Random Violence (3 page)

Jade put the newspaper back down on the table and turned to Piet. “Did you tell the police?”

He spread his hands. She noticed his fingers were stained brownish-yellow on the tips. Paint, perhaps. Or nicotine.

“I forgot about it till now.”

“It could be important.”

“I suppose so. I’m sorry.”

“Who was she trying to contact?”

Piet rummaged in his pocket and pulled out a battered pack of cigarettes. He put one in his mouth. He didn’t light it. He spoke with the cigarette in his mouth. It moved up and down, punctuating his words.

“She wasn’t trying to get hold of anyone special. She just told me she needed a private detective.”

“Do you know why?”

“She never said why. I didn’t ask. That’s what I learned from being married to her. She didn’t like to be quizzed. She’d tell you when she was ready.”

“What did you tell her? Did you give her any names?”

He shook his head. The cigarette followed the motion. “I told her she should look in the Yellow Pages. She said she didn’t know if she would be ripped off by a person from the Yellow Pages. She was like that. Careful with money.”

“Did she mention it again?”

Piet’s cigarette waggled to and fro. “No. She never spoke about it again.”

“Did she sound scared or worried when she asked you?”

He thought for a minute.

“She sounded the same as always. Curious, maybe. If she’d sounded scared I would have been worried. But she didn’t, so I forgot about it.”

He patted his pockets, looking for a lighter. Finding none, he took the cigarette out of his mouth and put it back in the packet.

After Piet had pushed the gate closed behind her, he walked over to the yard and let the dogs out. They bolted for freedom. One of them lunged at him as it ran past, forcing him to leap aside.

Jade shook her head as she pulled out onto the lonely road. She had a feeling that the dogs preferred women to men. Which was unfortunate for Piet.

5

Jade drove back to the cottage and rechecked the information in Annette’s file. There was one other avenue that she wanted to explore.

She had to sign an entrance register before the security guard allowed her to park outside Annette’s workplace. The building was a mishmash of steel, glass and face-brick. She supposed the architect had been aiming for a modern indus-trial effect. She wondered if he’d burst into tears when he viewed the finished result.

She asked the receptionist to call Yolandi Storr, Annette’s colleague.

Yolandi was a small, frail-looking woman with a mop of badly dyed hair and a stooped posture. Her face looked as if, over the years, it had been etched into a permanent expres-sion of dread.

“Come through, please,” she said. She pushed open the security door that led to the offices.

Jade followed her down blue-carpeted corridors, listening to the hum of the air-conditioning and the muted noise of phones ringing and business being done. She wrinkled her nose at the strong camphory scent of Yolandi’s perfume. They passed a pair of men in dark suits and striped ties striding along importantly. Jade thought they must be managers. They had that look.

“This cold is terrible, isn’t it? Just unbearable.” Yolandi pushed open another security door. Without waiting for an answer, she continued. “I can’t give you much time. We’re all going into a meeting at two.”

“What business are you in?” Jade asked.

“We manufacture plastic kitchen goods.”

“And Annette worked in accounts?”

“Together with me.” Yolandi turned her distraught face to Jade as she unlocked an office door. Her hands were trembling.

If Annette had worked with state secrets or been involved in the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction, Jade might have wondered if her murder was linked to her job. However, managing accounts for a firm that made bowls and scrapers didn’t seem to be a high-risk occupation.

“I do hope that you manage to find the people who killed her,” Yolandi went on. “We’ve all been shaken by this. It’s a dreadful thing. But then, crime in this country is out of control, isn’t it? My two daughters are both in Canada where it’s safe. They worry about me here. I get phone calls from them almost every day. I’d go too, but it’s so expensive to emi-grate and I just don’t have the funds.”

Presumably, in Canada the cold wasn’t terrible or unbear-able. For an uncharitable moment Jade wondered whether her daughters had emigrated to find a better life, or to get away from their mother’s complaining.

“This is our office.” Yolandi pushed open the door and Jade followed her in. The room contained two desks, two high-backed office chairs and two flimsy steel chairs for visitors. One desk was piled high with papers. A computer keyboard and monitor were wedged into the remaining space. The other desk was empty.

“How long had Annette worked for the company?”

“Twelve years.”

Jade took the seat that was offered to her. It was the kind of chair that made people glad to be standing. It was like sitting on gravel. She faced Yolandi across the cluttered desk and wondered what it must be like to spend twelve years of your life working for one company, in one place.

As a child, she had traveled with her father wherever his investigations had taken him. When Commissioner de Jong spent time away from home, his daughter went with him. Jade had spent long hours in planes and cars watching the landscape speed by and listening to the detectives discussing whatever case they were busy with. She was used to being locked in a hotel room with a selection of books, a box of bis-cuits, and firm instructions not to open the door to anyone unless it was her father.

