The Fallen

by Jassy Mackenzie

  In that case, Jade decided, she might as well go for a brisk walk before she froze to death.

  She followed the path down towards the office buildings. As she drew closer, she discovered that the buildings were, in fact, made of badly painted brick.

  Slightly disappointed by this, she walked on. Past the offices and in the direction of the harbour itself. She didn’t want to go too near the offloading area, so she turned away from the cranes and the activity, following a route that took her towards the massive sheet-metal barrier.

  The steel towered so high above her head that even with the tallest ladder she doubted whether she would have been able to see over its top. Was there a gate anywhere, she wondered, or was access only possible from the water itself? Surely there must be a gate or a door somewhere along its length. Curious to find out, Jade set out along the perimeter.

  The sheets were solid, but above head-height she saw small ventilation holes had been drilled into them. The wind shrieked and moaned as it passed through. The breeze caught the edges of the tarpaulins covering the piles of bricks and wood stacked nearby, and they flapped loudly in accompaniment.

  But even above this racket, Jade could hear a loud voice behind her; the angry shout of another uniformed guard.

  Turning round, she saw the man heading down the access road towards her at a shambling run. He waved his arm in a big, sweeping gesture that said, more clearly than words, ‘Get back.’

  Jade took one last look at the barrier. There was definitely a doorway in the metal wall, although the door itself looked firmly shut.

  ‘Lady, that’s a construction site. It’s off limits,’ the guard called to her. ‘Go back to your vehicle, please.’

  ‘All right.’

  She started walking away from the barrier and the guard fell into step beside her.

  ‘What’s behind the screen?’ she asked. Given his officious attitude, she hadn’t expected an answer, but to her surprise she got one.

  ‘It’s a dry dock, for repairing tankers and other large vessels. They’re busy rebuilding it.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘The wind is causing problems. One person has already been injured.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you put a notice up warning the public away, then?’

  ‘Lady, the public is not actually allowed to enter this area.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  Back at her car, Jade leaned against the door. It felt chilly to the touch. Hugging her arms around her body, she was about to resign herself to a long, cold wait when, to her relief, she saw the door of the office open and David emerge, with the harbour master close behind him.

  This time, David had made sure to bend way down before going through the doorway, as if he was bowing, leaving a sizeable gap between himself and the lintel.

  ‘What did he say?’ she asked David as he reversed out of the parking bay. He’d taken the wheel again without asking, a habit that was beginning to annoy Jade. After all, it was her car.

  Seeing them approach, the deeply tanned guard unlocked the heavy padlock and pulled the gate open to allow them to leave. Jade fastened her seatbelt tightly in anticipation of the speedy drive back to Scuba Sands, and twisted the heater’s dial as far over into the red as it would go.

  ‘He said there have been huge problems with theft. Stuff going missing from containers, equipment going missing from the harbour, and a whole lot of materials disappearing from a construction project they’re busy with.’

  As David drove out of the compound, Jade turned and watched the deeply tanned guard pulling the gate closed again.

  ‘Apparently they’re rebuilding one of the dry docks,’ she said, pointing over her shoulder at the tall barrier. ‘Another guard told me.’

  ‘Oh, OK. Anyway, when all this came out, they think Padayachee must have done a runner. He isn’t a permanent employee, by the way—they hired him specifically for this project. After he’d been absent from work and uncontactable for a couple of days, they phoned his nearest relative, a brother, who subsequently reported him missing. I have the brother’s phone number here.’

  ‘And are the police investigating the theft?’

  David nodded as he turned onto the main road and accelerated. ‘He gave me the case number and the name of his lawyer. I’ll follow up when I have time, but it doesn’t sound like a priority. I think it’ll end up being a dead end myself.’

  ‘So can he explain how Padayachee’s truck ended up being driven by a man who looks like a poor white and who’s now wanted by the police for questioning?’

  David took his hands off the steering wheel and spread them, palms up, in the air. ‘He had no idea. He said that for all he knew, Padayachee might have sold the truck, or lent it to somebody.’

