The Fallen (3 page)

The black man raised an eyebrow. ‘Given your history, I am assuming this acquaintance is a she, not a he.’

Bradley nodded miserably. ‘It is a woman.’

‘And how do you know her?’

‘We were—er—involved for a short time, a while ago.’

‘What does she want?’ Chetty leaned forward, his elbows on the table.

‘Well, money, of course.…’

‘What she wants is irrelevant,’ Zulu said. ‘What is important is this: why does she want it? What does this woman know?’

‘She doesn’t know about this operation. It’s personal,’ Bradley muttered. ‘Personal stuff. An amateur attempt at getting money out of me.’ He felt his face burning with shame.

‘Shit,’ Chetty said.

Zulu nodded, his face giving nothing away.

‘How did you know who it is?’ he asked. ‘Blackmail, by its very nature, is supposed to be anonymous, is it not?’

‘I picked up on some clues. It wasn’t difficult. In one of the texts, she told me where she was working.’

Chetty let out an explosive guffaw.

‘She gave away her location?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re right. That is amateur.’

‘Amateur, perhaps, but I would still prefer that the amount
not be paid and that the problem … is simply disposed of.’ Zulu cast a meaningful glance at Bradley, who felt a fresh wave of sweat flood down his back—this one prompted by fear.

His left leg had started to tremble, too. What was wrong with him?

Bradley tried hard to suppress the thought that in his past life he had never received assignments like the one he was working on now. Be tough, he told himself. You can deal with this. You know you can.

He clamped his knees together to stop his leg from shaking, and folded his arms.

‘Her details, please, just for the record,’ Zulu added.

Stammering slightly, Bradley told him the woman’s name, and the name of the beachside resort where she lived and worked. He knew that Zulu would memorise the address, rather than write it down. Nothing had ever been written down during their meetings, and his employers had told him that the phone he’d been instructed to wear around his neck at all times had an in-built anti-bugging mechanism that would beep if any recording devices were in the area.

Or on Bradley himself.

‘I think it’s best you stay out of it. You shouldn’t be seen in the area at all,’ Chetty advised.

‘I understand.’

‘Get Kobus to do it.’

‘I will.’

‘That’s all for now, then. You can go.’

Bradley got up so fast he almost knocked over his chair. He wrenched open the door and stumbled outside.

Chetty groaned as the door banged shut behind the departing project manager.

‘What a bloody screw-up,’ he said, although whether he was commenting on the situation or on Bradley himself was unclear. ‘How’d you know he was hiding something?’

Zulu smiled lazily. ‘The room is hot, but not that hot. He was sweating like a guilty man. Like somebody with a secret.’

‘You think we’ve been wrong to trust him?’

Zulu considered the words in silence for a while.

‘No,’ he said. ‘He is trustworthy.’

‘I worry he’s planning on selling us out to the cops.’

‘He won’t sell us out to the cops.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because he is greedy and because he is scared. He is waiting for his money, and is frightened about going back to prison.’

Chetty didn’t look convinced.

‘Getting him paroled early might not have been enough incentive. Or is there something you’re not telling me? Have you got something else on him?’

Zulu didn’t reply, but his smile widened.

Jade had never been more relieved to feel solid ground under her feet. Calling out a hasty thanks to Amanda, she jogged back along the jetty, her footsteps sounding hollow on the boards. She crossed the wide strip of blindingly white sand and headed up the grassy hillside towards the row of wooden chalets beyond. Her chalet was on the far left, next door to the more modest staff quarters.

After a quick shower, she was ready to go.

David’s flight would be landing in three hours’ time, and the airport was only two and a half hours away. But Jade wasn’t going straight to the airport. First she was going to drive to the nearby town of Richards Bay and visit the local graveyard.

Jade had never known her mother—Elise de Jong had died when her only child was less than a year old—and she had only recently learned the truth about who, or rather what, she had really been. Now she wanted to see her grave; to stand at the final resting place of the woman who had passed on her deadly talents, as well as her slim build, brown hair and green eyes.

What was she going to say to her at her graveside?

