As Nick drove down Jan Smuts Avenue, dodging taxis and pedestrians, following the quickest route to Sandton from Newtown, his idea about the old premises started to lose its brilliance. It started to look positively ludicrous, in fact. Logically, he didn’t see how Stronghold Security’s old premises could still be in existence. The company must have moved at least three or four years ago, and three or four years was a lifetime in terms of change and development in the Sandton area.
Most likely, the old building had been razed to the ground and redeveloped, the land now home to a multi-level underground car park and ranks of offices that redefined the word ‘upmarket’. Quite probably, it was now the headquarters of a multibillion-rand business. Perhaps Richard Branson himself had cut the ribbon on opening day.
And then what? Did he think Paul would be renting a suite across the corridor from a firm of lawyers or accountants?
Nick had to smile and shake his head at that ridiculous thought.
He reached West Street and headed down the busy road in the direction of Rivonia. Two to one the place was an insurance company’s head office, he decided. Even odds on a medical aid head office or a bank.
As he approached Rivonia Road, he realised he was wrong.
Orange netting and crash barriers lined the road. Ahead, traffic was diverted into a one-way system. He heard the hum of machinery, the whine of drills. He saw yellow bulldozers parked in an area that, unlike the rest of Sandton, was flat and bare, its houses and offices razed to the ground.
The area where the old premises had been located was, today, a construction site for one of the stations on the new Gautrain underground railway line.
Only one original structure remained. Not far from the construction site, he saw a low building, surrounded by dust and broken chunks of concrete. It looked neglected. The windows were dirty and the roof looked on the point of collapse. One of the grimy panes of glass was broken.
If this was the old premises, it was counting the days until it was knocked down to make way for something bigger and better.
Nick looked around for somewhere to park. The saying involving hen’s teeth came to mind. On this busy, barricaded street, he couldn’t do so much as slow down. In the Jeep he could have ridden up the kerb and parked on the pavement, but not in Laki’s precious yellow Renault.
He drove round the block again and parked in the Sandton Square garage, where spaces weren’t quite as rare as hen’s teeth, but almost. Then he jumped out of the car and jogged back the way he had come, flattening himself against the crash barriers to avoid the passing traffic, dust stinging his eyes and the grinding of heavy machinery in his ears.
Most of the construction activity was centred around the opposite side of the excavation site. Nick could see huge machines digging down, tunnelling deep into the ground. The air was thick with dust and throbbed with the low-pitched hum of heavy engines. A team of construction workers in hard hats and grey overalls were hard at work nearby.
Turning away from the barricades, Nick continued along the road towards the building, stepping carefully over the loose stones and chunks of concrete that lined the roadside. In places, the recent rains had turned the raw earth into mud.
Glancing down, he saw tyre tracks in the boggy ground. Someone had driven a car off the road and up to the building, and not so long ago. More than once, he guessed. The kerb was steep. Looking more closely, he noticed fresh scrape marks along its top.
He followed the car tracks around a tall, leafy privet that he guessed was also counting the days to destruction, and up to the entrance of the dilapidated building.
Three plain concrete steps led up to a wooden double door. A chain had been threaded through the metal handles of the doors and secured with a large padlock.
Nick looked over his shoulder. The sprouting branches of the privet provided effective cover. From here, he couldn’t see the road, or the construction site nearby, although he could still hear the sounds of both.
He guessed nobody was inside the building, seeing as it had been locked from the outside. Had somebody been there earlier? He’d have to find out.
Nick picked up one of the larger concrete blocks. It was heavy and cold and spattered with mud. A couple of beetles scuttled along the underside in a desperate bid for safety. He shook them off and hefted the block.
The first blow sent the padlock bouncing to and fro on its chain. The second crushed it against the door, leaving a lighter, splintered scar in the weathered wood. On the third blow the lock broke.
Nick yanked off the chain and pushed the door open.
He glanced around. The hallway was empty and so was the room beyond. No tools, no supplies, no equipment of any kind. Just a multitude of footprints tracked into the thick dust on the floor.
The lack of equipment was a reassuring sign. He’d have felt bad breaking the lock if this building was being used innocently by the builders, as a store room perhaps.
Nick took his gun out and grasped it firmly in his right hand.
