Pale Horses

by Jassy Mackenzie

  And then she heard Lance’s voice, coming from upstairs. Cold, sharp, professional.

  ‘Sipho? That you? Why the hell did you shoot her on the premises?’

  Jade listened to the seconds ticking away on the clock’s varnished wooden face, knowing that with each one Lance’s suspicions would be multiplying furiously.

  As she expected, he didn’t repeat the question.

  Like any professional, he’d immediately realised that the situation had turned bad. Now he’d be doing exactly the same as her. Analysing, formulating a plan, collecting information to gain the initiative. To stay alive and destroy the opponent.

  But something about his words troubled her.

  ‘Sipho? That you?’

  Jade had taken pains to be utterly silent when she’d entered the house. She was wearing rubber-soled shoes and her footfalls had been soundless as she’d padded across the hallway floor.

  How, then, had Lance known to ask that question at that exact time?

  Jade looked up.

  The small implacable eye of a wall-mounted security camera stared blankly back at her.

  She barely dared to breathe as she realised the truth of her predicament. Lance had the advantage, all right. He must have seen movement on the video screen and assumed it was his accomplice returning. By now, he knew that it was her because he could see her clearly on the monitor.

  And then Jade heard an agonised shout from upstairs, followed by a muffled moan.

  Her jaw clenched as she realised what his strategy involved.

  Harris was still alive – but what had Lance done to him, and what was he going to do?

  How many damn cameras were there in this house? She inched around the clock towards the staircase. The flooring and the stairs were covered with laminate, which was good news for her because she was lighter in weight and wearing shoes that allowed her to move more quietly than the man waiting for her on the first floor.

  She would hear him if he was coming downstairs, but that hadn’t happened, which must mean he was in the same room as Harris with his gun drawn and aimed.

  She glanced up but could see no video cameras in the stairwell. This part of the house, at least, was not under surveillance.

  Jade sneaked up the stairs, keeping as close to the sides of the treads as she could, knowing that any creaks or movements were more likely to occur in the centre.

  The moans were more audible now and seemed to be coming from the second room along. Her hand was welded to the grip of the gun she’d stolen. She was too wired to even blink. Any movement and she would shoot.

  Far away she heard sirens. The flying squad were on their way.

  And then another sound, coming from outside.

  The sound of the truck starting up and the gearbox being ground into reverse.

  Jade sprinted straight to the bedroom and skidded to a stop in the doorway, gun at the ready, but there was nobody there except Harris. And he was in a bad way.

  He’d been tied up to a beam near the room’s glass sliding door, which was open and led out to a garden on the upper level. The contraption his tormentors had used was deceptively simple. A car’s tow rope had been slung over the beam. One end had been knotted to form a noose around his neck. The other bound his wrists together. The rope was short enough that his feet dangled helplessly above the floor.

  A brutal and effective concept. When his arms couldn’t bear his weight any more, he would strangle himself. Swinging, struggling and sweating, while his captors watched and waited for him to break.

  He saw her and groaned again. His face was crimson and looked swollen from the tight bite of the noose. His eyes were popping in terror.

  Through the window, she saw the white truck exit backwards through the gate, weaving unevenly through the gateposts, and then make a frantic three-point turn.

  Jade had to chase down Lance. She also had to do something about Harris. But she had no knife and the knots in the rope were firmly tied. If she abandoned him, he would choke to death before she could return.

  Looking around for a possible solution, she saw a thickly padded armchair in the corner of the room. She pushed it across the floor towards Harris and helped him as he scrabbled to get his legs onto its seat. His limbs were quaking with exhaustion. If he toppled off again, he might not be able to pull himself back up.

  She couldn’t wait.

  In any case, she didn’t expect to be gone for too long.

  ‘I’ll be back just now,’ she said. ‘Try not to fall.’

  Jade shot out through the French door and followed the same route through the garden that Lance must have taken a couple of minutes earlier. She dashed over to Harris’s car and flung herself inside, praying that the keys were still in the ignition. She started the car and roared out of the property and down the hill in the direction that Lance had gone.

  The polite chime of the warning alarm reminding her to fasten her seatbelt was totally incongruous, given the circumstances.

  Jade didn’t have far to drive. As she had anticipated, the short distance was punctuated by curved smears of rubber on the road and white score marks where the vehicle’s wheel rim had scraped along the tarmac.

  Jade had shot the fifth bullet – her insurance shot – into the front tyre on the passenger side of the white truck. Lance must have realised what had happened soon after he’d started driving, but desperation had kept him going. Perhaps he’d believed that even with a partially crippled car he could still get away. She’d expected that once he’d realised this was impossible, he’d abandon the truck and flee on foot, giving her a chance to close in and shoot him.

  She had not expected this, though.

  The truck had slalomed at high speed for less than a kilometre down the steep and winding road before finally coming to grief on one of the hairpin bends.

