The Fallen

by Jassy Mackenzie

  It had pretty much stopped him from thinking about Jade; the way she’d looked yesterday when he’d dropped the bombshell of Naisha’s pregnancy. David realised that he must have looked pretty much the same after Naisha had sat him down in the lounge of the Turffontein house last Tuesday, and calmly and quietly told him the news that was going to change his future.

  The minute she’d said the words he’d known it was his child—that this was the result of the one regrettable night he’d spent with her since they’d been separated. There was nobody else in Naisha’s life. Up till now he’d been glad about that, in a way, because a new partner for Naisha would have meant disruption in Kevin’s life, with the promise of even more disruption if the relationship didn’t work out. Children complicated things in that regard.

  On the other hand, David had wished that Naisha would settle down with somebody else, because it would have meant that she would no longer be pressurising him to give their relationship another chance.

  He remembered her look of quiet satisfaction as she’d broken the news. She’d been watching him carefully too, which meant David had had to struggle to control his own expression, and not make a difficult situation worse by gaping at her in dismay, his face reflecting the utter, dismal shock he’d felt.

  Of course, there had been some discussion about timing, days of the month. But he’d known with a sinking feeling that this was simply observing the formalities.

  He’d screwed up, and now he was paying for it.

  David groaned, slamming down the folder of papers he’d been examining.

  These papers were from one of the boxes containing Amanda Bolton’s personal items. There weren’t many of them. The dive instructor had lived alone. It seemed she hadn’t socialised with many people during her months in Richards Bay, or had a boyfriend. There was no evidence of one, at any rate. Not according to the resort owner or the cleaner, and not according to the belongings the detectives had gone through that morning.

  These days, computers and phones provided a wealth of information. People shared everything via email or their mobile. David learned from the cleaner that Amanda Bolton had possessed a BlackBerry, but to his frustration it was nowhere to be found. It must have been stolen, presumably by her killer, although in South Africa that was never a certainty. Equipment and valuables frequently disappeared from crime scenes.

  With the cellphone missing, there was a delay in contacting Amanda’s next of kin. Neil had a phone number on record for her mother in the UK, but no address and David didn’t want to break such bad news over the phone. After obtaining the address from international directory enquiries, David had phoned the local police in Tooting Bec, where she lived, and requested that they go and give Mrs Bolton the news in person.

  Amanda’s passport revealed she’d done some travelling on it in the last few years and all of it in warm climates. Six-to-twelve-month stays in the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and a few other countries in the Middle East and north Africa. From the stamps, he noticed that she had permission to work in those countries, too. He wondered if she’d worked as a scuba-diving instructor, or as an air-traffic controller, which, he’d learned from Neil, was her former occupation.

  When he’d removed it from the top drawer of her desk, he’d discovered an old-fashioned postcard. It had caught David’s eye, because it was just about the only personal item he’d seen, apart from the collection of shells and an airplane pendant.

  The postcard was of the new Calabash soccer stadium in Johannesburg. The message on the reverse was short:

  ‘Hi Amanda! When are you coming to Jozi? Let me know—we must meet up for a drink. I’m staying at 10 Harwood Court in Dunbar Street, in Yeoville. It’s a dump, but there are some cool bars nearby on Rocky Street! Hope things are good down there with you and that you’re OK after 813. We need to stick together! Chat soon, Themba.’

  This time, David’s brow furrowed as he reread the card’s cryptic message.

  Hearing a soft knock, he looked up to see Jade standing in the doorway.

  ‘It’s almost seven o’clock,’ she said.

  David blinked in surprise as he realised it was almost fully dark outside.

  ‘Guess I’m finished here.’ He stood up and, feeling his back click, tensed in anticipation of the shooting pain he knew would follow. God, he was turning into a middle-aged wreck. A middle-aged wreck who had recently made a teenager’s mistake.

  ‘I’m making supper. Thought you might like some.’

