Stolen Lives (23 page)

Naude.

28

“It’s the man who shot at Pamela,” Jade said. “I’m sure of it.”

They were driving back towards Kyalami. At David’s speed, the twenty-minute drive would only take ten. Fuelled by the adrenaline that had surged through her when she’d seen Naude’s name on the feint-lined notebook page, Jade was confident she would manage to get through the journey without grabbing hold of the dashboard, in spite of David’s disconcerting habit of maintaining unbroken eye contact with her whenever either of them spoke.

“There are plenty of people called Naude,” David said. The words were deliberately matter-of-fact, but his tone was not. He couldn’t keep the excitement out of his voice.

Jade had wanted to storm straight back into the building, to question the receptionist and demand access to the office records and look up the man’s details.

Impossible, of course. She didn’t have any authority to act at all. It was Moloi’s case, and all she could do was pass the phone number on to him and let him take it further.

David looked across at her and the unmarked began to stray over the white line in the centre of the road. Cats’ eyes bumped under the right-hand tyres for a few seconds before the car drifted even further to the other side of the road. Jade tensed when she saw a pair of rapidly approaching headlights.

“Oncoming!” she yelled. She couldn’t help it. Adrenaline only went so far. David corrected his course with a deft twist of the wheel, the approaching car shot past and Jade let out an audible sigh of relief.

“Naude might have instigated all of this,” Jade added. “Perhaps he forced Pamela into cooperating with him.”

“He might have done,” David nodded thoughtfully as the unmarked hurtled down the hill towards a green traffic light at what seemed like reckless speed.

Jade tried to force herself to relax. She told herself David had managed to get through more than twenty years of accident-free driving, so he could surely manage to survive just a little longer without ending up in a fatal collision.

Then the light turned amber and despite her best intentions, Jade found herself making a grab for the dashboard, even though the intersection was still a good distance away. David wasn’t slowing down at all.

Was she going to warn him unnecessarily about a danger he must have noticed already?

Yes, she was.

“Light!” she called out, her hands moving up to grip the moulded plastic. David flattened his foot on the accelerator and hurtled through the intersection well after it had turned red.

“Chill, Jadey. There weren’t any cars waiting,” he said, slowing slightly to negotiate a bend before accelerating again. “This time of night, it’s riskier to stop at a red light than it is to go through it.” He grinned at her, his teeth white and even in his dark-skinned face.

“You’re still thirty kilometres over the limit.”

David shook his head. “Error of parallax.”

“You’re going to tell that to the Metro Police when they flag you down?”

“Nope. It’s a scientifically proven fact. From where you’re sitting on the left, the needle and the speedometer markings may look parallel with each other, but they aren’t, so the needle appears further to the right than it really is.”

Jade considered the logic for a moment.

“Not thirty kilometres further. No way.”

“No,” David agreed. “More like five or ten.”

Jade punched him in the thigh.

The unmarked rattled and bounced as David headed down Jade’s sandy road at a brisk pace. He flicked the headlights onto full beam, carefully scanning their surroundings as he skidded to a stop parallel to her gate. He waited while Jade buzzed it open with the remote control, and only then turned into the driveway itself and drove through. Then he braked again immediately and watched in the rear-view mirror until the gate was fully closed.

Exercising caution when arriving home after dark was standard practice in Jo’burg, but David was being even more watchful than usual. Jade guessed this was because of the phone call he’d told her about earlier. She wondered again who had been asking questions at the hospital in Richards Bay, trying to find out where she was now.

Had it been an old family friend? Or was it somebody who wanted to track Jade down, and had been asking questions about her mother as a smokescreen?

She didn’t know, so she tried to push the thought out of her mind as David accelerated up the driveway.

As he parked close behind her car, she thought about the last time they’d come back home together so late. It had been at the beginning of winter, during an unseasonal and violent rainstorm. They’d stopped in just about the same spot they were in now. Then, while they waited for the worst of the downpour to abate, David had reached for her with his long, strong arm and pulled her towards him, a manoeuvre that had caused her seatbelt to lock and had made them both laugh. After undoing the belt he’d kissed her long and thoroughly, and she’d pressed herself against his solid chest, wound her arms around his shoulders, and kissed him back.

