Pale Horses

by Jassy Mackenzie

  The silence with which they conducted the search and the lack of any audible walkie-talkie communication convinced Jade that her gut feeling was correct. This was not Randburg Guarding. There were the same three men they’d just encountered; the two who’d pursued them and the one who’d been waiting by Zelda’s gate. And now there was no way that their hunters could miss them.

  Harris’s breathing was quieter now but still unsteady, as if he was trembling from head to toe. She could smell fresh fear and old cigarette smoke on him. She felt sorry for him. He was both mentally and physically unprepared for this, a man who had no knowledge or experience of such situations.

  If it had been David crouched next to her, he would have known what to do. Before the hunters came too close, they would get up and start running as fast as possible. With a good head start they could make it round the corner, across the road, out of sight for just a few precious seconds, but that short time could make all the difference to the options available. They could double back, flag down a car and get out of the area. Or jump another wall and disappear. Or find better cover and call for backup.

  Jade knew all this could have been communicated through just a few simple gestures.

  Not with Harris, though. The most she could do was try to brief him, in an almost inaudible whisper, ‘When I say so, run with me.’

  He didn’t respond, just stared at her as if she was mad.

  And then a voice came from the last property they had run through. An elderly-sounding, authoritative and altogether disapproving male voice, one whose owner might be an ex-headmaster who regularly wrote letters of complaint to his local paper and signed them: Angry, Randburg.

  ‘What’s going on out there? Who are you looking for?’

  A moment of total silence ensued as the torch beams swung away from their hiding place and towards the speaker.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked again, and now Jade heard uncertainty in his tone. ‘Who are you? I’m calling the security people.’

  And then she flinched as the twin thunderclaps of two gunshots split the air almost simultaneously. The unmistakeable sounds were followed by those of running feet, slamming car doors, screaming tyres, and a vehicle taking off into the night.

  Jade jumped out from behind the cover, almost upending the wheelie bins in her haste. She was just fast enough to see the vehicle, a white Isuzu bakkie, disappearing around the corner. Gauteng number plates, last digit Y.

  The brief vacuum of silence created by the gunshots gave way and the noise of the aftermath rushed in to fill it. The hysterical barking of dogs; the ones they’d come face to face with as well as others. More car sounds. Raised voices. Shouting from one of the houses nearby.

  But no sound at all from Mr Angry, Randburg.

  She walked across the road towards the last gate they’d had to climb over. Walking not too slowly but not too fast. Wanting to know but not wanting to see.

  The white-haired man, wearing dark pyjamas and a grey, flannel dressing-gown, was lying flat on his back just inside his property. Pale blue eyes stared sightlessly up at the night sky. The neat, crimson-rimmed hole in his forehead looked incongruously small compared to the pool of blood and other matter that glistened on the tarmac around him, the telltale evidence of a massive exit wound. The shoulders of his dressing gown were bloodstained too. A hollow-tipped bullet for sure, or something specially made up to cause maximum damage.

  ‘Oh, my God, dear God, I don’t believe this.’

  Harris had crossed the road and was standing a pace behind her, eyes wide, his hands raised to his mouth.

  ‘Go back across the road, get behind the wheelie bins again, and call the police from there,’ Jade told him. It wasn’t likely that the shooters would return but it wasn’t impossible either. More importantly, though, the old man’s sprawled body, staring eyes and bloodied head were the stuff of nightmares, and the longer Harris looked, the worse they would end up being.

  A bunch of keys with a gate buzzer on the keyring lay a few inches from his outstretched right hand. Stretching through the gate as far as she could, Jade managed to grab it with her fingers before it ended up in the spreading pool of blood.

  Behind her she could hear Harris’s voice, several notes higher than usual, on the phone to the flying squad.

  Then, with a squeal of tyres, another big vehicle barrelled down the road. This one was black with a bold red-and-gold logo on its side. Randburg Guarding had finally arrived.

