Pale Horses

by Jassy Mackenzie

  ‘Now what makes you think that?’ he asked.

  ‘I saw the photo in the Williams Management offices. It looked really good. I know it was taken in summer and that everything looks better when it’s green and lush, but still.’

  Van Schalkwyk laughed. The sound was as joyless as his smile had been.

  ‘Exactly. That all happened last year. I went to have a look. Sonet was there for a few weeks, together with some other advis0rs. White people, who knew what they were doing. Everything was done up, clean and neat. Rows of prefab houses for the residents, a storage barn, even a little mill that they put up on the banks of the river – the farm has a spruit running through it that flows all year round. That was for them to grind their own flour and maize.’

  White advisors. And wasn’t that just great? Jade was beginning to find the pricks of Van Schalkwyk’s constant racist remarks as painfully annoying as having to walk with a devil-thorn in her shoe.

  At least she now knew the reason for the presence of the crimson ‘Boere Krisis Kommando’ pamphlet lying at her feet. What she didn’t know was whether Van Schalkwyk’s rage at his ex-wife’s actions might have been a force powerful enough to cause him to try to end her life.

  ‘Well, at least everything turned out well in the end on your old farm. Now, I have one other question for you …’

  But Van Schalkwyk interrupted her, lifting a stubby finger in a ‘Wait a minute’ gesture.

  ‘Who said it ended well?’

  ‘What do you mean? How could it not have?’

  ‘The minute the whites stopped looking over their shoulders, those lazy savages stopped working. You really think they wanted to farm? To work so hard for nothing? They were told that the first year they would only produce enough to feed their own community. Only in the second year would they produce surplus to sell commercially. But they couldn’t even be bothered to work that extra year and make some money.’

  Jade couldn’t help it. She felt a cold, sinking sensation in her stomach which she soon realised was disappointment.

  ‘What happened?’

  Van Schalkwyk shrugged his oversized shoulders. ‘Don’t ask me. I went there a few months back and they were gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Moved out, lock, stock and barrel. The houses were ripped up; the mill was gone; their cattle were nowhere to be seen; there was not a person in sight. They’d abandoned their own bloody farm. Moved back to wherever they were living before, I suppose. And God knows what they did to the fields, but they’re like a desert now. Trashed. They must have had goats on them or something, because that land was like bare rock. Not even a weed growing. So now you tell me, Mrs Bleeding-heart Liberal, what was the point of all that money being spent when you’re dealing with people like those?’

  Jade must have let her consternation show because, watching her face, Van Schalkwyk smiled again. It was his first genuinely happy expression she’d seen since arriving at his door.

  13

  Jade left Van Schalkwyk’s untidy, airless home with a heavy heart. Walking to her car, she turned her face to the cool wind that was gusting outside, hoping it would blow away some of the disillusionment she felt.

  On paper, at least, it had been a successful trip. She’d learned a good deal about Sonet’s background, as well as the names of Sonet’s brother and sister. Van Schalkwyk hadn’t known their addresses, but he had remembered the areas in which they lived. Or at least had been living the last time Sonet had spoken about them to him, which had been a couple of years ago.

  Zelda Meintjies lived in Randburg, Johannesburg, and Koenraad on a farm somewhere in the Tankwa Karoo – one of the most remote areas of South Africa. Van Schalkwyk couldn’t give her the name of the farm. He had, however, mentioned that there was a base-jumping location nearby which Sonet had visited a number of times.

  That would mean a bridge, an antenna or a cliff, Jade guessed, since she certainly didn’t know of any skyscrapers in the Tankwa Karoo.

  She started her car and drove away, but found herself unable to shake off the lingering, bitter sense of disappointment. Perhaps she was just an idealist, but she still felt disproportionately upset about the fact that the Siyabonga community’s story had not had a happy ending.

  Why not, dammit? What had possessed them to rip up their houses and abandon their rightfully claimed territory?

  She simply didn’t share Van Schalkwyk’s ingrained racist belief that the community had been too lazy, too unwilling to work on their land. It didn’t make sense to her as an individual or as an investigator. People would never abandon a farm that they had first been awarded, and then been assisted with, simply because they were disinclined to work it.