Jade didn’t know. Perhaps it would be something simple like, ‘Why couldn’t you have been good at needlework instead?’

She started her car and turned on the air conditioning full-blast, an exercise she had discovered reduced the little rented Fiat’s engine power by about fifty per cent and doubled its fuel consumption. Then she set off up the concrete driveway flanked by palm trees on one side and bushy forest on the other,
and through the low wooden gate that stood wide open between battered-looking white pillars and a rickety wooden fence. The gate and the fence were the only barriers separating the private resort from the outside world—a fact Jade found rather troubling. She hadn’t realised how accustomed she had become to the high walls and electrified wires that protected almost every property in Johannesburg.

Like so many other places in South Africa, Richards Bay had grown dramatically in the past thirty years. The expansion had been accelerated by the end of apartheid in 1994. The once-sleepy little seaside village was now a major hub of industrial activity. It was the place where many of the motor vehicles produced in South Africa were assembled, and it was also home to two aluminium processing plants, as well as a number of mining operations that took place near, but not inside, the iSimangaliso Wetland Park.

As Jade turned off the highway and onto the main road that led into the centre of the sprawling town, she tried to imagine what might have been there when her father had been posted here, long ago, as a police detective. Her father had never talked much about his life before Jade—he hadn’t been a great one for talking in general, and had only occasionally opened up to his only child.

The main road had been in existence back then. She knew that from an old map of the area she’d found in the box of her father’s possessions that David had given to her when she’d returned to South Africa more than ten years after his death. So Commissioner De Jong, or whatever rank he’d held in those days, must have driven along it many times, just as she was doing now.

The buildings on her right wouldn’t have been there, though. They were far too new—a walled Mediterranean-style residential complex built on what must have been vacant land. But the houses on the left looked older. Perhaps he would have seen them too, when their roofs were in better repair, their paintwork fresher and brighter.

And there, ahead of her, was the town cemetery.

She saw rows and rows of gravestones behind the high wrought-iron fence, their shadows sharp in the afternoon sun. Some graves untended, some well cared for, a few with colourful bunches of flowers at the foot of their headstones.

‘How did my mother die?’ she’d asked her father once.

‘There was a very wet summer in Richards Bay, where we lived at the time,’ her father had told her, his voice sad. ‘There was an outbreak of malaria in the town.’

‘Did that kill her?’

‘Malaria on its own doesn’t often kill. But the complications often do. Cerebral malaria is nearly always fatal.’ He’d turned away from Jade in a manner that made it clear that any further questions would be unwelcome.

The cerebral malaria that her mother had contracted had indeed been fatal. It had swiftly led to the kidney failure that had been the eventual cause of her death.

Jade drove through the cemetery’s main gateway and stopped under a tree in the otherwise deserted parking lot. Not far from her, an elderly black man wearing shabby trousers and a ragged cast-off T-shirt bearing the faded legend ‘Richards Mining Triathlon Team’ was sitting on a rock under another, smaller tree. Next to him, in a blue plastic bucket, were a few bunches of lilies. When he saw her, he heaved himself to his feet, lifted the bucket, and made his way slowly towards her.

‘How much are the flowers?’ Jade asked. She realised she was feeling nervous, butterflies fluttering in her stomach the same way they might do if she’d been on her way to meet a stranger that she had heard about for a long time, but never known.

‘Fifty rands a bunch,’ the old man replied. His ‘s’ sounded thick and sibilant. He smiled, showing a gummy gap where his front teeth should have been.

‘I’ll take one, thanks.’

Clutching the flowers, she made her way towards the cemetery gate, then stopped. She realised she had no idea where her mother’s grave was and she hadn’t expected the cemetery to be so large. In fact, it was probably a few acres in size. She turned around.

‘Do you know where I can find the caretaker?’ she called.

The old man hunched his shoulders in an expressive shrug.

‘He’s not here.’

‘Oh.’ Jade paused. ‘Is there a list, or a plan of the graves inside; some way of finding out where somebody is buried? This is the first time I’ve been here.’