  Jade told herself she wasn’t going to grab the wheel. She wasn’t. In a moment, David would take hold of it again. He must have noticed the vehicle was already starting to veer to the left.

  ‘But wouldn’t he …’ Jade couldn’t help it. She reached over for the steering wheel, but before she could touch it, David took hold of it again. The car swerved noticeably as he corrected his course.

  ‘I keep on calling him “he”, because you haven’t told me who he is,’ she continued. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Whose name?’ David frowned, obviously not following Jade’s train of thought.

  ‘The harbour master. The man you’ve just been speaking to.’

  ‘Oh. Sorry. He only introduced himself to me when we were in the office. His name is Chetty. Sanjay Chetty.’

  24

  Back at the resort, Jade saw Neil, the owner, outside his house unpacking a bootful of grocery bags from his yellow Beetle. It looked like he’d been shopping for a small army. Perhaps he was anticipating a siege.

  ‘Be careful if you go down to the beach this evening,’ he called to her. ‘There’s a spring tide late tonight and the sea will get very high.’

  ‘I will. Thanks for the warning,’ she responded.

  Craig was nowhere to be seen, but Elsabe was sitting outside her chalet, sewing. A yellow felt workbag lay open at her feet, and on the wooden table in front of her, scissors, pins, needles and thread were neatly arranged.

  Jade climbed out of the car and walked up onto her own verandah. She called out ‘good morning’ to the other woman. She hadn’t expected a response, but to her surprise, Elsabe looked up and greeted her with a nod.

  Jade moved over to the verandah’s edge.

  ‘What are you busy with there?’ she asked.

  Elsabe smoothed a hand over the white ruched fabric on her lap. ‘A skirt. I’m taking in the waistband,’ she said. ‘It’s too loose. I can’t wear it anymore.’

  ‘Wouldn’t a sewing machine make it easier?’

  ‘It would. But I don’t have my machine with me and, to be honest, I find this therapeutic.’

  She looked down again and deftly moved the needle in and out of the material.

  ‘Working with one’s hands is soothing,’ Jade agreed.

  ‘Do you like needlework?’

  Jade gave a rueful shake of her head. ‘I’m barely capable of sewing on a button, I’m afraid.’ Cleaning her gun was her form of manual therapy, but she didn’t think that now was the time to mention that.

  ‘There’s something about sewing,’ Elsabe said. ‘One little thread. On its own, you can snap it so easily. But stitch it into fabric, and it’s strong enough to hold a whole garment together.’

  ‘I suppose the opposite applies too,’ Jade said. ‘Cut one little thread …’

  ‘And everything falls apart,’ Elsabe tightened her lips.

  The two women were silent for a moment. Behind her, Jade heard David unlock the front door and walk into the chalet while speaking yet again on his cellphone.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked Elsabe.

  The redhead nodded. Looking more closely, Jade noticed the circles under her eyes looked even darker. Her skin was porcelain-pale, as if she had never be
en exposed to the sun.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m frightened, though. I had to cope with a personal tragedy in my life quite recently, and it’s left me feeling vulnerable.’

  ‘What happened?’ Jade asked softly. Craig had spoken to her about it, but she thought it only polite to ask.

  ‘I’d really rather not share my problems with a stranger.’

  Jade took a step back, temporarily silenced by the snub.

  Elsabe turned her attention back to her needlework for a while. Then she looked up, as if surprised to find Jade still there. ‘I’m only staying here for as long as the police need me. Then I’m driving back to Johannesburg.’

  ‘You live in Jo’burg?’

  ‘In Emmarentia, near Zoo Lake.’

  The old part of the northern suburbs. Big trees, beautiful old houses, quaint roadside stores. More character and history than the ‘new north,’ where cluster-home complexes and shopping malls had been rudely hacked out of the veld, the bush and indigenous grasses replaced by acres of paving, matchbox squares of instant lawn, spindly looking palm trees and endless ranks of tiled roofs.

