The Fallen

by Jassy Mackenzie

  The old lady whispered the words again, and this time Jade heard them exactly.

  ‘She died. Buried in the gardens.’

  Despite the warmth of the room, Jade shivered.

  ‘Yes, I know. That’s why I’ve come to visit. To find out …’

  But Mrs Koekemoer interrupted her, again with words so soft Jade had to lean right forward to make them out.

  ‘Car accident, right here in town.’

  Jade felt as if a bucket of icy water had just been tipped over her back. The skin on her arms turned to gooseflesh.

  ‘No … it can’t be.’

  ‘She was speeding,’ the old lady mumbled, nodding her head so that her white curls bobbed. ‘Going far too fast. She and her baby daughter, both. They’re with the angels now.’

  A gentle touch on Jade’s shoulder made her jump.

  The nurse was back, holding a glass of water on a saucer.

  ‘She’s talking about her own daughter,’ she said in a low voice, handing the water to Jade. ‘She’s the one who died in the crash with her baby. It was many years ago, but she still speaks about it as if it was yesterday. Sometimes she forgets it happened and asks us where Daphne is and why she does not visit.’

  Jade nodded. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered. Then, turning back to Mrs Koekemoer, she said, ‘That must have been terrible for you.’

  ‘Yes, yes. A terrible loss.’ Lacing her knotted fingers together, she bowed her head. ‘I pray for them every day. Pray they did not suffer.’ She glanced up at Jade again. ‘Who are you?’ she asked.

  Jade was beginning to think that this visit was a waste of time—that she should simply sit here and offer the elderly lady some company for a while, and come back another day.

  One last try, then.

  ‘I’m Elise de Jong’s daughter. You looked after her at the hospital.’

  When Mrs Koekemoer turned to stare at Jade, it was like a light had suddenly gone on behind her eyes.

  ‘You are so like your mother, my dear. I’d forgotten how she looked, but seeing you brings it all back.’

  Jade took a deep breath. She realised her hands were clenched so hard her nails were just about piercing her palms. ‘You remember her well?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, ja, of course. She had the very first C-section we ever did in the new maternity ward. A beautiful lady?’

  Jade nodded encouragingly. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Her glass of red wine,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I remember that. Her husband would visit every evening, and he’d bring along a bottle of red wine and pour a glass for each of them. Just one glass each, every night. It wasn’t really allowed, but we turned a blind eye.’

  Jade smiled. She could imagine her father’s pleasure in this evening ritual. He’d enjoyed red wine, although he’d only ever had a glass on special occasions. Perhaps her birth had been special enough for him and his wife to celebrate every night.

  ‘My father didn’t speak much about my mother,’ Jade offered. ‘There’s a lot I don’t know.’

  Mrs Koekemoer nodded sympathetically. ‘I see.’

  ‘I don’t even know where she’s buried.’

  The old woman’s eyes widened.

  ‘That’s a secret, my dear. I’m not allowed to tell. You must speak to the doctor in charge. What’s his name? Let me think now … Abrahams, that’s it. Ask him.’

  This odd reply made Jade start to worry that Mrs Koekemoer’s window of lucidity was narrowing. Changing the subject, she continued.

  ‘My dad said she loved to dive. Loved the ocean.’

  ‘Oh, yes. She was a diver, wasn’t she? Until the accident, of course.’

  The accident?

  Jade sat forward, propping herself right on the edge of her chair. ‘What accident? I’ve never heard anything about that.’ For a moment, she thought that Mrs Koekemoer must be thinking of her own daughter’s car accident again.

  ‘She’d been out at sea. Not diving, of course, because she was pregnant. She was snorkelling. A boat ran right over her. Her arms were all cut up from the propeller—it looked like somebody had taken a carving knife to her.’

  With those words, the vivid image of Amanda’s bloodied body flooded back into Jade’s head. She gave an involuntary shudder.

