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for example.’ She looked at Riedwaan. He 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 spenttwo 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