  22

  Barely quarter of an hour later, the street was swarming with people. Police, security, and residents looking frightened and shaken. Jade handed the keys and gate buzzer over to one of the dead man’s neighbours, a plump, red-haired woman from one of the units in the cluster development to the left of his property.

  ‘We should get the contact details for his family, shouldn’t we?’ the woman said, twisting her fingers together nervously.

  That was the police’s job, but Jade couldn’t see any harm in assisting an overly helpful neighbour, so she followed the woman into the old man’s house.

  In the course of her nervous chatter the woman told Jade that he lived alone, although Jade would have guessed it anyway after just one glance around the ordered, sterile-looking environment. Only one chair in the precisely arranged living room seemed to have been used in the last decade, and that was an ancient leather-covered armchair positioned a comfortable distance away from a surprisingly modern TV.

  On the wall opposite the window was a series of framed photographs. A posed wedding portrait that might have been taken fifty years ago. A few other more recent-looking family photographs. He must have had two daughters, since there were shots of two women in graduation gowns.

  The deceased himself, in younger days, receiving an award from Old Mutual insurance, and another of him, in military uniform, smiling proudly as he was presented with a trophy from the Wits Rifles Club.

  The kitchen looked as if it had never been used. One clean coffee cup on the draining board, and on the floor a china bowl, now empty, placed on a folded piece of newspaper. So, he had a pet – a cat, most likely, who was probably hiding somewhere. If the animal could not be found, perhaps she could ask the friendly neighbour to come back and look for it later.

  ‘His daughters live in Australia now,’ the red-haired woman explained. She’d followed Jade into the kitchen. ‘He always used to complain they never visited. I wonder where he kept their phone numbers. This is just so terrible, isn’t it?’

  Jade walked back into the hallway and opened the top drawer of the highly polished wooden table where the telephone stood. Inside, as expected, she found a phone directory and a smaller, cardboard-covered index book.

  ‘Try this,’ she suggested, and handed the book to the other woman.

  ‘Oh, thank you.’ She paged through, frowning down at the neatly written entries. ‘Here’s an overseas number. 61 is the code for Australia, isn’t it? And I’m sure I remember him saying his eldest daughter was called Sonja.’ She closed the book. ‘Well, at least we can give this to the police. I suppose we’d better go now.’

  Jade glanced again at the framed photos on the living room wall.

  ‘Just a minute,’ she said. ‘There’s one more thing I’d like to do. Could you wait here?’

  ‘Of course.’ But she sounded unsure.

  ‘I won’t be too long.’

  A flight of carpeted stairs led to the upper storey. Jade ran up, paused on the landing, glanced around. The door ahead of her stood ajar. She pushed it wide open and walked into the dead man’s bedroom.

  A double bed with a plain beige duvet cover and a couple of scatter cushions on one side only. In the corner of the room was another comfortable-looking armchair that was the twin of the one in the living room, although less well used. Two windows on opposite walls, both with cream-coloured curtains drawn. From the one on the left, she could hear the voices and walkie-talkies of the cops outside. Although the lamps in the room were tur
ned off, enough ambient light filtered through from the security light outside the window and the spotlight on the landing to allow her to find her way around.

  She hadn’t seen a safe downstairs and there was no evidence of one in the bedroom either. Quietly, Jade opened drawers and cupboards, searching through piles of neatly folded clothes and linen that smelled faintly of mothballs, doing her best to look thoroughly while leaving everything relatively undisturbed.

  She was about to lose hope when she found what she was looking for. Wrapped carefully in chamois leather and hidden away in a suitcase at the bottom of the cupboard, under a shelf holding three pairs of well-polished shoes, was the very firearm that the man lying dead outside had been holding in the picture she’d seen on the wall.

  It was a Colt .45. Although old, and obviously not used for a long time, the piece looked well cared for and in good condition. The grip gleamed and the barrel smelled faintly of oil. A showpiece item rather than an everyday weapon, but one that had clearly served its owner both faithfully and accurately.

