Pale Horses (2 page)

Jade couldn’t help wondering what the effect of the caffeine would be on a man who already looked wired to the hilt.

‘Look, I – I don’t think you understand my situation. How incredibly important this is, just how much trouble I’m in. Please, at least let me tell you.’ He was stammering now; in his haste to get the words out they tumbled over each other, spilling into the muted background buzz of the coffee shop.

‘You did give me a brief rundown over the phone.’

‘I did. But you need to hear the whole thing to understand. There was … I don’t know how to put this, even. For the last week I’ve been in a nightmare situation. What we did was a game. We took a calculated risk. I don’t know what went wrong or why. Statistically it shouldn’t have – that’s the truth of it – but it did.’

He pressed bony fingers against office-pale cheeks. Jade saw his hands were shaking.

She knew she shouldn’t ask him but she did.

‘Tell me, then. What happened?’ she said.

‘Sonet and I went jumping last week. At night. From Sandton Views. You might know it – it’s close to here. Sixty-seven storeys. It’s the newest and the tallest skyscraper in Sandton. The upper levels aren’t finished yet.’

‘When you say jumping, what exactly do you mean?’

‘Base jumping.’ He looked straight at her, blinking fast, and she noticed his eyes were an unusual light hazel flecked with green and gold. ‘It’s not legal. Not a legitimate activity at all. But for thrill-seekers it’s addictive. The adrenaline rush, you know?’

Jade nodded. She knew. Although parachuting from tall buildings was not her chosen hobby, she was all too familiar with the thrill of doing the forbidden, the dangerous.

Theron took a mouthful of his Coke and then told her more of his story, speaking in rapid bursts.

‘I jumped first,’ he said. ‘I always do, when we go together.’ He blinked again and corrected himself. ‘I always did,’ he said.

‘What happened then?’

‘I don’t know, Ms De Jong. I just don’t know.’

‘Please call me Jade.’

He gulped down some more Coke and, as if being on first-name terms had given him encouragement, let loose a veritable flood of words. ‘Thinking it over now, I’m confused. If I hadn’t been on such a damn adrenaline high, I might have been able to remember more clearly. I don’t know what happened. Maybe Sonet took a phone call, or her phone beeped, or something. Or maybe not. It was dark up there and I was focused on other things. At any rate, she turned away from the edge. Then she told me to go ahead and jump, and that she would follow me down.’

‘You jumped, then.’

‘I jumped.’

‘You didn’t wait?’

He met her eyes again.

‘It’s a difficult thing to do, jumping. For me, anyway. Takes a lot of guts. Turning away … I don’t know that I’d have been able to come back to the edge again. And I didn’t know how she felt, or whether she was up to jumping that day. I remember thinking at the time that she probably wasn’t going to do it. Besides, I wanted to go first, so that if
there were any problems with the landing, I could get them out of the way. Make it safer for her.’

‘Had she ever backed out before?’

‘No.’

Jade took a long breath. ‘I guess there’s always a first time.’

‘I suppose so. Whenever I’m up there, standing on the edge, I wonder if I’ll be able to go through with it.’

‘So what happened to her, then?’

‘She fell.’

Jade frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean just that. I don’t know what happened. One minute I was standing on the lawn down below, packing up my chute, and the next minute …’ He closed his eyes and grimaced before continuing at a slower pace and in a quieter tone. ‘She was falling. I heard her before I saw her. Heard the chute flapping – a partly opened parachute makes a horrible sound.

‘I ran, Jade. I sprinted over to where she was going to hit the ground, to try to break her fall, but I was too late. I didn’t know what on earth had happened, but I knew from the moment I heard her hit the ground that there was no way she could have survived.’

Jade studied his eyes. Watched him blink rapidly. He wasn’t quite blinking back tears, but emotion was there – so strong she could sense it, and she wondered what the nature of his relationship with Sonet had been.

A tragic accident. A partly opened parachute and a dead woman who had either lost her nerve and flubbed the jump or else simply been unlucky.

‘I need to know what really happened up there.’ Theron insisted.

Jade frowned. What had really happened up there after he had jumped was more than likely a secret that Sonet had taken to her grave.

