Ivory (31 page)

‘It could have been random,' she suggested without conviction. ‘It is Johannesburg after all.'

Alex waited for an Audi to reverse, then claimed the car's spot. ‘I've only ever seen that picture of all of us on Novak's laptop – it was his screensaver – and on Lisa's camera the day it was taken. We have a strict no-camera, no-photo policy on the island – we like to protect our identities. I was drunk the day the picture was taken and I made Lisa swear she would keep the picture to herself.'

‘Who were the other women in the picture?' Jane asked.

Alex had opened his door and was already walking around to open Jane's, though she beat him to it. ‘They stayed with us a while. An Australian and an Irishwoman. They wouldn't have had copies.'

Jane got out of the truck and let him close the door for her. He pressed the alarm remote. ‘It doesn't make sense, Alex. George has got your phone number – he even knows your name. If he suspected that you were the man who attacked the
Penfold Son
he could have tracked you down easily and had you investigated. I don't understand it.'

‘So you didn't tell him, then?'

She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and turned to him. ‘No, I didn't. And I don't bloody well know why I didn't.'

‘Would you like a drink?'

She frowned at him. ‘Oh, all right. I hardly touched a drop during dinner.'

Alex placed a hand gently on her arm to steer her towards a wine bar. She didn't protest or shrug him off. Her skin was cool and smooth, and pale like marble.

‘The chardonnay's good,' he said, scanning the wine list at the bar, where they took high-backed stools.

‘Sauvignon blanc, please,' she said to the waiter.

‘Make it two,' Alex said.

‘He knows who you are, Alex, and he's going to get you. I've never seen him so determined, so focused, so seething with quiet rage.'

Alex thanked the waiter and raised his glass to hers. She did the same, looking puzzled. ‘What are we toasting?'

‘Life?' He shrugged. ‘Lisa.'

‘May she recover.'

Alex drank some of his wine. He would stick to one glass, as there was still a long night ahead of him, and an even longer drive back to Mozambique once he'd finished his shopping. There was no way he could fly back to the island with what he needed to buy in South Africa.

‘You think George paid someone to rob Lisa – to shoot her?' Jane said.

‘Perhaps she resisted – stumbled upon the robbers and tried to fight them,' Alex said. ‘She's feisty, so I wouldn't put it past her.'

‘Van Zyl,' Jane said, as if thinking aloud.

‘Who?'

She explained to him that Piet van Zyl was the head of the security detachment on board the
Penfold Son
.

‘Those guys were pros,' Alex said, remembering the disciplined gunfire that had foiled his attack.

‘George is furious at him – at all of them – for losing . . . for losing me.'

Alex raised an eyebrow, but Jane stayed silent, not wanting to elaborate on what she had let slip.

‘Why? They saved his ship.'

She shrugged, not rising to the bait. ‘All I know is he blames them for losing me and for allowing his precious ship to be damaged. There's a lot riding on this South African deal for Penfold Shipping. If he succeeds in buying De Witt's – that's the company we're trying to buy – he'll have to put you out of business. De Witt himself says he can get the South African Navy to come after you.'

‘Sounds like the posturing of two negotiators to me,' Alex said.

Jane shook her head. ‘Don't underestimate George. But, God, I can't believe he'd sanction someone shooting an innocent woman.'

It was time for them to stop dancing around the central issue. Jane obviously wasn't going to mention it, so he had to. There was no more time. ‘Jane, George Penfold didn't have someone rob and shoot Lisa Novak and murder her maid in order to get payback on a bunch of pirates.'

She licked her lips, betraying her nervousness, then downed a mouthful of wine.

Alex continued: ‘Something went missing from the
Penfold Son
that George wants back. If you've told him you don't have it, then he thinks I do – or one of my men does. He might want us out of business, but he wants whatever belongs to him more than anything else in the world. The captain of the
Peng Cheng
told me he'd delivered something to the
Penfold Son
's master – he thought it might be diamonds. Is that what MacGregor gave you, Jane?'

