Authors: Jassy Mackenzie
He took a colour chart out of a big folder and frowned down at the gleaming swatches of hair.
“I was actually expecting the police to come along and do an identikit with me,” he said. “You know, the way they do it in the movies?”
“I expect they would have if Tamsin hadn’t been found,” Jade said.
“I’ve got an excellent memory for faces. I’m not so good with names, though,” Raymond confessed. “That’s why I call everyone ‘sweetie’ and ‘darling’.”
It soon transpired that Raymond also had an excellent memory for gossip. As Jade tried to relax in the chair, her head swathed in tinfoil, he treated her to a choice selection.
“I feel so sorry for Pamela,” he sighed. “She’s such an unhappy lady, with that ghastly husband of hers running off every five minutes with another of those strippers from his clubs. I’m sure that’s where he is now, you know. Off again with one of them.”
Jade filed that away in the section of her brain labelled “Interesting Facts on Pamela”. So she’d not only known about her husband’s infidelity, but had shared that knowledge with her hairdresser.
“Sometimes he even entertains those girls in his own marital bed, can you believe it? Pamela travels quite regularly to visit her mother, who’s in a retirement home down in Durban, and she often spends a night or two at the Sandton Holiday Inn when she needs some time alone. She told me she’d get home to find lipstick smears, perfume smells, even different-coloured hairs on her pillow. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s quite revolting.”
“I do too,” Jade agreed. “Why hasn’t she divorced him?”
“Oh, she’s too scared to leave the marriage, sweetie. Besides, Terence would never let her. Personally I think he can’t bear the thought of not controlling her. You’ve never met him, have you? He’s a horrible man.”
“Too scared, you say? Why?”
“Well, when she wanted to separate from him a while ago, Terence started making threats. He said if she went through with it, he couldn’t be responsible for her mother’s safety. And soon afterwards, the old lady slipped when she was going down a shopping-centre escalator. She banged her head quite badly and ended up in icu. It might have been coincidence, but … ” Raymond shrugged expressively, “it probably wasn’t.”
“And Tamsin?” Jade asked. “What does she think of all this?”
Raymond shook his head and gave a heavy sigh. “Tammy is a troubled soul. A very troubled young lady. She has her own problems, but I’d be betraying her trust if I spoke to you about them.”
With that, the hairdresser folded the last piece of tinfoil carefully into Jade’s hair. He placed a selection of magazines in front of her with a flourish before wheeling his trolley over to the sink.
Jade didn’t have time to glance at the magazines, because her phone started ringing. Taking it out of her bag, she saw that it was Moloi.
She lifted the phone to her ear, hearing the tinfoil rustle loudly.
“Moloi,” she said. “What can I do for you?”
A surprised pause.
“Where’s David?” Moloi asked.
“Well, he isn’t here.” Jade glanced around the small salon. She wished he was here, sitting on a chair next to her with his long legs stretched far beyond the footrest, paging through a magazine while he waited for Raymond to finish with her hair.
Reluctantly, she dismissed the unlikely vision of domestic bliss. In an environment like this, David would be pacing the room like a caged tiger. He got his hair cut at a little barber’s shop in town. He’d told her once that it took ten minutes from start to finish, but that he tipped the barber extra when he could finish it in eight.
“Well, how come you have David’s phone?” Moloi snapped.
“I don’t have his phone,” Jade replied, equally snappily.
“But why … ok, I must have made a mistake dialling. Sorry.”
He disconnected abruptly. A minute later, her phone rang again. Again it was Moloi. She let it go through to voicemail.
Almost immediately she had another call. This one was from the United Kingdom. She recognised the +44 dialling code.
The caller was a young-sounding English woman with a pleasant but stressed voice. She asked for Superintendent Patel, and Jade took a message. It was Detective Constable Edmonds, from the human trafficking team at Scotland Yard. She wanted David to call her as soon as possible, please.
“Certainly,” Jade said.
Jade kept her cellphone in her hand, waiting for the call that she was sure would come. In a few minutes, it did.
“Jade. I’ve diverted my calls to your phone.” It was David, and when she heard his voice she felt suddenly sick with nerves.