He walked into the next room. Here, there were signs of occupancy. Three plastic chairs were arranged in a semicircle under the strip-light in the centre. A black bin bag proved, on inspection, to contain trash from various fast-food outlets, empty drink cans and a couple of dog-eared magazines. Two copies of Car, he saw, and a trashy girlie mag with newsprint pages and blurred lettering that rejoiced in the name of Box.
The windows were blacked out from the inside by heavy drapes of fabric, allowing no light to penetrate. The air in the room smelled acrid. Perhaps chemicals had been stored there recently, but he could see no evidence of them now.
He could still hear the rattle and groan of the big machines at work outside and he could feel the ground trembling ever so slightly as the earth was cut and scraped and pummelled.
Refocusing on the room, he noticed a discarded phone on the floor in the shadowy corner. He walked over to have a closer look. A Nokia charger was plugged into the socket above it, but the other end lay loose on the ground. This phone was no longer charging. In fact, it was no longer chargeable. The casing was cracked and splintered, as if somebody had pounded it with a heavy-heeled boot. Even the battery was dented. The innards were in shreds. It would never work again.
As he turned away, he noticed the metallic gleam of a tiny object, half-hidden under the dusty skirting boards. He bent and picked it up.
It was a SIM card. It must have fallen out when the phone was dropped.
Who did it belong to? Perhaps he could find out.
Nick pushed his gun into his belt. He brushed the dirt off the card with his index finger, opened his own phone and swapped the SIMs. He switched the phone back on, relieved that it didn’t require a PIN code, and waited to see if any messages came through. When none appeared, he scrolled through the directory, wondering if he could identify the phone’s owner this way.
It was easier than Nick had expected.
The first two numbers were ‘Adam Home’ and ‘Adam Work’. Long strings of digits with the ‘61-’ prefix that identified them as Australian. He stared down at them for a long moment, gripping the phone tightly. This must be Adam the lawyer, the one who’d emigrated on his own even after Rachel had refused to go with him.
Most likely Adam was in bed and fast asleep, unaware of the drama that was playing out in Johannesburg, ten hours and eleven thousand kilometres away. In spite of his unfounded dislike for Rachel’s absentee husband, Nick found himself praying that the man’s sleep would not be interrupted by a call from the police to inform him his wife was missing, or worse still, dead.
Scrolling down further, he found a cellphone number for Khani, and another for Natasha.
Still no incoming messages.
He’d left two on her voicemail, and now there were none. Perhaps Rachel had listened to them, but given the circumstances, it seemed unlikely. In that case, someone else had.
Nick swapped his own SIM card back into the phone and slipped the other into his shirt pocket. Then he walked over to the stairs at the opposite end of the room and slowly went down them.
At the bottom was another door, unlocked. It led into a dark, stinking basement room. He sniffed the air, recognising the smell immediately. The skin across his shoulder blades crimped into tight gooseflesh.
He took a step back, only then noticing the light switch on the wall next to the door. He pressed it down with his knuckle – a useless gesture, really, since he’d touched every other surface in the room with his fingers. He’d probably left enough fingerprint evidence to get him convicted for life.
The basement light flickered into life with a popping sound. It lit up a room that was empty apart from a folded wad of blankets, more fast-food debris and the bloodstained body of a man near the door.
Nick walked inside, his footsteps loud in the silence.
He checked the walled-off toilet area at the back. Nobody there.
Then he approached the body and bent down to study it more closely. The man’s face was all but caved in, his fingers shattered. Nick guessed the brutal beating which he had suffered must have proved fatal, because he couldn’t see any other obvious causes of death. A death that had probably occurred a couple of hours ago, because the man’s body was cool but showed no evidence of rigor.
Although his features were mashed to a pulp, Nick thought he recognised him. The shape of his haircut, the colour of his skin, those long limbs and the gold ring on his index finger. This man had been part of the gang who’d attempted to murder him and Laki in Louis Trichardt. He’d been the only one who’d escaped that gun battle. Now he was dead himself. That was good, surely. Looking down at his corpse, however, Nick didn’t feel relieved, only confused. Who had killed him in such a brutal manner, and why?
Given his injuries, Nick thought he could guess. There was only one man he knew who loved to inflict damage this way.
