The Fallen (8 page)

Ahead, Jade could see the wooden gateposts that marked the boundary of Scuba Sands. They’d walked the length of the driveway. No sign of the person she’d seen earlier. Perhaps he’d simply been using the resort as a shortcut and had gone on to take shelter from the rain somewhere else.

Then Jade recalled how she’d noticed the change in the man’s demeanour; from his aimless wandering along the beach to the focused purposefulness with which he’d then headed up towards the chalets.

And then she caught her breath. She’d seen movement, illuminated for just a moment in one of the passes that the torch had made.

‘Over there,’ she said. ‘Something’s there.’

‘You’ve seen something? Where?’ Craig swung the torch back in the opposite direction.

‘Over that way.’ Jade pointed to a clump of trees. ‘More to the right. Yes, there. Look.’

The beam picked up the gleam of two eyes amid a brown-grey wall of skin. Its shape and size were unmistakable. Out of the water, it looked almost comically porcine—very different in real life from the smiling, cartoon-like animal on the doormat outside the Huberta room.

Jade’s legs felt suddenly unsteady. She knew only too well that these mammals were responsible for more human deaths than any other.

‘It’s a hippo,’ she whispered. ‘And it’s moving.’

Craig slowly arced the torch back across the trees. ‘It’s
OK—
it’s heading away from us, I think, into that thick bank of bushes.’

They strained to hear it making its way through the undergrowth, but above the clamour of the wind and rain Jade wasn’t sure if the tearing sounds she thought she could hear were real or her imagination playing tricks on her.

‘Still, we’d better get out of here,’ Craig said softly. ‘We certainly don’t want to get between it and its intended destination.

‘The brochure in the chalet did say to be careful about going out at night. Now I can see why,’ she whispered.

They turned and headed swiftly back down the road, Jade still feeling lightheaded from adrenaline and wondering if it would be possible to outrun three tons of angry hippo moving at more than forty kilometres an hour, should the beast decide to charge
them. Thinking about it more logically, though, surely all she would have to do would be to outrun Craig?

One thing was for sure—with hippos on the loose, she didn’t think that many vagrants would be choosing to bed down for the night anywhere near their chalets.

They walked along for a while in companionable silence and, as she saw the lights of their resort ahead, she felt herself start to relax.

‘You’ve got good eyesight, Jade,’ Craig said. ‘At that distance, in that light, I’d never have spotted it on my own.’

Jade nodded. ‘I’m lucky that way. Twenty-twenty vision. And I can see well at night.’

‘Just like my father. I didn’t inherit his eyesight, unfortunately. I wear contact lenses.’

‘What does your dad do?’

There was an awkward silence and then an abrupt response from Craig. ‘Not much. He’s dead.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It still … it’s still shocking when I think about it. It’s barely been six months.’

‘What happened?’ Jade felt a coldness inside her. She didn’t want to ask the question, but she knew that now it would be expected of her. That Craig was already preparing himself for the pain of answering it.

‘A crash up in northern Africa, in a town called Freedom. The stuff nightmares are made of. I went to go and identify his body, but it was so badly damaged that I couldn’t.… They had to do a DNA comparison. That was how I met Elsabe—at the crash site. She also lost family there, including a child. Half a year on and I’m still trying to deal with it. It’s even worse for her.’

Jade didn’t reply immediately. She had also lost her father in a horrific crash. Emotion overwhelmed her as she remembered seeing the smashed and buckled car in which he had been a passenger. He’d been trapped inside the stalled vehicle, unable to undo his jammed seatbelt, as a huge truck had come hurtling down a side road and smashed into it.

Only later did Jade realise that his death was no accident, that it was murder, an organised hit hastily arranged to protect the criminal whose identity her father had uncovered as he investigated a sensitive case.

The driver of that car had been the first man she had ever killed.

Had her father suffered? Had he died in terror, watching the truck’s large, angry grille thundering towards him?

Jade had prayed that his death had been quick, that he had been distracted by the deliberately jammed belt, unaware of the approaching vehicle. That it had happened in an instant. One moment alive, dead the next.

She wondered if Craig had prayed for the same.

