Stolen Lives (41 page)

Edmonds removed a few thick bundles of high-denomination notes. Money that she was no longer used to seeing because, since the introduction of the Euro, it had quickly disappeared from circulation. Swiss francs, lire, Deutschmarks. The bundles were old, with the peculiarly dirty smell that Edmonds always associated with money. Behind the money were five velvet pouches, each containing a sprinkling of gemstones. Edmonds guessed that the large, blue-white ones must be diamonds. The others, from their colour, were probably rubies and emeralds. In total, a small fortune. Conveniently portable assets. Edmonds was sure that selling just one bag would allow the criminals to live out their days in luxury.

The last item in the safe was a slim stack of documents held together by a rubber band. Old documents, their pages crisp and yellowed. Edmonds removed the band and unfolded them with great care, peering down at the printed words and wishing that she had a translator to help her, because some of them were in French. She carefully read each one through twice.

“Richards, look here.”

“What?” He was by her side in an instant, peering over her shoulder.

“These documents … it looks like Xavier Soumare was adopted.”

Edmonds’ head was spinning with the implications of what that might mean. “Look here. He was adopted by Mr Bernard Soumare, a doctor. Bernard is Amanita’s grandfather, so I was right about the connection between them. Xavier and Amanita are related.”

With a small surge of relief, Edmonds realised she wouldn’t have to mention her earlier phone call at all now. “This document says he was a war orphan from Nigeria.”

“Lost his parents in the Biafran conflict, I suppose,” Richards said. “I guess he must have seen his share of horrors during that time.”

He sounded thoughtful, and Edmonds wondered whether he was trying to understand what might have made Xavier Soumare the criminal he was today.

“According to this form, he took a new first name as well; a French name. Xavier is not his original forename. Trying to put his past behind him, do you think?”

Edmonds didn’t know. She sat, breathing the scorched-smelling air, thinking about what Soumare might have suffered during the war, and how it had changed him.

Or perhaps it hadn’t. Perhaps he had been evil all along.

The next document revealed another one of Xavier Soumare’s secrets.

“Well, he didn’t give up his previous identity altogether,” Edmonds said. “This is a Nigerian passport, but it’s in his old name. Obesanjo Achebe. And he’s done a lot of travelling on it.”

“Call Mackay,” Richards advised. “Ask him to run the name through the system and see what it comes up with. If that old passport’s been so well used, we might just find our man’s committed crimes using his Nigerian identity, too.”

Edmonds and Richards were on their way to the guesthouse when Mackay called back.

The name Obesanjo Achebe had hit paydirt. The Interpol computers were buzzing.

Achebe was a dangerous man, a wanted criminal in seven different countries. He was infamous for fabricating plausible stories to get close to his targets, a couple of whom had been high-profile businessmen and government officials. He’d been assisted by a number of attractive female accomplices who, in turn, had also proved to be untraceable.

And then he had disappeared.

After committing a series of crimes throughout the 1970s and 80s, Achebe had gone to ground. Fallen right off the radar.

Dead, the authorities had hoped.

The only problem, as Mackay explained, was that he had never been under any suspicion of trafficking.

All the crimes that Achebe was suspected of committing had been murders.

55

Xavier Soumare was no trafficker. He was an assassin.

Jade stood, staring at his hunched form while her mind struggled to accept the impossible truth.

The man in front of her, though elderly and sickly now, had worked as a hired killer.

And so had her own mother.

The code words that they used must have been crucial in tight situations. So critical that Elise Delacourt had held onto that part of her old life. She had taught them to her unwitting husband, who had later taught them to Jade.

Or had Commissioner de Jong known the truth about his wife?

Jade didn’t even want to think about that.

She remembered the way she had felt when she’d aimed her gun at her first victim, the man who had murdered her father.

It had been so easy to pull the trigger, to take him down. She hadn’t hesitated, not even for a split-second. Her hands had been rock-steady, her aim true. And as she’d watched her target collapse onto the pavement, she’d felt, for an instant, an emotion she could only describe as joy.

Afterwards, she’d tried to convince herself that she’d been confused; that she could never have felt such hot, euphoric delight in taking the life of any human being, even one so evil.

Now, Jade swallowed hard as she realised that Elise Delacourt had passed on more than her physical appearance to her daughter. And, although Jade had only ever taken the lives of murderers, her mother had done far worse.

She had taken the life of whoever she’d been paid to kill.

“I can’t believe this.” Jade shook her head, tears stinging her eyes. “She couldn’t have done that.”

Xavier shrugged. Then he wiped his mouth with a trembling hand, leaving a bloody streak across his lips.

In the silence that followed, Jade realised that Salimovic had stopped screaming. All she could hear from the house was an occasional low groan.

“Did you kill Tamsin, too?” she asked.

A nod. “It was quick. Better than she deserved. She didn’t suffer much.”

“Who paid you to do it?”

“This was not a paid job.” His voice was weak, breathy. He spoke in gasps. “Amanita is my brother’s child. He died last year.” Xavier pressed a finger to his chest. “Heart attack. He was a good man, a family man. My opposite, you could say. He and his father, Bernard, who adopted me when I was a boy, hated what I became. But when Amanita phoned to say she was a prisoner, Bernard begged me for two favours. To rescue the innocent girl, and to kill those who trafficked her.”

Xavier made a coughing sound that Jade thought might have been an attempt at a laugh. “The police raid interrupted the rescue, but we knew she would be safe. Then we had to find her traffickers, and get close. Finding them was difficult. The killing … was the easy part.”

With effort, Jade pulled her thoughts into focus. It was time for the question that was already causing her stomach to twist with anxiety. Xavier might not be a trafficker, but in order to get close to Salimovic, he and Mathilde had abducted an equally innocent boy.