  ‘Thanks.’ The word sounded as heartfelt as he’d intended it to be. He followed her out of the room, grateful not only for the supper, but for the peace offering that it implied.

  Jade was halfway through making a tomato and lentil curry, and garlic naan breads were ready to warm in a large frying pan. David was usually a committed carnivore, but Jade knew only too well that after a day spent in the close confines of a bloodied room, the thought of meat would make him nauseous.

  That wasn’t why she was making the curry, of course. If she’d felt like eating steak, she would have cooked up rare fillets regardless. Her days of worrying about what David wanted were over. He was damn lucky he was getting any supper at all.

  As he’d walked behind her to the chalet, David’s phone had rung. From the one-sided conversation that ensued, Jade had deduced that the police officers somewhere in London were phoning him back to let him know they’d notified Amanda’s mother about her death.

  He didn’t follow her inside, but stood on the patio while he finished his call.

  The television was on in the chalet, although Jade couldn’t have said what programme was playing. She’d been too preoccupied with her own confused thoughts and, when her attention hadn’t been focused on her cooking, she’d found herself checking the window. Moving back the blinds to peer into the growing darkness outside, scanning the trees for any sign of the tall, lean male she’d seen the previous night.

  Now, glancing at the screen again, she saw that the evening news was on. It didn’t take long for her to deduce that most of it was bad. ANC Youth League leader, Julius Malema, had managed to piss off just about everyone again with another of his inflammatory statements. Jade wondered if he’d been specially briefed to do this, to create a distraction that would grab the media’s attention so completely that it wouldn’t look too closely at anything else that might be going on.

  Or perhaps he was just one of those people who only opened his mouth to change feet. She didn’t know. The picture flicked away from him and on to international news. A forest fire was raging out of control in Australia, decimating thousands of acres of indigenous forest, and the Pakistani government was coming under increasing international pressure to start recycling the millions of litres of engine oil that were well on their way to creating a major pollution problem in the densely populated country.

  ‘We are putting steps in place to recycle the oil,’ a worried-looking government official was telling Sky News.

  ‘And what steps are those?’ the reporter shot back.

  ‘Two recycling plants are being set up on the outskirts of Karachi.’

  ‘But those will take time to build, won’t they? The problem is there now.’

  ‘Well, what we are doing in the meantime is collecting up the oil at special recycling points and shipping it to Kolkata.’

  ‘No, you aren’t. You have not done that successfully as yet. The last lot of dirty engine oil that you tried to get rid of ended up being shipped in a damaged tanker.’ As the reporter spoke, footage flashed onto the screen, with last year’s date posted above it. A massive oil tanker, half submerged in blackened water, followed by more footage of oil-soaked sand littered with poisoned fish and dead birds.

  ‘This tanker set off from Karachi, ran into bad weather soon afterwards, and sank just off the coast of Sri Lanka last August, discharging its load of filthy oil onto the beach there. By the time it went down, the crew had all abandoned ship, which wasn’t surprising since the vessel wa
s subsequently found to be totally unseaworthy.’

  ‘I … er …’

  ‘That beach is still contaminated and will be for years to come.’

  Staring at the screen, Jade could see why somebody with Craig’s qualifications would be kept busy. It seemed as if people all over the world were on a mission to destroy their environment.

  She muted the sound when David walked inside. He was looking ahead of him with the thousand-yard stare that Jade had come to realise meant he was absorbing difficult news.

  ‘That can’t have been easy,’ he said eventually. ‘Amanda was an only daughter. Only child, I should say. Anyway, they said Mrs Bolton doesn’t want to come out here. Just wants the body repatriated to England. I’ll have to call her tomorrow to find out what she wants done with Amanda’s clothes and personal possessions.’

  ‘Are they going to do a post-mortem?’

  David shook his head. ‘No point. The pathologist’s already confirmed the stab wounds were made by a large, sharp-pointed blade and that from the angle of the cuts the killer was right-handed. As I don’t think we’re going to get more than that, the body might as well be sent straight home.’

