Stolen Lives (31 page)

Only two pieces of equipment would require a tripod in this situation. A camera or a gun.

From here, the window looked small and distant. Jade knew that with a telescopic sight it would appear so large and clear that the hidden viewer would have felt that they could reach out and touch it.

Jade had no idea how recently the watcher might have left. It could have been an hour or a week ago.

She automatically recalled David’s words. Somebody had been asking about her. Asking questions, down in Richards Bay, at the hospital where she was born.

And now this.

Jade squinted at the window, but with the late afternoon sun reflecting off it she couldn’t tell whether the glass had been shattered by a bullet or not.

Pamela, she thought.

She straightened up and ran back towards the house, skidding in the sandy soil, the dry grass whipping her shins. Bonnie hurtled after her. The dog’s short legs pistoned as she dodged the bigger tufts of grass, sailing over the rocks and branches in her way.

Let Pamela be all right.

A camera, Jade prayed. It must surely have been a camera.

She and Bonnie arrived at the gate together, and Jade fumbled in her pocket for her remote control.

At the same time the security gate rattled, then swung wide open and Pamela stepped out. She looked worried and tired, but she was alive and unhurt.

Jade felt sick with relief.

“What’s the matter?” Pamela called. “I saw you running. Is everything all right?”

“Everything’s ok for now,” Jade said. She picked up the Jack Russell and carried her to Pamela. “This is Bonnie. Please hold her while I bring my car inside. I’ve got some news on Tamsin that I need to tell you about.”

Jade drew the curtains across the kitchen window while Pamela went indoors and sat down on the same sofa she’d occupied when she’d first come to ask Jade about bodyguarding services. She held the little dog in her lap and stroked her with her red-painted nails, staring anxiously at Jade as she did so. Jade hadn’t labelled Pamela as a dog person. She’d thought the blonde woman was far too immaculately groomed to take kindly to animal hair and dusty paws.

But now Bonnie was revelling in the attention. Her little body was wiggling with pleasure and her stump of a tail was wagging madly.

There’s no way of softening the blow, Jade thought, sitting down next to her. Better to get to the point straight away.

“Tamsin’s fake aunt is wanted by the British police after escaping a brothel raid in London. The brothel owner, a human trafficker, has also fled to South Africa, and the police have just discovered that he’s been using Tamsin’s cellphone.”

Pamela stopped stroking the dog, and sat very still. Bonnie looked up at her inquiringly and grunted before settling down on her lap again.

Jade hated having to break bad news. She just hoped that the shock of this revelation might force Pamela to open up and tell her the full truth.

Tamsin was in terrible danger now, and so was Kevin.

“Any information you can give me will be helpful. David told me that your husband was arrested for employing trafficked workers a few years ago. Do you know anything about that?”

Pamela remained silent and stared fixedly at the wall, her lips slightly parted.

Jade got the bizarre impression she might not even have heard the question.

She tried again. “Pamela …?”

Still nothing. Jade reached forward and gently tugged her arm.

Snapped out of her reverie, Pamela turned to Jade, with the same distracted look on her face.

“This can’t be happening,” she said in a shrill voice. “It absolutely cannot be.”

Bonnie jumped off Pamela’s lap, perhaps sensing the woman’s tension. Jade heard the click of the little dog’s claws as she trotted into the kitchen.

“Pamela, what can’t be happening?”

“Any of this. It’s not possible. He was arrested. I read a report about it just the other day on
The Daily Telegraph
website. They said the brothel was raided and the manager, an Eastern European, was taken into custody.”

Now it was Jade’s turn to stare.

“How do you know who Salimovic is?”

Pamela gave an impatient shrug, ignoring Jade’s question. “Salimovic’s in prison. He must still be there. He couldn’t have escaped, could he?”

“He was never arrested, Pamela. I’ve just read all the information on the case.”

“He was.” Her chin was high but she sounded unsure. “I know it for a fact.”

“The brothel manager is Salimovic’s cousin, Rodic,” Jade explained in a gentle voice. “He is the one who was taken into custody after the raid.”

