Pale Horses

by Jassy Mackenzie

  ‘I can go in if you like,’ she found herself saying to Theron.

  ‘Here.’ He took a white access card out of his wallet and handed it to her. ‘Security’s tight, but this card’ll get you through the turnstile. It’ll also allow you to take the lift to the top floor. Make sure you hold the card against the magnetic sensor while you press the button. If you don’t the lift won’t go beyond the twenty-fourth floor. They won’t let residents go up to the top floors because they’re still under construction. From twenty-five up, the building is basically a shell.’

  ‘How did you get the card?’

  ‘Sonet gave it to me,’ Theron said. ‘I don’t know how she got hold of it. I suppose she found a way. I guess I’ll have to give it back at some stage, but nobody’s asked me for it yet.’

  Jade supposed that, for a base jumper, gaining illegal access to buildings was all part of the thrill.

  ‘You don’t want to come with me and show me where you went?’

  He shook his head. ‘The card only admits one person. And, to be honest with you, I never want to go up there again. Not ever.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Take the service lift. It’s the one on the far left as you go in. You’ll see our footprints at the top. And be careful. The flooring is uneven and parts of it are missing altogether. I put my feet exactly where Sonet trod, literally followed in her footsteps, and I suggest you do the same. Oh, and you’ll need this.’

  He unclipped a small flashlight from the bunch of keys he carried on his belt.

  ‘It’s very dark up there,’ he said.

  Inside the building, Jade’s rubber-soled shoes squeaked softly as she walked across the shiny marble floor. A female guard was seated at the wooden reception desk near the turnstiles that looked distinctly temporary in the otherwise grand lobby. She glimpsed scaffolding set up behind a boarded-up area to the right of the entrance door, indicating that the builders’ work here was not yet complete.

  The place smelled brand new. Jade supposed it would for a while. Concrete had to harden, paint had to dry, adhesives had to set. The whole process could take weeks, and until they did their distinctive odours would continue to fill the air.

  There was a turnstile for visitors and one for residents. Jade went confidently up to the residents’ turnstile and held the card against the sensor. A green light flashed briefly and with a muted click the steel bar moved smoothly forward to allow her through.

  On the wall ahead of her, Jade saw the signs for the companies that had already set up offices. These too were temporary looking, if a little smarter. The building had only a handful of tenants so far, all of them located on the first five floors. Two attorneys, a construction company, no fewer than three psychologists, a dentist, a private bank, a recruitment consultancy and a few other organisations whose names gave no clues to their functions.

  She took out her notepad and scribbled down their details before heading towards the lifts, keeping close to the wall that sported an African-themed pattern of tiles in gold, ochre and brown.

  Inside the nearest lift, Jade pressed the button for floors number three and four. She waited at three while the doors opened and closed again, just in case the security guard was watching where she went, and then got out at four. Here, she walked towards the furthermost lift. This was the service lift, its floor untiled and its sides swathed in heavy-duty canvas.

  With the help of her illegal access card, Jade pressed the button for the topmost level, number sixty-seven.

  The floor pressed hard against her feet as the elevator shot upwards. When the doors opened, she stepped out into almost total darkness.

  Raw concrete here. She breathed in its distinctive smell, and those others that spoke of construction work in progress. Dust, fresh plaster, drying glue.

  Jade snapped the torch on and shone it around. Unsurprisingly, there were no carpets or wallpaper, no marble finishes, no round ceiling lights. Just rough flooring, gaping doorways, thick, white-insulated wires jutting like bony fingers from places where, one day, lights and plug points would be properly installed. Her shoes crunched over scraps of cardboard, loose pieces of concrete, discarded nails and lengths of unused rebar. She took each step carefully, peering down as she walked. After the warning Theron had given her, she didn’t want to step into nothingness.

  As she moved away from the lift, the shadows softened. Light could be glimpsed at intervals, through gaps in the walls that would one day be filled with doors leading into plush offices.

  Just as Theron had told her, there were footprints in the thick dust, a multitude of them, mostly so old that the dust had just about obscured them again. It had been a long time since the team of construction workers had last been busy on this floor.

  But some certainly looked more recent, and it was these that she followed. They took her on a winding route that led away from the main areas of traffic and through a couple of sections where the floor dropped terrifyingly away, leaving only a couple of rickety planks to bridge the darkened gaps below. The tracks ended – and not before Jade was ready – outside a closed steel door.

  Jade gave it a push and found, much to her relief, that it was locked. After the accident, the caretaker must have come up to secure access to the roof. The rather scuffed-looking prints she could see presumably belonged to him, and the trainer-patterned prints must belong to Theron, who must have indeed placed his feet squarely on Sonet’s footsteps, covering her tracks with his own.

  This didn’t explain the other set of prints. Somebody else had walked along this route recently, and in shoes with larger and heavier-looking soles.

  She doubted that the police had been here yet. There was no sign of large-scale disturbance and the handle of the solid door, although coated with a week’s worth of dust, bore no evidence of the silver-grey powder the detectives used to dust for prints.

  And why would the police have come up here in any case, when their concern was with what lay below? The crumpled body of the woman and the malfunctioning parachute that had caused her death.