Jade prayed that the black man would give her the answer she needed.

“Where is Kevin Patel?” she asked.

Xavier cleared his throat.

“The day is not over,” he said.

Jade blinked. “What do you mean?”

“I mean you still have other business to finish here. I need you to do it for me, because I can’t … ” He gave a humourless smile, looked down at his bloody shirt. “I can’t do it.”

“I have other business?” Jade stared at the black man. “I don’t understand.”

Xavier propped himself onto his elbow.

“Jade de Jong,” he said again. “You will understand. You’re a good detective, it seems. One of the best. Good instincts. Otherwise you wouldn’t be alive now.” He paused to gather breath. “Elise was good, too. The very best. I still miss her.”

Jade found herself blinking furiously once again because her eyes had unexpectedly flooded with tears. In the silence, a cricket chirped.

“I thought I did my last job many years ago,” Xavier said. “But then I was asked to do this one. The first I have ever done for honour, not for money. A chance to settle a debt that can never be fully paid. Au revoir, Jade.”

Then, as fluid as a cat, he sat upright and turned his wrist to point the muzzle of the Colt at himself.

“No!” Jade shouted, leaping forward in a desperate attempt to grab his arm. “Please, don’t … ”

But before she could reach him Xavier had tipped back his head and placed the barrel in his mouth.

The noise of the shot echoed off the faraway hills.

David’s phone rang as he was climbing into the passenger seat of the unmarked. The first time he and Thembi had driven together, David had taken the wheel. After that eventful ride, Thembi had politely insisted that he do the driving. He’d come up with a variety of excuses so far, the most bizarre being that he was suffering from terrible car-sickness due to an ear-canal imbalance which could only be alleviated if he had an open window on his right side.

“If you don’t mind, Sup, I’ll drive,” he said, sounding apologetic. “My left hip’s killing me, and for some reason, sitting in that passenger seat only makes it worse.”

At any other time, David would have responded with a caustic remark.

Right then he couldn’t have cared less who did the driving, or why.

He nodded glumly, opened the passenger door, and heard the phone start to trill as he was about to get in.

He clapped a hand to his pocket as the ringing caused reality to catch up with him in an unwelcome rush.

Jade.

With everything that had happened during the raid, he hadn’t had time to think about her at all. Now, anxiety came flooding back.

Where was she? Was she all right?

God, let nothing have happened to her. Surely, in one terrible night, he could not have lost both the people he loved the most?

“If you don’t mind,” he said to Thembi. He pulled the phone out and moved away from the car, squinting down at the display.

00.01 a.m. And the caller wasn’t Jade. It wasn’t a number he recognised at all.

“Patel,” he snapped.

“Mr David Patel?” The voice was middle-aged, female and worried. “It’s Sister Baloyi here, from the Nelson Mandela Children’s Hospital in Soweto. I’m so sorry to call at this hour, but your wife said you’d only be available after midnight.”

His wife? What on earth?

David’s first thought was that the stress of Kevin’s disappearance had caused Naisha to have some kind of breakdown.

“What’s happened? Is she all right?”

A pause. Then Sister Baloyi spoke again, sounding almost as confused as David.

“Your wife was here earlier today. At least, she said she was your wife. A white woman with brown hair. She told us she was on the way to the airport to catch an international flight, but she was very worried because your son passed out after he came home from school. That’s why she brought him in.”

“Kevin’s there?” The words burst out of David’s mouth. “Kevin’s at your hospital?”

“Oh yes. He’s awake now, and he seems fine. He’s been asking for you. We’ve checked him out, scanned him and tested him. The doctors did notice slightly elevated levels of ghb in his bloodstream, so it’s possible that he might have got hold of some tablets while he was at school. We’d like him to spend the night here for observation just in case, but you are welcome to come and fetch him tomorrow. He’s in the high care ward, next door to the burns unit. Oh, and your wife said I must tell you she has already settled the bill in full. In fact, she made a generous donation to the hospital as well.” Sister Baloyi sounded pleased at being able to convey this good news.

“Please, can I talk to him?” David said. “Is he well enough to talk? I need to speak to him now.”

When he heard Kevin’s voice, David felt as if the weight of the world had been lifted from his shoulders.

“Dad! Hey, Dad? It’s me. Are you there?”

Kevin’s voice. High-pitched, upset, but unbearably real.

David found he was so choked up that it took him a while before he could speak to his son with any coherence.

56

“Your work here is not done.”

What had Xavier meant by that?

Jade wondered for an uneasy moment whether this was why the assassin had alerted her to his presence, allowing her to duck and avoid his bullet, instead of simply shooting her first, and then Salimovic.

Jade stared down at Xavier’s body, and a number of random thoughts passed through her mind.

Pamela assuredly telling her that Terence had escaped his pursuers the first time round by going underground.

Naude, swivelling round on his motorbike, to fire the shot that left a double hole in Jade’s black jacket.

Salimovic, grasping a smouldering coal in the fire tongs, sneering as he called her bluff. Why had he done that straight after she had told him that Pamela and Naude had been arrested?

Suddenly, Jade understood.

“Salimovic had three passports,” she said aloud. “Three, not two. And an open-plan house with big windows and a rickety French door. And there are no beds in the spare bedrooms, no locks on any of the inside doors. There’s no way the victims were broken in here.”

The Colt.45 that Xavier had used had fallen onto the grass. Jade picked it up. She’d have to wipe her prints off it later, but for now, this was the gun she needed. She also needed a torch. She remembered seeing one in the hallway, and ran to get it.

The tracks leading away from the parking area were difficult to spot. In daylight she might not have noticed them at all, but under the low beam of the torch, the grass on either side of the short, flattened blades cast a sharp shadow.