Jade took no notice of the car, she just followed the black trail and the smell of burning rubber back down the road. Her shoes crunched over the broken glass from the BMW’s rear window. She walked into the sights of the sniper she knew was waiting for her.
She swung her arms by her sides. She had no weapon on her.
Viljoen was crouching on the grass, his hands over his head. The shopping bag lay beside him. The contents had spilled out. A loaf of bread, a half-liter of milk, a pack of veg-etables for soup.
When she reached him she held out her hand.
If she was wrong, the person in the bushes wasn’t a police sniper. Then she would die. If she was right, but the sniper was jumpy, he might still shoot her. Hopefully he would be experienced. Then she wouldn’t know about it. She wouldn’t know anything at all.
Jade waited. A bird fluttered down and hopped along the pavement in front of them. It pecked at a piece of orange peel and then flew away. The old man looked up at her, his eyes full of anxiety. He took her hand and she helped him to his feet. He moved stiffly.
She bent down, packed his groceries back into the bag and handed it to him.
“Wat gaan aan?” he asked her, in Afrikaans. What’s hap-pening?
Jade replied in English. “I don’t know what the shooting is all about. My name’s Jade de Jong. I want to ask you a couple of questions, Mr Viljoen. Can I walk with you?”
“Jade de Jong?” He squinted at her, hobbling forward on legs still jerky with fright.
“My father was Commissioner de Jong. He handled your case. Back in 1995, when you were arrested.”
The man nodded sadly. To Jade’s relief, he switched to thickly accented English. “Ja. We were arrested in December ’95. I remember de Jong.”
Jade could see the people from the car approaching. She felt a chill of despair. Williams and David were walking towards her, side by side. The other plainclothes detectives—the man in the jacket and the woman dressed as a domestic worker— watched from a distance.
Viljoen glanced nervously at the approaching men and then back at Jade.
“I need to know something, Mr. Viljoen.”
“Ja. You can ask me.”
“Did you or your brother have anything to do with the murder of my father? Did you know about it? Were you involved?”
Viljoen looked at her in total bewilderment. “Your dad was murdered? De Jong? No, I didn’t know that. I’m sorry. How did it happen?”
Jade stared into his eyes. She couldn’t see a lie there. She didn’t answer his question.
“Did you or your brother bribe a cop to sabotage your case?”
Viljoen gave a half-smile. “No. You don’t understand my brother, Ms. de Jong. He was a madman. He thought there was no case against us, that we would be found innocent. Until the day they sentenced him, he believed that he was right and they were wrong.”
Williams strode up to them, mustache bristling. “What the hell’s going on here?” he shouted. “That was an attempted assassination, my girl. We’re going to arrest your accomplice in that getaway car. And we’ll have handcuffs on you faster than you can say ‘Guilty.’”
“He wasn’t an accomplice,” Jade said.
“We have it on good authority he was.”
She shook her head. “He helped me locate Mr. Viljoen. That’s all.”
“You located Viljoen in order to kill him.”
The old man recoiled from Williams. He moved closer to Jade, despite the commissioner’s accusations, as if she could protect him from the frightening words as easily as she had picked up his shopping bag.
Jade spread her arms. “I don’t even have a weapon. Was I going to break his neck with my bare hands?” She stood her ground and stared down at Williams, who glared back up at her. “I wanted to ask him some questions relating to the death of my father. I got answers from him. The only shots fired were from your police sniper.” She indicated the camou-flaged man in Kevlar emerging from the bushes.
“Did the occupants of the car have a weapon?” Williams asked the sniper.
The man brushed dry leaves out of his hair.
“They were struggling with a weapon,” he said. “I fired a warning shot and then attempted to disable the vehicle by shooting out a tire.”
“You didn’t shoot very accurately,” Williams snapped.
“The car was all over the road, Commissioner. And there was a civilian directly in my line of fire.” The man sounded defensive.