She looked out of the bar, at the passing parade of tipsy office workers
looking for another drink, and tired restaurant staff heading home. ‘I don't know, Alex.'

‘What do you mean, you don't know? Wu told me it was worth a million quid. Didn't you look?'

‘You forget, there was a gun battle going on – you were shooting at us from that bloody helicopter. MacGregor opened the safe and thrust a package into my hand. It was a zippered black leather pouch with something small and hard in it, about the size of a box of matches. There was nothing rattling inside. He said to me, ‘Guard this with your life. It belongs to George.' Then he said something like he feared he'd been double-crossed.

Alex tried to imagine her fear and uncertainty – then and now.

‘You see the predicament I'm in? I can't be a party to a crime, and I can't marry a criminal. I'm sorry, Alex, but I
wanted
George to think you had whatever it was that was valuable to him. Now I can't bear the thought that my actions caused the death of one woman, perhaps two.'

Alex stayed silent a moment. He couldn't blame Jane for doing what she'd done, though right at this moment he cared far more about Lisa and the family of her maid than he did about a lawyer's principles. He forced the thoughts from his mind and said, ‘So, what are you waiting for? Tell him where his stuff is – whatever it is.'

She looked at him now, her face resolute. ‘No. I want to see what it is first. I
need
to know.'

Alex felt the anger surge in him, like rising bile. ‘If Lisa dies it'll be on your head, Jane. I can look after myself, but there are other innocents who depend on me and my men. If your fiancé's mercenaries pick a fight with me I'll happily go to hell with as many of them as I can take with me, but if they kill anyone else on my island then those deaths will be down to you as well. You've got the power to end this.'

Jane picked up her purse and wrapped her shawl around her shoulders. She left her glass half full and stood. ‘Don't you dare lecture me. You're a fucking pirate, Alex. You take what you want at the point of a gun and you'd kill to protect
your
precious bloody men and
your
island.
You think you're some kind of god to those people, but the truth is you've put them all in danger – not me. For fuck's sake, grow up and start taking some real responsibility for yourself and the people around you.'

She turned on her heel and walked out. He pulled out a handful of crumpled bills and tossed them on the bar. Outside he saw her striding away, heels clicking purposefully on the pavement. ‘I can't guarantee your safety if you walk back to the hotel.'

She laughed at him without turning around.

G
eorge Penfold kicked off his shoes and undid his tie. He poured himself a Scotch from the minibar and added ice from a dewy bucket.

He switched on the television remote and surfed through a few channels. The Melrose Arch Hotel didn't have a satellite adult channel, but one of the five complimentary DVDs in the drawer under the screen was an adult movie. George had wanted to bed Jane again but she had begged off with a headache. He wondered if there was more than pain on her mind.

He took the disc from the drawer and spun it on his little finger, deciding whether or not to watch it. After a commercial break the local news, in English, resumed. The Indian South African's diction was precise and cultured.

‘Police have today released descriptions of four men masquerading as Eskom workers who broke into a Kempton Park home yesterday and shot dead a domestic worker and seriously wounded the owner of the property . . . Reporter Sipho Bandile has more.'

George was dialling his mobile phone and only half listening to the reporter's monologue. He gulped his whiskey, the fiery liquid burning the inside of his throat.

‘Van Zyl,' said the voice on the end of the phone. He sounded as if he'd just woken.

‘You told me both women were dead.'

‘They are,' Van Zyl said.

‘Turn on SABC 3, you bloody idiot. Why did I ever waste my time hiring you? The Novak woman's in a coma. If she regains consciousness you're finished.'

There was a pause on the end of the line, then Van Zyl said, ‘And so are you. What hospital have they got her in?'

‘Jo'burg.'

‘I'll take care of it.'

George hung up. He was too wound up now to gain relief from masturbating to a porn movie. He picked up the hotel phone and dialled the concierge. ‘I need the number of an escort service. An expensive one.'

‘Of course, sir.'

 

Alex attacked the city traffic.

The effort it took to concentrate on weaving in and out of the fast-moving streams did little to take his mind off his heated conversation with Jane.

