The Fallen (36 page)

She waited a couple of seconds, then spoke again.

‘Ian, it’s Jade de Jong here. I need your help.’

Silence from the other end of the line.

‘Yes, it is urgent. I’ve been arrested on suspicion of murder. I’m at Hillbrow police station.’

‘You want out, babe?’

Jade swallowed.

She did want out. She needed to get out urgently. But even assuming that Robbie managed to accomplish the impossible and get her out of the holding cells, she was only too aware that there would be a heavy price to pay later down the line.

Asking Robbie for help felt like selling her soul to the Devil.
But if she didn’t, she might not get out of jail in time to do what she needed to.

‘You there?’

Decision made, then.

‘Yes, that would be great,’ she said, trying to maintain the fiction of talking to her lawyer.

‘I’ll try for you. I’ve got connections there. It may take a while, though. Maybe even a day.’

‘As soon as possible, please.’

‘I’ll be waiting for you.’

‘
OK
, then. Thank you, Ian. I know I can rely on you.’

Jade hung up and turned off her cellphone. When it was turned back on, it would require a
PIN
number to be keyed in before it could be used again. She really didn’t want the police checking up on the last number she had dialled.

‘Thank you so much,’ she said to the lady constable. ‘He’s got meetings after lunch, but he’ll come through later.’

The lady constable picked up the phone and called another cop. He stood by the exit door while she unlocked the handcuffs from the steel handle and cuffed Jade’s wrists together behind her back. Then, holding the cuffs in the same way that the detective had done, she hustled her out of the door at the far side of the room and along a short passage.

Around the corner at the end was a row of sturdy-looking doors with small, barred windows set into each one at eye-level. The constable opened the door to the second one on the left, unfastened her cuffs and pushed her inside, none too gently. Jade stumbled forward and heard the door slam shut behind her, followed by the sound of a key turning in the lock.

The small cell had three other occupants, all black women. Two were huddled together on the hard-looking wooden bench. They glanced up at her, but didn’t speak. The third was sprawled out on a filthy mattress on the floor, sound asleep.

Jade sat down on the small space that remained at the end of the bench and stared at the peeling paint on the opposite wall.

Her mind was still racing after what Robbie had told her.

The number 813 was a flight number that had been withdrawn from service last August after a fatal crash-landing in Freedom, Montapana.

And, just a few days ago, Craig had told her that he and Elsabe had met in August in a northern African city called Freedom, after his father and Elsabe’s son had been killed in a horrific crash.

This was no coincidence. Somehow, one or both of them knew more about these killings than they were telling. Worse still, perhaps they were even directly involved.

Craig had told her he was leaving the country tomorrow morning with Elsabe. Flying to Namibia. Once they were out of the country, they could easily disappear into thin air.

Locked in a holding cell with no means of communication with the outside world, Jade could do nothing about it.

The holding cells remained quiet, the silence interrupted only by sporadic and muted conversation. Jade had no real idea of the time, but she thought it must have been about five
P.M
. when a police constable unlocked the hatch in the wall and pushed a tray through.

On it were four large plastic mugs half filled with strong black tea and eight thick slices of roughly cut brown bread smeared with margarine.

The bread was stale and the margarine smelled rancid. Jade knew she should eat; that any food would provide energy, but she couldn’t bring herself to force down even one bite of these doorstop-sized hunks. The unappetising food was only part of the reason. Her stomach was in knots. Had she done the right thing by asking Robbie to help her escape? Or would his attempt fail, landing her in even deeper trouble?

She took a mug of tea, but no bread.

‘You have it,’ she told the other women. ‘Whoever wants it, go ahead.’

Jade’s offer was gratefully received. She watched one of the women carefully divide Jade’s slices into three even portions using her fingers. After a brief conversation in what Jade guessed was Xhosa, one of the other women took a small bag of white sugar and a plastic teaspoon from a hiding place under the bench, and offered it to Jade.

‘Thank you,’ Jade said. It was a good exchange. She stirred two spoons of sugar into the lukewarm tea and drank it quickly.

A while later, when she heard voices coming from the entrance to the cells, she stiffened. Was something about to happen now?