She couldn’t remember how long they had spent in the cramped confines of the car, snogging like two love-struck teenagers. First, the only noise had been the drumming of the rain on the roof, but later she remembered the sound of David’s breathing. The sounds he’d made, the words he had whispered to her. By the time the rain had stopped, the car’s interior was so fogged up neither of them had noticed.

Jade had climbed out and breathed in the chilly, damp, night air. To her, it had tasted of freedom.

Thinking about that time now made her heart ache.

Damn it, she felt as if she were waging a desperate guerrilla war against a massive, well-equipped army. Although she had moved out, Naisha was still David’s legally wedded wife and the mother of his child. She was a law-abiding career woman who would recoil from the crimes that Jade had committed.

There was every reason why David should go back to his wife, and none at all that she could think of why he should choose to be with her.

“Night, Jadey,” David said. He grasped her shoulders and pulled her towards him and her thoughts suddenly went back to that rainy night. He was going to kiss her. Her heart sped up. Where might that lead?

Where indeed? To another snatched victory. Another single night to add to her modest store of memories. Another skirmish won on the sidelines while, on the main battlefield, the war raged on unchecked.

She took a deep breath, then reached up and removed David’s hands from her shoulders. He stared at her, surprised. “That job I did last month,” she said.

“Which one? That surveillance job for the it company?”

“Yes, that one. Well, when I’d finished the work, Steve, the director, called and asked me out.”

Silence. She couldn’t even hear him breathing. Jade swallowed hard and continued. “I’ve been out with him twice. The second time was quite interesting. We met up at Emperor’s Palace casino, had dinner, then took a walk through the place to see what was going on. There was a function on in one of the conference rooms—an awards ceremony for the South African Police Service. I saw you there with your wife. Of course, you’re fully entitled to go with her anywhere you want, but you invited me to that ceremony back in June. Then you told me that it had been cancelled, and that you were going to be working late on that particular evening. Which means you lied to me.”

She didn’t dare look at him while she was speaking—she was too frightened of what she might see.

“I can’t carry on living my life like this,” she said, looking at his long-fingered hands which were now gripping the steering wheel. “It’s not fair. Not fair to anyone—not to me, or you, or your wife.” Jade couldn’t bring herself to say her name out loud. “David, I know you have issues with who I am and what I’ve done, but you need to make up your mind, because as it stands, this situation is unworkable.”

Now she looked directly at him and the pain she saw in his eyes made her want to cry.

“Jadey,” he said in a soft voice, “maybe it’s better that you go.”

“Go?” Her voice was unexpectedly hoarse and she cleared her throat.

“Go out with Steve. Or whoever else. I think you’re right. It’ll be for the best. I can’t ask you to put your life on hold indefinitely for a decision I don’t know I’ll be able to make.”

“OK. Well, ’night, then.” Jade didn’t trust herself to say anything more. She climbed out and slammed the door behind her. She didn’t look back. She felt as if she’d just said a final goodbye to a part of her life she couldn’t bear to lose.

Buzzing the gate open, she listened to the sound of David’s car pull away and rattle off down the sand road.

Then she let herself into her empty cottage.

She’d tried to confront the army on the battlefield and her efforts had been met with a sweeping, instant defeat.

She should have stuck to the guerrilla tactics. One more night with David suddenly sounded like a sensible proposition. It sounded a thousand times better than what she was left with now.

“Well done, you idiot,” she said aloud. Naturally, there was no reply.

Jade locked herself into her bedroom and climbed into her lonely bed.

29

October 27

Who was Mathilde Dupont’s black accomplice?

That question had been preoccupying Edmonds ever since the raid. Hunting down a criminal was a challenge even when his identity was known to the police—Salimovic had been proving that with remarkable success so far.

So how to find this man, when all she had seen was a glimpse of his face through a tinted car window, and when the only description of him had been provided by an observant porter at the hotel where he had stayed?

