Pale Horses (15 page)

Jade loved dogs but she wasn’t prepared to take her chances with these ones. She was sure that opening that gate would be the first step on a short journey to evisceration.

‘Over the next fence!’

Nothing they could do but climb again, this time over the wall of the property to their left. Harris ran to the wall. It was just as high, but the climb was made much easier by the fact that there was an old kennel to stand on. Jade followed, pulling herself up onto the narrow slats. Every new property they ran through was an additional risk, and when she saw the brightly lit windows of the neighbouring home, all she could do was to pray that this resident was hard of hearing and had less lethal taste in pets.

The screech of a security whistle from inside the house told her that her first prayer had gone unanswered. But then they were through and rushing towards the front gate, whose design thankfully offered a foothold halfway up. A scramble over, a rattle of hinges, and Jade and Harris were stumbling towards the relative safety of the road.

Behind her, the renewed barking of the pit bulls told her that the men who’d been pursuing them were on the hunt once more, and closing in.

Then, from the crossroads ahead, the sound of a badly tuned engine.

‘We need to hide.’ Jade realised she sounded breathless. There was a choice of cover, none of it ideal. Several metres to their right were a
couple of parked cars and a large heap of discarded tiles. But their best option was a row of three black wheelie bins on the other side of the road. Racing across the street, they reached its shelter and crouched down just as a pair of tungsten headlights pierced the darkness ahead of them. The shadows of the bins swung darkly over them as the vehicle approached fast.

Jade hugged the cold plastic that smelled of rotting food and dirty nappies. She could hear Harris’s noisy breathing.

‘This is probably Randburg Guarding,’ he whispered.

‘I hope so. But I doubt it. The engine sounds wrong.’

The car shot past and then braked hard outside Zelda’s house. It sounded heavy and solid; the noise of the engine a diesel-type rattle rather than a finely tuned purr. Jade heard running feet and then muted male voices – she could pick up the sound but not the words.

Then the car’s tyres scrunched, the lights swung round, and she heard the vehicle – and the footsteps – coming in their direction. Searching the area slowly and thoroughly, with the help of some very powerful headlights.

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.

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 turned 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.