‘Please,’ he repeated. ‘Trust me, money is not an issue. I’ve got a chequebook with me. You name the amount, I’ll pay.’

‘I don’t need the money right now.’

Theron gave an attempt at a laugh, strangled as it emerged. ‘We all need money. We live in Johannesburg, the city built on gold. We’re sitting in Sandton, within the richest square mile in Africa. Cash oils the wheels, you know. My view is you can never have too much of it.’

Jade did not argue the point. She knew Theron would not understand, could not understand, that there were instances where the money was not worth it. Not when earning it forced you to sell your soul, as her most recent assignment had done.

She could have said no to Robbie, the gangster who’d asked her to help him out with the killing. But if she had, she would have made a dangerous enemy out of a man who had recently helped her to escape from jail, and save a friend’s life in the process.

Choices like that were never simple. But this one was. She
could
choose to walk away from Theron and his problems.

‘There are plenty of other investigators who can help you. I’ll give you a couple of names of people I trust,’ she told him.

‘I was referred to you by Wouter Wessels from Software Technologies. He’s a client of mine. He said you’d done work for him a while back and you were great. He said I must insist on using you. Anybody else would be a compromise.’

Jade sipped her water and thought back to that case. She liked Wouter Wessels, and she would be sorry to disappoint him.

‘What I don’t understand is why you need a P.I. The police will have to investigate. Death by misadventure – there will be an enquiry.’

‘That parachute should never have malfunctioned.’ Now Theron looked her straight in the eye. ‘Jade, I packed the chute for her before she jumped. I packed it, and it malfunctioned, and she fell to her death. I’m more than just a witness in this case. I’m going to be a suspect at best, and at worst I’m going to be charged with culpable homicide.’

‘But when the investigation …’

‘No, wait. Please listen. I work in a business where my reputation is extremely important. My clients trust me. Being accused of this could ruin me. That’s why I’m asking you, as a favour, to just take a look at where it happened. It’s a five-minute walk from here. We can go there right now.’

Victor Theron was a fast walker. His long legs ate up the ground in gargantuan strides, and Jade might have found it difficult to keep up with him had it not been for the crowds of shoppers that thronged the Sandton City mall, their presence curbing his impatient pace and continually forcing him to sidestep.

Hurrying along beside him, Jade was regretting having agreed to look at the site where the accident occurred. Already, she was starting to feel as if she was involved.

Now that he was on the move and able to expend his seemingly boundless energy, Theron seemed more relaxed.

‘You mentioned you were nearby when I called. Are you a Sandton local?’

‘No,’ she replied. Crossing the polished floor of the atrium and moving past the succession of sumptuously decorated shop fronts featuring gold and bling and brand names all screaming for attention, Jade had to admit there wasn’t much here for her. ‘I was visiting a friend in Sandton Clinic this afternoon, though, so I was in the area.’

‘Oh.’ Seeing a small gap ahead, Theron thrust his shoulders forward and made up some distance. ‘Your friend OK?’ he asked, glancing back in her direction.

‘He was a victim of a stabbing a couple of months ago. He almost died and there have been complications since then. But he’s turned the corner now. Doctors are confident he’s going to make a good recovery.’

‘That’s Jo’burg for you,’ Theron muttered. ‘Does he work in the same industry as you?’

‘No. He’s an environmentalist.’

‘Did they manage to arrest the attacker?’

‘Not as far as I know,’ Jade said carefully. After all, it wouldn’t do to confess to Theron that she and Robbie had been responsible for the perpetrator’s disappearance into a shallow, unmarked grave.’

‘Too bad when that happens, isn’t it?’

‘It is indeed,’ Jade said, uncomfortably conscious of the irony of Theron’s remarks.

‘That’s why I like this place.’ Theron made a sweeping gesture with his arm that seemed to take in the entirety of the mall. ‘Security’s topnotch here.’

‘You live here?’

‘Not quite. I have an apartment in the Da Vinci Towers. I can shop, gym, eat, socialise, in fact, do everything I need to do under one roof without having to go outside.’ Theron sounded as if he thought this was a good thing. If nothing else, it explained his pallid colour.