“An oldish guy,” the Australian porter had told her. “He was a bit shorter than me, so about five-eight, five-nine, I’d say. Very dark-skinned, and the couple of times I saw him he was wearing a suit. Oh, and totally bald.”

In response to another series of questions from Edmonds, the young man had continued: “Nope. I didn’t see any scars or anything like that. And he didn’t speak to me. Just tipped me for carrying his bags.”

The porter had looked down at his hands while he’d said that, and she had thought that perhaps he felt guilty about having profited from the proceeds of crime.

Following the movements of criminals in and out of the country was possible if their passports were flagged. If they weren’t, it was a long and complicated procedure, especially if they did not require a visa to enter the uk.

Sometimes Edmonds wished that every human being could be micro-chipped. It might be a conspiracy theorist’s worst nightmare, but it would make her job so much easier.

It had been Richards who’d suggested that the team take a look at the footage of the two cctv cameras near the brothel. Luckily, they had caught Mathilde getting out of a taxi.

Edmonds was ashamed to admit that she wouldn’t have thought of doing that. She preferred to get information from people—and she believed eyewitnesses were just as useful as security cameras. Slowly but surely, in interview after interview, she had pieced together what had happened after Mathilde and her black accomplice had fled from the brothel after the raid. They had returned to the hotel, where they had packed up and left before sunrise. They’d asked the Australian porter to book them a taxi to Terminal 1, Heathrow airport.

It had taken Edmonds hours of investigation in the terminal itself to establish what flights they had taken, and when she did she could have kicked herself.

Mathilde Dupont had not flown straight to South Africa, as she had assumed. As soon as the Croatia Airlines counter opened, she and her accomplice had paid cash for return tickets to Sarajevo— the same place where Salimovic had fled. They had never used the return. Instead, Dupont had gone on to Cape Town, and Edmonds guessed her accomplice must have done the same.

But now, at last, she could confirm her suspicions because she knew the black man’s name. She was holding the photocopied page from the airline’s passenger records in her hands.

Edmonds heard the sound of shoes on carpet and hurriedly lowered the a4 sheet which she’d been brandishing like a victory flag. She put it away in the folder with the rest of the growing paper trail.

When she looked up, Richards was leaning against the filing cabinet with a smile on his face. He had a waterproof jacket slung over his arm. From the drops of water she could see dripping off the dark fabric, Edmonds deduced that the weather outside, which had been miserable when she’d arrived early this morning, was getting worse.

“Hard at work?”

Edmonds nodded. “I’m finally getting some results on this case. I’ve just got an id on Dupont’s accomplice.”

“That’s good news.” Richards’ smile widened. He shook the jacket out and hung it on the coat hook.

“What’s up with you?” Edmonds asked. “You’re looking very pleased with yourself.”

“So I should be. I got up early and went to gym. First time I’ve done that in a long while. Didn’t even have time for a proper breakfast, because I went straight into a meeting for Operation Platypus.” He glanced down and adjusted his navy-blue tie to cover a mark on his shirt that Edmonds thought looked suspiciously like an egg stain.

“I’ve got a lunch meeting with Crime Intelligence in just over an hour, which is a bit of a misnomer because those tight bastards never shell out for food. So, fancy grabbing a quick bite? Even canteen food is looking good now.”

She was about to shake her head when Richards continued. “And I’ve got some good news for you, too. I’ll tell you about it while we eat.”

Edmonds put the other papers on her desk back into the folder slowly, one by one. She put the folder in the wonky desk drawer that she had discovered fell off its runners if it was opened too far. She pushed her chair back and stood up. And then, because she still hadn’t been able to come up with a good reason why she shouldn’t join Richards at the canteen, she followed him out of the office.

She was hungry. She hadn’t eaten any breakfast either, not even an illicit egg. It wasn’t the food she was trying to avoid now; it was the socialising. Why was talking to a victim for hours at a stretch so easy, but chatting to one of her own team over lunch so hard?