It beeped again just after the stewardess had passed and Jade grabbed it up, earning a disapproving glare from the woman on her left.
‘Leving Blmftn.’
Christ, she’d been an idiot. Jade could have slapped herself on the forehead. She knew the woman was in a predicament and she hadn’t yet asked the most obvious, the most important question of all.
She typed the message in, fingers going at lightning speed.
‘Whats yr cars no. plate?’
She stabbed the ‘Send’ button and waited breathlessly for a response. David was looking at her curiously and the woman on her left was glancing up at the call button. Clearly she was about to summon an air hostess to force Jade to turn her phone off.
The seconds ticked by until Jade could wait no longer. Ntombi had not sent a message back. She turned off her phone and put it away.
Ntombi quickly deleted Jade’s message. She’d been too long in the toilet already, and in any case, as exhausted as she was, she couldn’t remember the BMW’s numberplate. She’d have to look and message Jade de Jong back later.
She flushed the toilet and opened the cubicle door, stepped out into the brightly lit ladies’ washroom still holding her phone.
And the killer was there.
Waiting just outside her cubicle.
He grabbed her, his steely fingers digging into her upper arm, and dragged her towards him as she let out a whimper of pure terror. Her bladder loosened and she thought that if she hadn’t just been to the toilet she would have wet herself.
‘What were you doing?
What were you doing?
’ he shouted. His face was contorted and now she could see only too clearly that there was madness in his eyes.
He yanked her out of the Ladies’, her shoes slipping over the tiles and her ankle twisting painfully. She tried to struggle, to scream, but it was as if he had stolen her voice? The next thing she knew he’d pulled her through another door and they were in a utility room. Small and windowless, it stank of disinfectant and cheap cleaning materials. He shoved her against the wall, clamping his hand around her throat, sending brooms and mops clattering to the floor.
‘Let me see that,’ he growled, tugging her phone out of her hand. His grip was an iron band around her windpipe and the blood started to pound in her head. Staring directly at his snarling face, she noticed that his upper and lower incisors had been filed to razor-sharp points. Whether this had been done as part of a tribal ritual or a gang initiation she had no idea, but the sight of it froze her and she could only wait, fighting for each choking breath, as he scrolled his way through her phone’s applications.
‘I heard you pressing keys in there. Were you sending a message?’
‘I …’ It was no use denying it. All she could do was lie, and pray that it was close enough to his idea of the truth. ‘I was texting my son. I told him not to worry that I am not back yet; that he must go and wait at his friend Bongani’s apartment.’
Desperately afraid, every single muscle in Ntombi’s body was shaking with fear. There was a singing in her ears and for a while she imagined that she would simply pass out in that stuffy, stinking space and be held there by him until the blood flow to her brain ceased and she died.
But suddenly he released her and she fell heavily to the ground, landing hard on her knees, bumping her shoulder against his granite-hard thigh.
She remained crouched over, staring into an empty plastic bucket, its bottom encrusted with a white residue, and waited for him to administer her fate.
To her relief, instead of the killer blow she’d been expecting, he simply said, ‘Get back to the car. We are running late. We need to be in Johannesburg before dark.’
Even though her legs felt as though they were made of rubber, she managed to struggle to her feet, brushing ineffectually at the creases in her skirt, and stumble back to the car. The man walked behind her. This time he did not give her cellphone back.
When they were an hour out of Bloemfontein it rang. Ntombi jumped in her seat. She couldn’t help it. She hadn’t realised he’d turned the instrument’s settings from silent back to ringing, and now the piercing Nokia ringtone filled the car. The sound battered her eardrums, while her physical reaction to the sound offered him ample evidence of her own guilt. She started to tremble again and sweat doused her forehead and hands, causing the steering wheel to momentarily slip in her hands.
She had no idea who was calling. The man did not answer, nor did he show her the phone’s screen. She waited for what felt like an eternity until the call rang through to voicemail and, a while later, she heard the beeping that signalled a message.
He made sure she was watching as he dialled her mailbox and then put the call onto speakerphone.