She had to crane her neck to see Yolandi over the towers of paper. “Did you know Annette well?” she asked.

Yolandi adjusted the clasp on a string of plastic beads that hung around her drooping neck. “As well as anyone. She kept to herself. I considered myself her friend, you know. We’d worked together for years. You’d think there’d be no secrets between us. I’m an open book, myself. But Annette hardly ever spoke about her personal life.”

“Did you notice any change in her behavior in the last month or so?”

Yolandi thought for a while. She stared at a spot on the wall so intently that Jade looked too, to check whether she had noticed something interesting. She hadn’t.

“No change, really. She was stressed about the move. Pre-occupied. But that’s natural when you’re packing up house, isn’t it? And she was working hard. Working late some eve-nings. This was going to be her last month here. She wanted to get everything finished before she left for Cape Town.” Yolandi glanced at the empty desk.

“Her husband told us she was looking for a private investi-gator a couple of weeks before her death.”

Yolandi nodded. “Yes. I knew about that.”

“What did she say?”

“She asked me if I could recommend anyone.”

“And could you?”

“Well, I used an investigator during my divorce. To prove my husband was cheating. I gave her his number.”

“Who is he?”

“He’s a man named Dean Grobbelaar.” Yolandi’s face pulled down into a more extreme expression of defeat. “Not a nice person. But then, divorce isn’t a nice business. He was reliable and he did the job. And he didn’t charge the earth for it.”

“Do you know why Annette needed a detective?”

Yolandi sighed. “She never said. I asked, but she wouldn’t tell me.” She looked up at Jade. “I knew, of course.”

“Why?”

“Her husband.”

“Piet? What about him?”

“He was having her followed.”

Jade edged the chair closer to the desk, and leaned forward. Her elbow pushed against the biggest pile of paper and it tee-tered sideways. She withdrew her arm hurriedly.

“Piet was having her followed?”

“She never said it was him. But he’d done it before, a year or two ago.”

“How do you know that?”

“Annette was a clever woman. She noticed things. She found him out. And he admitted to it. Then last week, she said she was being followed again.”

“Did she tell you she suspected her ex-husband?”

The lines on Yolandi’s face deepened and she twined her fingers together.

“No, no. She didn’t tell me anything, as such. I happened to overhear her conversation. I walked into the office unex-pectedly while she was on the phone.”

“I see,” Jade said. She would have bet a substantial amount of money that Yolandi had been eavesdropping behind the door, since Annette was so secretive.

“Who was she speaking to?”

“I don’t know. I just heard her say, ‘I know I’m being followed.’”

“You think it was Piet?”

“I think that he was having her followed again. And that she hired the private detective to try and catch him. Probably, Piet had her killed too. She was a wealthy woman. And he’s just a bum. But you didn’t hear that from me.”

Yolandi gave Jade a small, satisfied smile. Then she lifted a page off the tallest stack of documents, blew the dust off it, and turned her attention back to her work.

6

The trunk of the car was heating up in the morning sun. The car turned off the tarmac and bumped along a rough road. Branches swished and scraped over its roof.

The man in the trunk was pouring sweat. His white golf shirt was drenched and clammy and no longer white. He could smell his perspiration and the stench of his own terror. For hours he had twisted and writhed, flinging himself against the carpeting on the sides and against the hard metal shell above his head.

The car had been parked somewhere overnight. At one stage, when he’d stopped struggling, he’d realized how cold it was. He’d curled up and shivered. He hadn’t slept. The long minutes had passed, quiet and deadly slow.

Then the car had started up and begun to move again. He’d renewed his efforts to make a noise, to produce some motion that might attract somebody’s attention. But the car was too big and heavy. Its new, springy shocks simply absorbed the impact of his rolling body. He had a gag in his mouth, but he hadn’t let that stop him. He’d grunted and bellowed, putting all his effort into getting his voice past the obstruction in his mouth, in the desperate hope that somehow, somebody might hear.

The gag was one of his own socks, ripped off his foot and secured in his mouth with sticky brown packaging tape. He could taste the sour sweat and dirt from his foot and his shoe. The sock’s coarse cotton fibers pushed against his tongue.

The man who’d gagged him had wound the tape round and round his head, covering his mouth and chin in a brown bandage. In the back of his mind, he thought that the gag would be agonizing to take off. It would rip out the two-day growth of stubble and his graying buzz cut. Then he realized how stupid he was to think that. Because if the gag ever came off, it would be a miracle. He would be glad of the pain.

He was a strong man and, although he was pushing fifty-five, still a tough man. He’d thought he was too hard, too experienced to fall victim to an attack like this. But he’d been taken by surprise because it had been slick, so slick, and com-pletely unexpected. Done with military precision. He’d done a few years in the army way back during apartheid. He knew training when he saw it. He’d been outnumbered. And he was familiar with the brutal intent these men showed.

