Pale Horses (10 page)

‘What’s your name?’ she asked him.

‘Loodts.’

‘Do you know where the people went?’ she asked. ‘The ones who used to farm the land here?’

‘Ag, they had a land claim years back and sold up. I don’t remember exactly what his name was. Van Schaik? Van Schalkwyk?

‘No. I don’t mean the farmer. I mean the local community who took over the farm after the land claim.’

Loodts gave her a rather embarrassed-looking grin. ‘Sorry, I misunderstood you,’ he said. ‘I just thought … you were probably asking about Van Schalkwyk. But the local community – I don’t know where they went. Now you mention it, I remember the other lady also asked me something about them.’

The horse snorted and swished its tail, brushing away flies Jade couldn’t see. Then it lowered its head and rubbed its nose against a foreleg. The rider loosened his reins to allow this and the horse stretched its neck even lower and began to nibble at the yellowed weeds.

‘What did you tell the other lady when she asked?’

‘Same as I’ve said to you. Oh, and I also told her we’d employed one of the guys for a while last year. One of the community who you asked about, I mean. Khumalo was his name, and he had a driver’s licence so we used to use him on weekends, when our regular worker was off. He’d help out around the farm, sometimes take small deliveries into town, you know. Nice guy, I remember. Reliable.’

‘Why did he stop working for you?’

‘He got sick, I think.’ Loodts looked away, as if, with the prevalence of AIDS in South Africa, he surely didn’t need to say anything else.

‘What happened to him?’ Jade asked.

‘It was very sudden. He started looking emaciated – we both commented on it one weekend, myself and my wife. He left work early saying he’d been vomiting blood and he needed to go to hospital and get his stomach right. But you could see he was terminally ill. Then he stopped coming. That was the last time we saw him.’

The rider looked at Jade again and for a while neither of them said anything. The tearing sound the horse made as he ripped up mouthfuls of dry grass was all that broke the silence.

‘He was a good guy,’ he said, as if he felt the need to supply a suitable obituary. Then he smiled. ‘I remember he used to ask to get paid in food.’

‘In food? I thought they were growing their own food in the community. That they were self-sufficient.’

‘This guy Khumalo, he wanted whatever we could give him. Anything from our pantry or freezer, and not always the stuff you’d expect those guys to ask for. We gave him meat, of course, but he also took vegetables, white flour, baking materials – hell, he even went home with a pack of
tofu, soy sauce and rice noodles one time after we’d done a Japanese-themed dinner for the church. I remember he told us he had a wife who was trying to teach herself to be a chef.’

Jade didn’t ask if he knew what had happened to the wife.

She’d heard rumours of entire villages being wiped out by AIDS. Not in South Africa, though, in countries further north – Zambia, Malawi, the Democratic Republic of Congo – but she had no idea whether they were true or wild exaggerations. Very often it was the parents who died, leaving their children behind. If an entire community had been wiped out here, which was unlikely, Jade was certain it couldn’t have taken place in such a short time. That would take years, surely. And despite the stigma attached to the disease, wouldn’t some people have sought help at the local hospital?

She looked again at the barren fields and then walked over to the closest edge. The rider followed her. The change in the quality of the terrain was obvious; a clear line where weeds and grasses ended and arid-looking soil began.

‘Doesn’t look like anything ever grew here,’ she observed. ‘Not that I’m a farmer, but this soil looks completely barren. You’d think there would be some sort of plant life taking root.’

Loodts walked his horse out onto the field. The gelding dropped his head, sniffing the dry earth. Discovering nothing edible, he pawed the soil with an unshod hoof, raising a small cloud of dust.

‘Ja, I can’t say. If they were practising slash-and-burn agriculture together with overgrazing, that could have degraded the environment quite quickly, although you’d see more evidence of erosion. So perhaps it was something different. Maybe they got the fertiliser balance wrong, or used too much herbicide or pesticide,’ the rider hazarded. He glanced over at the lush growth that hemmed the flowing stream. ‘The river banks look OK though, but of course the running water can wash pollutants and toxins downstream. Once they’re on the field, they’re in the soil, aren’t they?’

