Pale Horses (12 page)

Jade opened her notebook and made a show of rummaging in her pockets for a pen. By the time she looked up again, the doctor had gone.

The woman was clearly overworked and if the relevant staff member was away, Jade didn’t hold out very much hope of her getting back with any information; at least, not within a time period that would be useful to Jade.

She wrote out her name, cellphone number and the reason for her visit on the back of one of the sheets of paper on which she’d scribbled her original notes the first day she’d met Victor Theron. Then, after tearing it out and leaving it on the desk, she walked to the door and looked left and right, as if preparing to cross a busy road. In reality she was waiting for a moment when the corridor was empty.

She was wondering whether she could use the hospital’s chaotic and understaffed situation to her advantage. It would be worth a try, she thought. And she knew the general location of the record office, because the doctor’s gaze had moved in that direction when it was mentioned.

Jade tore another sheet from the notebook, this one blank. She folded it in half and left the room. Instead of heading for the exit, she turned right, holding the fake note between her thumb and forefinger as she made her way deeper into the clinic’s warm and stuffy interior.

The clinic had a simple T-shaped layout. When Jade reached the junction, she paused to wait for a staff member approaching from the left. She didn’t have to wait long. Within seconds a nurse appeared, carrying one wailing toddler on her hip and tugging a slightly older but equally noisy one along by the hand.

Jade took a step in her direction. ‘Doctor Harper asked me to leave this in the records office for Sister Baloyi,’ she said, holding the note up with an air of entitlement. ‘Could you tell me where it is?’

‘Down there at the end of the passage,’ the nurse said. She looked as if she wanted to ask why Jade wanted to know, but the toddler she was leading made a bid for freedom, tugging her hand out of the nurse’s grasp, and by the time she’d got hold of the child again, Jade had already walked down the passage and out of the nurse’s sight.

The door that the sister had indicated was at the very end of the long corridor, and to Jade’s surprise it led outside. A path tracked to a steel Zozo hut a few metres away. At some past stage it must have been paved, but it was now a medley of cracked tiles and sprouting grass. The door was open just a crack. And if Jade had had any doubts that she was at the right place, the word ‘RECORDS’ painted on the door in bold white letters would have put them to rest.

Jade gently tapped the door twice. There was no response.

She glanced over her shoulder before she pushed the door open. Behind her, some distance away, she could see the now thankfully smaller group of patients clustered under the trees. Not one them was looking in her direction. She noticed, though, that her unexpected passenger was not among them, and found herself hoping that some form of triage system was in place and that he’d been seen early and not made to wait in line, leaning on his crutch, with his lame leg propped in front of him.

Jade slipped inside and pushed the door closed behind her. She gripped the note tightly as if the piece of blank paper could somehow justify her presence in a room she had no right to be in, should she be discovered.

The hut smelled of musty paper and old cardboard. A large pile of folders – some new, most dog-eared, all with loose pages jutting out from them – sat next to an ancient computer atop an enormous desk. The computer was turned off; its screen blank and grey.

On the far wall was a bank of steel filing cabinets. Several of the drawers were partly open, allowing her to see rows and rows of yet more folders that had been crammed inside.

The records office was not in chaos, but it was in disorder. It spoke of too many patients and too little time, of filing hurriedly done by exhausted interns at the end of an arduous working day. None of the drawers were labelled, although the files did have labels glued to their top right-hand corners. She opened one of the top drawers at random and found surnames starting with B. How much further along would K be? Guessing three cabinets’ worth, she headed for the fourth but stopped in her tracks when she heard a loud banging at the door.

Two thoughts collided in her mind. First, why would any of the doctors knock before entering? Second, the noise she heard was too loud
to have been made by a human hand. But it could well have been made by a long wooden crutch.

The feeling of unease she’d had since turning down the road to the hospital grew suddenly bigger and darker.

‘He’s not who I thought he was …’

At that moment the door was shoved open roughly.