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Her voice was shaky. ‘I’m so sorry, Craig.’

He sighed deeply. ‘Time heals, apparently, but I’m still waiting.’

Jade didn’t think it was possible for the rain to get any harder, but suddenly it was as if the floodgates to the Gariep Dam had been opened. Icy water fell in torrents from the sky. Hailstones stung her bare legs and ricocheted off the back of the leather jacket.

‘Inside!’ Craig shouted.

They raced to his chalet. A brief fumble with the padlock and they were inside, standing in the middle of the lounge, water dripping off them and down onto the tiles. As the door slammed behind them, Jade found herself waiting for Elsabe to call out from one of the bedrooms or appear in the passage, asking what all the noise was about.

She eased the jacket off her shoulders and hung it on the back of a dining-room chair. It had provided some protection against the rain, but her
T
-shirt was now sporting huge damp patches and her shorts were soaked. Luckily the heat that the storm had chased away outside was still lingering inside, so she wasn’t cold.

Looking round, she realised that both the doors in this bigger, two-bedroom chalet were open.

‘Where’s Elsabe?’ she asked.

Craig shrugged. ‘She went into town to visit a friend. Said she wouldn’t be back tonight.’

The reluctant way in which he said it made Jade think that the person Elsabe had gone to visit might be more than a friend, and that Craig himself was upset by this.

‘Well, thanks for lending me the jacket,’ she said. ‘I’d better be going.’

‘Wait. Your champagne.’

He’d put it in the fridge. Now he took it out and handed it to her. Strong, tanned fingers clasped the neck of the bottle. Water trickled down from his sodden blond hair.

Jade shook her head. ‘You might as well keep it,’ she said.

Now his eyes met hers and she saw concern in them.

Hazel eyes. Brown, with flecks of green and yellow.

Again, she noticed the twinge in the pit of her stomach she’d felt the first time she’d spoken to him. Not unease … something else.

‘Don’t you …?’ he said, then stopped himself as if he’d been going to ask her something personal but had decided against it.

And then, after a pause, he continued. ‘Don’t you want to drink it?’

‘What, now?’

‘Yes. Now.’

Jade could feel the tension in the air, like the way everything had felt before the thunderstorm, as he waited for her to answer.

She hadn’t looked away from him. She found that at that moment she couldn’t.

‘
OK
.’

Craig moved over to the door. The key rattled as he locked it.

The pop of the champagne cork sounded very loud in the otherwise silent room.

Jade dreamed about drowning that night. She was far under the water, which was warm but pitch black. She had no scuba gear on, no diving apparatus at all, and, in the gloomy depths, she couldn’t tell which way was up. She knew she had no more air left, that the next breath she would take in would send water rushing into her lungs, but somehow the knowledge wasn’t frightening.

‘Follow the bubbles,’ a woman’s voice whispered.

‘But it’s too dark,’ Jade responded, although how she spoke the words she had no idea. ‘I can’t see any bubbles. Can’t I just stay here with you?’

‘No. You can’t do that.’ Suddenly a slender, pale arm appeared in front of her. Its hand opened and the index finger flicked out. ‘There they are.’

A stream of silvery bubbles flooded upwards and Jade followed them, speeding through the blackness like a shooting star. She broke the surface and she was out, into the clear, beautiful air. She was blinking water out of her eyes, and in her ears she could hear the scream of seagulls.

The birds’ loud, intrusive calls continued as they wheeled above her. They grew shriller and shriller until the irritating noise pulled her right out of the dream.

It was fully light on a grey, rainy morning.

Her hair was tangled and her mouth felt dry. She could taste stale champagne and fresh guilt.

And the shrill ululations were still coming from somewhere nearby, audible even above the splashing of rain and the more
distant booming of the sea. Rubbing her eyes, Jade sat up, trying not to wake the sleeping man lying next to her, and listened.

She was sure that somebody, probably the cleaner, had opened Monique’s door and been startled by the devastation inside.

Jade swung her legs over the side of the bed, stood up, and pulled on her clothes. In the bathroom, she ran her hands through her shoulder-length hair, splashed some water on her face and drank some from the tap, then unlocked the front door as quietly as she could.

