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anyone.”
    “And could you?”
    “Well, I used an investigator during my divorce. To prove my husband was cheating. I gave her his number.”
    “Who is he?”
    “He’s a man named Dean Grobbelaar.” Yolandi’s face pulled down into a more extreme expression of defeat. “Not a nice person. But then, divorce isn’t a nice business. He was reliable and he did the job. And he didn’t charge the earth for it.”
    “Do you know why Annette needed a detective?”
    Yolandi sighed. “She never said. I asked, but she wouldn’t tell me.” She looked up at Jade. “I knew, of course.”
    “Why?”
    “Her husband.”
    “Piet? What about him?”
    “He was having her followed.”
    Jade edged the chair closer to the desk, and leaned forward. Her elbow pushed against the biggest pile of paper and it tee-tered sideways. She withdrew her arm hurriedly.
    “Piet was having her followed?”
    “She never said it was him. But he’d done it before, a year or two ago.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “Annette was a clever woman. She noticed things. She found him out. And he admitted to it. Then last week, she said she was being followed again.”
    “Did she tell you she suspected her ex-husband?”
    The lines on Yolandi’s face deepened and she twined her fingers together.
    “No, no. She didn’t tell me anything, as such. I happened to overhear her conversation. I walked into the office unex-pectedly while she was on the phone.”
    “I see,” Jade said. She would have bet a substantial amount of money that Yolandi had been eavesdropping behind the door, since Annette was so secretive.
    “Who was she speaking to?”
    “I don’t know. I just heard her say, ‘I know I’m being followed.’”
    “You think it was Piet?”
    “I think that he was having her followed again. And that she hired the private detective to try and catch him. Probably, Piet had her killed too. She was a wealthy woman. And he’s just a bum. But you didn’t hear that from me.”
    Yolandi gave Jade a small, satisfied smile. Then she lifted a page off the tallest stack of documents, blew the dust off it, and turned her attention back to her work.

6
    The trunk of the car was heating up in the morning sun. The car turned off the tarmac and bumped along a rough road. Branches swished and scraped over its roof.
    The man in the trunk was pouring sweat. His white golf shirt was drenched and clammy and no longer white. He could smell his perspiration and the stench of his own terror. For hours he had twisted and writhed, flinging himself against the carpeting on the sides and against the hard metal shell above his head.
    The car had been parked somewhere overnight. At one stage, when he’d stopped struggling, he’d realized how cold it was. He’d curled up and shivered. He hadn’t slept. The long minutes had passed, quiet and deadly slow.
    Then the car had started up and begun to move again. He’d renewed his efforts to make a noise, to produce some motion that might attract somebody’s attention. But the car was too big and heavy. Its new, springy shocks simply absorbed the impact of his rolling body. He had a gag in his mouth, but he hadn’t let that stop him. He’d grunted and bellowed, putting all his effort into getting his voice past the obstruction in his mouth, in the desperate hope that somehow, somebody might hear.
    The gag was one of his own socks, ripped off his foot and secured in his mouth with sticky brown packaging tape. He could taste the sour sweat and dirt from his foot and his shoe. The sock’s coarse cotton fibers pushed against his tongue.
    The man who’d gagged him had wound the tape round and round his head, covering his mouth and chin in a brown bandage. In the back of his mind, he thought that the gag would be agonizing to take off. It would rip out the two-day growth of stubble and his graying buzz cut. Then he realized how stupid he was to think that. Because if the gag ever came off, it would be a miracle. He would