  Investigating further, Jade found a full magazine of ammunition in a sealed plastic bag, wrapped in another piece of chamois.

  The gun must have had a holster at some stage, but now it was nowhere to be seen. Jade pushed the weapon deep into the waistband of her jeans and pulled her T-shirt out, which went some way towards disguising its shape.

  The search had probably taken all of ten minutes, although it had felt like an hour, and she was sure by now the redheaded neighbour waiting downstairs was getting seriously uneasy, if not suspicious.

  ‘Excuse me. Are you all right up there?’

  The neighbour’s tone was suspicious now.

  ‘Give me another minute and I’ll be right down.’

  Jade let out a deep breath. She walked over to the leather chair and sat down in it. She lowered her head onto her forearms. The padded arms felt cool under her skin. The dead man had spent his last night in this room, with its smell of mothballs and loneliness. She had no idea if he would approve of her stealing his weapon in the circumstances, but she knew the firearm represented her only chance.

  What she needed to do was to make sense of what had happened earlier.

  ‘Why did they shoot him?’ she asked in a low voice.

  A noise from the direction of the bed made her raise her head sharply. As if providing an answer to the question, a small grey cat wriggled out from underneath it, stretched rather stiffly, meowed once, stared at Jade as if daring her to question why he’d hidden there, and then sat down and began to wash his left paw.

  Jade felt her tight expression dissolve into a smile.

  ‘Well, hello there,’ she said. ‘You’d better come along with me, hadn’t you?’

  When she picked up the cat it began purring loudly. Making her way downstairs, Jade knew she now had no need to worry about the redheaded neighbour noticing the shape of the gun under her T-shirt. Or why she had been up there so long.

  ‘He took a little while to come out from under the bed,’ she said when she reached the bottom of the stairs. ‘The shooting scared him, I think.’

  ‘Oh, thank goodness you realised he was hiding there!’

  ‘It was the bowl.’ Jade pointed at the empty china plate on the floor next to the fridge.

  ‘Well, isn’t that a fine piece of detective work?’ the woman said, words that almost made Jade smile.

  When she and Harris finally left, Jade saw that the body had been removed. Harris, looking even paler than she remembered, was sitting on the grassy verge, well beyond the yellow barrier of crime-scene tape that was still cordoning off the road.

  The redheaded neighbour walked rather hesitantly up to the police to give the detective in charge the contact information for the dead man’s family. Jade guessed that her hesitation was partly due to natural caution, but mostly due to the fact that she was now carrying the grey cat in her arms and she didn’t want the animal to become frightened.

  Jade had hoped to give the cat to Harris. He looked like a man who needed some company. But if the neighbour was a cat lover who could offer it a good home, who was she to argue? And from the way the woman was holding the cat, talking to the cat, reassuring him and stroking him under his chin, it was obvious it was going to work out well.

  For a moment, Jade felt a pang of jealousy at this open display of affection.

  Her musings were interrupted by Harris, who said in a low voice, ‘The police want to interview us. That detective over there – he said I must wait for him, and that he would be ready soon. Oh. It looks as if he’s ready now.’

  Jade took a couple of deep breaths. The gun felt hard and heavy – a large, awkward object that her T-shirt was doing a poor job of concealing. Any policeman would notice it in a flash. She always wore a jacket when she carried a gun, but seeing she still didn’t have her own damn gun, she hadn’t bothered with a jacket. All she was wearing over her T-shirt tonight was a fairly-tight fitting jersey that, right now, was no help at all.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m going to tell him. How do I explain the fact you’re here?’ Harris said.

  ‘Tell him the truth.’

  She watched the detective flip through the pages of his notebook to find a fresh sheet. Then he began walking in their direction.