  ‘Elise was knocked out—she almost drowned. Luckily someone managed to get her back to shore before the sharks came along.’

  Jade’s breath caught in her throat.

  ‘For a while, we were worried she might miscarry, but she didn’t. She made a full recovery, but I remember her saying that as it happened, all she’d been able to think about was her baby … about you. Elise told me in hospital that she didn’t know if she could ever enjoy diving again. Having so nearly died had made her feel differently about it,’ the old lady whispered in a conspiratorial tone. ‘She said she was terrified to go back underwater, that she thought she had developed a fear of drowning.’

  25

  As Jade walked out of the retirement home, ready to make her way back to the shopping centre where she had said she’d meet David, her phone started ringing. The incoming number was unfamiliar.

  She cast a glance up and down the narrow road before answering, but there was nobody to be seen except for a young black man in shorts and a ragged T-shirt walking ahead of her.

  Jade punched the answer button.

  ‘Hello?’

  The voice on the other side stopped her in her tracks.

  It was sharp, confident, horribly familiar.

  ‘Babe. Thought I’d better give you a call, because I see you’ve skipped town.’

  Jade snatched the phone away from her ear as if it were a red-hot coal.

  Robbie. As soon as he spoke, she couldn’t help remember the way he’d looked when she’d last seen him, just a week ago, waiting for her in the darkness outside her cottage.

  The new scar on his jaw, the gold rings on his fingers, the hardness in his eyes.

  His expression when he told her he wanted her ‘help’ with a job.

  Heart banging in her throat, she stared at the instrument, bitterly regretting having answered the call. How bloody ironic. She’d refused to help because of David, because she knew it was what he would have wanted. And now that David was getting back together with his wife permanently, her noble decision had been in vain.

  She still wasn’t going to help Robbie, though. This was her chance—the opportunity to step out of his world and break ties with him forever. It would mean she’d just have to be more cautious when arriving home alone.

  She raised the phone again, to find he was still speaking.

  ‘… haven’t heard from them for a few days now, and it looks like the assignment’s changed profile, so I thought I’d better keep you in the loop …’

  ‘Robbie,’ Jade interrupted him, speaking loudly.

  ‘Yes, babe?’

  ‘This job. I’m …’

  And then, with the words she needed on the tip of her tongue, Jade heard her phone play the cheery little tune that meant the battery was drained.

  She stared down at the blank screen of the instrument in exasperation.

  ‘Damn you to hell!’ she shouted, so loudly that the black man turned, noticing her for the first time, and stared at her for a long, assessing moment.

  Jade raised her head and met his gaze until he looked away. Then she pocketed the useless phone and stomped back up the street.

  Immersed in her own frustrated thoughts, it was a while before she noticed that the yellow car parked up ahead by the side of the road outside the entrance to one of the dilapidated blocks of flats looked oddly familiar.

  She slowed down and took a better look.

  The car stood out from its surroundings, by virtue of its colour as well as its shape. The number plate looked familiar, and the unusual sticker on the rear window advertising a Durban surf shop confirmed her first thoughts.

  This car belonged to Neil Pienaar, the owner of Scuba Sands. She’d last seen it less than
two hours ago, parked outside his house while he unloaded shopping bags from it.

  What on earth was it doing here?

  Jade’s first and immediate thought was that Neil was visiting a prostitute. After all, he was a single man and she’d seen no evidence that he had a partner or lover of either gender. So perhaps this was how he preferred to conduct his intimate relationships.

  But in this ramshackle part of town?

  Jade frowned up at the apartment building, noticing the crumbling plaster, the rusty balcony railings, the two broken windows on the first floor.

  And then she saw Neil.

  Hurrying along the corridor of the third and top floor in the direction of the external stairwell. As she watched, he headed down the first flight of stairs and disappeared from sight.

  He would soon reappear, though, and when he did he would see her. And until Jade knew why Neil had been on the top floor of a dodgy-looking building in an unsavoury part of Richards Bay, she wanted to keep her presence here a secret.