Let it not be … she prayed. Let it not be …
Relief surged through her as Portia’s loud, jovial voice came clearly through the speaker.
‘Ntombi, my sister, where are you? Where are you? Khumalo is too worried. I have told him you are fine, but please phone him soon as possible. We are leaving shortly for Durban and he wanted to say goodbye before we set off. Go well, have a safe trip home, and remember that when we are back from holiday, you and I are going to explain to a labour lawyer exactly what your employer has been asking you to do.’
Her passenger said nothing. Just kept watching her, his gaze intense, his lips ever so slightly parted in a cruel smile, so that she could see the ivory points of those needle-sharp teeth.
Ntombi felt as if the air conditioning had sucked all the oxygen out of the car. Her thoughts flailed for coherence. How was she going to explain, under these circumstances and to this dangerous man, that Portia was meddling in Ntombi’s business without any idea of what was really going on. He would never ever believe her.
Then, as she opened her mouth in the futile quest to try to persuade him otherwise, the truth all but punched her in the solar plexus.
It wasn’t Portia’s mention of the lawyer that had caused the man’s reaction. It was her mention of Small Khumalo. Ntombi had said that the boy was worried, that he did not know what had happened to his mother.
Now the killer knew that the last message she’d sent hadn’t been to her son after all.
It meant that he knew that she had lied.
Jade switched her phone back on as soon as the plane touched down, in direct defiance of the air hostess’s polite but firm exhortations to please wait until the aircraft had come to a complete stop before activating any electronic devices.
There was no message waiting for her, though.
During the flight, she’d told David who she suspected was sending them.
‘I wonder why Mrs Khumalo, if it is her, would be travelling with that man,’ David had mused, keeping his voice low to avoid attracting the attention of the woman sitting next to Jade.
‘Perhaps it makes for better cover,’ Jade said. ‘A couple, a wealthy-looking black man and woman, probably politically connected, how often do the police pull them over? They’re just about lowest on the suspicion scale.’
‘Yes, yes, I know that.’ David had sounded impatient. ‘What I don’t understand is why – or how – on earth she’s ended up in a car with him at all.’
Jade couldn’t tell him that, thanks to the recorded interview she had listened to, she was starting to suspect the worst. Ntombi Khumalo knew what had happened to the Siyabonga community. She had somehow survived the disease that had wiped out every other resident of the farm – perhaps, as a chef in training, she had prepared her own dishes and not eaten the toxic maize. Ntombi had been incredibly lucky, but now her luck had run out. Jade had a cold feeling that somehow this poor
woman was being used, that the knowledge she possessed had landed her in a dangerous situation.
As the two of them walked into the arrivals terminal she found her thoughts straying. Not to the events of the past twenty-four hours, nor to her evening meeting with Victor Theron that lay ahead. Instead, she found herself thinking of the vastness of Africa. A continent so large that North America, China, India and the whole of Eastern Europe could fit inside, with room to spare.
A continent where in some areas the earth was so barren that nothing grew, but in others the subtropical climate bestowed its fertile blessings upon the people, keeping starvation at bay for even the poorest inhabitants thanks to the abundance of natural foods that thrived in the humid, steely-skied surroundings.
A continent where almost every leader had his price.
Where a field of seeds could surely be cultivated in secret with no questions asked.
And then …?
‘Where are you off to now, Jadey?’ David interrupted her thoughts as they climbed into his car, heading back to the Market Theatre car park.
‘Back home. I have a late meeting with my client, Victor Theron.’
‘Evening meeting?’ Jade picked up a note of jealousy in David’s voice.
‘He wants to take me to dinner to say thank you,’ she said.
It was nothing short of a miracle, she thought, that they managed to arrive back at the Market Theatre in one piece, because after hearing that news, David drove as if the Devil himself was on his tail.
‘And you? What are you up to?’ she asked as she opened the car door.
‘Work,’ he muttered. ‘I’ll go to gym first. I need a shower. See you around.’
As soon as she’d slammed the car door David sped off angrily.