  For a moment, Jade had a vision of Van Schalkwyk and his right-wing buddies storming the area and, with threats of more violence to come, forcing the community to pack up before driving them elsewhere.

  The crimson page of the Boere Krisis Kommando pamphlet tugged at her memory. Perhaps Sonet’s ex-husband hadn’t been telling her the truth. Or perhaps he hadn’t been aware of the full picture, and instead of moving away, the community had simply relocated to another part of the farm.

  She was still puzzling over the situation as she headed back onto the main road, ready for the long drive that would take her back to Jo’burg.

  Had Van Schalkwyk’s words not still been ringing in her ears, she might not have recognised the name on the sign at a minor junction, so faded it was nearly unreadable, just half an hour into her return journey.

  Theunisvlei.

  Somewhere in this valley, then, was where Doringplaas was located.

  Twenty minutes later, Jade was easing her car over a stony, rutted dirt road. Loose gravel popped from under the tyres as she drove cautiously through a deep dip and then around a tight, left-hand bend.

  She hadn’t seen a soul since the tarmac had simply petered out a while back and the surface had turned to sand – no other drivers, no other farms, and, more puzzlingly, no pedestrians making their way along the rock-strewn roadside. Only the occasional thorn tree punctuated the route. Ahead of her, the mountains on the horizon were starting to look familiar, their craggy shapes taking on the distinctive outline she recalled seeing in the photograph at Williams Management.

  And then the public road came to an end. Two steel gateposts marked the boundary between it and a two-track driveway with a central overgrowth of dry grass. A broken hinge on the left-hand gatepost was all that remained of the gate that had once been there.

  To the right of the gateway, on a weathered wooden signpost, Jade could just make out the lettering ‘Doringplaas’.

  ‘Well, it doesn’t exactly look like a hub of agricultural activity, I have to admit,’ Jade said aloud. She decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to try to drive her small sedan down the farm road as it looked too deeply eroded for anything other than a 4×4. Instead, she climbed out of her car and walked a few steps along the stony pathway.

  Half hidden behind a cluster of trees at the bottom of the hill, she could see a building.

  The glare of the sun was blinding, and a cold wind was making the flesh on the back of her neck prickle with goose bumps. Turning back to the car, she took out a baseball cap. She pulled her hair out of its ponytail and ran her fingers through it, shaking it back over her shoulders to cover her neck. Then she put the baseball cap on, pulling it down low over her forehead.

  Better.

  Jade glanced back at her car one more time. The grey rented Fiat would be fine here for a half-hour or so, she told herself. After all, this was not Johannesburg, but a remote rural setting. Besides, she hadn’t seen anyone who looked in the least like a car thief since taking the Theunisvlei turn-off.

  Trying to suppress her uneasiness about the fact that she actually hadn’t seen anyone at all, Jade set off down the hill towards the building, her shoes skidding and scrunching over the uneven layer of stones on the track.

  Ntombi pulled into the garage at two-
thirty p.m. and carefully parked the BMW in its allocated spot. Her nerves were shot and she felt like retching. Her mind had been bludgeoned by the enormity of what she had spent the day and most of the previous night doing.

  How could she have become involved in all this?

  She knew the man was a killer.

  That had dawned on her last week, one of the first times she’d chauffeured him. That night she’d been ordered to drive him to Sandton Views and wait for him. She’d dropped him off at ten-thirty and, in response to his terse midnight phone call, had rushed back to the entrance to the skyscraper to collect him.

  When he’d climbed into the passenger seat and barked at her to take him to the City Lodge near the airport, she’d noticed that he had a narrow, ragged scratch near his right eye.

  Two days later, Ntombi had read about the woman who had fallen to her death from the roof of Sandton Views that same night. She’d been paralysed by panic and fear when she realised that the victim might not have fallen at all, but could have been pushed.

  Ntombi knew with terrible certainty that if her passenger had done it, she had unwittingly helped him. Since she dare not inform the police about her suspicions, she was now an accessory to murder.

