Authors: Jassy Mackenzie
The house had a private garden which was fenced off by dark green palisades. Looking through the bars, she saw mowed grass and lush flower-beds blazing with colour.
And a koi pond. Perhaps she was psychic. Jade concentrated hard, but no other revelations were forthcoming. Glimmers of white and gold appeared briefly in the water as the fish lazily circled their little world.
“There you are.” The light voice again, from behind her. Its owner was a young, slender man wearing trendily ripped jeans and a Calvin Klein shirt, with hair gelled into a series of ferocious-looking black spikes.
He glanced at the pond, then back at her.
“Do you like koi?” he asked.
It seemed an odd introduction.
“I’ve never tried them,” Jade said.
“Sorry?” He frowned, looking confused.
Jade held out her hand. “Jade de Jong. I’m working for Pamela.”
He clasped it in a gentle grip. “Raymond Arends. I’m Tamsin’s neighbour, and her hairdresser. I also do Pamela’s hair.”
“Have you seen Tamsin recently? Do you know where she might be?”
The diamanté earring in Raymond’s right ear twinkled as he nodded. “I don’t know exactly where she is, but I’m assuming she’s with her aunt right now.”
“Her aunt?”
“Yes. She was with Tamsin when I popped round to borrow some Candarel earlier this morning. So I’m sure Tammy’s fine.”
“Oh.” Jade said. “Thank you.”
Raymond pulled a tiny silver phone out of his pocket and glanced down at the display. “Look at the time!” he exclaimed. “I don’t want to be rude, but I must fly. I just popped back home to change my shirt because I splashed tint all over the one I was wearing, can you believe it?” He laughed merrily, then rummaged in his pocket again and drew a business card from his wallet. “Take this, sweetie. I’d love to do your hair. Come down to the salon any time. I work in the Thrupps Centre. Oh, and if you drive right up to that gate you’ll activate the sensor and it’ll open to let you out again.”
He turned, trotted back towards the double garage to the right of Tamsin’s house, and pulled out in an electric blue Peugeot. As he passed the yellow cab, he hooted and waved.
Jade hurried back to the cab, which was still too hot, in spite of the fact that it had been parked in the shade with the air conditioning running. The meter was still running, too.
“Does Raymond know where Tamsin is?” Pamela asked anxiously.
“He said she’s with her aunt,” Jade said. “Do you think she’ll be safe there, or should we go and pick her up?”
Pamela stared at her with a blank expression for what seemed like a very long time.
“Tamsin doesn’t have an aunt,” she said slowly. “I’m an only child, and Terence’s sister died way back when he was in the army.”
Then she opened the back door of the cab, leaned out and vomited onto the lush, irrigated grass.
Cash Is King was located on the corner of Church Street and Central Road in Halfway House. Ten years ago, Halfway House had been a quiet village, so named because it was located halfway between Jo’burg and Pretoria. Today, thanks to the rapid development that had taken place in the surrounding area, it had become a mini cbd that, in turn, was becoming part of the megalopolis as Jo’burg spread north and Pretoria south. The two cities were gobbling up the empty veld between them at an ever-increasing rate, spitting out uniform housing estates, cramped office parks and busy road networks.
The traffic lights at the litter-strewn intersection were out of order. This had caused problems all morning and now, in the lunchtime rush-hour, it was creating chaos. Battered-looking taxis pushed their way in and out of the slow-moving queues of traffic, dodging pedestrians, tooting their horns, stopping wherever and whenever to cram yet another passenger into already overloaded vehicles.
Perched on a bar stool that was rapidly approaching the end of its natural lifespan, Garry Meertens glanced out of the dirty window on his left as the intermittent honking changed into one long, angry blare. Some arsehole had managed to piss everyone off at once. He squinted through the brownish glass, his view sectioned off into small squares by the thick metal mesh that covered every inch of his shopfront. He would have put his money on the offender being a taxi driver, but instead he watched the white Merc that had crossed the intersection out of turn swing off the road and park on the pavement behind his battered Ford Bantam.
