She shivered as she thought about that nighttime surveil-lance. How had Viljoen known she was back in the country less than twenty-four hours after her flight had landed? While he was locked up in prison, serving the last few days of a ten-year sentence which he surely wouldn’t want to jeopardize.
There were only two possibilities. Either Viljoen had uncanny instincts and a network of contacts second to none. Or she was wrong and somebody else was watching her. If so, she had no idea who it could be.
She’d been home for about half an hour when she heard honking at the gate. It was David, in an unmarked vehicle, on his way home from work. He wound the window down and shouted at her.
“You don’t have a bloody doorbell! The only way I can get your attention is to honk.”
Jade could see his breath fogging in the cold. She pressed the button on the remote control and opened the gate.
“You could have phoned,” she said as he got out of the car and slammed the door.
“Bloody airtime. Costs a bomb. It’ll bankrupt me.”
David’s large presence and angry mood filled the small kitchen.
“Tough day?” she asked.
“I’ve come round to see if yours was as crap as mine.” He slumped down onto a chair. It creaked ominously under his weight.
“I thought you were here to scrounge dinner.”
“That too. Same as always. And a beer if you have one. We can talk about the case afterwards. I’m too damn hungry and thirsty right now.” He glanced around the cottage, and looked at her. His mouth twitched in a smile. “Feels like we last did this yesterday,” he said. “You, me and your dad. All around the table in that tiny bloody house. Those were the good times, Jadey.”
She put a beer in front of him and poured herself a glass of wine. She’d gone shopping on the way home and the fridge and cupboard were now stocked with an optimistic selection of healthy food. Vegetables, lentils, brown rice, chicken breasts. That would have to stay where it was for now.
Jade took two giant pepperoni pizzas out of the oven. She knew that when David said he’d be round to discuss the case that evening it was a thinly disguised request for junk food and beer. Cop food, he called it. He was addicted. She had never seen him eat anything healthy.
He grabbed the biggest piece of pizza and crammed it into his mouth. The cheese stretched into long strands that snapped halfway and coiled around his chin.
He started talking before he had swallowed. “If you’d stayed here, we’d have made a good team. Remember. We were going to open the first ever multi-racial, bisexual detec-tive agency in South Africa.”
“Not bisexual. Multi-gender. There’s an important differ-ence,” Jade corrected him.
“Whatever. We had it all planned.”
She nodded. “I remember.” Planned was an exaggeration. But they had talked about it. It had been a dream for her. Perhaps it had been a dream for him too.
She’d ordered a small tub of chopped chili with the pizzas. She spooned a large pile of the oily green substance onto her slice.
“We’d be making a fortune now,” David said. “Easy work. Cheating husbands and debt dodgers. Good money. None of these politics. All I’ve been dealing with today is red tape and paperwork. The whole bloody day.”
“We could still do it.”
David lifted the beer bottle to his lips. He put it down again, empty, a minute later. He wiped a hand across his mouth, looking glum. “We wouldn’t be the first any more.”
Jade took another beer out of the fridge and passed it to him. She watched his hands as he took the bottle. They were surprisingly elegant, with long fingers and short, neat nails that shone against his dark skin.
“Every year, I tell myself this is my last in the police service,” he said. “Then I think to myself, if I leave, who the hell else is going to get the job done? It’s not like we don’t have the numbers. We do. But nobody’s halfway competent. That’s the problem. Case files, evidence, reports go missing all the time.” He rubbed his chin with the back of his hand.
“There is a paper napkin. There, by your knife.”
“Oh.” David looked at it suspiciously, as if it was a piece of evi-dence that didn’t match a crime scene. “You see, Jade, transfor-mation is good and necessary. Don’t get me wrong.” He glanced up and saw her frowning. “Transformation. Getting more black people into the workplace. In places where white people used to have nice cushy protected jobs. The police service, for instance.”
“But?”
“But it’s been too much, too soon. Most of the officers with knowledge and experience were told thank you and goodbye. Or they got their backs up because of all the changes and left. Either way, they never had a chance to pass on their skills. So now we’ve got a crowd of semi-educated and inexperienced workers trying to do some bloody demanding jobs. They’re not coping. You want to know what the police suicide rate is right now? If anyone in my team doesn’t pitch up for work, I phone them straight away to check they haven’t shot them-selves with their service pistol.”
Jade started on her third piece of pizza. She was matching David slice for slice, but she wasn’t confident about this situ-ation continuing much longer. For one thing, the chili was almost finished.
“You can’t help it if your staff are inexperienced. You’re doing the best that can be done. You always have.”
“Tell that to Commissioner Williams.”
“Is he still on your back?”
David shook his head. “Jade, I don’t know what the hell this guy has against me. He’s making me believe I can’t do the bloody job.”
Jade frowned. Williams had been a competent investigator, according to her father. Perhaps he was a poor manager, pro-moted past his level of skill. Then she had another idea. “You mentioned transformation. Could he have an issue with race? He’s an old-school white Afrikaner. He’s been in that position ever since my dad died. Perhaps he’s angry he’s got a non-white guy working below him now.”