  The knives in the chalets were not sharp. Knives in self-catering units seldom were, having been blunted from years of continuous use. Expecting that this would be the case, Jade had brought her own sharp knife with her. It was a Wusthof, one of the five-piece block set that David had bought her last Christmas, a present that she’d been delighted with, in spite of—or perhaps because of—the fact it had obviously cost him a fortune.

  She remembered how the blade had sliced so cleanly through the large piece of fillet she’d prepared the previous morning, and which was now still in its marinade in the fridge. She’d cut it effortlessly into three smaller, but still thick and substantial, chunks. When you prepared meat, you focused on finishing the job and getting it done efficiently. It was all too easy to forget that you were handling something that had once been a living animal.

  Jade wondered whether she could stab her chef’s knife into somebody’s stomach, just like Amanda’s killer had done. Feel it cut through skin, slice its way through muscle and connective tissue. She wondered how much effort it would require. Physically, she was sure she could do it, because the blade would do the work. All she would really need would be resolve.

  She’d like to think that she could never bring herself to do that to another human being. But she suspected that if that person was threatening her, if it was a life or death situation, a question of survival, she would be more than able to.

  Without cause, though, she couldn’t ever have done it.

  The question was: how could Amanda’s killer?

  Tonight, her knife lay innocently on the chopping board, its blade still half buried in a crimson mound of chopped tomatoes. These Jade now added to the simmering lentils. Spices were next on the list. She’d brought a basic selection—black mustard seeds, ground cumin and ground coriander. She added a generous teaspoon of each to the pot.

  On the other side of the chopping board lay a much smaller mound of sliced chillies. She liked her food much hotter than David did, despite his Indian heritage, so in a few minutes she would pour half the contents of the pot into another, smaller saucepan. Then she would add the chillies—just a few pieces for him, the rest for her.

  Apartheid may be over in South Africa, but a culinary equivalent was still practised regularly in the De Jong kitchen.

  ‘What does 813 mean to you?’ David asked suddenly.

  Jade gave the pot a stir and turned around to face him.

  ‘In what context?’ she asked.

  ‘It was on a postcard in Amanda’s room. The card was sent to her by a guy called Themba, from an address in Yeoville, Johannesburg. He wrote that he hoped she was OK after 813.’

  ‘Why don’t you send someone round to ask him, if you know where he lives?’

  ‘I’m going to get Moloi onto it tomorrow. It could be nothing, but it struck me as worth following up. She didn’t have much personal stuff in her room at all, but she kept that postcard for some reason. And I’m curious to know what 813 means.’

  ‘When you first said it, I thought it was a date. Like 9/11. It sounds similar, doesn’t it? Could it be the thirteenth of August? Something to do with something that happened on that day?’ Jade hazarded.

  ‘It isn’t written like a date. Just three numbers, one after the other.’

  Jade shrugged. ‘Maybe they’re old friends and it’s a personal code of some kind.’

  David nodded. ‘I’d like an explanation, just to stop those damn numbers bugging me. It’s not urgent, though. At the moment we have other, more important issues to pursue. Like where Monique’s disappeared to. And finding your unknown man.’

  Turning back to the cooker, Jade deftly transferred half the curry into another pan, added the chillies and breathed in their eye-watering aroma.

  ‘If the vagrant’s got any sense, he’s probably far away from here,’ she observed.

  At that point, David got up and walked over to the front door. He locked it and fastened the bolts that had been screwed onto the wood earlier that day. Then he drew the curtains, shutting out the dark.

  18

  In the neighbouring chalet, Elsabe and Craig weren’t doing anything about supper. Elsabe had told Craig she was too upset to eat, and Craig, although he could have done with some food, was also upset, and in any case was feeling too tired to cook.

  He was making do with a pack of peanuts that he had bought some time ago while filling up with petrol on a journey through Zimbabwe, and which had remained, ignored and then forgotten, in his glove compartment ever since.

