“That’s strange; they’re not there.”
“Not a problem,” David said. “I’ll wait. The next consignment’s only due tomorrow.”
“Oh?” she frowned. “I haven’t been told anything about that.”
“A Ms Prinsloo arranged it,” he explained.
Mrs Freese looked confused. “Well, then, I think you’d better speak to her. If she arranged it, she can deal with it. She’s down the passage with the auditors from Durban. They’re through the third door on the right.”
David thanked her and made his way out of the room. The passage was a long, cabinet-cluttered hallway of offices and filing rooms, all nondescript and made more so by an additional layer of unavoidable soot from endless cane fires burning nearby. The walls were institutional beige and the floor was brown linoleum.
The first door on his left led to an office labelled “Managing Director”. The second door announced this was where his or her assistant worked. The desk was as neat as a pin with in trays and out trays uniformly stacked. Opposite was an office labelled “Financial Manager”. The third office on the right was a cross between a filing room and a storeroom. Cabinets and cupboards had been left half open, as if someone had only moments before been searching for something, and the table that had been set up for the audit was covered with half-processed papers.
But no one was there. Laptops lay open and waiting and files of documents and paper-clipped collections of invoices lay in piles on the large flat surface. Coffee mugs dotted the table, still filled with hot coffee. Strange, David thought, something must have disturbed whoever had been working here.
He went to the door of the office again and started down the passage. The hallway was quiet, the offices empty. Where was everybody?
He stopped as he heard a howling noise in the distance. At first he thought it was the mill’s shift-change siren, but the noise increased in volume until he was sure it was just outside the building. An ambulance? The police?
He made his way through the offices to the back doors. The exit opened out into a large space which formed the centre of the mill complex. It was here that all the lumbering sugarcane trucks arrived with their cargo and where the offloading of equipment took place. It was unusually busy. Workers ran from the adjacent cafeteria to the mill itself, while drivers hurried from the huge cane trucks that had been parked haphazardly in the lot.
He caught sight of an ambulance as it arrived, its flashing red lights indicating its urgency as it wound through the parked trucks and running men. He followed at a slower pace, avoiding a cane truck that had just come to a standstill in front of him. He headed towards the largest building making up the square. It was the main extracting hall, the five-storey building which housed the vast labyrinth of machinery used to make sugar.
It was dark inside the mill, the outside light contrasting sharply with the shadows. He blinked to accustom his eyesight to the interior. Behind him he heard the door of a cane truck slam shut. Someone came up behind him, brushing past as he stopped. It was the driver of the cane truck.
“Hey,” David called after him. “What’s going on?”
The man slowed fractionally. “Ingozi,” he called over his shoulder. Accident, David understood. There was a look on the driver’s face, something in his voice. Dread.
David frowned, but followed the man further into the cavernous hall of the main floor. What looked like huge shredders were directly ahead of him, raised up on massive struts, and it was here, in the centre of the mill, among the leaking cooling pipes and humming motors and vibrating walkways that tragedy had struck.
A large crowd had gathered in front of an empty space normally cordoned off for the hoist, an open-platform lift in which workers and machinery were raised up or down from the top storey. A group of men – foremen or managers, David presumed – was ordering the crowd back.
David peered past them. The thick chain used to operate the hoist was coiled like a lazy snake on the concrete floor, liquid pooling around it, probably from leaking piping or the condensed steam of the plant. But when he took a closer look at the pool of liquid, he noted that there was a thickness to it that did not seem like water. A strange colour that had a deep ruby red to it. Blood.
He looked up. He could see the lift halted halfway up in the vast space between the sugar crystallisers and dewatering mills. The blood seemed to be coming from the shredders.
And then he realised. Someone had fallen from the hoist … into a shredder.
CHAPTER THREE
David stood and stared along with the rest of the crowd as paramedics pushed their way through the gathering to the managers at the front.
“Ngeke bamenza lutho,” the driver of the cane truck whispered. “Usefile.” David’s Zulu was rusty, but he could have sworn the man said they can’t do anything for him, that he was dead.
A white woman was standing in front of the driver, and as he spoke she turned. She was dressed in a short grey skirt, her long legs fitting neatly into court shoes that were a touch too high to be sensible. Were it not for the expression on her face she would have been pretty, attractive even, but now her eyes were wide with shock, her mouth open as she tried to gasp for breath. She was deathly pale, her face slack. David realised she was about to faint. He stepped forward just in time to catch her beneath her shoulders.
“Hey,” he said, struggling to hold her up. “Lady?”
She was still on her feet, her knees weak but supporting her. She clutched his arm. “Oh God, I’m going to be sick …”
“Hold on,” he told her. “Take it easy.”
He held her steady, looking around for a dark corner or somewhere private he could take her. There was only a stack of large forty-four-gallon drums standing beside the broad hangar door of the mill, and he supported her into the relative shelter of the drums, away from the staring faces. Just in time. The woman lurched forward in his arms and vomited weakly onto the floor. All over his shoes.
He held her as she heaved and coughed. She tried to apologise between each gasping breath.
“It’s all right,” he told her, one hand around her waist and the other holding back her long hair for her. He had done this countless times for his daughter when she had been ill and on numerous occasions for his other patients. In the past. It seemed natural to help her, the instinctive tendency to assist someone in need overriding the warning in his head that told him he shouldn’t, that he was getting involved, that he wasn’t allowed.
“What are you doing?” came a voice from behind him.
David looked over his shoulder to find a blond, bearded man in a white shirt and tie staring at him in confusion.
“Kathy?” the man began, then realised the woman was being sick. “Oh,” he said, grimacing. She had stopped vomiting and was now spitting, trying to rid her mouth of saliva.
The blond man came closer, skirting any splashes of vomit that the woman had made. “They say he fell,” he said in a conspiratorial tone, now watching the scene at the shredders over his shoulder and not even aware that David was struggling to hold up the woman. “He slipped in the hoist and the door wasn’t fastened properly. They say it was an accident,” he whispered as he turned to David. “But I don’t bloody see how that’s possible.”
The man looked at the woman in David’s arms again. “Kathy?” he asked. “Are you okay?”
Kathy didn’t answer. The man glared at David. “What’s wrong with her?”
David stared at him in disbelief. This man and the woman called Kathy must work for the auditors Mrs Freese had mentioned, but although the