“Yes. I’d say that also. It would be my first thought. Except the last superintendent was a colored man, and he didn’t have a problem with him.”
“The one who had a heart attack?”
He nodded, taking another slice. “The one who left things in a complete bloody mess.”
“Maybe he was good at blaming his inefficiency on other people.”
“If so, I’d better start learning how to do that in a hurry.”
“David.” Jade leaned towards him. She wanted to touch his arm, squeeze his shoulder. Hug him. Do something com-forting. She wasn’t great with physical contact. Never had been. And she was worried that he would interpret it the wrong way. Or rather, if she was honest with herself, the right way.
David was like an older brother, friend and protector com-bined. She’d liked him ever since the first time he smiled at her. A few months after that, when her father was out of town, David had come round for supper and they’d shared a couple of bottles of wine. They talked, with increasing inco-herence, about life and love and everything in between. She’d told him how hard it had been to grow up as a policeman’s daughter in a rough neighborhood. “Pig’s kid” was what the other children had called her when her father wasn’t around. When things had been really bad, she’d taken a knife with her to school, just in case.
In return, David had told her about his childhood. It had been difficult for him, too. He had an Indian father who lived in Durban and a white mother who lived in Port Eliza-beth. When he was old enough to understand, his mother explained that she’d divorced his father when David was very young. It took him a few more years to work out that she’d lied to him, and that although she’d given him his father’s last name, his parents had never been married. He told Jade he was illogically ashamed about this for many years. And he had never fit in. Not with the white people, not with the Indian community. He was a half-breed, an outcast. Bloody lonely, he’d told her. Just like her.
When David had finally stagger
ed out of the house that night, after kissing her on the cheek and cracking his head against the door lintel, Jade had realized that she was hope-lessly in love with him. But what could she do about it? He worked under her dad. She could imagine how difficult it would have been for him to confess to stern Commissioner de Jong that he had romantic feelings for his daughter.
Worse still, perhaps he’d never felt anything for her beyond simple friendship. So she’d bitten her tongue and said nothing.
Now, looking at him across the pizza boxes in the little cottage, all her old shyness returned in an unwelcome rush. It was ridiculous, when she thought about it. After all, she had suffered her share of rejection since then. Taken it and doled it out. Mended her heart and moved on. But David was different. He made her feel like an awkward teenager again, not somebody who’d been involved with other men in other countries. She didn’t want to think about having him look her in the eye and explain with uncharacteristic and humili-ating gentleness that he’d never felt the same way about her.
So she leaned towards him without touching him and said, “You know you’re not inefficient. You’re a details man. And a fantastic cop. Ten years ago you were the best investigator in the whole precinct. Everyone knew you’d be promoted fast and that you’d do the best job. Why should anything have changed?”
David’s face softened and he stretched out his hand across the table.
Jade sat immobile, her heart racing. Perhaps he did feel exactly the same way about her. She waited for his hand to touch hers, imagining how his fingers would feel laced through her own for the very first time.
It never reached her. He pulled her pizza box towards him and lifted out a slice.
“You don’t mind sharing, do you, Jadey? These things are bloody tiny. A whole one gone and I’m still hungry.”
“Of course I don’t mind.” Jade resisted the temptation to run outside and howl like an abandoned dog. Instead she got up and poured herself another large glass of wine. She felt she deserved it.
After David had eaten the last piece of pizza, they started dis-cussing the case.
He told her they’d found no prints on the gate motor. The lid of the motor had been levered off from outside the gate and two fuses had been broken. The gate had been effectively disabled. He strongly suspected that Annette’s killer had jimmied the motor a day or two earlier, so that she would have to get out of her car when she arrived home.
“Makes it much easier to hijack a vehicle if the owner isn’t in it,” he said. Jade moved her chair closer to the heater. David slung his arm over it and put his feet up on the table. She could have reached out and touched his legs. Put her hand on them. But she didn’t. They sat together in silence.
She couldn’t hear any cars on the bumpy road outside. Only the muted beep of the electric fence power supply.
That didn’t mean she felt safe. Jade never felt safe. Not in cottages, not in hotels. It was laughably easy to gain access to a hotel room. She’d done it before when she needed to. A plausible story at the reception desk, a swift bribe slipped to the right person. Or better still, a hurried entry into the room as the turndown service was being done, with an apology to a chambermaid who wouldn’t think twice about it. Jade never opened a hotel room door without wondering if somebody was inside, waiting for her.
The cottage was more difficult to penetrate. But it was still possible in spite of the reassuring electric fence. She’d seen gaps under the palisade fencing where people could crawl through. Then her attackers would have the advantage. They could break in or they could wait for her to step out of the front door.
Forcing back the troubling thoughts, she told David about her day.
He frowned. “So Annette’s work colleague claims her husband had her followed? That doesn’t sound good. What’s your impression of Piet?”
Jade thought that over for a moment. “Before I spoke to Yolandi, he wasn’t my first choice of suspect.”
“Why not?”
