The Fallen (17 page)

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 here, 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.

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.

The main building was actually part of an old railway station that looked as if it had been disused for years. Tall shoots of straggly, yellowish grass had pushed up through the bricks alongside the graffiti-covered outside walls. One train, with its engine, was permanently halted in a siding outside the building. The train itself looked ancient, although the tracks it was stopped
on looked oddly shiny and free from weeds, and the railway cars smelled strongly of old, dirty engine oil.

The harsh stink of it caught in her throat, and she found herself coughing as she hurried past. And then she stopped as, from somewhere inside the building, she heard another cough.

Unlike hers, this one was deep, heavy, rattling. An old man’s cough—or a sick one’s. It was soon joined by another.

The old station was obviously a refuge for homeless people or squatters.

More disturbingly, though, the path didn’t lead where she’d thought it would. Instead of going past the building and up towards the main road, it ran along the side of the station, then down to the tracks and into the main entrance, where the railway tracks themselves led.

Following the path anyway, Jade discovered that the station was locked. A pair of enormous doors prevented all access to the building itself.

Above her, the clouds were starting to thicken. It wasn’t exactly raining, but the air felt damp, as if rain was just a click of the fingers away.

She retraced her steps back to the road and set off at a run to go the long way round. By the time she arrived at the little shopping centre, David was already parked outside, tapping his fingers on the dashboard. His head was turned away from her, watching the shops, and when she yanked open the passenger door he jumped so hard he smacked his head against the driver’s window. He must have been deep in thought.

Lunch, Patel-style, was laid out on the car’s dashboard. Coke, bottled water, a brown paper bag of biltong and a large packet of salt and vinegar crisps.

‘Where were you?’ he asked. ‘I was about to start driving round the area looking for you.’

‘I went for a walk,’ Jade said.

David grabbed a handful of the biltong and crammed it into his mouth before starting the car.

‘Go on, take some,’ he said with difficulty around his large mouthful, handing her the bag. ‘It’s good stuff.’

Jade tried a piece. She didn’t agree with David’s assessment. It was tough and tasteless; quite possibly the worst biltong she’d ever had in her life. But David often forgot to eat when he was stressed or upset and, as her father had always used to say, hunger was the best sauce.

David joined the main road and sped up, his attention divided equally between the road in front of him and the brown paper bag on his left. Jade hastily fastened her seatbelt. David, of course, wasn’t wearing his.

‘Do me a favour and please don’t speed,’ she said, pressing herself back into her seat.

David gave her a pained look as he reached for another fistful of the dried meat.

‘Jadey, I never speed.’

‘I don’t want to get a bunch of fines.’

‘But it’s a rented car.’

‘Rent a Runner keeps records of all their regular clients. Speeding fines get passed on to them as part of their monthly bill. They’re a small operation and they can’t afford to subsidise bad drivers. At least, that’s what they told me a while back, when I queried the extra thousand rands added to my invoice.’

‘And that was me?’

‘Yes. They emailed me the tickets and I had a look. Three fines. I checked the dates. Three hundred rands for doing ninety in a sixty zone when you drove us to the Local Grill in Hurlingham. Another three hundred for doing one hundred and forty on the highway when you were driving us back from the weekend in the Pilanesberg. And four hundred rands for doing one hundred and twenty-five in an eighty zone on a day when you borrowed my car. You were on your way to Pretoria, I think,’ Jade said, emphasising the city’s name meaningfully since that was where Naisha lived.

There was a short, embarrassed silence.

‘I’m sorry, Jadey.’

If he called her by her pet name once more, Jade decided she was going to slap him. ‘Don’t be sorry. Be careful.’

‘You should have said something before now.’

‘Things were different before now.’

David gave another deep sigh.

‘I guess so,’ he said.

Glancing down at the speedometer, David eased off the accelerator.

They didn’t speak again. Wrapped in her own suddenly gloomy thoughts, Jade stared blankly out of the window at the lush foliage lining the quiet main road.

After a while, hoping to distract herself from her relationship difficulties, she turned her mind to Pillay’s missing persons portfolio.

One man had been reported missing and his truck had been found at a crime scene, having been driven by somebody else. But what had the detective told her so proudly when she’d asked him during their interview? He’d said that there were a number of missing persons in his files. Quite a few, from the sound of things. He’d been kept busy.

That didn’t make sense. In a small town like Richards Bay, why would the number of missing people be so high? And if one missing person had been loosely connected to a crime through his vehicle, what about the others?

She was about to share these thoughts with David, when he braked hard and swore.

‘Oh, crap. I don’t bloody believe it.’

Jade’s seatbelt tightened hard across her chest. Ahead, she saw a tall police officer standing authoritatively in the road and waving their car over. His policeman’s cap was perched on the top of his head, as if it were a size too small.

‘This is KwaZulu-Natal,’ she reminded him. ‘Zero tolerance for speeding.’

‘But I wasn’t exceeding the damn limit. We just had that conversation, remember?’

‘Don’t tell me. Tell the cop. Perhaps he’ll let you look at the camera and you can see how fast you were going.’