That hour’s sideshow over, he turned his attention back to the shop’s interior. A couple of raggedly dressed customers were browsing the dusty shelves in the area where the second-hand hi-fis and music systems were displayed. One of them, a stocky coloured man, was a frequent visitor but had yet to buy anything. Garry was starting to suspect he was planning some kind of trouble. Moffat, his assistant, was busy nearby, ostensibly cleaning the display but in fact keeping a close eye on the two browsers.
Then the doorbell buzzed, and Garry’s stool squeaked as he twisted round to check out the new arrival.
In contrast to the rest of the windows, Garry kept the glass around the entrance door sparkling clean so that he could check out every customer before letting them in. He’d looked down the barrel of a gun three times in his career, in spite of having the surrounding area pretty much sewn up in terms of security, and that had been three times too many as far as he was concerned.
A lone black man waited at the door. He held a walking stick in his right hand in a way that made Garry think he’d used the tip of it to ring the buzzer bell. He was slim, very dark-skinned, respectably dressed in a button-down shirt, jacket and dark trousers. His head was completely bald, and it gleamed in the bright afternoon sun. Apart from the cane, the man appeared to be empty-handed. Not a seller, then, unless he’d brought along small goods like jewellery, which they didn’t deal in, because neither Garry nor his business partner was an expert in stone identification, and it was too easy to get ripped off.
A buyer, then. Garry’s finger hovered over the button behind his desk for a fraction before he pressed. With a buzz and a clanging sound, the door sprang open.
The man walked slowly through the aisles. Past the other two customers, who were still staring longingly at the hi-fis that Garry had known from the moment they entered they could not afford. Past the ranks of mountain bikes and racing bikes that Moffat was now dusting. Garry saw the assistant’s gaze follow the older man as he headed towards the furniture section, and then return to the coloured guy.
Garry shifted his weight on the stool and it squeaked again.
“Damn thing,” he muttered.
He stepped off it and fumbled underneath, his fingers exploring the area where the seat was attached to the four steel legs. The problem was here, he was sure. A screw that needed tightening; a nut or a bolt that was misbehaving. He couldn’t feel anything wrong, though. He squatted down, tipped the stool sideways and peered underneath. Couldn’t see anything wrong, either. He’d have to take it home tonight and dismantle it, see if he could put it back together in a way that would make him feel he wasn’t sitting on top of a badly tuned musical instrument every time he moved.
“Baas!” Moffat’s voice was loud and insistent. At the same time, he heard a harsh, barking cough from the other side of the counter.
Garry heaved himself upright, catching the stool with his knee and sending it clattering to the floor. He’d expected to see the big coloured man there, but he was wrong.
The dark-suited gentleman was standing by the counter, leaning over it and examining the contents.
Rattled that the man had got so close without him noticing, Garry drew himself up to his full height of six foot three, and faced the smartly dressed man.
“Help you?” he asked.
Close up, the man was older than he thought. In his fifties or sixties, Garry guessed. His dark skin was dull, with a greyish tinge, and deep lines carved their way from his surprisingly aquiline nose to his full lips. The joints of his fingers, gripping the head of the walking stick, looked swollen and sore.
“Yes, please.” The man spoke softly, dropping his gaze to the display under the glass counter.
That was where the knives were kept. A selection of about twenty, ranging from short to long, from smooth to cruelly serrated, all with their blades uncovered. Unusually for stock in a pawnshop, Garry’s knives were always brand-new. In the entire history of Cash Is King, nobody had brought one in to sell secondhand. He got them straight from the manufacturers—ends-ofranges, old stock, surplus items.
Garry didn’t feel good about the knives, but he didn’t feel bad either. They were just something he sold, like the secret stash of hard-core porn movies that he showed to only a few selected customers.
In the display there were a few fire department rescue knives, with their dark steel fold-away blades flipped outwards, and a couple of ak-47 fixed-bayonet knives. These were displayed out of their leather pouches, with broad, smooth six-inch blades and a button to hook them up to the rifle, should anyone who bought one possess such a weapon and wish to attach a knife to it.
But it wasn’t those that the man was staring at.
He was looking at the four traditional Scottish sgian dubhs that Garry had noticed while shopping in Edinburgh a few years ago after travelling there for a friend’s wedding. He’d bought six, kept two for his own collection, and put the other four in the shop. And at a hefty price, which was why they hadn’t attracted much interest. Up until now, that is.
