Random Violence (11 page)

He consulted the list again. “Nobody of that name either.”

Jade looked up at him. She was beginning to feel out of place, standing there getting more negative responses than someone selling encyclopedias. Another car drove out of the gates. A Land Rover. The woman driving glanced suspiciously at Jade. What was she doing, distracting security like that?

“How many houses are in here?” she called up to the guard.

“Thirty-three.”

Jade sighed. It would take her a week to ask thirty-three different people if they knew Ellie. “Is there an admin office I could phone?”

He passed down a business card to her.

“Thank you,” she said.

“It’s a pleasure.” He slid the window closed and the sun flashed off the tinted glass.

She phoned the office while she was sitting in the car. It was warmer than her cottage. Perhaps she could rent a space under the oak tree and bring the case file along here every day.

A woman answered on the third ring. She sounded brisk and efficient, and Jade found herself wondering whether Annette would have had a similar telephone manner.

She introduced herself and explained that she was assisting the police with an investigation.

“I’m glad someone is,” the woman said. “It seems to me they need all the help they can get.”

“I’m trying to trace an Eleanor Myers. She lives at Oak Grove. Or did. Perhaps she sold up and moved away.”

Jade heard the tapping of computer keys. She cranked her seat back and stretched her legs forward, jiggling the clutch pedal with her foot.

“No, dear. She’s not on our current system, and we’ve had very few people move on. This estate is new, you see.”

“And before that? Who did the land belong to?”

“It would have been a free-standing house, like all the others. Let me see if I can make a phone call for you and find out. Can you hold on for me, dear, or would you like to call back?”

“I’ll hold, thanks.” Jade revised her ideas about the woman’s similarity to Annette. From what she had heard of her, she couldn’t imagine Annette calling anybody “dear.”

She listened to the one-sided conversation. This was going to cost her in airtime. She hoped the results would be worth it.

Eventually the woman came back on the line. She sounded resigned.

“I’m sorry, dear. I’ve done my best, but we don’t have any-thing that I can put my hands on right now for you. We only took over the administration of the estate when the units were fully sold, so we don’t have access to previous records. But I’ll keep my eyes open for you, and ask around,” she said, as if Jade had all the time in the world.

For the sake of thoroughness, Jade walked down the road, ringing doorbells and shouting into crackly intercom systems. Perhaps a neighbor would know what had happened to Ellie Myers. But none of the residents were willing to come out from the safety of their secluded houses. At all of the homes whose bells she rang, the domestic servant claimed that the madam was not home. After the sixth attempt, she called it a day. She phoned David but he didn’t answer, so she left a frus-trated message for him.

On her way home, she stopped at a center called Country Lane. She’d passed it on the way out and thought it looked like a good spot for lunch. The shops had twee wrought iron signs and big green awnings. She walked along the pavement in their shade. She passed a travel shop and a saddlers, a gift shop and a place that sold tie-dyed hippie-style clothing. Across the way she could see a second-hand books and music store. Jade thought it would be a fun place to spend a relaxing couple of hours on a weekend. So far, since she’d been in South Africa, she hadn’t had a relaxing couple of hours. Or a weekend, because she’d been working every day.

Viljoen would be released tomorrow. She might not have a weekend in the country at all, if things went wrong. If they went seriously wrong, she might never see a weekend again. Did Viljoen know she was back? Who were his contacts? Who had been watching her?

As she sat down at a restaurant called The Coffee Bean, she heard somebody call out a friendly hello. Graham Hope, the estate agent she’d met at Piet’s house, was powering towards her on his crutches.

“Well, fancy meeting you here. I was going to grab a bite and then go and see my specialist for some therapy on this wretched knee.” He looked hopefully at the empty chair opposite Jade.

“Have a seat,” Jade said.

“You’re sure you don’t mind?”