  There, it had left the road, flattening the crash barrier, and sailed out over the edge of the steep and rocky hillside. From that point it had bounced and smashed its way down the slope, marking its passage with broken glass, pieces of engine and the exhaust and various items it had contained. It had come to rest about fifty metres down the slope, and in the process appeared to have rolled right over Lance, who had been flung out through the distorted gap where once the windscreen had been. Steam hissed out from under the twisted bonnet.

  The crash must have made a thunderous noise, but by the time Jade got out of Harris’s car, all she could hear was the sound of wind whipping through the foliage.

  Quickly, she wiped down the two guns and hurled them as far as she could, down the cliffside, in the direction of the wrecked car. She’d have liked to have kept one, but in the circumstances, both needed to be accounted for. After all, how else were the police going to solve the puzzle of who was responsible for the shootings?

  Two other drivers stopped and climbed out of their cars after turning on their hazard lights. Their expressions were anxious.

  ‘How’d it happen?’ one of them asked Jade.

  ‘I think he was fleeing a crime scene,’ she said. ‘There was shooting just now, further up the hill.’

  Shocked, yet hypnotised by the horror of the sight, they stared over the edge of the cliff, taking in the sight of the devastation before, in unison, taking out their cellphones.

  Jade turned away from the scene. For the time being, the threat was over. The hired gunmen were dead. But the situation had not resolved itself the way she would have liked, because she still had no idea who had hired them or why.

  Had Sonet’s ex-husband tipped them off? Although she hadn’t told him she was going to investigate his old farm to see if what he’d said about the community disappearing was true, it was on her way back and it would have been easy enough for him to put them on alert.

  Jade thought back to the hour or so she’d spent poking around the abandoned farm the day before. The only person she’d seen there had been the man on horseback, and she’d assumed the encounter had been a chance meeting with an i
nnocent local resident. But perhaps he had not been what he seemed.

  One thing was sure – those men wouldn’t have been driving around in that sparsely populated part of the world without good reason. They must have been briefed to keep a lookout for her, or for somebody like her, and she needed to find out who had made sure that happened.

  As Jade drove away two police cars came into view, accelerating towards the accident scene, the wail of the sirens pulsing through her eardrums. She eased Harris’s car over to the left to let them pass.

  31

  Jade took Harris to Weltevreden Park Clinic, where the doctor told her he had either broken or dislocated two of his fingers, and had probably fractured a rib during the struggle with his captors. He asked Jade if she could wait while X-rays were taken, and she said she would. To pass the time, she decided to flip through some of Zelda’s notebooks. At best, something the journalist had jotted down might provide a useful clue. At worst, she’d get to know more about the woman who had disappeared over a week ago.

  As she sat down on the plastic chair outside the cubicle where Harris was being given painkilling injections before going to the radiology department, her cellphone rang.

  ‘Miss De Jong?’ A woman’s voice on the other end.

  Jade preferred Ms, but she let it pass. ‘Speaking.’

  ‘It’s Sister Baloyi here from the Theunisvlei Clinic.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ Drained though she was, Jade nevertheless felt a spark of excitement that someone was finally responding to her request.

  ‘I just wanted to let you know that we did manage to find a phone number for the wife of the patient you were asking about, Mr Khumalo. I’ve passed your details on to her.’

  ‘You have? She hasn’t been in contact yet.’

  ‘I spoke to her earlier this morning. I’m sure she’ll call you soon.’

  Jade frowned in concern. ‘But what if she doesn’t have airtime? Can’t you give me her number just in case?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’ The woman sounded sincerely regretful. ‘I’m sure she’ll call you. She’s a reliable woman. She was there every day with Mr Khumalo in the oncology ward, right up until the day he passed away.’

  The oncology ward.

  ‘So Khumalo had cancer?’

  ‘Unfortunately, yes, he passed away from stomach and intestinal cancer.’ The nursing sister seemed to realise she’d said too much and continued in a brisker tone, ‘If Mrs Khumalo hasn’t got in touch with you by next week, phone me again.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Jade said.

  She disconnected, stared down at her phone and, without success, willed it to ring. Then she turned her attention back to the topmost notebook and found herself reading notations for an article Zelda had written entitled ‘The War of Land Reform’.

  Reading Zelda’s abbreviated notes was a struggle at first, but became easier after a while as she tuned into her thought patterns. Squinting at the prescription-like scribbles, Jade slowly read her way through the skeleton of the story.

  According to Zelda’s interview with the director for the Institute of Poverty, Land Reform and Agrarian Studies, the occupation by white settlers of land previously used by indigenous black societies had played a key role in creating a racially polarised and unequal society from as far back as the seventeenth century.

  In 1913, the first Land Act legalised land dispossession on a large scale. The situation became far worse in the mid-1900s when the apartheid government relocated millions of black people living in urban and rural areas in an attempt to create separate, racially defined zones and to confine black people to specially demarcated ‘homelands’. In this way the communities lost a great deal of their productive farmland as well as the ability to farm on a small scale in order to allow their rural households to survive.

