Pale Horses

by Jassy Mackenzie

  Jade got up from the sofa and walked back into the kitchen, Harris following at her heels. She pulled open the fridge door and wrinkled her nose at the unpleasant smell inside.

  The contents of the fridge were modest. A half-full litre bottle of organic milk, now yellowed, separated and stinking. Some limp, leaking vegetables and an over-ripe cheese that looked to have come from a farmer’s market as it had a handwritten price label. The near-empty freezer had defrosted completely, although its vegetarian contents – a bag of garlic rolls, soy burgers and tubs of gourmet soup were far less offensive finds than a supply of rotting meat would have been.

  A week’s worth of spoilage, give or take a day or so.

  ‘Looking in the fridge isn’t going to help bring her back,’ Harris snapped, just about elbowing her aside as he pushed the door closed. ‘I must ask you to leave now. I’m going to lock up here and go to the police station and report her missing.’

  ‘The power was cut off about a week ago,’ Jade said. ‘Round about the same time Sonet fell to her death. There was a week’s worth of unopened mail in the box. All this points to the fact that Zelda’s been gone for a while, Harris. And the longer a person is missing, the slimmer the chances are of finding them. The first twenty-four hours is the most critical period of all. That’s an industry statistic that all private investigators and the police are aware of, and that twenty-four-hour period is long gone.’

  Harris opened his mouth as if to retort, and then closed it again. His frown reappeared, the lines in his forehead deeper this time.

  ‘Go to the police station, by all means. But before you do, tell me this. What publications did Zelda write for?’

  Harris stared at her, surprised. ‘How did you …?’

  ‘I’m guessing she’s a journalist,’ Jade continued. ‘Based on the evidence that my trained investigator’s eyes have noticed here in her house.’

  ‘Yes.’ Harris cleared his throat. ‘Yes, she is. Freelance. She writes for a few of the leading newspapers and some magazines.’

  ‘Mainly about farming?’

  ‘She’ll tackle any topic, but she specialises in farming practices and land reform issues. She’s very knowledgeable in that regard. She has a BSc degree in …’ He stopped, clearly unwilling to say too much. However, Jade detected an element of pride in his tone. Glancing at him, she picked up a vulnerability in his expression. In the candlelight his features looked stronger, and she could see that in spite of the thirty-odd surplus kilos he carried, Harris was actually not a bad-looking man.

  She wondered whether he had, in an ideal world, wanted the relationship with Zelda to progress further than the present buddy system that was in place.

  Jade picked up one of the shorthand notebooks on the kitchen table and leafed through it. To her surprise, what she saw inside did not correspond with the general chaos of Zelda’s home. Her handwriting was small and neat, the notations carefully ordered. In this aspect of her life, at least, it seemed that discipline took priority.

  The date on the back of the notebook told her that Zelda had worked on this notebook in December last year, six months ago. Flipping through the book Jade realised the story was on land reform and the standard of farming before and after the changes of ownership. A thorny topic to tackle, and one that made Jade think again of Sonet’s chosen vocation.

  ‘What was Zelda working on when she disappeared?’ Jade asked.

  Now Harris’s lips tightened. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, although she was certain he did. ‘She usually worked on more than one story at a time.’

  ‘She must have a computer.’

  ‘She does. It’s a MacBook Air.’

  ‘Where does she keep it?’

  ‘She takes it with her wherever she goes.’

  ‘That’s a pity. The information on it might have been helpful,’ Jade said, disappointed but not altogether surprised.

  ‘I warned her that she shouldn’t carry it around because the risk of it being stolen is so high. She said she was paranoid about doing backups and that she emailed her work off to Gmail and DropBox and other sites every time she finished a page. She said the writing was what was important, and that the computer was insured.’ He spread his hands as if to say – I tried.

  ‘Last time you saw her, did you pick up on anything that was troubling her?’