“Not at all,” she lied. She was preoccupied with finding Ellie Myers and annoyed with her lack of progress on the case. Her father had never been good company when he was bogged down in an investigation, and Jade realized she had inherited this trait. She wanted to eat in brooding silence and then go home and bang her head against the wall until a new theory fell out. She sighed. Perhaps the company would do her good.

Graham’s crutches clattered to the ground as he carefully lowered himself into the chair opposite. “Dammit,” he said. “You can’t believe how unwieldy these things are. I can’t wait till this cast comes off.”

Jade ordered a mug of house blend, and a tuna salad. Graham opted for a cappuccino and a bacon omelette.

“So what have you been up to?” he asked.

Jade gave him a brief, carefully edited summary of the last couple of days.

“The detective disappeared?” Graham’s blue eyes widened. Jade wondered whether he was really concerned about prop-erty prices in northern Jo’burg, or whether he was a gossip who loved to hear bad news firsthand. If so, had his arrival here been a lucky coincidence? Or had he been following her, looking for a chance to hear more?

“That’s right.” She wasn’t going to tell him that Grobbe-laar had almost certainly been murdered. She didn’t want to trigger a selling frenzy among his distressed clients.

“You deal with this kind of situation every day? Missing people, dead bodies, murder suspects?”

“Yes.”

Graham bit his lip. “Don’t you find it affects you at some level?”

Jade shrugged. “I’m sure it does. But I’m used to it. My father was a police detective. When I was little, there’d always be somebody on the phone when he was at home, discussing a case. I grew up hearing him ask where the body was, what evidence to look for.”

“Now that’s an unusual upbringing. And your mother? Where was she during all this?”

Jade looked away. “I never knew my mother.”

Graham frowned. “Why?”

“She died when I was very young. When we lived in Rich-ard’s Bay.”

“Yes, I know it. Beautiful place.”

Jade didn’t remember it. She’d been too young. She’d never been back and her father had never talked about it. He said the place had too many bad memories and it was best forgotten.

“It’s on the edge of the malaria belt. There was a very wet summer the year I was born, and they had an outbreak in the town. She got cerebral malaria and fell into a coma. She died the same day, Dad said.”

“Goodness. How dreadful.” Graham stirred sugar into his coffee.

“She chose my name, though. It was the stone in her engagement ring. Dad couldn’t afford anything more expen-sive. Diamonds have to be set in gold, and a ring like that was way beyond his pay grade. So he bought her a piece of jade set in silver.”

“That’s a lovely story. I thought you were named for the color of your eyes. I suppose that was just a lucky coincidence. Did you inherit the ring?”

She smiled. “It’s still with my mother. Dad decided to leave it on her ring finger.”

Graham put his cup down, reached across the table and squeezed her hand. Jade was conscious of the softness of his skin and the heat radiating from his palm. Was it a gesture of comfort? Or something else? He’d mentioned a wife last time they’d spoken and she’d seen the glint of gold on the third finger of his left hand. He was married. She hoped he was simply trying to be kind.

His touch didn’t comfort her. It made her feel lonely, made her wonder how David’s hand would feel if he did the same to her. Probably, his long fingers would be calloused and hard from years of handling a gun. And how would it make her feel if he touched her like that one day?

Graham withdrew his hand as the waitress arrived with their food.

She’d also brought a wire basket with four hot sauces in bottles ranging in color from pale green to deep fiery orange. Jade chose the orange bottle and poured a pool of the sauce on her plate. She speared a sliver of tuna with her fork and dunked it in the hot sauce. Graham watched her in amazement.

“You’re not going to put that in your mouth, are you? That’s Bandito’s Habanero Sauce. It’s the hottest one they make. You see that little white label on the side of the bottle? That’s the heat strength indicator. Ten out of ten.”

“Where else would I put it?” Jade chewed and swallowed.

Graham produced a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead. He laughed in disbelief.

“Just watching you do that makes me feel sweaty. How on earth can you stomach food that hot?”