She was playing both him and George Penfold.

He ignored the hooting horns and scowls of other drivers and pushed the four-wheel drive until its big diesel engine was screaming. He left the M1 and made his way towards Parktown and the sprawling Johannesburg Hospital. He turned left into York from Prince of Wales, then followed the road around the bend to Jubilee and the hospital's car park which, despite the late hour, was crowded. As he walked towards the bunker-like concrete complex he realised this was probably the busiest time of day for the medicos on duty.

As if to reinforce his suspicion he had to step sharply back out of the gutter as he approached the entrance, to avoid being run down by a minibus taxi that skidded to a halt with a screech of brakes and smell
of burning rubber. The side door of the tinted-windowed vehicle slid open and two black men climbed out, carrying between them a third man whose white T-shirt was stained purplish red with blood. One of the men carrying him was bare-chested and the injured man had his friend's shirt pressed against his stomach. He screamed in pain as they tried walking him.

A medical team of a young female doctor and two nurses ran out, the male nurse wheeling a gurney in front of him. They eased the wounded man onto the trolley as Alex walked by.

‘What happened to him?' the doctor asked, already starting her examination as the orderly wheeled the bed.

‘He got shot in the stomach. Bang, bang, these
tsotsis
opened up on us, like, for no reason.'

The doctor looked to Alex like she'd heard it all before and Alex caught the strong scent of booze coming off the man as he spoke.

Inside the sliding doors, the emergency room looked more like a war zone than any Alex had ever been in. He'd been one of three patients in the American military hospital in Bagram, Afghanistan, where he'd been flown by a Black Hawk after losing his fingers in the grenade blast. A team of US Army surgeons and nursing staff had cared for him before he was airlifted in a C-17 cargo jet to Ramstein Air Base in Germany and then on to Stoke Mandeville in Buckinghamshire, England. All along the way he'd been surrounded by calm, experienced professionals.

This, however, was barely organised chaos. Some of the people sitting in rows of plastic chairs had makeshift bandages. There was fresh blood on the floor and a cleaner merely smeared it pink when she sloshed her mop through the stain.

Ambulance officers in green overalls called for doctors and nurses, in competition with each other for priority. Gowned staff crossed the floors and patients groaned or cried in agony. A woman was screaming abuse at a hospital staffer who simply stood in silence and nodded. A baby cried. A young man vomited on the floor.

Alex stopped an Indian woman in a white lab coat. ‘Excuse me, are you a doctor?'

‘Yes,' she said brusquely, looking at her watch.

‘I'm looking for a woman who was admitted yesterday. She suffered two bullet wounds –'

The doctor cut him off. ‘We get eighteen thousand patients a year coming through this emergency room and too many of them are gunshot wounds.'

‘Her name is Novak. Lisa Novak.'

‘Tell the lady on reception over there. I'm sorry, I have to go.'

Alex queued for ten minutes behind angry relatives and bleeding patients. Eventually, the harried African receptionist looked up Lisa's details on a slow computer and directed him down the corridor to the intensive care unit.

It was almost as crowded there as it was in the emergency room. Patients with tubes sticking out of their bodies lay side by side in the open ward, which was festooned with monitors, drips and ventilators. It looked like the aftermath of a major disaster, but this was everyday life in Johannesburg.

He heard Mark Novak before he saw him.

‘You can't smoke in here, sir,' said a man in Afrikaans.

‘Fuck off,' Novak replied in the same language, then switched to English. ‘I'm not leaving my wife.'

Alex poked his head around a curtain and saw the face-off between the fierce looking ex-soldier and a tall African male nurse, who looked as though he could more than hold his own if it came to a fight.

‘Howzit, Alex,' Novak said, exhaling smoke.

‘Hi Janine,' Alex said to Novak's daughter. She looked up at him and tried to smile, but he could see the tears in her eyes. Janine was twenty, and only recently married. She was sitting by her unconscious mother, holding a hand from which an IV drip protruded. ‘Don't get up. Novak, I need to see you – maybe outside is better.'