Pamela was quiet for a moment. Then she leaned forward and covered her face with her hands. “Oh, God,” she whispered. “Oh, dear God.”

“Why is it so important to you that Salimovic was …?” Jade fell silent as her own thoughts raced ahead. Suddenly she remembered the photo she’d seen in Tamsin’s cluttered house, the unsmiling young woman arm in arm with the unsavoury older man.

Now she thought she understood.

“Tamsin knows Salimovic, doesn’t she?” Jade said. “She’s been—or maybe even still is—in a relationship with him.”

Pamela nodded. Huddled in her chair, she suddenly looked very small.

“You’re right,” she said. “But that’s not all. There’s something else, Jade, something terrible, that I haven’t told you.”

She turned towards the D-shaped arch where Jade had placed the photo of her mother cradling the newborn in her arms, her eyes filled with all the love in the world.

Pamela stared at the portrait.

“That was me, once upon a time. I was so happy when Tammy was born. She was a loving, lovable, beautiful little girl. Oh, God, why did it all go so wrong?”

Then she burst into floods of tears.

40

Where had it all gone so wrong?

Salimovic turned away from the guesthouse window where he’d been looking out at the view of Jo’burg city. A crisscross of roads, now twinkling with the headlights of cars as it grew dark. The skyline against the setting sun—a postcard-perfect picture; not that he gave a shit about the way it looked.

The Hillbrow Tower with its spindly stem and dome-shaped head; the tall cylinder of Ponte. Other high-rise buildings, although he didn’t have a clue what they were. Why should he? This wasn’t his goddamn city. It was a place he came from time to time, to do business, and now it was a place where he’d been cornered, trapped, all his escape routes cut off one by one.

Salimovic pulled down the sash window with a bang. It didn’t wake the sleeping girl sprawled on the bed, snoring gently, the sheet damp with sweat wherever it touched her. He’d known it wouldn’t. Tammy slept like the dead after ghb and she slept like a corpse after sex, and right now that meant that she was out for the count. Doubly dead.

He sat down hard on the squeaky bed.

It had been sheer luck that he’d avoided the police raid. Total dumb luck. He’d been booked to fly home to Sarajevo the previous week, which meant he should have been back in London by the time the raid took place, but crap weather and traffic jams had meant he’d missed his first flight. As a result, he had already landed at Butmir airport when the detectives banged on the brothel door.

He could have been arrested at his penthouse apartment in Ciglane, Sarajevo. Thinking about that made him shiver, because it had been such a close call.

He’d switched on his mobile phone in the taxi on the way from the airport, and the first message had been from Tammy. Her voice had been high, breathless, worried.

“Sam, call me as soon as you can. It’s urgent. I just found out the detectives are raiding Number Six.”

A shock, like a block of ice against his back.

“This the building?” the cab driver had asked, slowing down outside Salimovic’s apartment.

Christ, if Scotland Yard was involved, the local police could already be outside his front door, waiting for him.

Thinking fast, he’d told the cab driver to keep going. “I’ve just had a message that the meeting here has been cancelled. You can take me straight to my hotel.”

He’d asked the driver to drop him outside the Hotel Michele. He’d walked inside and waited in reception for half an hour, edgy and paranoid, then got into another cab and driven to the Hotel Kovaci.

There, he’d called Katja, one of Rodic’s many girlfriends in the uk. A short while later she’d called back and confirmed that Rodic was in jail.

Cold panic had descended on Salimovic. He needed to get out of Bosnia, and fast … but how? It was far too risky to travel under his own name now, and he hadn’t brought his other passport; a fake South African one. He’d gone and left it in his goddamn house, so by now it was doubtless in the hands of the police.

He’d phoned Tammy back.

“How the hell did you know?” he’d asked.

“Long story,” she’d replied. “I’ll tell you later. Are you all right? What can I do to help?”

“You can buy me a ticket. Business class to Jo’burg. Use a false name and make sure it’s fully transferable. I don’t know what passport I’ll be travelling on.”

“I’ll do that.”