  Jade paused, then asked, ‘You’ve spent a lot of time out on the boat on those all-day dives. Did you get to know Monique well?’

  Elsabe peered down at her sewing. ‘I spent time with her, yes. But knowing her well, no. I found her … superficial, I suppose.’

  That was a good way of putting it, Jade thought.

  ‘Sometimes even superficial conversation can hold valuable clues.’

  Elsabe gave a small shrug. ‘I’ve told the police what I know. I can’t do more than that.’ Then she turned away from Jade and began rummaging in her workbag.

  Conversation over, Jade guessed. The short exchange hadn’t made her like Elsabe any better. She’d feel sorrier for her, she decided, if she wasn’t so damn prissy.

  Inside her pocket, her cellphone made a bleeping noise, telling her its battery was low. She went into the chalet to charge it up, but found to her annoyance that the only available two-prong plug adaptor, which she had brought along, was being used by David to charge his phone.

  Jade suppressed the urge to yank it from the socket, put hers in instead, and shout angrily at the closed bathroom door behind which he now was. Something about respecting people’s property and asking first. If they’d been in a relationship, it wouldn’t have mattered. Now it did matter. The boundaries had changed.

  She bit back the words and stuffed the phone back in her pocket. She wasn’t going to scream at him like a fishwife. After all, from what he’d told her, that was what his wife often did. So he’d surely be getting more than enough of it in the years to come.

  The thought barely out of her head, the bathroom door opened and David walked out.

  ‘Pillay’s just phoned. He wants to meet at the police station. Any chance you could give me a lift? I won’t be long.’

  Jade wasn’t going all the way into town. Only as far as the retirement home where she was going to meet Mrs Koekemoer and ask about her mother, a fact that she would rather not have shared with David. Too late now, she supposed.

  ‘I need to go to Harbour View. You can take the car from there and pick me up on your way back.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  David took his service pistol out of the holster and put it back in the safe. Before he could lock it, Jade took her Glock out. She shoved the compact weapon deep into the pocket of her cargo pants and pulled her T-shirt over it to hide its shape. After all, she didn’t want to frighten the old lady; but, at the same time, she was nervous about going out without a weapon. At least one of them should be armed, she reasoned.

  To her surprise, David didn’t ask why she was going to Harbour View. He was too preoccupied, immersed in his own personal problems and in the complexities of the unwelcome new case he’d taken on.

  This murder should never have happened, Jade thought. Not here, in this small and peaceful community. It was incongruous—a big-city crime in a seaside village.

  ‘Right. Let’s go, then.’ David picked up her car keys and jingled them in his hand, an action that forced Jade, yet again, to bite her tongue.

  Harbour View, despite its appealing name, was a suburb of small criss-crossed streets that appeared to be wedged in between a disused railway station and the eastern boundary of the harbour, where the only available view was of rows of blank-walled warehouses.

  This was the bad side of town—or as bad as Jade supposed it got in Richards Bay. Overall, the place had none of the energy of Johannesburg. She’d never thought that she would miss the traffic-clogged roads, the queues of roadside hawkers, the brilliance of the high-altitude electric storms that sent bolts of lightning through the thin, dry air—but she did. And, of course, there could never be any shortage of work for a private investigator in a city that had come into being as a result of gold and greed.

  In contrast, Richards Bay had started out as a tiny beachside community. When, in the late sixties, an aluminium smelter was built, the industrial area expanded massively and the town had followed suit.

  At about the same time, Jade’s father, at that stage a young police captain, had been posted there, to head up the brand-new Richards Bay precinct. He’d spent a few years here—Jade wasn’t sure exactly how many, and she’d been too young to know her exact address. The words ‘police village’ sounded vaguely familiar, so she thought her father must have lived in specially assigned accommodation. Jade wasn’t sure where that would have been. Not in an expensive area, certainly, although the house had had a well-treed, but otherwise neglected, garden that had seemed enormous to a small child.