Williams shrugged. “It doesn’t matter now.” He turned back to Jade. “You were struggling for possession of a weapon, with intent to commit murder.” Jade glanced at David. He stood statue-still and silent. She wondered what he was thinking, and if he knew that what she was saying was a lie.
She shook her head. “My driver was nervous. We saw a man with a gun in the bushes as we passed. He thought we might be hijacked if we stopped the car to talk to Mr. Viljoen. He wanted to have his gun ready for self-defense. I was trying to persuade him to put it down. I didn’t want Mr. Viljoen to be frightened. Then our back window was shot out and my driver panicked.” Jade put her hands on her hips and waited. Williams was still glowering at her, but she could see some uncertainty in his eyes. He didn’t have grounds for her arrest. She had been insanely lucky. The police sniper had fired the first and only shots. Hopefully, that meant David would be out of trouble too.
Williams’s walkie-talkie crackled.
“We lost the suspect, Commissioner,” a voice said. “He got away from us on the back roads.”
Jade felt a surge of relief.
“Roger. Return to the scene, then.” Williams sounded dis-appointed. He turned to Jade. “You’re off the case, as of this moment.” Then he turned to David, jabbing a finger into his chest. “And Superintendent, you’re suspended with imme-diate effect, pending a disciplinary inquiry.”
33
Jade couldn’t get hold of David on his cell. She couldn’t get hold of him on his landline either. And he wasn’t home. Not at his upstairs room next to her cottage, at any rate. Not by eight in the evening. Not by midnight, when she walked outside huddled in a jacket to check. The carport was empty and the window above the garage was dark. Which left only one logical place for him to be. And she didn’t want to think about that unpleasant possibility.
She was off the case. David was off the case. The investiga-tion was stalled. The evidence against Whiteboy had proved insubstantial and he’d been released. Jade was sure that by now he had vanished. She was willing to bet that the dilapi-dated house in Townview was as deserted tonight as David’s rented room.
A few minutes after one a.m. her phone beeped. She had a message.
“Jade.” Robbie’s voice was loud, and it hummed with stress. “I’m still hiding out. How could it all have gone sour like that? Call me when you can.”
She pressed the key to return the call. He answered imme-diately. From the background noise, Jade guessed he was drowning his sorrows in a bar somewhere.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“I’m lying low.”
“The cops raid late-night drinking establishments, you know.”
“Oh shut up, Jade. Stop jumping to conclusions about me. I’m in the Cat’s Pajamas. A twenty-four-hour restaurant.” He said the last word slowly as if to emphasize his respectability. “In Melville. West of the city. Come join me.”
Robbie sat at a corner table, his back to the wall. Jade looked around. At two in the morning, a twenty-four-hour restau-rant attracted an interesting variety of clientele. Some of the customers hunched over their whiskies and nachos looked like gangsters. Others reminded her of vampires risen from their coffins. Robbie had chosen his hideout well. He blended right in.
Jade sat down next to him. She wanted her back to the wall, too.
He pushed a glass over to her. Amber liquid sloshed around two ice cubes. “Whisky. For you.”
Jade cradled the glass in her hand and took a large gulp.
&n
bsp; “I need my gun,” she said.
Robbie’s face twitched and his eyes darted from side to side. He looked shaken. Jade had trusted him. Had she been wrong?
“I’ll get it for you. I don’t have it on me now. Too risky. If they bust me and link the ballistics to that other shooting in Pretoria, I’m in deep shit.”
“Where’s Verna?”
“Home alone. The cops have been round twice. Once to the shop, once to our house. She’s telling them I’m out of town, that I left on a business trip yesterday morning.”
“What happened?” Jade put her glass down and leaned towards him.
Robbie leaned away. “I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you everything. But don’t get mad at me, all right? I’m warning you right now, you wouldn’t have done any different.”
Jade preempted his explanation. “Were you dumb enough to carry out a hit on him?”