  ‘She’s an ex-alcoholic who comes from an abusive background,’ Harris shot back. ‘She has long-standing issues she sometimes struggles to cope with. It’s not always for me to ask why, or what’s wrong.’

  ‘Then I need to get in touch with her brother urgently.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I also need a recent clear photo of Zelda and a general physical description,’ Jade said, ignoring his question. ‘There’s a picture there on the mantelpiece but it’s too small to be of any real use. Does she still have shoulder-length brown hair?’

  ‘I think I’ll give that information to the police.’

  ‘You could do both.’

  ‘Drive with me to the police station then. I’m not happy with you being here uninvited. I need to lock up; get her place as safe as possible.’

  Harris walked back to the kitchen door.

  ‘We don’t have time to do that,’ Jade said. ‘Besides, I don’t know if I’ll get another chance to come back here.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘My tyre was slashed earlier today while I was out in Theunisvlei, asking questions relating to a work project Sonet was involved in.’

  ‘Oh.’ A frown creased Harris’s forehead.

  ‘The cut tyre was a very efficient job. If somebody hadn’t pointed it out to me before I’d left, it would have burst once I was back on the road and I most likely wouldn’t be here talking to you now.’

  Harris worried at the dry skin under his left thumbnail with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand.

  ‘I think both Zelda and Sonet got themselves on the wrong side of some ruthless people. That’s why I want to get hold of their brother Koenraad. He might know more about this. I understand the three of them were very close.’

  ‘The brother’s off the grid. I wouldn’t know how to contact him.’ Harris’s words were clipped and then he clamped his mouth shut as if to emphasise the point.

  ‘I need to trace him.’

  ‘Well, I want to know is where Zelda is. She’s the one I’m worried about.’

  ‘I get that, I really do, but …’

  Harris cut her off.

  ‘I’m going to phone Randburg Guarding and ask them to come round and watch the property until it gets light. In view of what you’ve told me, I think that’s a sensible precaution to take.’

  Harris took his phone out of his pocket and speed-dialled a number, walking over towards the French doors while he waited for the call to connect.

  Jade hurried back into the lounge. The majority of the notebooks seemed to be discarded here; on, under and around the coffee table. Perhaps Zelda had stretched out on her couch, laptop on her knees, while she wrote up her stories. Given what Harris had said, Jade was certain that Zelda had kept multiple backups of her work online. At worst, though, there would surely be a wealth of information in these shorthand notebooks.

  In the background she could hear Harris arguing with Randburg Guarding in an increasingly stressed tone. From the gist of the one-sided conversation, she gathered that Zelda was no longer a subscriber to their services.

  Rummaging through the books, she discovered that Zelda had dated and labelled each one on the outside back cover. In addition, she’d written brief notes about the contents.

  Working as fast as she could she gathered the notebooks together and shuffled them onto the table in chronological order. There were one or two missing; a few gaps in the series. Those were probably buried in a pile in another room. What did stand out, though, was the fact that there seemed to be no books for the last couple of months at all.

  ‘Right. Right, then. Good.’ Harris sounde
d as if he’d finally got his way with Randburg Guarding. ‘I’ll wait for you here and sign the forms on her behalf. See you in ten minutes.’

  He paused, listening to the control-room operator. Outside, the branches hit the roof again and inched their way off it, sounding like fingernails scraping down a giant blackboard.

  And then came another noise. One that in the part of her mind that was forever watchful and paranoid, Jade had at some level been expecting and which prompted her hand to drop reflexively down to her right hip, reaching for a gun that was not there.

  It was the splintering sound of the wooden front door being forced.

  21

  Harris heard the noise too and froze. He glanced at Jade, wide-eyed, the mild annoyance she’d seen in his face earlier on now transformed into naked fear.

  ‘No … this can’t be happening,’ he whimpered.

  But it was. Jade had thought they would have had more time here without interruption. She had assumed that whoever had opened the gate and vandalised the power supply had finished the job they had set out to do.