  She’d expected the worst when he’d come back to Jo’burg, but she hadn’t known how very bad the worst could be.

  Now she did.

  Despite her most determined efforts to suppress them, images of the last thirty-six hours kept flooding back. Parking outside a large property in Randburg – a big house with an overgrown garden. Him getting out of the car, making a phone call – presumably to her employer – and then disappearing inside the house. Preparing herself for another lengthy wait, but a few minutes later seeing him come out carrying a body.

  At that point Ntombi’s heart had jumped into her mouth and for a horrified moment she’d considered flooring the accelerator and speeding off, leaving all of this behind. But she’d known she couldn’t, and could never, simply because of her boy.

  This dangerous man had walked round to the front of the car and the headlights had shone onto the image, lit up in stark bright white, until she’d dimmed them in response to his angry frown.

  In his arms was the motionless body of a thin, long-limbed woman wearing jeans and a crimson top. Ntombi could see no sign of blood and her first thoughts were: how had she died?

  Her long dark hair swung from her lolling head like a curtain in the breeze.

  ‘Give me a hand here,’ he told her in his strongly accented English.

  When the man saw the expression on Ntombi’s face his own hardened into impatience, and then something worse.

  ‘She’s not dead.’ His words stabbed her like a blade. ‘And even if she was, you would still help me. It is what you are being paid to do.’

  She fumbled with the door handle, swung it open, and nearly fell out of the BMW in her haste to comply. Under his direction she opened the back door and climbed inside, pulling the woman into place as the dark-suited man pushed her in. Then she helped him buckle the seatbelt tightly around her, holding her upright, even though her head still swung forward.

  And no, the woman was not dead. Her skin was warm, and upon hearing her soft breathing, Ntombi felt a surge of relief, even though she knew it was entirely unfounded.

  ‘If the police stop us, she is our friend,’ the killer told her, in the hard voice she had heard him use before. ‘We are driving her home because she has had too much to drink. Her name is Tanya Fourie and she lives at number twenty-three Standard Drive in Blairgowrie.’

  He tossed a handbag onto the back seat. The brightly coloured leather bag would, Ntombi knew, contain the necessary ID.

  ‘I … I’m sorry,’ she stammered as she climbed back into the driver’s seat. ‘This was so unexpected … I had no idea what to think when I saw her.’

  She also had no idea what his response would be. She was hoping for reassurance, that he had forgiven her, that her shocked reaction was going to count against her.

  But none was forthcoming. He gave no sign he’d even heard her words; just slammed the car door and settled back into his seat.

  Ntombi had fastened her own belt and pulled onto the road, driving carefully, heading for the house where the sleeping woman was to be taken.

  Listening to the silence of her passengers had filled her with a terrible coldness.

  14

  As Jade half scrambled, half slid down the last and steepest section of the old farm driveway, she was forced to finally acknowledge the truth which, deep down, she had known ever since she had first seen those two lonely metal gateposts.

  Doringplaas was indeed abandoned.

  The building she’d seen from the road was only a shell – an ancient one that probably predated the arrival of Van Schalkwyk’s ancestors. Built of stone, with its crumbling walls reaching waist height at their highest, it was a ‘kraal’ – an enclosure where, at one time long ago, livestock would have been kept at night to keep them safe from predators.

  Up on the far side of the hill she could now see the skeleton of the farmhouse, its roof all but stripped away, its windows gaping holes where the frames as well as the panes of glass had been removed. Nearby was an old barn that was in no better condition.

  Apart from that, there really was nothing, as Van Schalkwyk had said. Nothing except the evidence of efforts discontinued and hope abandoned.

  A large field that must once have been a neatly planned rectangle was now ragged-edged and flanked with spindly weeds that appeared to be struggling to grow. It looked impossibly barren, bare and fissured, as if a miniature Armageddon had taken place, wiping all life from the soil.

  Jade thought she could make out faint, squarish outlines in another flattened piece of ground where the worker’s prefabricated houses had once been situated. And down by the river, which at this stage of winter looked shallow but still fast-flowing, she could see a concrete plinth that could indeed have been the foundation for a small mill.

