given her nothing new, nothing concrete.
    The hand tapping on her window snapped her into the present. It was Shipanga again. ‘I found this,’ he said, reaching for Clare’s hand and placing a tangle of gossamer threads in her palm. It was a cast, a compact ball of insect remains; wings, shimmering and transparent, some still attached to fragments of insect bodies.
    ‘What is it?’
    ‘It’s from insects, after they’ve been eaten. You only find these ones in the desert.’ Shipanga pointed to a red-streaked pair of wings, longer than the others. ‘They come out if it rains.’
    ‘Termites?’
    Shipanga nodded.
    ‘Why are you giving me this?’ The tangled limbs moved in the breeze, their husky weightlessness horrible in Clare’s hand.
    Shipanga stepped back from the car window as Clare tipped the little corpses into the cubbyhole. ‘After they took the boy away,’ he said, ‘I went back to the swing. I found it stuck in the tyre where his head had been.’

sixteen
    Karamata was finishing his coffee in Tamar’s office when Clare got back to the police station. ‘Are you ready to see the sights?’ he asked. He was scheduled to take Clare to the dump site where Nicanor Jones was found.
    ‘I’m ready. Are you coming, Tamar?’ asked Clare.
    Tamar shook her head. ‘I am still going through all the ship logs to see if there’s any pattern with which ships were in and these murders.’ She leant back on her yellow couch. She looked so slight, despite her pregnancy.
    ‘Find anything yet?’
    ‘Not much. The Russian ships, of course. The
Alhantra
’s been in all the time. Ragnar Johansson’s the skipper. You know him, I think.’
    ‘I do,’ said Clare. ‘From the last time I was here.’ She couldn’t