“Why have you done that?” she retorted. “After what we discussed last night, I would have thought you’d be considerate enough to forward calls somewhere else if you’ve gone and lost your bloody cellphone.”
“Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t have time to argue. I’ll explain when I see you. I’ll be at the cottage in half an hour. Jade, it’s serious.”
Something in David’s voice was dissolving her righteous indignation. And he’d called her Jade, twice in a row, instead of Jadey. She couldn’t remember the last time David had spoken to her without using his pet name for her.
“Half an hour?” Jade glanced into the mirror and saw Raymond frowning and waving his hands in warning. “David, I’m sorry. I can’t get back that soon.”
“Please.”
The desperation she heard in that softly-spoken word was enough to convince her that she should.
“All right. I’ll make a plan.”
She put the phone away and glanced at Raymond in the mirror. “You’re going to have to rinse me now, I’m afraid.”
Raymond paled. “Sweetie, I can’t possibly do that. The colour will be ruined. It won’t have had time to develop properly and the copper lowlights will be bright orange.”
“How much longer does it need?”
“Another thirty minutes, minimum.”
Jade stood up and pulled off the cape. “I’ll rinse it myself at home then. Now I must pay you, because I need to go.”
Raymond rushed to the till, arms a-flutter. “This is not happening,” he cried. “I’ve never, ever had a client walk out of my salon in the middle of a tint. Sweetie, it’s seven hundred rand for the hair, but Lord knows what it’s going to look like. This is my reputation on the line, you know.”
He crammed a couple of bottles into a pink paper bag and handed them to her.
“Here’s a professional shampoo and conditioner as a gift to you. You must use them when you rinse. Shampoo twice, condition once. And please don’t leave through the front entrance, or somebody might see. Go out through the back door over there.”
Jade put the money on the counter, grabbed the bag and ran. Tinfoil flapped deafeningly around her ears as she sprinted out of the back entrance. Above the rustling, she was aware of Raymond calling forlornly after her, “Shampoo twice, condition once. It’s vitally important, sweetie, and for God’s sake, please use the products I gave you!”
David hadn’t slept since he’d left Jade’s house the previous night.
He’d driven back home wrapped in a cloud of sorrowful self-righteousness. He’d made a sad decision, but it was the right one. He and Jade were always going to be an uneasy partnership at best, and an impossible one at worst. Far more sensible to bring this troubled relationship to an end.
In fact, thinking about it with even more brutal honesty—what a roll he’d been on at the time—David acknowledged that Jade was a real catch. Intelligent, fun, beautiful; a woman any man would be proud to call his girlfriend … or even his wife. Thinking about that particular concept made David feel ill, but he’d stubbornly pursued his train of thought.
Yes, you would need to have a certain amount of broadmindedness where guns and shooting were concerned if you dated Jade de Jong, but hell, this was Jo’burg. Every man and his dog carried weapons, and half of them, no doubt, illegally acquired.
The it director—had she mentioned his name? Yes, Steve, a name David now realised he had always hated. At any rate, Steve sounded wealthy. David allowed himself to wonder whether Jade might settle down if she was married to a well-off businessman. She surely wouldn’t need to take on the cases that saw her risking her own life and, occasionally, taking the lives of others?
With an effort, David silenced the small voice in his head that was muttering he was wrong, that if Jade was subsidised by a wealthy partner, then all she would do would be to take on pro bono cases that would only expose her to a darker side of society, and to more danger.
Back at home, he’d listened to the messages on his landline. There was only one, from Naisha. Could David please check his car, because they’d hunted everywhere for Kevin’s maths workbook and it was nowhere to be found. Kevin thought it might have slipped out of his school bag while David was taking him home and, if so, could David take it to Devon Downs before ten tomorrow morning, which was when his boy’s next maths lesson was scheduled.
Suppressing his irritation at the fact that Naisha thought his time was flexible enough to undertake another mammoth voyage to Pretoria and back during morning rush-hour traffic, David deleted the message.
He went back out to the car. Sure enough, under the seat, he discovered a slim, brown-covered notebook with pages of sums painstakingly written in Kevin’s childish hand.
