Stolen Lives Page 9

  Operation Platypus—the police computer system that assigned the names to their cases was currently working its way through an alphabetical list of mammals—had been handed over to her, and she was now in charge of the investigation. She hadn’t expected to be assigned her own case so soon, but as DS Mackay, the team leader, had explained, they were critically short-staffed and it was the best way for her to learn.

  “I trust you,” he’d said, words which had sent a nervous thrill down Edmonds’ spine.

  Now, standing in the meeting room, she almost dropped the folder with her notes inside, but Richards grabbed it before the pages could slide out. He handed it back to her and Edmonds nodded her thanks, her face hot.

  “We’ve interviewed the victims, sir. All except one.” Her voice was squeaky, like a little mouse. Nothing she could do about that. “They were recruited from South Africa. The only people they had contact with were the customers, each other, Salimovic, and his cousin Rodic, who we arrested during the raid. He—er—helped to—um—break them in. Unfortunately, none of the victims is willing to cooperate with us any further. They’ve chosen not to become witnesses, and they aren’t offering any other information on how they were recruited in their home country.”

  “What about the victim you haven’t interviewed yet?” Mackay asked.

  “Hospitalised. She was badly injured and had to have three operations. Her grandfather’s here from Senegal, and he’s been with her almost constantly. She’s recovering well, so I’ll be going to the hospital straight after this meeting to try and have a chat.”

  Mackay scratched his chin. “And Rodic?”

  “He’s not talking either.”

  “Not talking?” Mackay asked, sounding surprised. “I thought he was going to do a deal with us.”

  “He’s not saying a word, sir.”

  “Any updates on Salimovic’s whereabouts?”

  The team had discovered that the brothel owner, in a display of what waseither dumb luck or an uncanny sixth sense, had taken a taxi to Heathrow and boarded a Croatia Airlines flight a few hours before the raid. By the time Edmonds had climbed the fire escape of Number Six, Salimovic had already landed at Butmir airport. His passport number was now flagged and, according to the Bosnian immigration authorities, he hadn’t attempted to leave the country since then, but Edmonds knew only too well that people like him would have access to false passports and forged identity documents, allowing them to cross borders with ease.

  The Bosnian police were investigating his whereabouts. As a matter of priority, too, if the number of increasingly desperate phone calls she’d had from her foreign counterpart was anything to go by.

  “Nothing further on him yet. We’ve searched his house in South Woodford, but it had been broken into, so some evidence might have gone missing. We have had better success with identifying the red-haired woman, though.”

  Glancing down, she saw Richards touch a protective hand to the small dressing taped to the side of his neck.

  Edmonds cleared her throat and continued, her heart pounding so hard she felt as if she were halfway up Everest. “We checked the footage of street cameras in the surrounding area, and we spotted her climbing out of a cab an hour before the raid. The cab driver said he picked her up from a hotel in Chelsea, and they had a photocopy of her passport. According to that, her name is Mathilde Dupont. The hotel staff told us she had a black partner, but we haven’t been able to get any id on him yet. The hotel forgot to ask for his passport, unfortunately.”

  Edmonds paused for breath.

  Mackay nodded approvingly. “And where is Ms Dupont now?”

  “When we searched the room, it was obvious they’d packed up and left in a hurry.” Edmonds remembered the hours she’d spent in the palatial sixth-floor suite, in the hot confines of her protective overall, dusting for prints with the forensics team and crawling around on the pale, thick-pile carpet, collecting trace evidence. She’d earned herself a good case of backache as well as a friendly warning from Richards that her time was valuable and she should have let forensics do that job on their own.

  “The night porter at the hotel told me he called a taxi to take them to the airport, but at this stage I don’t know where they flew—if they flew at all. I’ve done almost two days’ worth of investigation at the airport already, and I’m going back again later this afternoon, when I’m finished at the hospital.”

  Mackay nodded again, thoughtfully. “Try checking Dupont’s passport number with South African immigration,” he said.

