Pale Horses (30 page)

They must have died recently because they were still bloated and the rot had not yet fully consumed them. She supposed a few days from now, in this heat, they would be little more than writhing piles of maggots.

‘Where there are flies, there’s rot,’ her father had said once. Those words she had always remembered, even though at the time she’d been
young enough to know he wasn’t really talking about flies, but not old enough to know what it was he had actually meant.

Now here she was looking at the physical proof of his words.

‘Perhaps they were sick,’ she said.

‘Would’ve had to have been an epidemic. Maybe they were poisoned. In fact, is that blood around their nostrils?’

‘I think so. I can’t think of anything else it could be.’

The heat was stifling in the enclosed space. The sun was beating down on the metal roof now, sending the flies into frenzies of activity.

‘Could that be why this place was all closed up? So predators couldn’t get to the carcasses.’

‘The flies seem OK.’

David snorted. ‘When have you ever known a bloody fly to die from sitting on anything toxic?’

‘True.’

‘Well, I guess we’ll also have to ask the Crime Scene boys to take some of these bodies away for analysis. Now let’s get out of here, Jadey. If they were poisoned, I don’t want to stick around.’

‘Wait,’ Jade said. Thoughts were swirling in her mind; the evidence of what she had seen both in this gloomy barn and out in the deserted settlement of the Siyabonga community. The rusty bloodstain on the rock. The words that the nursing sister at the hospital had spoken to her.

A long shot … a scenario she didn’t even want to visualise but which maybe, just perhaps, made sense.

‘What?’ David asked. He was already at the door.

‘That gym bag.’

‘What about it?’

‘Were there any unused knives inside?’

‘There were a few, yes.’ Now he sounded unsure, as if he was regretting even having given her that answer. Quite probably she would end up regretting it too. But she had to try.

‘Please could you bring me one?’ she said.

David hesitated for a moment as if deciding whether or not he should comply with Jade’s bizarre request. Then, without speaking, he turned and strode off, heading not towards the hired car but towards the empty farmhouse.

A few minutes later he returned holding a long, shiny carving knife.

‘I found this in the kitchen,’ he said, and from his sickened expression Jade knew how much it must have cost him to go back in there.

‘Thank you.’

‘Better you use one of the farmer’s knives. Those others – even if they weren’t used, they might still have prints. But Jade, what on earth are you going to do?’

‘I want to see if my hunch is correct.’

She walked over to the lamb. Its stiffened legs jutted at awkward angles and its beady eye stared unseeingly up at her. Now she could clearly see the blood that flecked its muzzle.

‘Surely you don’t have any experience of this,’ she heard David say. His voice seemed to be coming from somewhere well behind her.

‘I don’t. I’m hoping that I won’t need a lot, though.’

Jade bent down, grasping the handle of the knife more firmly than usual. She didn’t want to touch the dead creature with her hands, but putting a foot on it to hold it down seemed somehow disrespectful.

‘Could you pass me one of those sacks?’ she asked David. ‘There are a couple there in the corner.’

The sacks had been used for carrying feed here. David shook out a dry corn cob before passing the topmost one to her.

Jade grasped the animal carefully, feeling the delicate bones of its rigid limbs through the weave of the sack. Even though she knew the lamb was already dead, she felt herself hesitate, as if unwilling to defile it any further. Which was ridiculous, given that she had, in the past and on more than one occasion, eaten and enjoyed free-range Karoo lamb.

She brought the knife down to its stomach and wiggled the stiletto-sharp tip of the blade through the dense wool. She shook her head, blowing away the endlessly buzzing flies. Then she pressed down, hard
and decisively, into its distended belly and was rewarded by a rush of gas and foul-smelling, blackish, soupy liquid that spilled onto the straw in front of her.

‘God, Jadey. What are you looking for?’ David sounded as if he was going to be sick.

Her anatomy skills were limited. She hadn’t known if she would be able to see what she hoped she would find. But to her astonishment, after making just a couple more cuts into the lamb’s stomach and guts, the evidence was there. Even to her eye it was clearly and gruesomely obvious.