The short knives had plain black handles—he’d learned that the words “sgian dubh” actually meant “black knife”—and short, wickedly sharp spear-point blades forged from Damascus steel. When he first saw them, they had lain next to their simple sheaths, the same way that they were displayed now.
It had taken Garry a few tries to get the pronunciation right when he asked what the knives were called. The closest he’d been able to get was “ski-and-do”.
“In the old days they were secret weapons,” the buxom Scottish shop assistant had explained to him in her delightful accent, hooking her thick, copper-coloured hair behind her ears. “They’re small, see, so they could be carried hidden. That way, if you had one, you’d have the element of surprise in a fight.”
“The aily-ment of surprise, hey?” Garry had grinned at her, mimicking her accent, and she’d giggled and blushed. He’d bought the knives, asked her out that night, and taken her along to the wedding with him the following day. What had her name been? Morgan? Morag? Something like that. They’d lost touch soon after his return to South Africa, but looking at the knives always reminded him of that Scottish salesgirl.
“May I see one of those, please?” The black man was pointing to the sgian dubhs. Garry noticed that his fingertip did not quite touch the glass. Respect. Older guys had it. It made a welcome change from the youngsters, usually rough types who flattened their entire palms over the counter and peered inside, bending so close that their breath steamed up the glass, leaving greasy smudges and sweaty finger-marks behind them.
“Ja, sure.” He unlocked the display cabinet, reached inside, and placed one of the knives on the counter. He stepped back, just in case the man was going to try anything funny with it, but he wasn’t overly concerned. After all, they weren’t throwing knives, and his gun was within easy reach.
But the man simply took it and, holding it in his palm, ran the back of one of his swollen knuckles gently down the blade. Then, as if reaching a decision, he nodded once and closed his fingers around the handle.
“I’ll take them.”
“Them? You mean …?”
“All four, please.”
“They’re a thousand rand each, my friend,” Garry said, in the particular accent he always used when dealing with black customers. “You sure you got the money for that? Cash only, hey.”
The man reached into his jacket pocket and produced a bulky white envelope. He opened it, and offered it to Garry in the same way that a friend might have offered him a piece of biltong from an open packet. Inside the envelope, Garry could see a thick wad of two-hundred-rand notes.
“Please, take your money.”
Surprised, Garry took the envelope. The man wasn’t a local— he could tell that from his accent—but he sounded well educated. He could surely count twenty notes off a stack without help.
Perhaps those swollen knuckles would make the job too painful; although Garry’s old man had worse arthritis than that, and he could still shuffle and deal a pack of cards like a croupier.
Garry counted out the notes, examining them carefully, holding each one under the uv light on his desk to check its authenticity. They looked genuine enough as far as he could tell. Genuine enough, at any rate, to be spent by him again.
When dealing with customers like these, Garry’s standard policy was to short-change. Hell, why not? Especially seeing there was way more than four grand in the envelope that the man had so unsuspectingly handed over. Garry guesstimated that it contained over six thousand rand. He had nothing to lose and everything to gain. Just let his fingernail hook a bunch of notes all at once, and add a little onto his own personal Christmas bonus. Money that he would not have to declare to the taxman, or to his business partner, who was away today doing a stocktake at their other shop in Jo’burg city.
He glanced up furtively, but his customer wasn’t watching. He had his head turned away, and was looking around the shop.
Garry’s right index fingernail snagged the extra notes easily, but then he hesitated.
He had a pretty strong sense of self-preservation—a must for any guy running a successful pawnshop in this area—and his instincts were starting to scream at him that, perhaps, doing this wasn’t a good idea.
Perhaps, in fact, it was a very bad idea.
It was all too easy. Was this some kind of test?
Garry lifted his finger and the little bunch of notes riffled back into the stack. He carried on counting out the notes, and when he had reached the exact amount, he handed the envelope back to his customer.
Then Garry put the other three knives and their sheaths into a white plastic bag and pushed it across the counter, noticing that the man didn’t add the fourth knife to it. While Garry had been packing the other three up, he must have done something with it. Garry had no idea what. All he knew was that the knife was no longer visible.