  Edmonds frowned. “South Africa?”

  “Well, the victims came from there, didn’t they? It’s possible Mathilde Dupont or her anonymous black accomplice might have connections in that country. Now, we don’t yet know exactly what these two were doing at Number Six that night, do we?”

  “No, sir. Rodic denies knowing them at all—but then, he’s denying everything.”

  “Hmm. At this stage I’m inclined to think they might be business associates. So, if we can trace Dupont or her partner, they could lead us to Salimovic.”

  “Yes, of course. I’ll do the checks this afternoon, sir. Or I’ll put one of my team onto it,” she added hastily, remembering Richards’ words.

  “Thanks, Edmonds. Now, is that all for Platypus? Right. Richards, can you give me the report-back on Operation Raccoon?”

  Relieved her grilling was over, Edmonds sat down. Her face was still warm, and to her dismay her underarms felt wet with sweat. Ninety-nine per cent perspiration was absolutely correct. Nobody had told her police work would involve a scarier equivalent of public speaking, but at least now she understood why Richards doused himself in aftershave before these meetings.

  14

  Back in the kitchen, the musty smell hit Jade immediately. The box was impossible to miss. It sat on the table like an accusation, dominating the room, daring her to ignore it for any longer.

  By now, Jade’s coffee was lukewarm and her half-eaten pita bread cold. She stuck them both in the microwave for sixty seconds. When she took them out, they were both steaming hot and the coffee smelled of chilli. Fusion food, de Jong-style.

  She took a searing gulp of coffee and turned back to the wretched box. Steeling herself, she ripped the packing tape off the top, pulled open the cardboard flaps and stared down at what was left of her father’s life.

  The neatly stacked contents stared back up at her. All the papers were arranged in see-through document wallets as if they were sections of case files. She didn’t know if that was her dad’s doing or David’s. Both, perhaps.

  Jade risked another swallow of coffee, then set to work.

  The topmost file contained her school reports. Thanks, David. She didn’t read through them. She had no memory of what the teachers had said about her when she was younger, and she didn’t want to be reminded now. She would just have to take David’s word that she hadn’t mixed well with other children. It sounded likely enough.

  Her father’s personal documents took up two large sleeves. She found his id book, his passport. Commissioner de Jong stared up at her from the photo page, his face stern, his hair as grey as she remembered it, a navy-blue tie knotted around his neck. There were tax returns, insurance documents, her dad’s birth certificate. He’d been born in Howick, Natal. She found a copy of her parents’ marriage certificate. Elise Delacourt and Andre de Jong. So now Jade knew her mother’s maiden name. There was Jade’s birth certificate. She’d been born in Richard’s Bay, where her father had been posted at the time. And her mother’s death certificate just a few short months later, also in Richard’s Bay. Cause of death, kidney failure. That would have been as a result of the cerebral malaria that her father explained had killed her, Jade supposed.

  Her death had been quick, her dad had told her. Quick didn’t mean easy, though. He’d never talked about it. In fact, he had spoken so little about her mother it was as if she had never been an important part of his life. But Jade knew she had, because he’d always ke
pt one photo by his bedside, a tiny print of them on their wedding day. It was so small that all she’d been able to make out was that her mother was smiling and wearing white flowers in her hair.

  Opening the next plastic sleeve, Jade was astonished to see that there were more.

  She stared down at the pile of photos before examining each one carefully. Some large, some small. A few in black-and-white, the majority in colour. Some were of the wedding. Here were her parents together, sitting at an outdoor restaurant. Cars in the background, their boxy shapes and square-looking headlights evidence of an earlier decade, and beyond that a couple of distant palm trees. Had this one been taken on honeymoon? It was a close-up of her mother, strands of brown hair blowing across her face, her eyes narrowed against the sun.

  Green eyes, Jade saw. Just like hers.

