Random Violence (7 page)

“Annette found him out, didn’t she?”

Piet laughed. “She busted him after about two days. She marched right up to his car and banged on his window. Asked him what he thought he was doing. She must have thought he was a stalker. She gave him such a fright. He told me he nearly peed his pants. Then she phoned me and told me I was stupid, she said I should just have asked her, and she would have told me.” He slapped his forehead in a frustrated gesture.

“Why didn’t you mention it to the police?”

He shook his head.

“Why would I? I didn’t think that my friend following her so long ago would mean anything to anybody now. It was just me being stupid. Like she said.”

“Did you have her followed again, more recently?”

Now, Jade thought, Piet looked as uneasy as Graham had done earlier. He twined his gnarled fingers together and chewed the filter of his cigarette nervously.

“Annette phoned me last week. Just a couple of days before she died. She asked what was happening. She wanted to know if I’d got somebody else to bother her again. I said no. I said she must be imagining things.”

Jade wasn’t sure if she believed him. “You’re telling me that you only had her followed once?”

“Just the once. And I found out what I needed to know. You can phone my friend now and ask him. I’ll give you his number. He’ll tell you I’m correct.” He patted his pockets again, as if his cell phone or address book might have miracu-lously appeared there.

Jade scrutinized Piet closely. Was he lying?

“Annette was pretty sure she was being followed the first time it happened,” she said gently. “And she was right. She was being followed.”

“She was a sharp lady.”

“Then why would you tell her that she was imagining things if she thought she was being followed again? Surely she’d proved she had an instinct for it.”

Piet thought for a while. Then he shook his head in a small, defeated motion.

“Jade, I don’t know. I thought maybe she was scared of moving. Worried she was making the right decision. I’m like that when I get stressed. My mind plays tricks on me. I imagine the worst.” He picked his cup up again. His hand was trembling. Tiny ripples scudded across the surface of his tea. “I just didn’t want anything to get in the way of us. So I tried to reassure her.” He sighed. “But I was wrong. I should have worried. I should have told her to be careful.”

He put the cup down again without drinking.

Jade shook her head. “How could you have known? You weren’t there.”

“That’s what I keep telling myself. What happened to her, Jade? Hiring detectives, being followed. What had she got herself into? Why didn’t she tell me about it?”

“That’s what we need to find out.”

Piet didn’t reply. He sat hunched over his tea. Jade was sure he was racked with guilt over his misguided advice to Annette. She couldn’t give him any further comfort. Reason and logic were poor weapons against the assault of those ter-rible words, “If only.”

“Did Annette have any staff?” Jade asked him, in a soft voice. “A domestic worker, a gardener, anyone who visited the house regularly?”

Piet shook his head.

“That was the first thing the police asked me. They said domestics always know what’s going on. But she did her own housework. Her own gardening. She was house-proud. And she didn’t like having strangers around her. She’d get the neighbors to help her with grass cutting and firebreaks out in the fields. Not often. A couple of times a year, I think.”

“Any repairs to the house? Building? Recent deliveries or installations?”

“None that I know of.”

“Where did she keep her accounts?”

Piet climbed slowly to his feet. “I’ll show you.”

Jade guessed that Annette’s accounts system would be neat and tidy. Even so, she was unprepared for the rigor-ously ordered ranks of files that Piet unpacked from one of the boxes. The woman had covered every file in brown paper and plastic as if they were schoolbooks. She stared in awe.

She helped Piet carry the files back into the lounge. He put them on the coffee table and she paged through the most recent one. It was up to date. Annette must have done filing the day before she died. Each month was separated by a plastic divider. Bank statements, phone bills, water and lights accounts. Sundry expenses. If she ran a business, she would’ve liked Annette to control the accounts department, that was for sure.

The section for June wasn’t complete. The bank state-ments were missing. She supposed they arrived at the end of the month. But some bills and sundry expenses were there. There was an invoice for a car service. Jade checked the details. It was for the vehicle parked outside the house. Other bills for groceries, dog food, gas, hardware. Annette lived modestly. No expensive purchases at hairdressers or clothing stores, even though she could have afforded them. Her bank balance was healthy. Much healthier than Jade could ever expect her own to be. Annette’s current account stood at six figures, and Jade was sure there was more money stashed away in invest-ment funds.

She flicked through the payments for May. Then she stopped. She noticed a plain sheet of paper, a printout from an Internet transaction. Neatly filed like all the others. It had been made to the personal account of D. Grobbelaar.

She was willing to bet that this was money Annette had paid Dean Grobbelaar for some form of investigation work.

Jade checked the amount. Seven hundred rand.

She frowned. Grobbelaar might be cheap, but that payment wasn’t high enough to justify spending hours and days waiting around in a car, trying to spot somebody who was following her. Jade had done counter-surveillance herself, on occasion. It was difficult work. The hours were backbreaking and it was mindlessly boring. And at the same time, every long minute was potentially fraught with danger, because people who were following other people weren’t too pleased if they noticed somebody was trying to catch them out.