No. It was only the change of shift. Another cop, an older grey-haired man she hadn’t seen before, walked along the passage holding a clipboard and peered briefly into their cell through the large barred window. Once his inspection was over, the lights in their cell were abruptly dimmed.

Night had officially begun.

Her three cellmates took turns sleeping on the mattress, which Jade now realised was actually two thin mattresses, one on top of the other.

She stayed where she was, on the bench, and leaned over her knees and rested her forehead on her folded arms. It was an uncomfortable position, but she thought she must have dozed off eventually, because the next thing she knew, she was jerked wide awake by a commotion outside.

The grey-haired cop was escorting another prisoner to the holding cells. A wild-eyed, dreadlocked woman who was screaming and swearing non-stop. Her bare legs kicked out at the officer behind her and Jade heard him swear as one of the woman’s high heels connected with his shin.

Jade glanced around at the other women. They stared at the new arrival with sleep-blurred eyes, but their frightened faces made it clear that this was not somebody with whom they wanted to share a cell. Jade’s first thought was that the woman was on a monster drug high.

She actually had foam at the corners of her mouth.

The cell door clanged open.

The others shrank away as the dreadlocked woman lunged through, ripping herself away from the grasp of the cop who held her before he even had a chance to get her cuffs off.

And then she slipped on the concrete floor and fell forward onto the mattress, narrowly missing the woman who had been lying there moments before. To their horror, she let out a horrible, yammering scream. Her eyes rolled back in her head, her
back began to arch and her legs kicked out wildly as she went into what was undoubtedly a major convulsion.

Foam drooled from her lips as her head snapped back.

‘Call an ambulance!’ the grey-haired cop cried, and his partner went sprinting back along the corridor.

Jade was about to grab her by her shoulders and turn her head sideways before she choked on her own frothing saliva, when the grey-haired cop wrenched open the cell door, grabbed the stricken woman’s ankles and started trying to pull her out.

But then she realised that this was it. It was surely no coincidence that the woman had suffered a severe fit just as she entered the cell. This had to be the diversion that Robbie had set up for her. She certainly hoped it was.

She knew it was now or never. She had to make a run for it.

Leaping to her feet, Jade jumped over the fallen woman and shoved the crouching officer to the side as she grabbed the doorframe and pulled herself through.

He overbalanced, shouting in protest, but his voice was drowned out by the gleeful cries of her fellow inmates. ‘Run fast, sister!’ she heard one of them yell. ‘Run!’

She was out of the holding cell.

She raced back down the passage that led to the front office. God, who was in on this and who was not, she asked herself. She knew an escaping prisoner could be shot on sight. Where was the cop who’d gone to make the ambulance call? If he was in the front office as she expected him to be, she’d have him to reckon with as well.

To Jade’s relief, the front office was empty.

She burst out through the door and into the badly lit and almost empty car park. Just a few paces away, facing the exit gates, was a shiny black
BMW
, its engine revving.

Jade wrenched open the passenger door and flung herself into the seat.

Robbie was in the driver’s seat. He didn’t look at her. Before she’d even got the door closed, the big car was on the move. With a screech of rubber, he accelerated out of the car park, turned hard left and began a zigzag route through Hillbrow’s
back streets. When Robbie had put some distance between them and the police station, he slowed the car, allowing Jade to fasten her seatbelt.

He turned to her and grinned. His eyes gleamed and his lips drew back from his teeth, which looked sharp and predatory in the gloom.

‘Welcome back, babe,’ he said.

‘Who was the woman that had the fit?’ Jade asked, struggling with her seatbelt as the
BMW
accelerated round a bend.

Robbie shrugged, turning his attention to the road again.

‘Friend of a friend. She’s done this before for cash. Knows what to do. What to take to make it look real. She’ll escape later, in hospital, when there’s less security around. It was the way we had to do it. Otherwise the officers on duty get disciplinaries, you see. They want to help, want to earn a bonsella—a bonus, you know how it is—but they don’t want to lose their jobs. This way nobody’s to blame. Even so, it took time, because the old guy refused.’

‘How did you convince him?’ Jade asked.