Brandishing the crutch like a weapon, the lame man blocked the doorway. For a moment there was silence filled only by the drumming of Jade’s heart. To her immense relief, he lowered the crutch and nodded at her.

‘You come,’ he said. ‘Come this way and see.’

‘See what?’ Her voice sounded shaky. This could so easily have been a setup. Perhaps it still was.

‘Outside,’ he insisted. ‘You come now.’

‘Where?’

The crippled man turned away without responding. He didn’t head back into the hospital as she had expected. Instead, leaning heavily on his crutch, he made his slow way back across the uneven ground towards the group of patients that was now reduced to a small knot of people.

She noticed he had a small brown paper bag in his other hand. He’d obviously been to the dispensary.

Jade left the Zozo hut and closed the door behind her. Stuffing the blank note into her jeans pocket, she took a couple of brisk steps to catch up with the stranger.

‘I look everywhere,’ he said. ‘Try to see you in there.’ Clamping his crutch impatiently under his shoulder, he jerked his thumb towards the hospital.

‘Why did you want to find me?’

‘I must show you this.’

As they passed the group of waiting patients, Jade saw the woman with four children walking into the hospital, her noisy toddlers tagging
behind her and the expression on her face one of unutterable relief that her turn had come.

To Jade’s surprise, the man made his way over to her car. The shade had moved since she’d gone inside the hospital and her car was now bathed in the glow of the setting sun.

Beyond it she saw an ancient-looking bakkie waiting to leave. The back was jam-packed with passengers, their combined weight so heavy that the exhaust pipe was almost trailing on the ground. When the driver saw the lame man, he hooted; the noise a tiny ‘parp’, as small as the car itself.

Leaning on the bonnet of Jade’s car he held up his crutch, telling the driver to wait. He shuffled around the passenger side and for one perplexed moment she thought he expected her to drive him somewhere; that whatever he wanted to show her was not on the hospital’s premises.

Instead, he banged his crutch on the ground and aimed the end at something she couldn’t see.

Her confusion deepening, Jade walked reluctantly round the car.

‘Down there.’

She followed his gaze; temporarily transfixed by the worn rubber tip of the crutch half buried in the sandy soil. Refocusing, when she saw where he was pointing, she stared at the wheel of the car in consternation.

There was a two-inch gash in the tyre wall, a darkly gaping slit, just above ground level.

The rubber hadn’t split all the way through. The canvas innards still held … for now. But without a doubt, the tyre would have burst once she was heading back along the narrow, potholed road that had brought her here.

She thought of the buckled crash barriers that were all that separated the worn strip of tarmac from the rocky gorges below and shuddered.

Her unexpected protector moved his crutch aside as she knelt down to examine the gash more closely.

It was definitely a cut, not a split. The edges were too exact, she could see the ridge marks where a serrated knife had sawed its way through.

With the sun nearly gone, the wind was stronger now, and colder. It scudded over the bare ground, lifting swirls of dust.

The driver of the tiny bakkie hooted again. The noise wasn’t any louder but it was definitely more prolonged. The old man turned away from Jade’s car, his crutch scraping over the sandy soil.

‘Wait!’ Jade scrambled to her feet. Questions raced through her mind. Which one to ask first?

But he could not wait. As yet another hoot sounded, he shuffled over to the back of the bakkie where the hands of the other passengers reached out to help him on board. The truck sagged even lower once he was in. Then, with a belch of grey exhaust smoke, it pulled away, juddering over the hard ground.

‘Thank you!’ Jade called after him, hoping he could hear her. ‘Thank you for showing me!’

With the bakkie gone, she let out a deep breath.

And at some stage during this cloudless, chilly afternoon, somebody had cut into her tyre and somebody else – a child at play, perhaps – had seen them do it.

Jade looked down again at the ground. She hadn’t expected to see any clues, but then noticed the distinctive, heavy tracked marks of solid work boots in the dust near her vehicle.

She remembered the Isuzu that had tailgated her down the narrow road.