Blackened growths bulged from the flesh, feeding off the lamb’s otherwise healthy viscera. Their roots were deeply embedded in its intestines, its stomach, its bowel. The creature had died from an aggressive strain of cancer.

Glancing down at the now-stained sack, Jade saw a logo she recognised. Three leaves forming a large green-coloured crest.

Below it, the legend: Global Seeds.

David shoved the barn doors closed and wedged the metal piping back into place, leaving the flies to their spoils. Then they walked back into the farmhouse via the front door to avoid having to go past the horror in the kitchen and Jade went to the bathroom. A typical second bathroom in an old farmhouse, with a stained toilet and an ancient, dried-out looking bar of soap in a crusty dish, and a plumbing system that choked and gurgled for a couple of minutes before any water was forthcoming.

When the tap finally ran hot she lathered her hands up. She soaped and scrubbed and soaped and scrubbed as if she couldn’t rid herself of the contamination she had touched; as if the lamb’s diseased flesh was ingrained in her being.

She washed her arms as well, and her face too, for good measure. There was no hand towel in the bathroom and the toilet roll on the holder had nearly run out, so she reached out to remove the spare roll from an old-fashioned pink-and-blue crocheted cover with a pompom on top that stood on top of the cistern.

When she picked it up it felt heavier than it should have done.

She pulled off the crocheted cover, her heart suddenly racing.

Wedged into the middle of the roll was a small black device, shaped rather like a compact cellphone.

A digital Dictaphone.

This was what must have been in the package that Zelda had told her friend Harris to post so urgently.

‘David?’ she called, but there was no answer.

She weighed the instrument in her hand, suddenly doubtful.

If this was what Meintjies’s tormentor had come looking for, why was there no evidence of a search? And why, having found nothing, had he not torched the place?

In any case, why would Meintjies have hidden the device inside his home when he had the whole of the Karoo in which to bury it without trace?

Obviously, this was not meant to be a permanent or effective hiding place. It was a temporary concealment point, nothing more. If this was what Meintjies’s torturer had been looking for, Jade was certain that he would have found it.

But he hadn’t been. Or it wasn’t.

What, then, had Meintjies been tortured for?

She slid the device into her jeans pocket and left the room.

Walking back to the hallway she heard the door to the main bathroom slam. David had been doing the same as her. Scrubbing himself clean again – or trying to – after being exposed to the rot and the disease.

‘The local police are on their way,’ he said. ‘I’m going to have to get the investigation team from Johannesburg to fly down here, but in the meantime the scene has to be protected. They said they’d be here as soon as possible, but that could take a while. Do you want to wait in the car?’

‘Yes. And while we wait …’

But he handed her the key. ‘I’m going to take another walk around in the meantime,’ he said. ‘Make sure there are no other surprises waiting. I’ll join you as soon as the police have arrived and I’ve briefed them.’ He squeezed her shoulder before turning away and striding back through the house.

Jade turned the car’s engine on and the air conditioning up high when she climbed in. Once the interior was a comfortable temperature, she turned it down to a whisper so that its noise would not interfere with the sound from the recording machine.

Offering a silent prayer that there would be usable information on the device, Jade pressed the ‘Play’ button.

A swishing, hissing background noise filled the car.

And then, surprisingly loud, Jade heard a woman’s voice. Clear, confident, well spoken.

‘25th May, ten a.m. Interview with Danie Smit, General Manager, Global Seeds.’

Jade stabbed the ‘Pause’ button and picked her jaw up from where it had dropped to the region of her chest.

Danie Smit. The man whose name had been written down in Zelda’s notebook, the one who’d been found dead in his car in Fourways Mall.

She had assumed that Danie Smit had been the person Harris had told her about, the mystery man who had been working with Zelda on the story. But he hadn’t been.

He had been her source at Global Seeds.

Jade resumed play, listening intently.