  He sat beside her on the couch, eating the peanuts slowly, one by one. Elsabe, her face half hidden by her long hair, was reading a historical novel, but he didn’t think she was focused on the story at all. Normally a fast reader, she hadn’t turned a page for minutes.

  What a thing to happen, he thought, wondering if he should turn on the television.

  Suddenly, Elsabe raised her head, sat up straight and glanced nervously at their tightly bolted door.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ she asked.

  ‘Hear what?’ The plastic crumpled as he dug inside the bag’s small opening, searching for another nut.

  ‘There was a noise outside. I’m sure of it. Would you please stop rooting around in that bag?’

  Craig put the bag on the table as carefully as possible. Now he too stared at the door, and for a while there was a tense silence.

  As hard as he tried, Craig couldn’t hear a thing. Not that that meant there was nothing to be heard, though. He knew from experience that Elsabe’s hearing was far more sensitive than his own.

  ‘What did it sound like?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘I don’t know. I’d need to hear it again. A sort of rustling noise. That’s why I noticed it—because there’s no reason for it. It’s very still tonight.’

  Craig moved over to the window and pushed the curtain back just far enough for him to be able to see outside. He’d spent some time in Johannesburg a few years ago, and one of the security tips he’d been given by a friend during his stay was that opening the curtains wide and staring outside would present a potential assailant with a large and obvious target.

  As he had expected, there was nothing to be seen in the darkness. But he could hear the tremor in Elsabe’s voice and he couldn’t stop himself from looking once again at the two new steel bolts on the front door.

  ‘I could go and …’

  ‘No!’ she hissed, clenching her small hands tightly. ‘Don’t go out. That’s how people get killed. Somebody could be waiting there.’

  Exasperated, Craig found himself wanting to snap at her, ‘Well, what do you want me to do then?’, but thought better of it. Then he had an idea. The powerful LCD torch that he’d used so often on his field trips, and again the night before, was in the chalet, in the box with the towrope, the orange tr
affic cone and the reflective vests that he always took along as a precaution, but had never needed to use. In fact, a couple of months ago, he’d had to give one of the vests to a customs official in a central African country who, for some reason, had taken a liking to it and refused to let him through without a ‘donation.’

  Grabbing the torch from the box and turning it on, he hurried back to the window. The beam of white light looked dazzlingly bright, even in the well-lit chalet.

  In one swift movement, Craig pulled back the curtain and shone the flashlight through the glass, scrutinising the sudden pool of brightness.

  ‘There’s …’ He was going to say, ‘There’s nothing there.’ But then, suddenly, he saw there was. The beam had picked out a faint shape near the tree-line above the beach.

  Breathing more rapidly now, he stared at what he saw. Bracketed between the pinpoint glows of two newly installed outdoor lamps, and now caught in the strong gleam of his torch, there was something that looked very much like a man. He could see the faint smudge of greyish-looking trousers and, above that, what might be tanned arms. Tall and thin, standing stock still, as if he knew that if he moved now he would give his presence away completely.

  ‘I think I can see something …’ he said in a voice that, even to him, sounded strained.

  ‘What?’ Her response was high, tense, panicked. ‘What can you see?’

  Hurrying over to the window, she grabbed at his arm. His right arm; the one holding the light.

  ‘Wait! Careful …’ he told her.

  His warning came too late. Her anxious grasp jerked his elbow down, and the beam of light swung away from the intruder and went arcing up into the sky, where it was swallowed by the darkness.

  Jaw clenched in annoyance, Craig redirected the beam and scanned the tree-line, trying to find the greyish form he’d just seen.

  But however hard he gazed at the boundary, no matter where he aimed the beam, there was nothing to be seen. The man—if there had been one there at all—had vanished.

  The call came just as David was digging his fork—with some trepidation—into the steaming bowl of lentil curry that Jade had dished up for him.