  She’d been wrong. But her self-blame would be as much of a futile waste of time as Harris’s denial.

  They were unarmed, possibly outnumbered, and with only one torch between the two of them. Jade knew it would be impossible to stand their ground and suicidal to try to hide. Running was the only option.

  She grabbed the notebooks, stuffed them into a green canvas Pick n Pay shopping bag that was hanging from the arm of the sofa. She swung the bag over her shoulder, blew out the candles, and grasped Harris’s wrist and pulled him towards the French doors.

  Then, footsteps in the hallway; more than one person. Heavy shoes. No attempt at silence, which meant they had no idea that anyone was in the house. They would know soon enough, though, when they walked into the living room and picked up the scent of warmed vanilla and smouldering wick that still lingered there.

  Outside, into the teeth of the strengthening wind. For the first time that evening, Jade was grateful for its noise – it would help them to escape unheard. She closed the French doors quietly behind them.

  Glancing towards the gate, her heart lurched when she saw a tall man wearing a bulky jacket standing there. He had his back to them and his hands in his pockets, head bowed against the worst of the wind. He was clearly watching for threats from the outside, not from within, but even so his presence ruled out that exit point.

  Randburg Guarding would arrive soon, but not soon enough, and even if they did there was no guarantee their protection would be effective. That left only one option. They would have to climb over the wall into the next-door garden.

  And then she heard shouts from inside the house. The recently used candles had been discovered.

  ‘This way,’ Jade hissed at Harris, and sprinted along the paved walkway, following the route she’d taken earlier when he’d shone his torch outside.

  Adrenaline was surging through her, making her hyper-aware of her surroundings. It was as if every sound was amplified tenfold; everything she saw in the gloom was etched into sharp relief.

  They ran past the house, past the verandah, past an ancient, half-filled and unfenced swimming pool surrounded by a border of ageing Slasto and down a sloping and unmown stretch of lawn. As she’d anticipated, the property was walled in on all sides. The eastern one had a row of electrified wire on top, and since it was obviously the neighbour’s fence, it would still be working, unaffected by Zelda’s sabotaged power supply.

  Legs powering her forward as fast as they could go, with Harris not too far behind her, Jade sprinted down the grassy hill towards the southern wall, the bag with the notebooks banging against the small of her back.

  This wall was made of precast concrete panels, and what it lacked in the way of electrified wires and spikes it made up for in sheer height. It was at least two metres high.

  Harris stopped in front of it and stared up in dismay.

  ‘I’m never going to be able to climb this,’ he muttered.

  More raised voices and the wavering beam of a flashlight indicated they had no other choice. Their pursuers were now searching the garden and they were quickly running out of time.

  ‘I’ll give you a leg up,’ Jade said. She grabbed his left ankle, bent her knees. ‘Count of three, jump as high as you can. Ready? One … two …’

  As she felt him jump she straightened up and boosted him, throwing all her strength into the movement. Harris grabbed the top of the wall, limbs scrambling, and Jade felt the panels give a little under his weight. His left leg smashed into her shoulder, throwing her off balance, and for a moment she felt him start slipping down again.

  Then he got his knee over the top, gave one final thrash, and, with a brief cry, disappeared from sight. An audible thud signalled that he’d landed somewhere that was hard but thankfully debris-free.

  Jade glanced back … and wished she hadn’t.

  Two figures had rounded the house and were standing at the corner, deciding where to look next. And then their torch beam found her, silhouetting her against the grey panels behind her. With a series of shouts both her pursuers sprinted down the slope towards her.

  Jade flung herself at the wall, grabbing the top with cupped hands. The gritty edges bit into her palms as she fought her way up to the top, expecting at any moment to feel the rough grasp of hands pulling her back.

  And then she was up. With moments to spare, she swung herself over and down, landing rather shakily on her feet, right next to Harris.

  Two of the books had fallen out of the bag and onto the neatly swept paving below. She scooped them up and shoved them back inside.