Robbie looked at her, hurt. “It was money for jam, OK? I didn’t tell you because I knew you wouldn’t have liked it. But I was going to share the bucks with you when I was paid.”
Jade was absolutely certain he was lying. About sharing the payout with her, at any rate. “Really? Have you been paid?”
“Well, no. I mean, it’s all null and void now, isn’t it? The target’s still alive.”
They paused. A waitress was hovering at their table. She had a piercing in her lower lip and a huge metal crucifix around her neck. Jade thought she probably wore it to ward off vampires.
Robbie ordered nachos. After a brief scan of the menu, so did Jade.
“Did you know the cops would be there?” she asked when the waitress had gone.
“Honest to God, I had no idea it was a police setup.” Robbie stared at her, eyes steady and unblinking. Not that that meant anything. Once, on a nighttime game drive in the Kruger National Park, Jade had seen a caracal on the hunt look at a baby gemsbok much the same way. A moment later, it had sprung forward, claws bared, and seized the unsuspecting fawn.
“My contact told me the opposite,” Robbie continued. “He said Monday was the day to do it, no question.”
“Who approached you for the hit? Who was this trusty contact?”
“I don’t know.”
Jade buried her face in her hands. When she’d raised her head again, she took another large gulp of her drink. “Robbie. How can you not know?”
“We spoke on the phone. He told me government people wanted Viljoen out of the way because of political sensitivity. It made sense, seeing as how the new government are all blacks, and those workers were friends of their friends. Look, Jade, it sounded genuine as hell. I trusted him. And I’m a sus-picious guy.”
“You’re stupid.”
“I am not.”
“You were sold out. Your contact was an informer.”
“Well, maybe the guy got arrested for something else and had to make a deal.”
Robbie’s eyes widened as a large man wearing a collared shirt pushed through the crowds towards their table. The man lifted his head and regarded them for a long, slow moment. Then he pulled up a chair at the neighboring table and sat down. Robbie exhaled, a long, shaky breath.
“I can’t take this stress, Jade.”
“Then don’t take on dodgy jobs from people who tell you they have government contacts.”
Robbie slapped a hand against his chest. “I’m patriotic. I love the new government. I’d do anything to help them. They look after entrepreneurs like me. In the old days, it was so difficult to do business. Now it’s a pleasure. Pay off a few people, and there’s no more worries.”
The waitress returned with the nachos. Jade asked for a dish of chopped chili. She wondered who had sold Robbie out, and why. Was it somebody he’d screwed over in the past? She was sure there were more than a few of those. If you lined them up, the queue of people who’d got the short end of a deal with Robbie would probably stretch around the block. But that wasn’t her problem. He had got her into trouble. That was her problem. Right now, she couldn’t do anything about it.
“Viljoen didn’t kill my dad.”
“Huh?” Robbie pushed a nacho into his mouth with his fingers.
“He didn’t arrange the hit.”
“Who did, then?”
“I don’t know. But the Viljoen brothers weren’t sabotaging the case. The elder brother thought he had a God-given right to do what he wanted and stay out of jail.”
“So who was paying Jacobs, then? Who was sabotaging the case?”
Jade shook her head. The food was excellent. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was. She ladled chili onto another mouthful. “Perhaps we’re looking at it the wrong way round. Whoever sabotaged the case might have wanted to keep the brothers out of jail, so they could take their own revenge.”
Robbie frowned, considering her theory. “Could be.”
They ate in silence, listening to Led Zeppelin playing in the background.
“I was wrong,” Jade said, scraping the last piece of chili out of the bowl.
“No, I was wrong. I screwed things up for you. Sorry.”
Robbie took a wad of fifties out of his wallet and counted out four of them. Jade watched him with suspicion. Robbie didn’t do apologies. Why was he saying sorry now?
He sounded determined. “I’m going to do some scouting around, babe. I’ll find out who sold us out. Then I’ll put a few bullets into him. To say thank you very much, from both of us.