He straightened up again, now sure that Rachel had been held prisoner in this house. Probably in this room. But there was no sign of her now. He had no idea where she could be, or whether she was alive or dead. Had she suffered the same fate as the long-limbed man? He prayed she hadn’t. One thing he was sure of – she hadn’t suffered it here. Apart from the congealed blood surrounding the corpse, he could see no physical evidence of a second assault in the bare-walled room.
A loud bang from the front of the house froze him to the spot. He crept back upstairs, his hand tight around his gun, and moved cautiously towards the entrance.
Nothing there. It must have been the front door slamming against its frame. As he watched, it swung open again, pushed by the afternoon breeze that was now growing stronger, sending bulky grey-bellied clouds sailing across the sky, heralding another storm.
As quickly as he could, Nick retraced his route through the building and, using the edge of his shirt, wiped down everything that he could remember touching. Then he left. He looped the broken lock back through the ends of the chain and gave it a final wipe to get rid of any evidence that he might have been there.
Thanks to the efficiency of his team, Masondo had the information he needed in just over an hour. The fingerprint evidence obtained from the police computer system was the first to arrive. Next came pages of faxes, warm and slightly curled from their journey through the brand new 3-in-1 printer, whose acquisition Masondo considered something of a coup for his department. And then, a series of emailed documents and images, which he glanced at before forwarding them on to the necessary specialists.
The print records and criminal history of one man, all reduced to black and white bitmapped images and photocopies crammed with words.
It took another hour for the phone call to come through. Masondo was used to being patient. He kept busy. Made a few more calls that led to some good progress on another case. But the thought of what he was waiting for never left his mind, and when the phone rang again, he snatched it up before the second ring.
‘Captain, we’ve confirmed the initial findings,’ the pathologist informed him.
‘And? What?’
‘They’re correct. I’m faxing the report to you now.’
Masondo thanked the man and replaced the receiver.
The corpse belonged to the man Masondo had been hunting – Mr Abraham Jonas.
While he’d been waiting for the pathologist’s call, Masondo had followed up on the tip-off he’d received from Nick Kenyon, suspect at large. He’d discovered Kenyon’s information was correct. Jonas had been sentenced to a short spell in Modderbee Prison for murder. Interestingly, Masondo also noted that at the time when Jonas had committed the murder he’d been suspended from work on suspicion of theft after a sizeable quantity of explosives had gone missing from the mine warehouse where he worked.
As for his injuries – the pathologist had just confirmed what his initial findings had been when he had examined Jonas’s body. The injuries were typical of those that would be sustained during a fatal car crash.
Lacerations to the scalp, forehead and face, identical to what might have occurred if an unbelted man had been flung out of the vehicle through the windscreen. Lacerations so severe that part of his forehead had been ripped away from the skull. Nose sliced off, teeth sheared from the upper and lower jaw. The pathologist had also noted a few crumbs of glass still embedded in the mangled flesh.
Grievous and undoubtedly fatal head injuries. The back of the man’s skull had been flattened. His ribcage and pelvis were crushed and his spinal column shattered. The pathologist’s opinion was that these injuries had been caused by an impact with something solid, like a tree or a concrete crash barrier, or more probably, given their severity, by the vehicle itself rolling over the man.
This discovery left Masondo with two rather pressing questions.
How had the man’s body ended up in a storm drain twenty kilometres from the site of the highway accident that had presumably killed him?
And, more importantly, why?
Masondo instructed two of his team to go back and conduct a thorough search of the area where Jonas had been found. Where there was one body there might well be others.
Then he walked outside to his police unmarked and started it up. Jonas was off his list of murder suspects now, by virtue of being deceased, but somebody had been killing people after Jonas’s death, using his modus operandi, and Masondo needed to find out who that somebody was.
After Hansen’s interview, Masondo had crossed Nick Kenyon off the list of prime suspects. He had more promising leads to investigate. Hansen had told him the name of the nightclub owner, and he’d confirmed that Jonas and his girlfriend had left the club in the early hours of Sunday morning. They had driven off at high speed, with Paul Kenyon in pursuit.
It was time to ask Mr Paul Kenyon some tough questions. That meant, of course, that Masondo had to track him down, but he had a good starting point. He was off to Sandton, where he planned to pay an unexpected visit to the owner of Rhythm Town.