  The portrait was a shock, because it could have been of Jade herself. Elise Delacourt, or de Jong, had the same slim build, the same pronounced cheekbones, the same determined angle to her jaw. Even her mother’s hair was the same shade and length as her own.

  At the bottom, Jade found one of Elise with a tiny, crimson-faced baby in her arms. Her heart skipped a beat as she saw the tender smile on her mother’s face, the expression of utter love in her eyes. On her left hand, curled protectively around Jade’s white-swaddled form, she saw the engagement ring her dad had told her about. Silver, with a clear green stone—the stone that she’d had been named after.

  Jade slipped the photos back in their sleeve. What would their relationship have been like, she wondered, if her mother hadn’t died soon after she had been born? Would she have grown up any different if she’d had a mother?

  Perhaps they would have been best friends, with the type of giggly, let’s-share-make-up-tips closeness that she’d seen a couple of her friends enjoy. Or would Elise have been more distant, more authoritarian? She didn’t think so.

  In that photo of her holding Jade, she looked so gentle.

  Jade wondered what Elise Delacourt had thought about living the hard, uncertain life of a police officer’s spouse.

  At the bottom of the box, Jade found a hand-painted coffee mug she’d decorated for her father as a school crafts project, and a couple of ancient, hardcover Nancy Drew stories. The books’ dust-jackets had long since disintegrated.

  She smiled as she remembered the obsession she’d developed as a young girl with the fictional detective Nancy Drew. Her father had bought her the entire series of books—a few new; most of them from second-hand shops, dog-eared and smelling of mildew. He’d bought her other books, too—books written for younger readers “explaining” how to be a detective. How to hide behind a tree without your shadow giving you away, how to search for evidence in a criminal’s hiding place, how to spot a character behaving suspiciously.

  Her father had taught her some basic judo throws and defence moves, and they’d even shared a secret language, a coded method of communication to be used in an emergency, or a combat situation.

  “Marseille” meant “dodge”, “Toulouse” meant “drop”, and “Lyon” meant “duck”.

  Jade had spent hours practising the moves, and had been fascinated by the unfamiliar words, which at first she hadn’t known were the names of cities in France.

  “Why did you decide on French words, Dad?” she’d asked, when she had found out. “You don’t speak French, do you?”

  He’d smiled, but his voice had sounded sad.

  “I didn’t choose them, Jadey,” he’d said. “They were taught to me, too.”

  When she was much older, Jade realised that this secret language must have been something that her mother and father had shared.

  Keeping the sleeve of photos aside, Jade carefully repacked the box. She glanced at the clock on the wall and saw she’d spent far too long looking at the pictures. She needed to get going. She’d better try to take Bonnie home again. Surely, if she took a spade with her, it would be possible to push the dog through the hole under the fence and block it up again behind her.

  Then she’d drive to Pamela’s house, check that everything was in order, pick out some clothes and toiletries for her, and get back to The Seasons.

  The microwave hadn’t done the pita bread any good at all. It had cooled to the approximate hardness of a brick, so she tipped it into the bin. The orange Nando’s sauce was still pooled on the plate. It would be a pity to waste that. Jade wiped a finger through the sticky mess and licked it off, enjoying the distraction of the hard, hot burn.

  Elise Delacourt had married the cop she’d loved. At the moment, Jade couldn’t even get David to spend five minutes in her company, and seeing they couldn’t even sort their issues out in English, she guessed sharing a secret language was definitely out of the question.

  15

  October 26—Afternoon

  The shrill, piping sound of the pennywhistle being played on the staircase outside Lindiwe Mtwetwa’s second-floor office in central Pretoria could mean only one thing.

  She had more business coming her way.

  Another customer. Would they never stop? It seemed there was no limit to demand. When she’d first set up shop she’d sometimes gone weeks without a sale. Now, people were in and out, in and out, their numbers rising steadily. Glancing at her with shifty eyes as they handed over their wads of crumpled, grimy banknotes. Treading dirt into the pale beige carpet that she’d had installed last winter, and which was her pride and joy.