Jade reckoned this amount would probably have bought Annette a half-day of investigation work, at best. What had she hired him to do?

She went through May again. Then she looked through the entire file to see if any other payments had been made. There were none. This was the only money Annette had paid to Grobbelaar. Seven hundred rand. A few hours of his time.

Jade looked more closely at the paper. She’d noticed some-thing else. As a reference, Annette hadn’t put her own name, she’d used “Ellie Myers.”

“Do you know anyone called Ellie Myers?” she asked Piet. He was hovering anxiously over her shoulder, breathing smoke down her neck. He had found a way to light his cigarette. The strange burning smell wafting through from the kitchen made her think he must have used the toaster.

He looked at her blankly. “No. Why?”

“I’ve found a payment here. I’m pretty sure it was made to the detective her work colleague recommended. But the reference says Ellie Myers.”

“I don’t know an Ellie.” Now Piet was frowning, too. Jade could see he was upset all over again, because he hadn’t been able to share that piece of Annette’s past with her either.

Annette wasn’t very trusting. Could she have used a pseu-donym? Then she looked at the paper again and answered her own silent question. No, no, of course not. Her account name appears here. He would have seen that. Pointless using a pseudonym as a reference on an Internet transfer. So who the hell is Ellie Myers?

Then she had another idea. She turned to Piet. “Did Annette have a computer at home?”

He shook his head. “No. I e-mailed her at her work address.”

Jade remembered the desk opposite Yolandi’s. Clean, shiny, and bare. Perhaps the company had reallocated Annette’s computer.

Or perhaps not. Maybe it had simply been put away some-where, or gone to the IT department for reformatting. In which case, there was a chance it might still have correspond-ence stored on it. If she used the Internet for the transfer to Grobbelaar, they might have communicated via e-mail. A naturally suspicious woman like Annette would probably keep a record of her dealings with a dodgy detective.

“I’ll be back later,” she told Piet. “Take care, without the dogs around.”

“I will,” he said. “I’ve booked into the City Lodge tonight. I don’t feel safe here any more. I feel as if I’m being watched.”

Jade checked over her shoulder as she drove out of the gate. She saw only the empty road and the parched grass nodding in the wind. All the same, as she pulled away and left the lonely house behind her, she wondered with an uneasy chill whether somebody was watching her go.

11

Whiteboy sat behind the wheel of his car and laughed. Things were going well. So extremely well, they couldn’t be going better if they tried.

The Botha job had gone exactly as planned. It had been as slick as the best he’d ever done. And he knew the rest of the job would go as planned, too, although the investigators were further ahead than he’d anticipated. It didn’t worry him, though. He’d put a backup system in place immediately. From now on he’d be able to keep a closer eye on them. He wouldn’t be surprised again. And, when the time was right, he’d set the score straight. In the end, justice would be done. His own unique form of justice.

He remembered one of the first times he had meted it out. Years ago, it had been. Back in the old apartheid days, when every white South African male was forced to report for mili-tary service. In a place whose name he didn’t remember now. Somewhere near the Angola border. Where his unit was sent on some pointless mission.

He’d been running a scam with a colleague. It involved one of the kitchen staff, Farm Boy, a clueless white kid who was straight off the farm and as ignorant as pig shit. He was stupid enough to do whatever Whiteboy asked him, without realizing that if he was ever caught he’d been set up to take the fall, all on his own. He was also too stupid to realize that Whiteboy knew the exact quantities of the goods that were being sold off. He’d tried to keep some back for himself, even though they were both making money on it, even though Whiteboy was always fair. But this farm boy had tried to make too much money on it, had tried to screw Whiteboy. And that wasn’t allowed.

They would meet late at night after roll-call, in a hollow near the dunes. Whiteboy drove a vehicle to their rendez-vous. One of the big armored trucks called Casspirs. Farm Boy walked. They met in the place where the supplies had been stashed earlier on, to share out the money and organize the distribution of another load. A ten-minute contact from beginning to end. Arranged whenever necessary, circum-stances permitting.

This time, it worked differently. The kid arrived as usual. He loaded the supplies into the Casspir. When he was fin-ished, Whiteboy jumped him from behind and got a rope around his neck. He couldn’t do anything after that. He was immobilized. Whiteboy thought he would have been immo-bilized anyway from terror. Probably all he’d needed to do was shout and the kid would have dropped down dead of a heart attack.

But he didn’t. That would have offended his own code. Instead, he clicked a pair of handcuffs onto each of the Farm Boy’s wrists and ordered him to lie, face up and arms spread, splayed across the front of the vehicle. The boy resisted at first. He tried to scream, but a few tugs on the rope round his neck had sorted him out. Then he’d tied a rope to the handcuffs, running it through the APV’s interior so that his victim’s hands were tied apart.

