Jade went home and ignored Sanders’ phone calls for as long as she could. One bottle of wine later, and on the sixth call, she picked up.

“Hello? Jade? Jade is that you?” Sanders said anxiously into the phone.

“Yeah. What do you want?”

“What do you mean? I thought we were going to see each other tonight?” Sanders asked, confused.

“Why don’t you call your girlfriend Molly Botha? She told me you’ve been sleeping together for the last six months.”

“You’ve got it wrong. Let me come over and I can explain it all to you. It’s just a silly misunderstanding. I like you, Jade, I don’t want things to end over something silly like this.”

“Don’t call me again, Sanders.”

*****

Jade’s hangover the next morning only got serious once she was at the station, and four paracetamols were not curing anything.

She was trying to call that troublesome call centre caller. She had finally got his name, Victor Burton. And though he called Tasneem constantly, talking for as long as an hour, suddenly he was not answering the phone.

Jade was dialling the number she now knew by heart, when Molly came in to the station. She put down the phone immediately.

“What the hell happened to you?”

Molly’s beautiful face was a mess. Her nose was plastered and looked broken. One eye was swollen shut and blue, and her cheek had an angry purple bruise.

“Where’s my aunt?” she asked.

“She went down to the lab to collect some evidence. Who did this to you, Molly?”

“You ought to know. You’re the one who caused it!”

“Sanders? Sanders did this to you?”

Molly sat down in her aunt’s office chair. She began to cry and suddenly that arrogant, hard young woman who had been in the car the day before was revealed for who she really was: a scared, confused girl.

“He was so angry. He said I ruined everything for you two. I didn’t even know you were seeing him. How was I to know? I should have stopped seeing him the last time he was like this. I’m so stupid.”

Jade sat down next to her. “No, you were not stupid. He’s a psycho. We’re going to pick him up. He needs to be prosecuted for doing this to you.”

Suddenly Molly was very scared. “No, that’s not why I’m here. I just wanted to see if I can stay by Aunt Debra’s until this all gets better. My mother will go insane if she sees me like this. I don’t want to press charges.”

“He did this to you before?”

“Not this exactly. But he choked me until I passed out.”

“Why? What was he angry about then?”

“Because I told Tasneem about that bribe thing.”

“Bribe?”

“Isn’t it Excel is getting that government tender for all of the cellphones for the civil servants. It’s huge, like billions. I was at Sanders’ house when the Minister came to get his money, the money for making sure Excel got the tender. I was supposed to have stayed in the bedroom but I looked. I was curious. That’s my problem I guess, I always want to know things.

“Then later I forgot I wasn’t supposed to know and I said something like, ‘that time when the minister came for the money’. And he went crazy. He was shouting and throwing things. Then he slapped me and asked if I had told anyone about it. I told him no and then he started choking me. I couldn’t breathe; I thought I’d die. So I told him the truth. I told him I had told Tasneem. I did tell her, it wasn’t a lie. She didn’t believe me when I told her I was Sanders’ girlfriend. So I told her what I saw in his house, that I saw the Minister taking that money, so that she would believe me. She always thought I was lying about stuff.”

“What the hell happened to you?” Detective Botha threw the papers in her hand on the desk and bent down to look at her niece’s face. “Who did this to you? I’ll fucking kill him.”

Jade glanced at the papers from the lab. They were the results from the tyre cast. The car that collected Tasneem, took her to the vacant lot at Hollyland, and left her bleeding body to be found by Tops and Rorisa was a Range Rover.

“You two stay here,” Jade said. “Do not go anywhere. I’ll be back just now.”

***

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