  They were standing in a trim-looking courtyard within a property that was far better maintained than the one they’d left behind. Better lit, too. A lantern shone above the closed kitchen door and a bright security light lit up the garden; it must have been activated by their presence. All around, dogs were barking, so if the residents were home they would be looking outside sooner rather than later.

  Pushed into the soil of one of the two large pots of herbs by the kitchen door, Jade saw a small garden fork with a wooden handle and three sharp prongs. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do. She pulled it out and turned back to face the wall. The concrete slabs grated together as the first man pulled himself up, boosted by the one below. His meaty fingers gripped the top just as hers had done. If she and Harris were unlucky, he’d get over before she could stop him, and then they’d be left to defend themselves, using only a miniature garden implement, against a criminal who was almost certainly armed.

  As the man pulled himself up, Jade leaped as high as she could and, with all her strength, stabbed the fork downwards.

  They met in mid-air. She had a split-second glimpse of his astonished face before the prongs buried themselves deeply into the back of his hand.

  The man let out a howl of pain. He let go of the wall, ripping the fork out of her grasp as he did so, and fell heavily back down to the ground.

  ‘Quick,’ Jade urged. She could hear the two of them conferring, an exchange that consisted mainly of expletives delivered in shouts and gasps.

  Harris wasted no time. They ran. Across the tidy yard and up to a gate in the wire mesh fencing that separated the garden from the courtyard. It was fastened with a simple latch that would have taken only a moment to open had it not been for what stood beyond.

  On the other side of the mesh, three pit bulls growled and yammered, their excited barking shattering the silence. Teeth flashed in hugely powerful jaws. The dogs flung themselves at the wire in gravity-defying leaps, scrabbling up it with their paws in their efforts to get to Harris and Jade.

  Jade loved dogs but she wasn’t prepared to take her chances with these ones. She was sure that opening that gate would be the first step on a short journey to evisceration.

  ‘Over the next fence!’

  Nothing they could do but climb again, this time over the wall of the property to their left.
Harris ran to the wall. It was just as high, but the climb was made much easier by the fact that there was an old kennel to stand on. Jade followed, pulling herself up onto the narrow slats. Every new property they ran through was an additional risk, and when she saw the brightly lit windows of the neighbouring home, all she could do was to pray that this resident was hard of hearing and had less lethal taste in pets.

  The screech of a security whistle from inside the house told her that her first prayer had gone unanswered. But then they were through and rushing towards the front gate, whose design thankfully offered a foothold halfway up. A scramble over, a rattle of hinges, and Jade and Harris were stumbling towards the relative safety of the road.

  Behind her, the renewed barking of the pit bulls told her that the men who’d been pursuing them were on the hunt once more, and closing in.

  Then, from the crossroads ahead, the sound of a badly tuned engine.

  ‘We need to hide.’ Jade realised she sounded breathless. There was a choice of cover, none of it ideal. Several metres to their right were a couple of parked cars and a large heap of discarded tiles. But their best option was a row of three black wheelie bins on the other side of the road. Racing across the street, they reached its shelter and crouched down just as a pair of tungsten headlights pierced the darkness ahead of them. The shadows of the bins swung darkly over them as the vehicle approached fast.

  Jade hugged the cold plastic that smelled of rotting food and dirty nappies. She could hear Harris’s noisy breathing.

  ‘This is probably Randburg Guarding,’ he whispered.

  ‘I hope so. But I doubt it. The engine sounds wrong.’

  The car shot past and then braked hard outside Zelda’s house. It sounded heavy and solid; the noise of the engine a diesel-type rattle rather than a finely tuned purr. Jade heard running feet and then muted male voices – she could pick up the sound but not the words.

  Then the car’s tyres scrunched, the lights swung round, and she heard the vehicle – and the footsteps – coming in their direction. Searching the area slowly and thoroughly, with the help of some very powerful headlights.