It was the thought of having to sit in the rush-hour traffic that made Jade decide to follow him. It was now close to five p.m. If she killed an hour staking out the gym she’d be able to drive home a lot faster and still have more than enough time to get ready for her seven-thirty meeting with Theron.
Decision made, then.
She got into her own car and set off along the same route that David had so recently taken, although driving at approximately half the speed.
This afternoon the apartment block opposite the gym was quieter. Fewer people were coming and going, probably because it wasn’t quite the end of the working day.
Sandwiched in between two empty bays, David’s car was parked at a careless angle, its bonnet jutting out into the street. She suspected he’d bashed the bottom of its bumper against the kerb on his way in.
Temper, temper.
She drove past slowly, not wanting to park too close by, deciding to stop around the corner and walk back. And even then, she felt she was going to be far too visible this time.
The security guard inside the apartment lobby was leaning on the desk and chatting to an elderly man in green overalls. Across the street, a slim Indian woman in a denim skirt and sports shoes – a student, perhaps – was striding purposefully towards the traffic lights, her arms swinging as she walked, a folded piece of paper held carefully in her fingertips.
A piece of …
‘Wait a minute!’ Jade said out loud.
She stamped on the brakes and twisted round to see, to her astonishment, the student pause by David’s badly parked car and casually slip the small, white square under the windscreen wiper before continuing on her way.
Jade felt shocked, as if she’d been slapped. Who on earth was this innocent-looking youngster? More importantly, who was she working for?
Only one way to find out.
Jade scooted the car into a yellow-demarcated loading zone, parking at an equally crazy angle. She was out, tugging the keys from the ignition and closing the car door so fast that her jacket got caught in it. She spun back, wrenched the door open, freed it and, slamming it once more, set off in pursuit.
She didn’t know whether it was the repeated sound of the car door
closing or simply instinct that made the dark-haired young woman look round.
For one astounded second she watched Jade sprinting towards her. And then she was running too; her slender limbs pistoning in her haste to get away. She fled round the corner and disappeared from Jade’s sight.
Seconds later, Jade was also skidding round it, her breath burning in her lungs, praying that she wasn’t about to be ambushed.
All she saw was the student’s fast-retreating back. Damn it, she must be a runner, because she was proving to be cheetah-fast. No matter how desperately Jade flung herself forward the other woman’s lead was increasing. Twenty metres, then thirty. Jade’s foot crunched down onto a loose kerbstone and she stumbled, losing her rhythm. Her quarry was heading towards the busy Commissioner Street crossing and the red man on the pedestrian sign was already flashing. She was going to make it across before the light changed and Jade was going to be stuck on the approach, separated from her quarry for a few crucial minutes by a thick, fast-moving stream of traffic.
And then the pretty Indian student glanced over her shoulder, gasping for air, her face wide-eyed and open-mouthed when she saw Jade was still in pursuit. She seemed to stumble and the next moment fell flat on her back on the worn paving, her head thumping down onto the brickwork with a solid thud that, even half a block away and over the noise of traffic, Jade thought she could hear.
Another few strides and she was onto her. Dropping to her knees, Jade slammed the heels of her hands into the woman’s shoulders, ready for a struggle.
But there was none.
The young woman’s breath was coming in agonised sobs and she was moaning. ‘Ow, ow, so sore. My head … my head.’
Her hair had worked loose from its clip and it streamed out over the dirty paving. Close to her feet Jade saw a blackish smear with a distinctive aroma. When she’d turned to see how far behind Jade was, she had failed to notice the discarded banana skin that had effectively taken her down. Old and rotten, as slick as black ice and almost as invisible.
A couple of passing pedestrians gave the fallen woman a concerned glance, but seeing Jade already at the scene they walked on, assuming that she was there to help.
She blinked tears away and Jade moved her hands enough to allow her to turn onto her side. She was younger than Jade had first thought. Perhaps even still a teenager.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked. Never in a million years would she have expected these would be the first words she’d say to the person leaving anonymous notes for David. But then, the skinny Indian student she was looking down at now didn’t fit that person’s profile either.