‘Do you use water from this river on your farm?’

‘No. My farm, “Vyf Damme”, over on the other side of that hill, is named for its water supply. We have five large dams on the property. Never had a problem, I must say, and I’d know pretty quickly if there was one.’

He turned the horse around and rode back onto the grass. ‘Doing without those poisons is a way of life for me,’ he continued. ‘Natural, organic, unspoilt. That’s what we try to do on our farm. We have the whole ecosystem working with no input from chemicals.’ He glanced down and checked his watch.

‘I’ll follow up on your theories,’ Jade said. And then, as an afterthought, ‘Have you ever heard of a group called the Boere Krisis Kommando?’

‘That bunch of extremists? Yes, I’ve heard of them but I don’t subscribe to their views. Anyway, I’d better get going now. Got another horse to ride after this one. Enjoy your day.’

Giving her a friendly nod, he wheeled the horse around and cantered back up the steep slope.

Jade walked over to examine the outlines of the houses that had once been there. Nothing now remained of their walls and doors, or the floors that once surely must have been installed. It was as if the entire settlement had been picked up and removed from the earth.

The door to the old barn was gone, and so was its window glass. She walked around the inside, examining the walls, peering into the gloomy corners, but there was nothing to be seen. As she walked alongside the back wall, her foot brushed against something soft. She froze, looked down, but saw only the crumpled shape of a dirty sack. It looked as if it had been stuffed into a gap where the barn wall met the floor; perhaps to help keep out rain or rodents.

She eased it out of the hole. It was dusty and filthy, with congealed dirt caked into its folds. It was also empty, although when she shook it out – handling it carefully by the corners in case it had contained something toxic – she noticed a logo printed in black on the brownish canvas. She frowned, struggling to make it out in the dim light. Walking over to a brighter area of the barn, she could see it comprised three leaves in the distinctive shape of a trident, which she remembered seeing on the invoice in the Williams Management offices.

Not poison, then. Seeds.

She folded the sack up again and shoved it back into the gap between the bricks.

Outside, the sun seemed even more blinding. She blinked against its glare, looking away as she waited for her vision to adapt. She noticed a rocky outcrop in the shade of the twisted-looking thorn tree near the barn.
The boulders had caught her attention not because of their smooth shape, but because of the streaks of rusty reddish-brown on their sides.

Curious, she walked over to take a closer look.

In this sheltered outcrop, she saw the only evidence that anything had ever lived here: a crimson liquid that had pooled on the flat surface of the rock and trickled down its sides. Dry now, it was faded on the top where it had been exposed to the sun’s rays, but darker on the shadier sides. It looked suspiciously like blood.

Had someone lain here bleeding or vomiting blood? Had an animal been sacrificed here, either to be eaten or to appease the spirits?

Jade took a photo of the rock using her cellphone. She needed it for the record because when the summer rains came this evidence would most likely be washed away for good.

She found no other traces of anything untoward in the remainder of her search around the dusty remains of the settlement.

Making her way back up the hill, Jade wondered what Sonet had been doing here on the land, after the community she’d worked so hard to help had vanished. Had she managed to find out where and why they had gone?

It was only when she was back in her car, which was warm from standing in the sun, that she realised something.

Taking off her baseball cap and tying her hair back into a ponytail, Jade suddenly remembered that Sonet had worn her hair short. Cropped to the nape of her neck like a boy’s.

Down there on the lonely farm, Jade had been wearing her hair loose, blowing back over her shoulders in the chilly breeze.

There was no way that, from a distance, anyone could have mistaken her for Sonet when the differences in their hair were so distinctive.

So who, then, had the horseman originally spoken to on that abandoned land?

Ntombi wrenched herself away from her thoughts and forced her attention back to her surroundings. The purr of the BMW’s idling motor was so soft she barely noticed when she switched it off, especially with the constant flow of chatter from her son in the back seat. She had picked up Small Khumalo from school just a few minutes ago, the normality of this act seeming almost impossible after the long, dreadful hours she had spent with the hired killer.