The man didn’t answer immediately. He made his way back to his rock and carefully put down his bucket. Then he straightened up again. From twenty paces, Jade heard his back pop.

He started shuffling towards the gate.

‘This way,’ he said, making an impatient gesture with his hand, as if she were the one lagging behind.

Walking at a snail’s pace and keeping a respectful distance behind the elderly man, Jade followed him through the cemetery gates and down a paved pathway in the direction of a small brick building.

The paving was lifting in places and thick dark-green shoots of grass had pushed their way up through the cracks. More grass lined the path, the overgrown blades whipping in the strong wind that had started to blow.

When the old man reached the building, he felt in his pocket. To Jade’s surprise, he produced a key that, after a short struggle, opened the rusty padlock on the door.

‘In there,’ he said gruffly. ‘There’s a list on the wall.’

Jade walked inside. The little room was chokingly hot, a mini-sauna. With the old man watching her, she stepped over to the notice board on the wall. On it, a yellowed plan of the cemetery was held in place by four blobs of rust that may once have been drawing pins. Next to it, a few milky plastic folders held papers with a list of names and plot numbers.

The list was arranged alphabetically, by surname.

Eagerly, Jade scanned the list, looking for the letter D.

But there were only two De Jongs on it—Mildred and Kenneth, who from the looks of it must have been married, because their graves were right next to each other. Jade blinked, peering more closely at the oddly spaced names that had been typed out long ago on an old-fashioned typewriter.

Why wasn’t her mother listed here? Was the grave in her maiden name, for some unfathomable reason?

Jade didn’t have to look far—just a little further down the Ds. She swiftly established that there was no Delacourt buried in this graveyard either.

Just in case the name had been mistakenly listed under J for Jong, she looked in that section as well, but it wasn’t there.

She stepped away, shaking her head, then read through the entire list, just in case she was missing something obvious. It was impossible that her mother’s name was not here. Thirty years ago this was the only graveyard in town. She’d checked up on that before booking her trip.

Her mother had died in Richards Bay. The death certificate had stated this clearly. But she was not buried here.

She turned back to the elderly man.

‘Are you sure this has all the names? Is it totally up to date?’ A silly question, she knew, since her mother had died so long ago.

‘That’s the list,’ he said, the sibilant hissing through the gap in his teeth.

Jade bit her lip, trying to make sense of this. Could her mother have been cremated and her ashes scattered? But if so, why had her father told her that the jade engagement ring he had bought her, the ring whose stone she had been named after, had been buried with her?

Those had been his exact words. She would never forget them.

Her father had said ‘buried’.

Back outside, the wind snatched at her hair. It cooled the sweat that had dampened her hairline and rustled the cellophane wrapper on the bunch of flowers. Now that the flowers could not be used for their intended purpose, Jade found herself carrying the bouquet self-consciously, blossoms pointing down, the way that a teenage boy might hold a floral arrangement after being informed at the front door that his new girlfriend was out of town.

She gave the old man another ten rands for his trouble. While he refastened the padlock on the office door, Jade walked back towards the car park.

Before she left the cemetery, she turned right and made her way down one of the gravel paths, past the ranks of tombstones.

The name on one of them caught her eye. A small and simple granite gravestone that had no flowers. She stopped beside it and read the inscription.

‘Elizma Pienaar. 1929–1983. Sadly missed.’

The name was close enough to Elise. As close as Jade was going to get today, at any rate.

She gently placed her flowers on the grass covering Elizma’s grave. Then, still frowning, she left the windswept graveyard and headed for her car.

‘I need your help, babe.’

Those words, more than anything else, had prompted Jade to book a holiday and get away from Jo’burg for a while.

Robbie had been waiting for her a week ago, when she arrived home late one night after finishing up a surveillance job. He had stepped out of the shadows, directly into the path of her car, as she’d made the slow turn off the narrow dirt road and into her cottage’s driveway. Even though her headlights were dipped, she’d recognised him immediately, but still she had not been able to stop the instinctive, frightened stamp of her foot on the brake pedal.