  Listening to the rush of water in the otherwise silent land, Jade felt incredibly small and impossibly sad. Van Schalkwyk had been right. After all, why would he have lied? She had been an optimistic fool to doubt him. Now, though, she couldn’t help but feel as if her own personal hopes for South Africa’s future had been crushed.

  And then, from somewhere behind her, she heard a shout. A man’s voice, calling out a friendly hello.

  Jade spun round. At the top of the track she’d recently walked down stood a horse and rider. The wind tugged at the horse’s mane and tail, which streamed out like a flag.

  The man waved and shouted something that she didn’t understand. Then he put the horse into a canter and came down the slope. Jade couldn’t help noticing that the animal moved with a great deal more ease and grace over the slippery stones than she herself had done.

  As he drew closer, he slowed the horse to a walk. Now she could see he was frowning under the wide brim of the Akubra hat he wore.

  ‘Ag, nee wat,’ he said ruefully. ‘Jammer. Ek het gedink jy was die ander meisie.’

  Blinking, Jade did her best to translate from her own rather sketchy Afrikaans.

  ‘You thought I was somebody else?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’ He switched to English, which was accented but otherwise good. ‘I thought you were the lady who comes here sometimes.’

  ‘Sonet Meintjies?’

  He shrugged rather apologetically. ‘I don’t remember her name. I saw her here a couple of times when I came past on training rides. We said hello, but then we just talked about horses. She told me she’d had horses on her farm, growing up, and she loved them. Arabians, like this one.’ He patted his chestnut’s neck.

  It must have been Sonet, Jade decided, remembering the photo she’d seen at Williams Management of the skinny young girl and the ribby, inquisitive horse.

  ‘How long have you been riding here?’ she asked.

  ‘Not that long. I used to ride past on the road outs
ide. Then, one day, quite recently, I saw the gate had gone, so I came in. I thought it couldn’t be private property if the gate had disappeared. At least, I hoped so.’ He smiled again. ‘I do endurance riding, and my horse competes without shoes. This farm is very stony, so it’s a great place to train and condition his hooves.’

  ‘He seems very sure-footed,’ Jade agreed.

  ‘He is. And his feet are strong.’

  ‘They do look tough.’ Jade glanced down at the animal’s hooves with what she hoped was a knowledgeable expression.

  ‘It’s like anything in nature,’ the rider continued. ‘If you support it artificially, you weaken it. Allow it to fight its own battles, and it becomes stronger.’

  ‘Yes, I do see that,’ Jade agreed again. She wondered why this conversation was sounding somehow familiar. Perhaps it was the fact that, at least once a week, she ran barefoot herself. After all, there was no point in allowing weakness of any kind if you could prevent it.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asked him.

  ‘Loodts.’

  ‘Do you know where the people went?’ she asked. ‘The ones who used to farm the land here?’

  ‘Ag, they had a land claim years back and sold up. I don’t remember exactly what his name was. Van Schaik? Van Schalkwyk?

  ‘No. I don’t mean the farmer. I mean the local community who took over the farm after the land claim.’

  Loodts gave her a rather embarrassed-looking grin. ‘Sorry, I misunderstood you,’ he said. ‘I just thought … you were probably asking about Van Schalkwyk. But the local community – I don’t know where they went. Now you mention it, I remember the other lady also asked me something about them.’

  The horse snorted and swished its tail, brushing away flies Jade couldn’t see. Then it lowered its head and rubbed its nose against a foreleg. The rider loosened his reins to allow this and the horse stretched its neck even lower and began to nibble at the yellowed weeds.

  ‘What did you tell the other lady when she asked?’

  ‘Same as I’ve said to you. Oh, and I also told her we’d employed one of the guys for a while last year. One of the community who you asked about, I mean. Khumalo was his name, and he had a driver’s licence so we used to use him on weekends, when our regular worker was off. He’d help out around the farm, sometimes take small deliveries into town, you know. Nice guy, I remember. Reliable.’