  In contrast, the white-owned farms, with their massive subsidies and government support, became extremely productive.

  It was no surprise, confirmed the director, that these acts created immense bitterness among the dispossessed black people, together with a strong desire to have their land restored to its rightful original owners – or at any rate, their successors. In addition, he explained that the redistribution of farmland through land reform would also go a long way towards alleviating the wrenching poverty in the country’s rural areas, where about forty per cent of the population lived and where the highest levels of unemployment were found.

  The director concluded his interview by telling Zelda that land reform needed to take place faster, in a well-planned and strategic manner, including both large-scale commercial farms and smaller-scale subsistence farms. He argued that if land reform took place too slowly, it would provide fuel for ‘populist’ politicians to call for forcible appropriation. If implemented, this policy risked creating the same inflammatory and destructive situation that had all but annihilated Zimbabwe’s agricultural sector.

  It all made sense to Jade, but then she read the next interview, which Zelda had conducted with a Doctor Van Eck. Here Zelda had been careful to quote Van Eck verbatim, ‘The racist and Marxist regime that the ANC has implemented is causing a state of famine in our land, while at the same time leading to genocide being committed against the farmers who have worked so hard to make it productive.’ Absolute power, Van Eck stated, came not from the barrel of a gun, nor from the might of the armies of the state, but through the control of a country’s ability to produce its food supplies.

  While Jade didn’t agree with Van Eck’s philosophy – in fact, she couldn’t help wondering if he was a member of the Boere Krisis Kommando – she had to admit he’d also made an interesting and sobering point. Absolute power could indeed be gained through control of a nation’s agricultural resources. They were a major, and hotly contested, political weapon.

  It all depended, she supposed, on who was attempting to wield it.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by the return of Harris’s doctor, who told her that the X-rays had shown a fractured finger and had confirmed his tenth rib was broken. He also said they wanted to admit him in order to further assess the trauma to his larynx and trachea.

  Jade gave the doctor Harris’s car keys for safekeeping before walking out of the hospital and catching a taxi to Sandton.

  Back in Sandton City, she was pleased to see that her car was still safely parked in the Nelson Mandela Square car park and that it was sparkling clean. The ladies had even blacked its wheels. Fifty rands well spent, she thought, taking out her phone and calling Victor Theron to give him a quick update.

  When he answered she thought he sounded just as on edge as the last time they’d spoken.

  ‘I’m making progress on your case,’ she said.

  ‘Well, thank God for that,’ he said snappily. ‘Because my situation’s just gone from bad to disastrous.’

  ‘I can meet up if you’ve got some time. If you’re not too busy with the markets.’

  ‘The markets are hectic. I can give you ten minutes, but I can’t leave my apartment now. You can come up here, if you don’t mind. Sixteenth floor of the Da Vinci Towers. Number 1610.’

  Jade arrived at the entrance to the towers five minutes later and, after he phoned Theron’s apartment, the security guard behind the wide, gleaming desk pressed a button to open the glass door that led to the elevators.

  A lift swished her up sixteen floors in a matter of seconds, and soon afterwards she was ringing the bell of apartment 1610.

  Theron pulled open the door almost immediately.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ he said. Stress was emanating from him in waves. His hair was tousled and unkempt and his fidgety fingers were playing furious concertos.

  Walking inside, Jade found herself in an apartment that looked more like a presidential suite than a home. Immaculate finishes. Lavishly decorated. Not one but two flat-screen televisions mounted on pristine walls. Clearly, professional contractors and interior designers had been responsible for creating this top-end living space.

  ‘
Er … coffee?’ he asked.

  Jade glanced over to the compact but well-equipped kitchen.

  ‘I’ll make it,’ she said. ‘Tell me what’s been happening.’

  ‘No,’ Theron said. ‘First, I want to know what progress you’ve made.’ He’d perched himself on the edge of a black leather couch, staring at the topmost television screen, which was tuned to CNBC. Jade turned the kettle on and took two cups out of the cupboard above it.

  She’d thought that Theron would be a bare-fridge kind of person but when she opened it to look for the milk she saw to her surprise a well-stocked and organised array of groceries, as well as a stack of neatly packaged, tasty-looking meals in plastic containers with clear lids.

  ‘You have a beautiful apartment,’ she said. It was the kind of place she could never even dream of owning. Perhaps she, too, should have worshipped at the altar of the money god, as Theron had chosen to do.

  Theron gave an impatient sigh. ‘You can’t imagine the hassles I’ve had with building management. And the decorators should have been fired, they were so useless.’

  The rich. Never satisfied. Jade didn’t believe she’d ever met a wealthy person who was.

  While she waited for the kettle to boil, she gave him a brief rundown on what had happened so far. He listened in sullen silence, without comments or questions, but before she’d finished her story he interrupted her.

  ‘The police told me they’ve made a breakthrough,’ he said.

  ‘What have they found?’

  ‘One of the detectives came round yesterday to say that they got an expert in to analyse the parachute. Apparently it had been deliberately cut.’