Robbie’s grin widened. ‘Upped the payment,’ he said.

Was there anybody in the South African police service who didn’t have a price, Jade wondered. Her father had been incorruptible. At any rate, his reputation for integrity had been so fearsome that when criminals had needed to get him off a case, they had opted for the riskier, but more certain, route of murder.

There was David, too, she supposed. A man who chose to go back to an unhappy marriage for the sake of an unborn child showed great integrity.

A pity for her.

‘So what’s on the agenda?’ Robbie asked.

He was heading down Louis Botha Avenue, approaching the sharp twist in the double-lane road that was known as Death Bend due to the number of accidents that occurred there. At this hour of the morning—four thirty-five according to the digital
clock on the dashboard—there were no other cars on the road and they negotiated it safely, if too fast.

‘I need to know about flight 813,’ Jade said.

Robbie nodded. ‘I found some more info for you. Interesting stuff. I’ve got it stored here on my BlackBerry.’

Turning left without indicating, he drove through a badly lit entrance into the otherwise-deserted car park of what Jade saw was the Doll’s House, a twenty-four hour roadhouse. A sign on the wall read ‘No Hooting, Flash Lights for Service.’

‘I’ll tell you what I know over breakfast,’ he said.

The emptiness of the car park made Jade nervous. Parked at an angle in the middle of the worn tarmac, the black
BMW
was as obvious as a boil on the forehead of a beauty queen.

‘Shouldn’t we get out of the area altogether? The police are going to be hunting for your car.’

‘The Hillbrow cops are on the lookout for a navy-blue Audi,’ Robbie said. ‘Cape Town registration plates. When I do something, babe, I do it properly. Your file’s gone missing, too.’

A sleepy-looking waiter shuffled over and, without consulting Jade, Robbie buzzed the window down and ordered two large coffees and toasted egg and bacon sandwiches.

‘Extra chilli sauce with the one,’ he said.

When the waiter had shuffled away again, he turned back to her.

‘So. Flight 813.’

‘Tell me,’ Jade said.

Robbie leaned back in his leather driver’s seat and laced his fingers behind his head. Jade noticed a new scar on his left wrist. Ridged and inflamed-looking, it writhed its way up his arm like a snake.

A knife wound, she guessed.

‘Flight 813 belonged to Royal Africa Airlines. Seems a couple of years back, some tin-pot dictator on the northwest coast of Africa decided to start up a service offering cheap flights to and from Europe.’

Reflected in the
BMW
’s wing mirror, a pair of slow-moving headlights appeared on the road behind them. Jade twisted round to see better, but the car didn’t stop.

‘So business is good until, six months ago, Flight 813 takes off from Jo’burg with ninety-eight passengers on board. Comes in to refuel at the airport in Freedom, misses the runway, crashes, flips and breaks apart. Everyone was killed instantly. Most of the bodies were ripped to pieces. They had to fly the passengers’ relatives in to
ID
the victims through
DNA
comparison.’

Jade felt suddenly cold. Her skin started to prickle and she wrapped her arms around herself.

Craig’s words ran through her mind. ‘My father was killed in a horrific crash, in a town called Freedom in the north of Africa. That’s where Elsabe and I met.’

For some reason, Jade had assumed he’d meant a car accident, but he hadn’t. It had been an airline disaster.

‘Do they know what caused it?’ she asked Robbie.

He lowered his hands, glanced down at the scar Jade had noticed earlier, and scratched it with the nails of his right hand.

‘The jury’s still out on that,’ he said. ‘They got the black box, but there’s no official verdict yet. Seems there were no problems with the plane itself. It was an Airbus, and a fairly new one. Witnesses say it made a normal approach. No engine trouble or other problems. So they’re down to two possibilities. Pilot error or an air-traffic control stuff-up. Possibly a combo of both.’

Air-traffic control. The words stabbed into Jade’s gut.

‘Air-traffic control how? There was no other aircraft involved.’

‘Look, this wouldn’t happen at Heathrow or JFK or OR Tambo International. It would be an impossibility. But according to a report I read from another pilot who did commercial flights via that airport, things were different up there in Freedom. Seems a culture of laziness had settled in.’