She shrugged. “It’s hereditary, I suppose. My dad used to eat fresh chilis with every meal. He’d hold them by the stem and bite into them as if they were fruit. He always maintained fiery food kept you healthy.”

Jade cut a slice of tomato. Graham Hope was surprisingly easy to talk to. She’d have to watch herself. She didn’t want to be charmed into accidentally giving away any unnecessary details of the case.

Graham stared at Jade as she swiped the tomato through the hot sauce.

“Each to their own, I suppose. Anyway, I was thinking about Annette.” He forked a piece of bacon into his mouth.

“What were you thinking?”

“I had a client years ago. A wealthy woman. She would have been even richer, except her husband had a gambling problem. Her ex-husband to be more accurate, because she eventually divorced him.”

“And what happened?”

“She was hijacked. The robbers took her along with them in the car and shot her later. The police found out, in due course, that the husband had taken out a one million rand life insurance policy in her name a year previously. Just before the divorce went through. The hijacking was arranged. He’d hired a gang to do it.”

The waitress was hovering. Jade ordered a bottle of water.

“You’re implying that Piet might have something to do with Annette’s death.”

“No, no. I’m not implying anything.”

“Piet is under investigation, as he told you. Spouses, or ex-spouses, always are. They’ll find out whether any poli-cies were taken out in his wife’s name. And check his bank records. Look for any suspicious transactions.” Jade dotted more habanero sauce onto her lettuce. “Hired killers charge nice big, round numbers for their jobs. So people generally pay them in nice big, round amounts. That’s what the police look for.” She put the lid on the bottle and replaced it in the wire rack. “In any case, Annette didn’t use the detective to investigate her husband. She was trying to trace a woman.”

“Good heavens.” Graham shook his head. “Well, if I ever hire a killer, I’ll be sure to add on a few odd rands and cents to his price, to avoid suspicion.” He glanced at her.

“I’m joking, of course. But I am serious about Piet. I’m an excellent judge of character, Jade. Be careful of him. There’s something about that man I don’t trust.”

18

David stared at the form slumped against the tree. The face was blackened with trapped blood, the puffy flesh swollen into a bloated mockery of human features that bulged over the brown packaging tape that covered his mouth. A brownish-red stain had discolored the inside of the tape. One lifeless eye stared sightlessly ahead. The other had been plucked out, leaving an empty red socket and a smear of blood on the swollen cheekbone below.

Around him, the team bustled back and forth. The pathol-ogist had arrived and was unpacking his gear.

The game ranger stood next to David.

“Vultures,” he said, pointing to the empty socket. “That’s how we found him. Saw a whole bunch of them circling over the trees, so we came along to take a look.”

He was a lean, bearded man with a rifle slung over his shoulder. He was looking at the body, whistling softly, with an expression on his face that David supposed was meant to convey that, out here in the bush, he’d seen it all before.

Normally such a display of unfeeling machismo would have irritated David. Right now, however, he was relieved that there was a local who could stand the sight without throwing up.

Grobbelaar was hanging from two cable ties buried in his neck. They had cut a groove into the tough bark of the tree trunk. Despite what must have been violent struggles, they hadn’t snapped. Looking at his corpse, David hoped that his efforts to escape had caused him to lose consciousness, sparing him the worst of the torture inflicted on him.

His body was covered in a blue-black mantle of flies, some of them as big as David’s thumbnail. Their hysterical buzzing drowned out the trill of the cicadas and the rustling of leaves in the wind. The air was tainted with a raw coppery tang. The smell of blood, with undertones of rot.

He couldn’t tell where the first heavy blow had landed, or how many there had been. Grobbelaar’s flesh was a mass of gaping wounds, encrusted with blood and surrounded by bloodied, tattered clothing. David could see splintered bone and torn muscle. Intestines spilled from the gashes in his stomach and ended in a half-chewed mass. Had vultures done this work, too? Or hyenas, or wild dogs?