As soon as she opened it, the spray-soaked wind snatched her hair away from her face. Ahead of her was the restless ocean, which, if Craig’s facts were correct, was flanked not by a beautiful national park, but by a war zone. A territory where developers and miners, the indigenous population and ecologists, fought for the upper hand every day.

Above the sound of the rain, she could still hear the cries. They were, if anything, louder than they had been. Jade started to feel uneasy.

She was starting to fear that her first guess might have been wrong.

Ducking her head against the hard, driving rain, she ran towards the staff quarters, following the direction of the sound. A few seconds later she burst into the narrow corridor, under cover at last.

Right in front of her was the cleaner. She was a few feet away from an open door, crouched down against the railings, her head buried in her hands. Sobs racked her body and the loud cries burst from her lips, harsh and agonised, as if she had no control over them at all.

‘Hi there,’ Jade called. ‘What’s the matter?’

She could hear the uncertainty in her own voice, too. She walked forward and, although her feet made a loud noise on the hollow-sounding board flooring, the cleaner gave no sign she had heard her.

Looking more closely at the door, Jade now saw the wood surrounding the lock was splintered, as if it had been forced.

Inside … Jade’s breath quickened and she blinked rapidly as she took in the gruesome scene.

The body of a young woman was sprawled face up on the floor in front of the bed, her arms outstretched, her head half covered by the duvet. The floorboards were stained dark with blood and the pale bed linen was covered with deep-red splashes and streaks.

And the corpse … Jade steeled herself for a closer look, realising her hands were cold and her heart was hammering.

The wounds must have been made by a knife. One long, deep cut had slashed right through her pink
T
-shirt and sliced her stomach wide open, the wound exposing a bloody mess of innards. A smaller stain on her left breast showed Jade where the only other visible cut had been inflicted.

Looking around the tidy room, Jade could see no sign of the weapon that had been used to kill her.

Then she heard herself give a small, involuntary moan as the awful truth hit her.

This little bedsit was neat. The covers might be blood-stained, but there were no half-empty bottles of mayonnaise on the windowsill and the window itself was shaded by a new-looking bamboo blind, not by curtains.

This was not Monique’s room, as she had first assumed. Looking further down the corridor she could see that Monique’s wooden door was shut tight, the way they had left it last night. In fact, since Monique clearly hadn’t been alerted by the Zulu woman’s screaming, Jade doubted whether she had even come home.

This was the room next door.

Stepping forward carefully to avoid a dark, sticky-looking pool of blood, she took hold of the top of the duvet and carefully teased it away from the corpse. To her dismay, she found herself staring into the lifeless eyes of the woman she had last seen alive the day before; the scuba-diving instructor she now realised she had come to regard as a friend.

Amanda Bolton.

Detective Inspector Pillay from the Richards Bay investigation unit reminded Jade of a startled fawn. She had no idea they made detectives so young these days, so wide-eyed, or indeed so slim. He barely looked out of his teens, although she knew he must be in his mid-twenties at least.

At any rate, she didn’t place a whole lot of confidence in the slender, olive-skinned, smooth-jawed man who, after having instructed his even younger-looking black assistant to cordon off the corridor on both sides of the door with a brand-new roll of yellow crime-scene tape, was now approaching Amanda’s corpse as cautiously as if it might bite.

Although inexperienced, the crime-investigation unit had certainly been prompt. They had arrived within a few minutes of Jade dialling 10111, and an ambulance had arrived shortly afterwards.

The first thing Jade had done was to run back to the chalet and wake David. He had been fast asleep on the couch in an uncomfortable-looking position that she was sure his back would start telling him all about later in the day.

He’d frowned when he saw her, struggling into a sitting position, and she knew he was going to ask where on earth she had been.

She’d pre-empted his questions by telling him, rather breathlessly, to call the emergency services and then get his arse over to the staff quarters as fast as he could, because there had been a murder.

Then she’d run straight back to the scene of the crime, where she had helped the cleaner to her feet and led her gently back to her own room at the end of the passage. There, Jade sat her down on her bed and made her a big mug of strong, sweet tea.