  She often complained her office was busier than the Bree Street taxi rank, even though, to be truthful, the most she’d ever seen was five people in one day.

  Lindiwe rocked forward in her reclining office chair and wearily lifted her braids off her shoulders.

  She’d had the coarse artificial hair in all winter. She’d been meaning to get it removed, get her hair relaxed and cut in a short, chic style for mid-summer, but the sudden heat had taken her by surprise. Now, in the early afternoon, the sun was blazing through the window behind her.

  Her office was cooler than the two down the corridor, principally because its windows were unbroken and shaded by creamcoloured blinds that blocked out the view of the building across the road, with its crumbling balconies and colourful rows of washing.

  The electric fan propped on the desk in front of her, and aimed squarely at her face, also played a role. It hummed valiantly, doing its best to make the temperature bearable, but on summer afternoons, even with the blinds closed, her neck and back usually ended up dripping with sweat.

  Lindiwe watched the security gate, listening for the sound of the penny-whistle, but she didn’t hear the tune again.

  That meant she could expect only one arrival.

  During apartheid, the clear, happy tones of this instrument had become one of the most famous sounds in the townships. It was traditionally played by young men on street corners to alert residents drinking and gambling in the illegal shebeens to approaching police, allowing them to make a safe and speedy getaway.

  Apartheid was over now, but Lindiwe used the same system for her business. The instrument was played by Veli, her youngest nephew, who positioned himself in the building’s stairwell and kept a lookout for her. She needed no electric doorbells or cameras, which was just as well, because in Pretoria’s dilapidated inner city, power cuts occurred on an almost daily basis.

  If there had been two men, Veli would have played the tune twice. For three or more, he would play it a third time. A simple system to forewarn her of the numbers coming up the stairs in case a returning visitor knocked at the door while his companions hid out of sight.

  She never admitted groups, not even two people together. The inner city was a dangerous place, especially for someone who regularly accepted large amounts of cash. The Muslim clothes hawker, whose warehouse was downstairs from her and who also ran a cash business, had been robbed more than once.

  To make matters worse, Lindiwe had come to realise that most of the customers she dealt with were nothing but common criminals. Scum
bags. People she wouldn’t ever risk turning her back on.

  Because of this, she had a rule. Only one person in her office at a time. And if Veli thought the arrivals looked dangerous, she had told him he must run down to the Muslim trader’s shop and call the security guard who now worked there full-time.

  He’d taken that precaution a few times, although there had never been any incidents—probably because she was the last resort for the people who knocked on her door. They might be scumbags, but they were desperate ones. They had nowhere else to go.

  Lindiwe tugged her blouse straight, glanced over the pitted surface of the wooden desk in front of her, and brushed away the crumbs from her lunchtime sandwich. The contents of the desk were entirely innocuous. Just an old calculator and a couple of invoices for the transport business that was a front for her real setup. For this there were no documents or stamp pads on view. No official forms or receipt books. No incriminating evidence at all.

  That was all concealed in a locked filing cabinet in the small room that led off the office.

  Lindiwe heard footsteps, and a moment later she saw her new client appear on the other side of the security door.

  The man was of average height and slightly built, wearing a formal-looking jacket and black trousers, holding a leather briefcase in his left hand. Too dark-skinned to be a South African, she thought, as she assessed him with a swift, experienced glance. Nigerian, probably. Well-dressed; his clothes looked expensive. Clean shoes, too, so no need to worry about her carpet this time.

  The little till in Lindiwe’s head went “ka-ching!” as she took another look at those shoes.

  “Good afternoon,” the man said in a hoarse voice. “Are you open for business?”

  He looked, and sounded, older than her average customer. And more polite, too. Quite the elderly gentleman.

  Most importantly, he was not a policeman. Policemen didn’t dress like that, not even plainclothes ones, which meant the biggest danger was out of the way.