Light spilled through the ventilation gaps in the garage’s wall, giving her a glimpse of the street outside. Minibuses jostled for position at the taxi rank, most of them white or off-white in colour, many with dents in their bodywork, all with the compulsory yellow reflective strips along their sides.

Behind her, Small Khumalo undid his seatbelt and slid out of the car. She heard the miniature thunder of his feet as he raced away; she was just about to call him back when she realised he’d seen a school friend arriving home on the other side of the garage.

Ntombi got out of the car and stood on legs that were leaden with exhaustion. She glanced again at the taxis. Every single one, to her, represented an escape route. She could climb in and go … leave the evil behind … but go where? Where would be safe? Really safe?

She would have to sacrifice everything – her ID, her bank account, her cellphone, the money she’d so diligently saved. She knew from listening to her employer how people could be traced by these things, and he’d told her that he wouldn’t hesitate to track her down if she tried to run. In fact, he was already tracing her. The phone she used had GPS activated at all times so he knew where she was. The car she drove had a tracker system in place. Even her bank account was controlled by him and was a savings account only, with a credit card but without the facility to make cash withdrawals. The cash she required for her everyday use was given to her by her employer, and every last cent had to be accounted for.

The only way she could obtain her freedom would be to give it all up. Climb into one of those taxis, paying for herself and Khumalo with the few hundred rands that was the most she ever had on her at any
one time. And then disappear off the grid. But where would she go and how would she support her son? What sort of work would she be able to obtain with no identification and no references? Even being able to drive would be useless without a licence.

Perhaps, with the cookery skills she had, a restaurant or fast-food outlet somewhere in a small town would hire her … but in small towns people talked and news travelled. And in the big city, although she was nobody, she would not even dare to stand at a traffic light begging for money in case she was recognised by one of the people who would doubtless be hunting for her.

She locked the car after taking her shopping bags out of the boot and hauled herself over to where Khumalo was having an animated conversation with his school friend, Bongani. The two boys raced out of the exit door, heading, Ntombi knew, for the private lift that led up to Bongani’s apartment.

Bongani’s mother was a stately woman with immaculately braided hair and expensive-looking clothes that were exquisitely cut to fit her generous frame. She turned from opening the boot of her gleaming black Toyota Prado.

‘Hello, my sister.’ Portia Ndumo greeted Ntombi with a smile as sparkling as the large diamond pendant that rested in the cleft of her bosom. ‘Your Khumalo, how is he? My son tells me he is the class maths champion.’

Ntombi nodded weakly in reply. ‘He’s well, thank you,’ she replied in a low voice.

‘And you? How are you?’

She nodded again.

‘Well, that is good. I myself have a problem right now, a worry in my mind that I do not know how to deal with. You see, my son …’

But Ntombi was not listening to the woman speak. She was staring at the grocery bags that she was unloading from the car and packing carefully into a wheeled carry bag for easier transportation up to her apartment.

Among the Thrupps delicatessen packets and Fournos bakery parcels, Ntombi saw the distinctive green-and-white bag, the package containing the brand of white maize meal that was sold all round the country and was the staple food of the poorer people.

Before she could stop herself, before she could think better of it, she shouted, ‘No!’ and grabbed the maize meal from the woman as she was transferring it to the carry bag.

Startled, Portia let go of the heavy package, which also slipped from Ntombi’s grasp and landed with a dull thud on the concrete floor. It split as it landed, and its contents spilled out in an ocean of white.

For a moment neither woman spoke. Ntombi stared down at the fallen bag, breathing hard, feeling tears prickle her eyes as she braced herself to incur Portia’s wrath.

But when Portia spoke, her voice was surprisingly gentle, even if her words told Ntombi that she had misunderstood her futile gesture.

‘Are you perhaps suffering from stress?’ she asked. ‘Because you are behaving as if you are.’

‘I think so.’ Ntombi found herself blinking furiously. ‘I think I might be, yes.’

‘That is what I said to my husband the other day. I said: Khumalo’s mother is too thin and her hands are shaking every time I see her. Is it post-traumatic stress, my sister? Have you been a victim of crime?’