Grobbelaar’s knees had buckled over the set of cable ties fastening his ankles to the tree. Half-hidden in the leaves, his bare feet were swollen, the flesh mottled purple where it showed through the dried streaks of blood.

The ground was swarming with ants.

The ranger moved away from the body and stamped his boots on the dirt.

“It’s what we always tell clients. Man is the most evil pred-ator there is. Lions, leopards, crocs, even our wild dogs, none of them would kill like this. They kill to eat.”

David nodded in agreement.

“When did you find him?”

“Just before we called you. Normally the sight of vultures wouldn’t worry us. We’d have thought the wild dogs had made a kill, and left it at that. We breed them here, you see. But one of the workers’ children on the farm next door wandered off into the bush a couple of days ago. We’ve been keeping an eye out for her. To be honest I was ninety-nine percent sure we were going to find the child’s body here. I almost phoned the owner before we came out, to give him a heads-up.”

“Is your reserve electric-fenced? How could this man have been brought in here without you noticing?”

The man shrugged. “We’ve got one section inside electric fencing. That’s where the chalets are, where the guests stay. We don’t want anything getting in there and making trouble. Guards at the gate, twenty-four hours.” He spread his hands. “For the rest, we’ve just got normal fencing. Six-foot diamond mesh, with a couple of barbed strands on top. It’s enough to keep the dogs in and the buck hardly ever jump out.”

“I need to check the perimeter. Somewhere near here, I’m betting you’ve got a section of broken fence.”

The game ranger squatted down and scanned the sur-rounding area. David waited and watched as he leaned forward, focusing on a point nearby. Then he straightened up again.

“If I’m right, I can take you straight to it. See between those two trees? Looks like the ground cover’s been disturbed. Let’s go check it out.”

David couldn’t see what the game ranger had noticed. But he followed him, leaves rustling around his feet, the yellow crime-scene tape surrounding the area flapping in the breeze as he lifted it and they stepped underneath.

They walked over a gentle rise in the ground. On the other side, David could see leaves crushed into the hard ground. A car had parked here.

The ranger whistled again. “So they drove in.”

He turned to follow the tracks, walking alongside them and peering down at the dirt.

“Ground’s so hard I can’t see any tire treads.”

David walked alongside him. The tracks curved round the contour of a hill. Grass sprouted in their center, but they were flattened, stony and dry.

“This looks like an old road,” David observed.

The game ranger nodded apologetically. “I’m sure it doesn’t help you, but it is a road. We recently bought this land from Sappi. You know, the paper manufacturers. That’s why there’s so little ground cover. No bushes, no shrubs. And tracks like this all over the place, where the logging trucks drove in and out.”

“So they followed a logging track.”

“Not difficult to do.”

“Bloody hell.”

They went down the hill. Now David could hear the noise of traffic and see the glint of the sun on wire. The fence was stretched between solid metal posts. The tracks ran under the wire and down to the road.

“Fence is still there,” muttered the game ranger.

They walked closer. The fence had been cut, each section sliced through, and then neatly repaired. Shiny new loops connected the broken ends.

“They came in and they went out,” David said. He looked at the earth by the side of the road where the car had driven away. Dry, hard, unforgiving. Winter terrain. The ranger was right. He doubted forensics would be able to get a tire imprint.

“Summertime, these woods can become a wetland,” the ranger said, echoing his thoughts. “Deep with mud. They’d have left tracks everywhere. This time of year is bad luck for you.”

Bad luck. That was one way of putting it.

Where was the weapon that had butchered the body? David stared around him. An axe, most likely. He didn’t think a panga would have inflicted such deep, heavy blows. The weapon hadn’t been left at the scene of the crime. It could be anywhere. It could have been thrown away, far out into the leafy forest. It could have been disposed of back in the city, in a dumpster. Or it could be wrapped in plastic, festering in the tire well of a car somewhere. He’d tell his team to comb the area anyway. It was a small chance, but their only one so far. If they could find the axe, it might lead them to the murderer.