“Dinner’s on me, to make up for it.” He slid the notes under his empty glass. “You’re lucky. You can go home and sleep now. I’ve got to keep on ducking and diving till the heat’s off.”
Jade didn’t go straight home. She skirted Johannesburg city and drove through Turffontein, along the empty roads. She didn’t want to go there, but she had to know.
She stopped when she reached David’s house. The lights were off and the place was quiet. David’s unmarked was parked in the driveway behind Naisha’s car. Jade pulled over and watched the silent house for a long while before she drove away.
Now beyond the point of exhaustion, Jade found sleep was impossible. She gave up trying just before dawn. She moved her heater into the kitchen and put the kettle on. There were no books in the cottage. None she wanted to read, anyway. And no satellite TV. There was nothing for her to do except the one activity she wasn’t supposed to pursue any more. Working on the case.
She was so accustomed to doing it, she found it difficult not to. Out of habit she took her coffee to the table and turned the pages over, reviewing her notes, searching the evidence for anything they had missed.
She’d even drawn a timeline.
On the twenty-seventh of May, Annette had called Dean Grobbelaar, private investigator, to trace Ellie Myers. She had transferred an advance payment to him for his efforts. A week later, she’d mentioned to Piet that she thought she was being followed. On the seventh of June, she’d been murdered. And on the fourteenth, Dean Grobbelaar had been hacked to death with an axe.
Jade added two more dates to the timeline, right at the beginning. 22 February 2001. The date of Ellie’s murder. And a month or so later, Mark Myers had sent a check for the sale of his property to his father-in-law, and disappeared out of his life forever.
She frowned as she wrote the final entry. The sale of the property. They’d tried to trace Ellie Myers. But they hadn’t looked at the other side of the equation.
Who benefits? That was a question her father had always advised her to ask. Sometimes, he told her, it would be the only question she’d need to ask.
Mark Myers had sold the property for one million rand. A giveaway price. He was traumatized by the death of his wife, his pride wounded by the uncompromising attitude of his father-in-law. Perhaps he thought he had nothing to lose. That didn’t alter the fact that somebody had gained from the transaction.
Jade remembered David sitting at the table opposite her, telling her about the prices of the luxury homes at 48 Forest Road. How much had the developer made on that proj
ect? She knew David had said it was a mind-boggling sum.
So. Who did benefit from Ellie’s murder?
The person who bought the property from Mark.
At eight a.m. precisely, she phoned the cheerful lady in charge of the Oak Grove cluster development.
“The name and contact details of the developer? I’m sure we can give you that, dear.” The lady sounded bright and breezy, as if she had walked into the office after a healthy breakfast, a good coffee and a pleasant drive through easy traffic. Jade envied her.
“It was done by a company called White & Co.” She gave Jade the details. Phone number, fax number, postal and e-mail addresses.
When the woman said the name, Jade jumped. For a moment she thought the lady was going to say Whiteboy. Then she remembered the job they’d done in Pretoria. White & Co had been developing phase two of the luxury villas where Hirsch stayed. But now the two names seemed eerily similar. Could there be a connection? Was this Whiteboy’s venture?
“Who’s in charge there? Do you know?”
“I couldn’t say, dear. We dealt with the contractors, mostly. The company outsourced most of the work. Architecture, design, and of course we took over afterwards to do mainte-nance and upkeep. The only job White & Co did themselves was the subdivision and the property sales.”
Jade rang off and tried David again. His cell went straight through to voicemail. She didn’t leave a message. He could see her number on the screen. He’d answer if he wanted to.
Next, she tried the phone and fax numbers of White &Co. On both calls, she listened to a recorded message from Telkom telling her the number she had dialed did not exist.
The number might not exist. But perhaps the company still did. She paged through the file until she found Graham Hope’s business card. She hoped the friendly estate agent could advise her on how to find it.
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