She struggled to find the words to describe the weathered little man. “Not because of motive. He benefits from her death. More because he’s so unworldly. I feel sorry for him. He can’t control Annette’s dogs. I can’t imagine him being able to deal with a Pekingese. He couldn’t manage to light a cigarette while I was talking to him. He got distracted and then just gave up on the job. If he’d arranged a successful hit, which would surprise me, there’s no way he could do it without leaving evidence behind. That’s my first impression of him, anyway.”
“Let’s find out what he’s up to, then. But if the evidence points any further towards him, I’m going to have to bring him in and ask him some tough questions. Maybe handcuffs and a night in a cell will get the truth out of him.”
“I’ll talk to the private detective tomorrow. See if Annette contacted him, and why.” Jade stood up. She bent the empty pizza boxes in half and pushed them into the dustbin.
David took his feet off the table and rocked forward on the chair. “Yell if you need anything. Thanks for supper, and all that.” He got up and walked towards the door. She followed him, but he stopped suddenly and turned back to her. They were so close they were almost touching. He gazed down at her.
“You know, Jade, it’s bloody cold in here.”
“Yes. I know.”
He turned and left, closing the door quietly behind him.
8
“Always check your facts, Jade,” her father used to say. After she’d told him she wanted to become an investigator, he spent many hours talking to her about the profession. Usually they’d sat at the kitchen table and drank coffee. Often she took notes, and sometimes he wrote them out for her. During these informal training sessions, she’d felt closer to her father than she ever had before.
“Check and double check. People lie. If you’re a cop they might lie to you just because of the uniform you wear. Some-times they’ll lie for other reasons, especially to a pretty girl like you. Maybe they’re trying to impress you by making out they’re more than they actually are. Or maybe they’re jealous.”
“And what if they lie because they’re guilty?” she asked.
“That happens. Those are the biggest lies of all. And the hardest to catch out, because the people who tell them have the most to lose. So you have to keep digging away to uncover the truth. And remember that the minute you try to find something out, there will be people who’ll try and stop you. So never make yourself vulnerable. Trust your gut feeling. And always watch your back, or have somebody watch it for you.”
Her father’s words echoed in Jade’s head as she drove into the center where Dean Grobbelaar had his office. The shopping center was small. The entrance was in a quiet minor road and it didn’t look like it was doing too well. The parking lot was deserted, the gutters littered with cans and crisp packets. The tarmac was cracked in places where grass, now withered, had pushed through.
Jade wound down her window and checked it out. She saw a row of three shops. Two of them looked closed. The windows were dusty and dull, the spaces beyond were bare except for empty shelves and discarded cardboard boxes. One, at some past date, had been a hairdresser, if the peeling poster hanging from the door could be believed. Another had been a hard-ware store. The glass in the shop front was cracked, as if some-body had thrown a stone at it.
Only one shop was operational, the little general store on the corner. The aproned shopkeeper stood outside leaning against the doorframe, his face turned to the sun. She saw two black domestic workers approaching the store, chatting and shrieking with laughter, their voices loud in the stillness. Roused from his reverie, he hurried inside to serve them.
Jade parked next to the general store just as the two women walked out with bulging shopping bags, still talking at the tops of their voices.
She watched them go, wondering how far they had to plod up the road with their heavy bags while drivers whizzed uncaringly past them. She felt sorry for Jo’burg’s poor, who had to walk vast distances to reach cramme
d and dangerous taxis. Nameless, faceless, they were ignored by the rich people speeding past in the air-conditioned cocoons of their fast and expensive cars.
Turning away from the women, she noticed an open doorway at the side of the building. A staircase led up to the first floor. The steps looked ancient, dips worn into the middle of each tread.
Jade walked up and reached a landing with an open window that looked out over the back of the building. She leaned out and saw another dilapidated parking lot. An old Toyota occu-pied one of the spaces. It was parked at an angle in the shade and its windows and windshield were still covered by a thin layer of ice.
The Toyota looked like a typical police unmarked. Like the kind of vehicle that a cut-rate private detective might drive.
Jade’s fingers brushed against the shape of the gun under her jacket. She trusted her gut, just as her father had always told her to do, and it was telling her that something was wrong. The car clearly hadn’t been driven anywhere since the frost came down, which would have been well before sunrise.
She reached the top of the second flight of stairs and started down the corridor. Her shoes clacked on the linoleum. The walls were dirty. They needed a scrub and a fresh coat of paint. She shivered. The corridor was like a wind tunnel, channeling cold air along its length.
The first office door was protected by a security gate locked with a rusty padlock. The metal was also dusty. It had been a while since anybody worked in this room.
The next door had a sign on it, handwritten on a piece of cardboard that curled at the edges. “Alliance Finance.” It, too, was locked from the outside. Jade wouldn’t have trusted a finance company operating from premises like these, or with a sign like that. Presumably the clients had felt the same.
The door of the third office was closed. But the security gate was ajar.
D. GROBBELAAR INVESTIGATION was printed on a laminated piece of cardboard and attached to the door with four brass drawing pins. Compared to the signage on the previous door, Dean had chosen the luxury option.
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