  Either way, somebody else had been here, and she wanted to find out who.

  6

  Theron was waiting for Jade when she walked out of the building, following behind a pair of pinstripe-suited men who were arguing about a legal case.

  She’d expected him to be pacing and fidgeting, or perhaps standing by the Candle of Hope and reading through the inspirational sayings, but instead he was peering down at the screen of a small gadget he held in his right hand. All his attention was focused on this and he barely glanced up when she reached him.

  ‘Hang on,’ he muttered. He pressed a few keys and waited, frowning down at the brightly lit screen.

  A little while later he nodded and let out a deep breath.

  ‘Online trading,’ he told her. ‘I have positions in the S&P 500 futures market in the States. They’ve just opened and trading has gone crazy. They’re extremely volatile right now. I’ve taken short positions as there’s a lack of consumer confidence over there at the moment.’

  ‘And that makes a difference?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Markets are, to a large extent, affected by investor sentiment. With a short position, if the indexes fall, I profit. And hugely, with every point they go down. But if they strengthen, I’m in trouble.’

  He pocketed the gadget, and now, his concerns with work temporarily resolved, she saw his worry about his current personal circumstances return. ‘So, did you see anything at the top of the building? Anything you could pick up on?’

  ‘Who else went up there, Victor?’

  ‘Nobody. Not that I know of. I spoke to the superintendent the day after it happened, to explain what we’d been doing. He said he’d sent the caretaker up to lock the access door, but that he didn’t think anybody else would be doing work up there until the police had had a look. But the police haven’t been there yet.’

  He looked at her directly and Jade saw silent appeal in his eyes.

&
nbsp; She didn’t want to take on the case. There were so many compelling reasons not to. For a start, she was exhausted, as much mentally as physically. The job she’d had to do in exchange for the favour she had received from Robbie had been tough and brutal.

  A killing.

  It was ironic that, so soon after finding out that her mother had worked as a paid killer, Jade had found herself once again in a similar situation. Holding an unfamiliar and unlicensed gun in her hand, willing herself to damp down the adrenaline that surged through her, suppressing all her fears of what might go wrong, refusing to think about the person into whose chest and head she had accurately fired two bullets with a borrowed gun, the weapon unlicensed and untraceable.

  Which brought her to yet another, more practical reason why she should refuse this case. Her own gun, a Glock 19, was still in the hands of the police. It had been confiscated at a roadblock a few months ago, after the police had refused to accept a photocopy of her gun licence as valid documentation. She knew she’d have to cut through a forest of red tape to get it back. For the time being, she had no weapon of her own. No way to defend herself if a case turned bad.

  No way of taking the law into her own hands, either, which was probably a good thing, given her history and now, perhaps, her genes.

  She wanted to turn her back on the business now, before it was too late.

  Although she couldn’t help wondering if it was already too late.

  The money she’d received for helping Robbie with the contract killing was still sitting in her bank account untouched. A massive sum, unwanted and unappreciated, as toxic as a tumour.

  If she took on Theron’s case, she wouldn’t have to touch this blood money. She would have some time to decide what to do with it, even if it meant signing the whole damn amount over to Friends of the Cat or another worthy charity.

  Jade sighed. ‘I’ll investigate your case for a week,’ she told Theron. ‘Seven days from now, we can reassess. I don’t know if I can help you, but I’ll try.’

  His face softened and she saw a smile doing its best to crack through the tension.

  ‘Thank you, Jade,’ he said.

  7

  Superintendent David Patel had started going to gym four days a week – all right, then, three days on really bad weeks when the case load gobbled up every spare minute and the Organised Crime division’s resources were spread thinner than Flora Light on a dieting man’s rice cakes.

  The gym he’d chosen was a privately owned setup, not one of the big names. He wouldn’t get any points from Virgin Active on his Vitality card for taking the short walk – round the corner from Johannesburg Central police station, down two blocks and then a left turn – that took him into an area of the city centre even more dilapidated than he was accustomed to seeing. It was easier to count the panes of glass that remained whole in the crumbling tenements than it was to count the broken ones.

  The gym was in the basement of one of the buildings, and David had absolutely no idea who lived in the flats above. One thing he was pretty sure of was that if the shabby-looking tenants were paying rent, it wasn’t to the building’s legitimate owner.

  He was ninety-five per cent certain that the six-storey apartment block was another of Jo’burg’s ‘hijacked’ buildings, abandoned by owners who were daunted by the prospect of carrying out massive repairs, not to mention evicting the squatters who had taken up residence in the meantime and who were contributing still further towards the building’s decay.

  In due course, David assumed, it had simply been taken over by the Nigerian ‘landlord’, Obji, who was doubtless managing to extract some form of rental from the occupants and had also installed the almost-new gym equipment – although how exactly he’d got his hands on it was something David didn’t want to know.

  He contented himself with the fact that membership was cheap, even if the gym’s atmosphere was somewhat lacking. The space must have originally have been part of a car park. Two small sections within it had been partitioned off, one for men and the other for ladies, with a toilet, shower and a few lockers inside each.