  Jade sprinted to the opposite side of the road and crouched down behind the only available cover on that side of the street—another parked car, this one an old beige Toyota. If the car’s owner appeared, she’d be exposed and have some explaining to do. But Jade didn’t think the owner would be heading this way any time soon, because the car’s tyres were so soft that it was basically listing sideways on its heavily rusted rims.

  Lifting her head, Jade peered through the car’s dirty windows and looked across the road. She heard the thud of Neil’s shoes before she saw him. He emerged from the ground-floor entrance and marched towards his car with shoulders squared, fists clenched and arms swinging by his side. He looked very different from the inoffensive and rather timid man that Jade remembered. Was he angry now? And if so, what had caused his rage?

  The Volkswagen started with a roar and a moment later its rounded yellow backside shot off down the street.

  Jade got up from her hiding place and crossed the road. Standing outside the flat’s entrance, she looked up.

  The building was designed in an L-shape, with the longer leg of the ‘L’ running parallel to the road. Since Neil had come round the corner, from the shorter side of the building, there were only one or two apartments that he could have been visiting.

  On the left-hand side of the main doorway there was an intercom system with eighteen buttons. Jade could have pressed all of them if she’d needed to, and the chances were good that one of the residents would have let her in. However, the security system, such as it was, was rendered null and void by the fact that the steel access gate at the building’s entrance, the one which Neil had so recently pushed open, was unlatched. In fact, looking more closely, Jade saw that the latch was broken.

  She walked in and headed up the gloomy stairs.

  Jade didn’t go straight to the third floor, but walked along the second-floor corridor to get an idea of the layout. On her right was the railing, and on her left the wooden doors to the flats themselves. The entrances to flats seven to ten looked onto the road, and when she rounded the corner she saw that those of numbers eleven and twelve faced the bare wall of the next-door building.

  So, assuming the third-floor numbering system mirrored this pattern, Neil could only have been visiting someone in flat seventeen or eighteen.

  Returning to the main entrance, Jade pressed the buzzers for both these numbers. The intercom was working—she could hear the loud ringing noise it made. After a pause, number seventeen answered.

  ‘Yebo?’

  A woman’s voice. Jade couldn’t tell more than that, because the voice was just about drowned out by the yelling of babies in the background. The sound burst out of the cheap intercom, accompanied by a series of distorted crackles. More than two infants, certainly. Perhaps three or four, each trying to gain ascendancy over the other in terms of the pitch, volume and duration of screams. Gritting her teeth, Jade took a deep breath.

  ‘Did a man come and visit you just now?’ she shouted.

  ‘Angizwakahle.’

  Huh?

  Jade’s Zulu was too sketchy to understand the response, so she pushed open the security door and walked all the way up to flat number seventeen. This time the cries of the children were audible even before she turned the corner of the ‘L’. With some trepidation, she knocked on the cheap plywood door.

  It was opened a short while later by a plump, twenty-something woman. She had a white headscarf wrapped around her braided hair, a baby on her hip and a half-full bottle of milk in her right hand. The infant was screaming so loudly that the sound waves actually battered Jade.

  The woman looked out at her, her manner suspicious, but not entirely unfriendly.

  Behind her, Jade could see that the apartment was well lit, clean and, apart from a number of toys and blankets strewn on the living room carpet, relatively tidy. Another child was wailing from the confines of a push-chair in the passage and two toddlers were on all fours on the carpet, bellowing as they struggled for possession of what looked like a stuffed zebra.

  ‘Hello,’ Jade said. The baby drew breath for another scream and into the silence she said quickly, ‘Did a man just come here? A white person, name of Neil?’

  The woman’s smooth forehead furrowed into a small, confused frown and she shook her head.

  ‘No white man comes here,’ she said in halting English.