  Jade sat down on the grass next to Harris. Reaching into the waistband of her jeans, she wriggled the firearm free. She leaned over and stretched behind the wheelie bin as surreptitiously as she could, hearing the crinkle of plastic as she pushed the Colt underneath the bag with Zelda’s notebooks, which she had left there when the shooting started. The hiding place was laughably inadequate, but it would have to do.

  Harris stood up as the detective approached. She could sense his anxiety and suspected that her presence might have a lot to do with it. Still, he should count himself lucky. If she hadn’t been there, Harris would have found himself alone in the house when the men had broken in, and things might have ended up a whole lot worse.

  Tuning out their rather stilted conversation, Jade replayed the events of the previous half-hour in her mind.

  The intruders pursuing them, then searching the street. Methodically, as if they’d had some training. Ex-army, perhaps. Another minute and they would have found the two of them hiding behind the bins.

  And then the shooting. Two shots, almost simultaneous. A double tap, with one bullet passing directly through the forehead of the elderly man. In dim light and in motion, that was either superb marksmanship or a very lucky shot.

  Thinking it over carefully, Jade decided she was going to go with luck. There were very few people who could shoot so well.

  In which case, she had the advantage, because in their haste to make a quick getaway, the men in the bakkie would have no idea they’d killed the elderly resident. In which case they would be back soon, looking for her. And this time she’d be ready for them.

  Leaning back casually in order to nudge the bag covering the stolen gun even further out of sight while she waited for the policeman to question her, Jade thought her theory made perfect sense. The idea that she might be badly wrong never even crossed her mind.

  23

  By the time the police were finished with Jade it was nearly midnight. The detective who’d interviewed her thanked her for her time and, turning rather tiredly away, began packing the last of the traffic cones into the police van.

  The area was quiet now. Empty of curious neighbours and onlookers. Empty too, Jade saw, of Harris. He’d left without saying goodbye or, more usefully, giving her his contact details. He had her business card, though. All she could do was hope that at some stage he got in touch.

  She retrieved the shopping bag with the pistol and notebooks and walked back to where she’d parked her car. Carrying the stolen gun, she didn’t feel particularly vulnerable on the lonely streets, but this changed when she reached the parking area and saw that all the other vehicles had gone.

  There had been plenty of time and opportunit
y for somebody to tamper with her Fiat. Perhaps do something less obvious and more lethal than simply cutting a tyre.

  Jade felt her heart speed up. Dammit, these thugs had already gained the advantage. Here she was, nervous about even climbing into her own car.

  She breathed in and out slowly, trying to calm herself down. She checked the tyres, examined the bodywork and inspected the locks. She knelt down and pressed the tiny flashlight on her keyring and peered at the shadowy undercarriage, trying to assess whether it looked normal or whether there was something there that shouldn’t be.

  On that front, she didn’t have a clue. Didn’t know enough about cars to be sure.

  ‘Oh, stop being such a coward,’ she told herself. ‘There’s no way they would have stayed in the area. They’d have got out fast, planning to come back tomorrow.’

  She pressed the button to unlock the car and all four locks snapped up. She hated this feature of central locking.

  The driver’s door made its usual creaking sound when she pulled it open and climbed in. She closed the door, re-engaged the central locking, and stuck the key into the ignition.

  Then, holding her breath and sitting absolutely still, she turned the key and fired the engine up. At that exact moment her phone rang. Its loud shrilling nearly made her heart stop.

  The caller was David.

  ‘You sound breathless,’ he observed when she answered. ‘Been running?’

  ‘No.’ Jade clamped her mouth shut in an effort to control her breathing.

  ‘I had a call a little while ago from the detectives at a homicide scene in Randburg. Said you were a witness to a shooting and that you’d mentioned my name during the interview. They wanted to know if you really were a private investigator.’

  She eased the car into first gear and moved off. No bangs. No bursts.

  ‘Thanks for confirming my credentials,’ she said. ‘I hope the call didn’t wake you.’