  She must have been three or four when her father had been promoted to lead a national investigation unit. His work had taken him all over the country, sometimes for months at a time, but he had been officially based at Jo’burg Central police station, which in those days had been known as John Vorster Square. She remembered sitting on a row of cardboard boxes in the Richards Bay house, watching her father help the removal men load their simple furniture into a van. Then they had embarked on the seven-hour drive to Johannesburg. It didn’t take that long today—the highways that had been built since then had taken a good hour off the journey.

  By the time they had reached Johannesburg, it had been almost completely dark and, even now, Jade could still remember the sense of utter wonderment she had felt as their car crested a hill and there, in front of them, had been the last orange smudge of the setting sun … and the lights.

  Twinkling lights in every direction, as far as she could see, stretching right to the horizon. Some bright, others so dim they were only a faint shimmer. Some clustered thickly together, some marching away from her in an orderly sequence, following the straight lines of the roads.

  Jade had had no idea that a city could be so big. It had seemed to her like another planet. Foreign, mysterious and exciting.

  ‘Wow,’ she had breathed, turning her head from side to side to take in the dazzling view.

  She remembered how her father had laughed, stretched out his hand and ruffled her hair.

  Rose Village Retirement Home looked more like a prison camp. A series of stark buildings surrounded by a scruffy garden and a low brick wall, with not a rose in sight.

  She’d asked David to drop her off at a shopping centre on the way, so that he wouldn’t know exactly where she was headed. Her quest to find out more about Elise de Jong was a private matter. She didn’t want David knowing—and most probably disapproving, since he knew who her mother had been. Jade had told him soon after she had found out, although in retrospect she wished she hadn’t.

  At the shops, she had bought a big tin of biscuits as a gift for the old lady, and taken a close look at a street map of the area before embarking on the fifteen-minute walk to the retirement home.

  Inside, the place smelled institutional, as if decades of bland meals and cheap disinfectant had seeped into its very pores. Jade asked for Mrs Koekemoer at reception and,
after a short wait, was escorted down the corridor by a smiling coloured nurse.

  ‘Is she your granny?’ the nurse asked her, and Jade shook her head.

  ‘She knew my mother,’ she replied.

  The nurse gave a soft knock on a door that already stood ajar, before walking inside. Jade followed her. The small room was warm—stuffy, even. Cream-coloured blinds were pulled up, revealing a rather grubby window that looked out onto the rear garden. Still no roses to be seen, but other flowers and shrubs filled the untidy-looking beds.

  A portly, white-haired lady was sitting in a wheelchair by the window, staring out at the garden.

  ‘Mrs K?’ the nurse called. ‘You have a visitor.’

  The elderly lady looked round. Her eyes were confused and somehow opaque-looking.

  ‘Mrs Koekemoer? I spoke to you yesterday on the phone. I’m Jade de Jong. You knew my mother, Elise, when you worked at the Richards Bay hospital.’

  The lady stared at Jade, her expression blank.

  ‘Elise de Jong?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Jade said gently.

  The old lady looked away.

  ‘She has some good days, and some days that are bad. Yesterday was a very good day for her. Today is not so good, I think,’ the nurse whispered.

  Jade was beginning to wish she’d asked the questions over the phone the previous day.

  ‘What should I do?’ she whispered back.

  The nurse shrugged. ‘Stay for a while. Perhaps she will remember just now.’

  Jade stepped forward and put the Spar shopping bag down on the table next to the narrow bed.

  ‘I brought you a present,’ she said, taking out the tin.

  The old lady’s face lit up.

  ‘Biscuits!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Would you like one?’

  ‘No, no thank you. Later, with my tea. Who are you?’

  ‘Jade de Jong. You knew my mother, Elise. You looked after her in hospital. I’m her daughter.’

  The old lady whispered something so softly Jade could hardly hear it. She stepped closer and sat down on the plastic chair that was obviously for guests. In her pocket, she heard her phone beep its low-battery warning and she pushed her hand against it to muffle the noise.