  When he’d first seen it, David’s overriding thought had been how amused Jade would be by this setup. ‘It’s like a dominatrix’s whipping room,’ he could imagine her saying, green eyes sparkling. ‘Bend over, you naughty boy, and drop your trousers!’

  He’d smiled at the idea, but his lightheartedness had swiftly dissolved as he’d realised that this was a comment Jade was unlikely to utter in his presence. In fact, they hadn’t spoken for months. Not since David had moved back in with Naisha, his wife, after she’d told him she was pregnant. And that was partly the reason he’d started looking for a gym to attend in the first place. Since he’d felt he’d lost control over every other aspect of his life, he decided he was damn well going to try to get a grip on his own fitness and get rid of his inappropriately named love handles.

  The gym equipment had to rely on two plug points, and one of those sometimes tripped the lights. There were three sockets installed, but as the surprisingly well-spoken owner had explained gently to David when he’d shown him round, ‘The third one causes fires, I’m afraid.’

  That hadn’t inconvenienced David so far; he was often the only one there. In any case, he preferred to use the free weights and the weighted machines. He was damn well going to get back into tip-top shape, even if doing so killed him – and sometimes when he was struggling alone and unsupported, bench-pressing dumbbells that were too heavy, he feared it actually might.

  Tonight, as usual, he was the only client. Obji was nowhere to be seen when he’d walked in and headed down the raw concrete stairs. David changed quickly, not bothering to use a locker but instead leaving his clothes in a neat pile on one of the plastic chairs, and made his way into the gym. One treadmill was switched on and the other working plug point was powering a large ghetto blaster which was belting out rap music.

  He did a half-hour run on the treadmill, in the process becoming better acquainted with Soulja Boy’s latest hits than he’d ever wanted to be, before stepping off, towelling his face dry, and turning down the volume on the irritating machine. Pressing the heel of his left hand against the right side of his chest, he massaged the area where a reddened, shiny scar bore witness to the bullet he’d taken earlier that year.

  The pectoral muscle had been damaged, and his shoulder blade, which had been shattered during the bullet’s exit, was now held together by a series of metal pins and plates. After every gym session, the entire right side of his upper body felt raw and bruised.

  With the music thankfully muted, faint voices of people outside were now audible. Heading over to the free weights area, he arranged the heavy discs to his satisfaction, adding another two kilograms more than he’d lifted the last time. He lowered himself down onto the bench, feeling his back pop as he manoeuvred himself into position.

  Cardio was all very well and good. But these days it was only when he was struggling with the weights, heart pounding and muscles quivering, that David managed to get some distance from the personal circumstances that were weighing him down, heavier than any dumbbell could ever be.

  He shifted his position on the bench, hoping to alleviate the nagging ache in his back, courtesy of a bad night’s sleep in an awkward position.

  Oh, wait. Make that more than sixty consecutive nights of uncomfortable and interrupted rest.

  When David moved back in with Naisha, from whom he had previously been separated, one of the first sacrifices he’d had to make was giving up his extra-long double bed – the only one he’d been able to find that comfortably accommodated his six-foot-five frame.

  Gently but firmly, Naisha had insisted that in the small master bedroom of the compact Pretoria townhouse where she and Kevin now lived, a long bed would mean that the built-in cupboards opposite could not be easily accessed.

  ‘I don’t want to have to squeeze past the cupboards every morning,’ she’d explained to David in a tone that had brooked no arg
ument. ‘The doors won’t be able to open all the way if we have your bed in here. Besides, the room is too small for it. It will look messy and cluttered.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Naisha, my bed’s only six inches longer than this one. Can six inches possibly make that much of a goddamn difference?’

  As he spoke, looking at his wife’s rounded belly under the maternity blouse she wore, David had wanted to let out a mirthless guffaw at his own words. Thanks to the one regrettable night where he’d slept with his wife during their separation and she had fallen pregnant, his affair with Jade was now history. Here he was, living with Naisha again, their marriage officially back on.

  So yes, he supposed, in that case, his own six inches and what he’d chosen to do with it had made all the difference in the world.

  Rather than having his feet jut out into the cold – Naisha couldn’t bear a warm bedroom at this stage of her pregnancy and insisted that the air conditioning be turned up full blast – David now slept in an awkward curl that, by the morning, left him feeling as if he’d been welded into position.

  Pushing weights would help with his sore back, though, he was sure of it. He’d do twenty reps, then rest, then another twenty.

  Hefting the bar into the air for the first set of repetitions, David gasped at its weight. His muscles screamed with the effort and the blood soon began to pound in his ears. He realised he could actually feel the pressure building behind his eyes. The breath was forced out of his lungs in an involuntary huff.

  ‘Come on, do it,’ he grunted.

  His world narrowed down to the metal bar above him, held by his own tightly clenched brown fingers. And above that the concrete roof and flickering strip light that left garish purple stripes on his vision when he blinked.

  One. Two. Three.

  He’d made it way too heavy this time. Start light was what he’d been told to do by his physiotherapist after the injury. He knew he should do that: start light and go heavier. Why, then, did he always end up ignoring his own advice?