  ‘Sorry to disturb you,’ Jade said, taking a step back as, once again, she was bludgeoned by a wall of noise. ‘Thank you,’ she called, as the door to the flat closed. ‘Er … Ngiyabonga.’

  Jade’s eardrums were still ringing as she turned away from number seventeen. She really did need to learn better Zulu, she decided. It just didn’t make sense that she was less capable of communicating effectively with the woman than the baby in her arms had been.

  Even though Jade hadn’t been able to speak the black woman’s native tongue, her body language had told Jade that she was genuinely confused by her presence. That ruled out this apartment, which meant that Neil had definitely been in the flat next door.

  Jade walked the short distance down the corridor to number eighteen. To her surprise, when she reached it, she found the flat was extremely well secured, even by Jo’burg’s high standards. The door—not plywood, but solid timber—was guarded by a heavy steel security gate, which had two separate locks. Unlike the flat next door, the burglar bars on the window overlooking the corridor were thick and solid—no doubt custom-made. Jade also noticed there were alarm sensors on the window frame.

  Whoever lived in number eighteen took safety very seriously. And they clearly weren’t home; no one came to the door when she knocked and there was no sign of life inside.

  So whoever Neil had come here to see, he’d been disappointed. Not an arranged meeting, then.

  Walking back down the corridor, Jade thought again about the way he’d looked as he’d strode out of the building. For some reason, his demeanour had reminded her of a sight she’d seen more than a decade ago in a private game park, when a zebra stallion had spotted a rival male entering his territory. The way the dominant zebra had held himself as he faced his competition had been similar to the way that Neil had looked.

  She had no idea why he’d looked that way, though.

  Just as she reached the top of the last flight of stairs, she heard the access gate slam.

  A few seconds later, a blond man with a pair of sunglasses pushed back on his head started up the stairs towards her. He had several bulky shopping bags in each hand and she had to press herself against the wall to allow him to pass.

  The man didn’t look as if he belonged in the building. Wearing a mid-grey suit, pale Oxford shirt and dark tie, he was far too expensively dressed for this part of town. The effect was rather spoiled, however, by the large cellphone hanging from a lanyard around his neck, which swung wildly with each step he took.

  He glanced briefly at Jade as he passed.

  Curious as to why he was living he
re, she stopped and turned to take another look at him.

  She was taken aback to see that the blond man had stopped for a second look at her too.

  Jade hurried down the last few stairs and out into the fresh air.

  She’d already had a suspicion about where the blond man was going, and it was confirmed when she saw him striding along the third-floor corridor, obviously heading for flat number eighteen.

  So this was the man that Neil had hoped to see. But why?

  Jade turned away and carried on down the road to the place where she was meeting David, her mind spinning.

  If she’d looked up over her shoulder, she would have seen the blond man leaning out over the parapet, watching her.

  She would also have seen him lift his heavy phone to his ear and start speaking urgently into it.

  26

  After the amount of time she’d spent with Mrs Koekemoer and the lengthy detour she’d taken on the way back to the dilapidated flats where she’d seen Neil’s car, Jade was sure that David must have been waiting for her for ages. Rather than walking back around the wide loop of road, she decided to take what looked like a quick and convenient shortcut back to the main street. At any rate, it was a well-trodden, if somewhat muddy, grass-lined path that led directly away from the road, down the hill and over the railway track towards some old-looking buildings. Surely after that there would be a road up the hill towards the shopping centre. It would be worth checking out, at any rate, as it would save her time.

  Jade set off at a run, jumping over the muddier sections and puddles in the boggy ground near the bottom of the hill. She noticed that, apart from mud, the narrow strip of beaten dirt was surprisingly free of the litter that normally collected on the edges of a well-used shortcut.

  After barely a minute, the black-stained bricks of the buildings she’d seen came clearly into view. Much to Jade’s relief, the path led to a gap in the chain-link fence that surrounded them, which she climbed easily through.