A white man driving; a black man in the passenger seat. She’d thought at the time it was simply a farmer bringing an employee to the clinic. But why had she thought that? Because the truck had been driving behind her. It had come from the direction of the farmlands, not from the highway.

She hadn’t given it a moment’s consideration. Hadn’t thought to note the number plate. In the parking space, the passenger had been looking away from her, and, since the driver’s face had been largely obscured by a deep-peaked cap and dark glasses, she doubted whether she would recognise him if she saw him again.

Certainly, neither of them were anywhere to be seen now.

Had they already decided to sabotage her vehicle and known this would be a convenient spot to do so? Or was it the fact she’d taken the detour to the hospital that had prompted them to act?

Perhaps the men had guessed that there was only one reason for her to make the journey to this remote rural clinic – and that was to ask questions about the man from the Siyabonga community who had died there.

Something for her to keep in mind. A sign that perhaps she was on the right track.

After checking the other wheels for any similar damage but finding none, Jade opened the boot and took out the jack, wheel spanner and spare tyre. In the last of the fading light, she managed to quickly change the tyre.

She would have liked to have gone back into the clinic. To have sat down in the waiting room and waited for the stressed Dr Harper to materialise again, and to refuse to leave until she knew what had happened to Khumalo. But she was worried about leaving her car, and this time it would be without any kind eyes watching what was going on. Instead, watching her surroundings carefully, she did a three-point turn and headed for the highway and the relative safety of home.

Zelda Meintjies was listed in the phone book under an address in Randburg. She wasn’t answering her landline, but Jade decided to drive there anyway. Climbing back into her car yet again, she arrived outside Zelda’s wrought-iron gate at nine-thirty p.m. It was late for unexpected social calls, but she didn’t want to wait until the following morning. Apart from the logistical problem the traffic-clogged roads would present, there was also the issue of her damaged tyre. The men who had done this must have been confident that Jade would not have survived the trip back home. But she had survived, and that meant that their job was not yet done.

The area she was driving through seemed to be in transition. A couple of blocks away from the main thoroughfare, Republic Road, the houses were an uneasy mix of old, established properties and recently developed office blocks and cluster homes. Older fence lines bristling with well-established trees and hedges alternated with brand-new, face-brick walls topped with electrified wire. By the side of the road were piles of rubble, bricks and decimated shrubbery awaiting removal.

Zelda’s house was one of the older properties and looked as if its time was nearly up. It must have been a few years since any work had been done on its exterior and the rusty palisade was almost obscured by a riot of leafy growth from the untrimmed hedge beyond.

She’d anticipated that she’d find the house in darkness, the owner asleep or simply out. But the wad of leaflets and envelopes jutting from the mailbox next to the gate suggested something very different.

The verge in front of the house was too steep to allow Jade to park so she drove round the corner until she found a place where her car was safe from the sparse but fast-moving traffic on the side street. She thought it should be secure enough there, as there were a few other cars parked nearby. Then she got out and jogged back, not wanting to linger.

Tugging the mail out of the box, she discovered it held a few day’s worth of correspondence. None of it looked personal and the envelopes were all addressed to Zelda. There were flyers for plumbers, electricians, a pizza delivery service. Bills from Johannesburg Water, Eskom and Truworths, and a letter marked confidential from Nedbank Credit Services.

It looked like the box hadn’t been cleared since the previous week – the same week her sister, Sonet, had fallen to her death from the roof of Sandton Views.

A coincidence?

Jade doubted it. Looking up the driveway at the blank, dark windows of the house beyond, she shivered in a way that had nothing to do with the evening temperature.

Logic told her that the gate should be locked, but when she put her shoulder against it and pushed she was not altogether surprised when it slowly slid open, its runners protesting with a harsh metallic wail.

She walked up the driveway, her shoes crushing the dead leaves that were scattered over the uneven brickwork. Her heart was thudding hard, even though she was certain that nobody would be home in the house she was approaching.