David let out a frustrated sigh. If Kevin hadn’t been a new boy he would have been tempted to phone his wife and ask her if his son could do without his book for a couple of days. But he was, and David couldn’t bear the thought of upsetting his still-fragile world. Nor did he want to upset Naisha, or do anything that might cause her to doubt the decision she’d made to accept the Pretoria job. She’d made a huge sacrifice by turning down the overseas posting, and only because he had begged her to. He’d just have to start work early, then drive to Devon Downs and hand the book in at the admin office.
David got into bed and as his head touched the pillow, the self-righteous cocoon enveloping him dissolved.
He’d been an absolute idiot.
What had he done?
He knew Jade wouldn’t come back to him. Not after what he had said in the car last night. He’d lost her now, and lost her for good. And, furthermore, he had to acknowledge that in the process he’d been a complete arsehole to the two most important women in his life.
He’d enjoyed Jade’s hospitality, her meals—and, talking of meals, why on earth did he end up having the table manners of a pig whenever he’d eaten with her? Was it some kind of rebellion against Naisha’s constant nagging that he conduct himself properly while at the table? He didn’t know.
He’d been eating at Naisha’s place, too. Sleeping there on the odd occasion, and even sleeping with his wife again on one recent, regrettable night when he’d managed to convince himself that getting back together with her was the right thing to do.
What in God’s name was wrong with him? He’d been shirking his responsibilities, refusing to make a commitment, or rather, shying away from making any decision at all, foolish or otherwise.
And he’d lied to Jade about the awards ceremony being cancelled. Why had he done that? He’d invited her along and he’d had every intention of taking her with him. But then they’d had that disturbing argument, where Jade had revealed the side of herself that David had hoped no longer existed.
Her words had filled him with fear.
Lying to a private investigator, David now realised, was an exercise in futility. It had surely been no coincidence that Jade and her consort had ended up going to Emperors Palace that night.
What an idiot he’d been.
David pounded his forehead against the pillow in frustration.
The night seemed endless, and when his alarm clock finally went off at four a.m., David was no closer to reaching a conclusion. All he knew was that he’d never felt so miserable in his life.
He stood under a steaming shower in the hope that the hot water would somehow relieve the leaden exhaustion that had penetrated his bones. When he was a young officer, he’d often spent the entire night dancing and drinking in Durban’s dodgiest clubs and had always managed to get through the next day without a struggle. On really busy weekends, he’d even managed two party nights in a row.
Now, after five sleepless hours, it was all he could do to keep his eyes open, and he had a long day ahead. A meeting with the director of security at OR Tambo airport in the afternoon. A conference after that with the management at South African Airways, in connection with a drug trafficking case that had seen two of their flight attendants arrested at Heathrow Airport. Finally, he would be leading the night-time raid on the notorious brothel in Bez Valley.
He shaved, dressed in a white, collared shirt and beige tie, and checked the fridge to see if any breakfast fare had magically appeared inside.
Fourteen neatly stacked Black Label beers looked out at him.
Sighing in disgust, David slammed the door shut again.
Male pig.
When he got to work, David found that an urgent email from Scotland Yard had been sent late last night.
“A very good morning to you, Superintendent Patel,” the mail from Sergeant Richards began. The British detective’s writing style, like his voice, seemed to be permanently set on “cheery” mode. David glanced out of the window and saw that a faint ribbon of light was starting to show on the horizon.
“I think ‘morning’ might be an exaggeration at this stage,” he muttered.
Scanning the text, David learned that the messages on Salimovic’s home phone had been accessed from a South African mobile number, which Richards had included in the email.
David made a note to get a subpoena issued to the service provider immediately and have the caller identified and the line tapped.
Reading on, he discovered that the team had another urgent question for him. While reviewing evidence from a search carried out on Rodic’s home, one of the detectives had noticed that his passport was missing. They suspected that this passport might have been taken by Salimovic, and perhaps even used to enter South Africa.
David grunted and made another note to check the passport number with Immigration. If Salimovic had used Rodic’s passport to get into South Africa, David would be able to get it flagged as stolen.