They’d handcuffed and gagged him. They’d yanked his laptop from the power supply and taken his cell phone. Then they’d searched his files. He’d shaken his head and shrugged. Whatever they wanted, he wasn’t going to point it out to them. An operation like this, he was in deep shit anyway. He’d recognized the signs.

The tall man had shouted at him and punched him in the stomach with an iron fist, so hard that he’d doubled over in agony. He’d braced himself for a brutal beating, but the man with the gun had intervened.

“Leave him. Not here, not now.”

“We could take the gag off and question him.”

“And if he shouts?”

“We need the info.”

“It’s recent. Probably nothing’s been filed yet. Anyway, he’s all we need. And this.” He indicated the laptop.

Then they’d marched him down to the car and, at gun-point, forced him into it.

Slowly, fighting the gag, he’d screamed his voice away. Now his throat felt ragged and he could taste blood in the back of his mouth. Even if the gag was removed, there was nothing he could do now. He’d been stupid. He had wasted his voice.

The cable ties that bound his hands behind his back had been too tight to begin with. His hands had swollen now, which made the thin plastic even tighter. His wrists throbbed with a hard hot rhythm in time to the panicked beating of his heart. Every time he moved, a bolt of pain shot up his arms. He wondered if he’d ever be able to use his hands again. Then he realized that was the least of his problems.

He always instructed his clients to try to loosen the car-peting on the inside of their car’s trunk so that they could kick out a rear light if they were held captive in a hijacked vehicle. The carpeting in this vehicle was sturdy. In the dark-ness, it took him a long time to work out where the lights were. Eventually he followed the curve of the trunk’s lid and found the area by feel. He tried to grab the edge of the carpet with his swollen fingers and yank it away.

It didn’t work. He lost a nail. The red, tearing agony as it ripped out of his finger squeezed a flood of tears from his eyes. His nose blocked and he sobbed in desperation, fighting for breath as the gag threatened to choke him. Deep in his gut he knew that this was it. You didn’t get let out and set free when you were tied up in the back of a car. Only worse would happen.

The car stopped. The heat pulsing through the metal above him reduced just a little. The engine was switched off. In the shade, he thought, with odd clarity. They had stopped in the shade.

Then the lid was flung open.

He shrank away from the light that burnt his eyes, filtered only by a thin layer of dry leaves and twigs from the tree above him.

Blinking in the low rays of the sun, he looked up at the man who stood there. The tall man. The one with the cold, empty eyes.

He could only watch. The man lit a cigarette.

“Get out.”

He sat up, knocking his head on the top of the open lid, and a wave of dizziness caught him. The world spun, and for a moment he thought it would spin away. Then it righted itself. With legs that trembled so violently they could hardly work, he wriggled up until he was sitting on the rim of the trunk. Then he pushed himself over. He lost his balance and fell head first onto the stony ground.

“Get up.”

He swung onto his knees and staggered to his feet. His bare feet, bruised from kicking and struggling during the journey. The stones hurt his soles. They were soft, used to shoes. He stood bowed, swaying and snuffling through the gag.

“Walk.”

The other man climbed out of the passenger seat and trained the gun on him. There was nothing he could do. He stumbled into the trees. They were somewhere out in the bush, far from anywhere. Tears welled in his eyes as he walked. What had he done to deserve this?

“Stop.”

Trees were all around him. Their long trunks stretched up to a winter sky. Birds twittered in the branches. His feet were planted in a carpet of leaves.

The man shoved him backwards against a tree trunk. He had more cable ties with him. Long enough to stretch around the tree. Two were tightened around his neck. Another two pulled his ankles back against the rough bark.

He couldn’t speak, but his pleading eyes asked questions. The tall man laughed.

“You might be wondering what we’re going to do to you now.” He waited for a moment with his head on one side, as if expecting an answer.

“Nothing.”

The two men turned and walked away. He couldn’t move his head, only follow them with his eyes. They reached the car. Were they going to leave him on his own?

He closed his eyes for a moment, wondering if anyone would find him or if he would die slowly, strangled by the cable ties when his exhausted legs finally gave way.

He heard scrunching on the leaves and strained his eyes sideways again. The tall man was returning. He was wearing a full-length protective mackintosh, the sort of coat that might keep you dry in a monsoon.

The man smiled. “Before I go, I think I’ll cut a little wood. It’s always nice to have freshly chopped wood in winter, for the fireplace.”

His eyes grew wide in horror and he struggled with all his might, bucking and fighting the cable ties.

The man had produced a heavy-looking, long-handled axe from under his raincoat.

The forest was still for a moment, seeming to hold its breath. Then the first blow of the axe landed. A shower of dry leaves fluttered to the ground and, in the tree above him, the birds took fright and wheeled away into the air.