She’d sounded pleased, excited at the thought of seeing him again. He couldn’t have cared less at that stage, but he’d played along because, right then, he needed her badly. He couldn’t access the safe in his apartment in case the local detectives were watching, and when he’d travelled to another part of the city to try and draw money from an atm, he’d discovered that his bank accounts had been frozen.

He’d had no idea how he was going to get out of the country safely, or how he was going to get hold of a travel document that wasn’t his own. His connection in Bosnia had been arrested years ago, which was partly why he’d started the South African operation. He’d subsequently hooked up with another dealer who worked in Moscow, but this man was proving to be uncontactable.

In prison or in hiding? One of the two, he was sure.

Since then, Salimovic had been on the run, checking into different, and increasingly seedy hotels every night, paying cash from a stash that was starting to run terminally short. His frustration at the situation made him so goddamn angry that he could have murdered the plainclothes policewoman he saw stationed outside his apartment, standing and watching. Waiting for him. He could have walked right up to her and flung her out over the balcony, forced his way inside, grabbed the wads of cash that were tucked away in his safe.

He’d murdered a woman that way before, years ago, when his half-sister—his whore mother hadn’t stayed with any man longer than a few months—had been living in the penthouse and working for him. Having a reliable female was necessary in his business, because women trusted other women more easily than they trusted men.

But she’d got drunk one night and an argument between them had escalated into a fight. She’d leaned back against the balcony, elbows resting on the rail and glass in hand, and started hurling insults at him.

Salimovic had not been able to restrain the eruption of fury that had taken him over to where she was standing in three long strides. Her smug expression had dissolved into horror when he bent forward, slid his arms under her knees, and heaved. The last he saw of her alive was the crotch of her pink knickers, neatly sandwiched in between her fish-white thighs, when she somersaulted backwards over the rail.

She’d screamed as she fell, and the sound had followed her tumbling body down, floor after floor, as she plummeted to the tarmac far below.

When the police arrived, he’d acted the part of a grieving brother. His sister was drunk, he had told the police. It had been a tragic accident.

He’d avoided arrest then, but Salimovic knew he couldn’t risk getting rid of the plainclothes officer in the same way, because there might be other detectives nearby. Besides, there was no guarantee the cash would still be there, the local police being what they were.

In any case, that was how people got caught. By being careless. He wasn’t careless, and he wasn’t stupid. He’d had contracts out on him before—it was the nature of the game—and he had gained something of a reputation for being the invisible man, disappearing the instant he smelled a rat.

He’d relieved his tension by paying a visit to a trusted friend’s brothel. A good friend who owed Salimovic a favour; so there was no charge and no questions asked. He’d spent an hour there and left the slut bruised and bleeding, inside and out.

Then, on the way back to his shitty hotel, he’d had another call from Katja, sounding nervous this time.

“Rodic called me from prison,” she’d said. “He said I should tell you that his passport is still at my house, if you need to use it. And he said something else, too. He told me you need to be careful, because he thinks there is something else going on.”

“What are you talking about?” Salimovic shouted.

Katja didn’t know. Rodic had also been nervous, and hadn’t been able to say much. She promised she would find out more when he called again. In the meantime, Salimovic told her to courier his cousin’s passport to a friend’s address.

It was a huge gamble, because the prison officials could have been monitoring the call Rodic had made, but it was his only hope. He’d got on the plane to South Africa the day after the passport had arrived. By then, his money was just about finished. He’d walked through Immigration, shitting himself with fear that the document had been flagged, but he’d been lucky. The police had been too slow.

He knew he couldn’t use Rodic’s passport again, but he hadn’t thought he’d need to.

Until he’d found himself trapped in South Africa, too. His usual connection for passports was no longer doing business, and his emergency contact had temporarily closed shop due to a security clampdown at Home Affairs.

South Africa was a big country with a police force that, in his opinion, could be kindly described as “inefficient”. It would have been easy for him to lie low for a while, but he knew that the police would soon be hunting for Tammy again, and he needed her to stay with him because she was his only source of money.

There was another reason Salimovic was in a hurry.