‘I enjoy Sandton City,’ he continued. ‘Do you know, the original development was a massive gamble? This area was way beyond the city limits of the day. This mall and the office tower were built out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by rural properties and veld and trees.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ Jade said.

‘The founders had foresight. Vision. Although it wasn’t an easy road. I read in a history of Sandton that the father-and-son team who started it came from humble beginnings. The father was originally a baker until he started developing property in Yeoville. He was more of a gentleman developer. His son, Michael Rapp, was the real entrepreneur. When Michael wanted to finance the hundreds of millions it would take to build Sandton City mall and tower, his father went apeshit. Said he’d destroy the company with borrowings on that scale. But Michael got his way and their concept took off, and today Sandton City is the new CBD of Johannesburg. Of Africa, even. I admire that tenacity. Rapp’s gamble. Or should I say, the calculated risk. I do it every day in my job.’

‘Which is?’ Jade was curious now.

The corridor they were on, lined by smaller but even more exclusive boutiques, led to the main entrance of the Sandton Sun hotel. They stepped from tiles onto plush carpeting and Theron led her confidently towards the bank of lifts on the far side of the imposing lobby.

‘Taking a short cut through the hotel is the quickest way to get there,’ he assured her, pressing the button to summon the lift. ‘We’re going down to the street-level exit. Sandton Views is literally a block away.’

In the lift, Jade was interested to see that his nervous habits returned. He twisted his fingers together, tapping a foot on the floor, glancing frequently up at the display as the lift descended.

‘I’m a trader,’ he told her, moving forward to stand in front of the doors as the lift reached its destination. ‘I trade in derivatives. Futures
and options. I used to work for one of the bigger banks but I left about fifteen years ago. Since then, I’ve been operating on my own. I trade for myself and I handle investments for a few selected clients.’

‘I don’t know much about futures,’ Jade admitted.

‘Most people don’t. They’re very complex financial structures, based on the forward trading of commodities, and their origins are just about as old as civilisation itself.’

‘Is that so?’

‘Going back in time there’s evidence of futures being traded in olives in Greece, tulips in Holland, rice in Japan. All sorts of things. Futures as we know them today began about a hundred and fifty years ago with grain trading in Chicago. To avoid being caught out by a lack of demand for their produce when it was harvested, farmers started to sell their crops for forward delivery. This concept led to the development of futures.’

‘Sounds complicated,’ Jade said, just as the lift came to a halt.

The uniformed doorman stood aside and they stepped out of the comfortably air-conditioned hotel and into the blustery winter afternoon. They hurried down the uneven pavement, and Theron raised his voice so that Jade could hear him above the constant roar of passing traffic.

‘High risks, high rewards. There’s way more opportunity to make big money than via conventional trading, but because futures are so highly leveraged, if the market moves against you, you have to pay in a fortune to maintain your positions. One bad trade can bankrupt an individual and take a company under. It can basically destroy you.’

He fell silent, as if his own words had reminded him of the situation in which he found himself.

They turned the corner and there, straight ahead of them, was Sandton Views.

The building was a monster.

Set on a paved plinth, wide marble stairs leading up to an imposing lobby, the skyscraper itself was smooth-sided and brilliant and endlessly tall. Behind the plinth, Jade could see the large square of mown lawn where Theron must have landed safely and Sonet plummeted to her death. Shading her eyes as she stared up, Jade had the impression its design narrowed towards its apex, further exaggerating the impression of height. Its glass-clad sides telescoped away from her, the exterior reflecting the deep blue of the clear winter sky.

It was dizzyingly high. Jade’s stomach flipped as she imagined standing on the very edge of that concrete rim with no railing or banister to hold onto. Just the idea of leaning out and looking directly down into the empty space yawning below made her palms sweat.

Jade wondered how well sound would carry downwards.

Had Sonet screamed or cried out during her fatal descent? Perhaps there had been no time; perhaps the speed of the descent had hammered the air from her lungs and rendered her voiceless. Or perhaps her cries had been snatched away by the speed of her fall. While Theron had clearly stated that he’d heard the noise of the parachute, he hadn’t mentioned hearing Sonet’s voice before she hit the ground.