Some more shuffling noises. The sound of a chair moving and a man’s throat being cleared. Perhaps they were in a restaurant. Although, given the confidentiality of what Jade guessed they were going to be discussing, perhaps it was somewhere more private. A hotel room, or even in the cluttered living room in Zelda’s Randburg home.

The speaker – Zelda, Jade assumed – continued.

‘Danie, thanks for making the time to talk to me again.’

Again. So Smit was probably her regular source.

‘No problem.’

The man’s voice was softer, but decidedly wary. Perhaps he wasn’t entirely happy about having agreed to the meeting. Jade wondered how Zelda had persuaded him to disclose information on a steady basis. She felt ashamed of herself for immediately supposing that Zelda had been sleeping with Smit.

‘I know you have a tight schedule, and I’m going to have to ask you to
go over some background information for the record, so let’s get started. Can you tell me about your company’s relationship with Williams Management,’ Zelda said.

‘Global Seeds was approached a couple of years ago by Sonet Meintjies from Williams Management. She explained that the charity was starting up a number of farming initiatives to help previously disadvantaged communities become self-sustainable. She wanted to know if we would be prepared to donate maize seeds to this project.’

‘What was your response?’

‘At first we declined. To subsidise the number of farms she had in mind with the amount of seed she requested wasn’t going to be remotely cost-effective. However, as you know, she is a persistent woman and during our fourth meeting, we came up with a possible solution.’

‘What did that involve?’

‘Our committee put forward the proposal of using these farms as testing grounds for various new hybrid varieties of maize. This would allow us to monitor how well the seed coped in varied climatic areas, often under sub-optimal growing conditions, and sometimes without the use of the recommended herbicides and pesticides. We agreed that doing this would be a useful field test, thereby justifying the expense. I was in charge of this project and I visited the farms two or three times a season to assess, photograph, and report back.’

‘Now, Mr Smit, could you please explain what Global 10-422AM is.’

A pause, presumably while Smit collected his thoughts. Then he spoke again; his tone measured and precise.

‘Global 10-422
AM
is a hybrid variety of corn, or maize as we more commonly refer to it in this country. It was first developed by Global Seeds at their research headquarters in Nebraska, USA, during the 2009–2010 season. The number “10” is a reference to the development date, the “A” indicates it is for human consumption and not for industrial use. “M” indicates it is one of the speciality hybrids developed during this season.’

‘What’s special about this particular hybrid?’

‘Like the others, it was developed with the intention of producing a very fast-growing variety, uniform in size, and with an inbred resistance to pests as well as to the effects of the most commonly used pesticides and herbicides marketed by Global Seeds. However, the “M” in its code
name referred to a brand new sub-series of hybrids – the medical series. This hybrid was a pioneer. It represented groundbreaking research done by the company in this field.’

Jade glanced over at the house and saw David in the distance, walking back from the greenhouses towards the kitchen door.

‘Why was the decision taken to plant Global 10-422AM on the Theunisvlei farm?’

‘Mainly due to costs. It was a very expensive hybrid to produce and, had it reached market, it would still have been expensive, largely due to its multiple benefits. The Siyabonga community was the smallest of the farms run by Williams Management, and it was in its first year of operation. Because of the small scale of the planting area we felt it would be financially justifiable to donate half a ton of seed from the new hybrid in order to run field tests on it.’

‘Had any of this seed been through a field test or tested on animals before?’

‘No. It had been grown, of course, in our laboratory greenhouses, but this particular variety had not been tested comprehensively on animals, although its predecessors had.’ His voice sounded flat and toneless, as if he didn’t want to talk about this, even though he had come to the interview prepared.

‘Could you tell me more about the medical benefits this seed was going to offer consumers, Mr Smit?’

Another clink. Jade imagined Zelda putting down a glass of water, perhaps jotting the occasional note on her pad while keeping a watchful eye on the Dictaphone’s red flashing light.

Smit’s tone suddenly changed, and for the first time she could pick up the high top-notes of stress and frustration. ‘Christ, babes, is this all actually necessary?’

Jade didn’t need to think long about what the word ‘babes’ might mean. Either a current or a past relationship, for sure. Her first guess had been right.