Then he’d worked on his legs. First, he took off his boots and camo pants. Then he’d ripped off his underpants. By that stage, Whiteboy recalled, the little wimp had already wet himself. That was disgusting. His dick had looked pale and tiny, like a little white maggot. By way of punishment for having pissed himself, he had stuffed the warm and soaked underpants into Farm Boy’s mouth and used another piece of rope to tie them firmly in place.

When he thought about it, his MO hadn’t changed much since then. Clothing for gags always worked well.

After that, he’d knotted a rope to each of the boy’s ankles and tugged the knots tight under the chassis of the big, heavy vehicle. Then he and Farm Boy, now splayed, naked and writhing, across the Casspir’s angular grille, had gone for a good long ride in the bush.

This punishment wasn’t his invention. It was a well-known method of torturing captured terrorists on the way back to camp, to soften them up for interrogation. He’d never done it before. But he liked to think that he’d improved on it, on his own, that night.

He drove through the thickest trees he could find. The Casspir was old. Its camouflage paintwork was already scratched in a thousand places and it was tough as old boots. Nothing much could happen to the vehicle. But the same could not be said for Farm Boy.

It was amazing, Whiteboy remembered, how a man could scream through a gag. Sitting behind the thick windshield, he had watched the strong thorny branches whip and rip into Farm Boy’s white flesh, leaving hundreds of bloody lac-erations behind them. He’d become increasingly bolder and more inventive. After all, it wasn’t as if he would need to interrogate Farm Boy afterwards. He found a tree with a long, ragged stump of a branch jutting out. Long ago, an elephant or something must have broken it off. Whiteboy drove and reversed, drove and reversed. Each time, the branch ripped further up his victim’s thighs. Closer and closer to where the little white maggot was cringing away.

It had been an anticlimax, in the end. Such pleasures often were. He had revved the engine before delivering the coup-de-grace and sent the vehicle hurtling forward in order to embed the branch in Farm Boy’s groin. Whiteboy was looking forward to seeing what would happen. He remem-bered smiling as he put his foot on the accelerator, his armpits damp against his heavy body in the tropical night.

In his fear, Farm Boy found the strength to move himself further down the grille. God knows what he’d hoped to achieve by doing it. He was stupid until the end. The branch missed his groin. Instead, it ripped open a path higher up, through his stomach. It must have torn his diaphragm and ruptured his lungs, too, because he died quite quickly after that.

Whiteboy untied him and let his body slide to the ground. He undid the handcuffs and the ropes. Army property had to be accounted for, after all. Then he threw Farm Boy’s trou-sers and shoes out on the ground after him. He was in the middle of nowhere, deep in the bush. He was confident that it would take a couple of days at least for anyone to find the body, and by then it would be well mauled by small preda-tors, decayed and unrecognizable.

He’d stopped at a riverbed on the way back. For most of the year it was more or less dry, but the recent rains had swollen it to a torrent. He sluiced the front of the vehicle clean of blood. The next morning he overheard some talk that the boy might have deserted. Then it was discovered that supplies were missing, and everyone assumed that was linked to his disappearance. There was a half-hearted search for him a day or two after that. His remains were never found.

Shortly after that, Whiteboy was recalled from Angola and discharged from the army. But before he left, he heard through the grapevine that Farm Boy’s parents were selling off their farm. They were broken by the disappearance of their only child. They’d been keeping the farm as his inheritance.

Just for fun, Whiteboy went along to see the setup. It was closer to civilization than he expected, northwest of Pretoria, on the way to the Magaliesberg mountains. The land bordered a little go-nowhere tar road, which in turn eventually led to a little go-nowhere town called Rustenburg. On the way, the road passed close to a nearby black homeland.

There were a few of those homelands dotted around back then. They were mini-states within South Africa, ones that the government had allowed the blacks to have in compen-sation for taking all their other, and better, land away. He’d heard that a rich Jewish bloke called Sol Kerzner was building some sort of gambling mecca in this particular homeland. He was going to call it Sun City.

Whiteboy thought it sounded like a fun place. Cards and slots, blue movies, naked dancing girls. All the stuff that you couldn’t get in South Africa itself in the late 1970s because of the stupid outdated Calvinistic laws. He thought it might do quite well. And if it did, land along the Sun City road would become a sought-after commodity.

He bought the farm. It was extremely cheap and, because he arrived in his army camo and gave Farm Boy’s parents some sad little story about how he was struggling to make a living and had been their son’s best mate in the army, it was cheaper still. An extra special price for him.

It turned out to be an excellent investment. He’d subdi-vided it into ten smaller pieces and, over the years, sold off the sections. He’d sold the last one for ten times the original price of the entire farm.

The episode with Farm Boy had launched him into his future career.

Whiteboy heaved his bloated body upright in the seat. Time to phone his contact for information. He believed in having contacts he could trust. He liked having a history with people, some water under the bridge. He liked to be able to rely on them. That was one thing he’d learned in the army. You watched your buddy’s back, and he watched yours.

He snapped open the cell phone and made his call.