Stolen Lives Read online

  Amanita closed her unbandaged eye and leant back into her pillow.

  “I am tired now. I am sorry.”

  Edmonds nodded. The injured girl had endured enough grilling, and she had given her all the information that the police would need for now.

  “Thank you for cooperating, Amanita. You’ve been so helpful.” She switched off the tape recorder. “Is there anything else you want? Anything I can get you while I’m here?”

  “No, thank you. Is my grandfather still here?”

  “I’ll go and fetch him right away.”

  A nurse entered the room and nodded a quick hello. She was a short, smiling lady with blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail.

  With a jolt, Edmonds saw that the name on the nurse’s badge was Mary.

  She turned back to the hospital bed.

  “Amanita, are you sure …?”

  But the Senegalese victim’s eyes were tightly closed and she did not respond to the policewoman’s voice.

  “I won’t be long,” Mary said. She checked the chart at the foot of the bed, jotted something down in a notebook, and left after opening the curtains again.

  As Edmonds packed her equipment away, trying to keep as quiet as possible, she thought about the sequence of events that Amanita had described. The whispered phone call, the distracted man in the noisy jazz club, the unanswered return call.

  From those few seconds of conversation, Mr Soumare could surely have had no idea that anything was wrong.

  No wonder he had sounded so shocked when Edmonds had contacted him after the raid and broken the news.

  Edmonds walked out of the ward and headed down towards the lifts to the ground floor. Oh yes, it all made sense. It was an entirely plausible story. In addition, the human trafficking team members had been trained to accept that everything the victims told them was a possible truth.

  Why, then, did she have the disconcerting suspicion that Amanita had been lying?

  20

  David knew he had to leave work early. Not because he’d finished his daily tasks—a detective’s work was never done—but because he’d promised his wife that he’d pick up Kevin from his afternoon football practice and take him back to her rented townhouse in Pretoria.

  “Don’t be late,” Naisha had insisted, with a tone in her voice that would have impressed a sergeant-major. “He’s still a new boy. I don’t want him waiting around after the game is over. It finishes at four, and he must come home straight away.”

  He knew exactly what she meant. They’d lived together for nine years, and been married for most of them. Naisha understood what police work involved. Late nights, cancelled holidays, broken promises. It was one of the reasons why they weren’t living together now, although technically they were still married.

  Despite his best efforts, he had to take two urgent calls as he was about to leave, and he was a quarter of an hour behind schedule by the time he’d sprinted downstairs to the underground parking garage and scrambled into his detective’s unmarked vehicle.

  The M1 highway from Johannesburg to Pretoria was already clogged with traffic. In another half-hour it would be at a standstill. Now, by weaving through the lines of cars, ducking into the emergency lane, grabbing opportunities wherever he could find them, David managed to keep moving at a reasonable speed.

  Even so, it was ten past four when he took the final corner at thirty kilometres over the limit and roared up to the imposing entrance gates of Devon Downs College, hoping like hell the game was running late.

  He parked in a hurry, under the watchful gaze of the security guard, his modest little unmarked car looking like a poor relation in the row of new, luxury vehicles.

  Enrolling Kevin for this expensive school had forced David to make some unwanted changes to his own life. He didn’t regret any of them, not even for a moment. The alternative—not seeing his son for months at a time—would have been so much worse.

  He could still remember the panic he’d felt when Naisha had requested a special meeting with him a couple of months ago. Never mind that David was in and out of the Turffontein house regularly, picking up Kevin, dropping off Kevin, visiting Kevin. This was a matter that didn’t concern her son, Naisha explained. She needed to speak to him alone, so they met up at the Mugg and Bean in the Eastgate shopping centre, a convenient halfway point.

  “I have something to tell you,” she said.

  David was certain that Naisha was going to say she’d met somebody else, that she no longer wanted to give their marriage a second chance. The guilty twinge of premature relief he’d felt didn’t last long. It was cut short by the words that followed.

  “I’ve been offered an overseas job—Secretary of Immigration and Civic Affairs at the South African Consulate General in Mumbai.”

  “Mumbai?” David stared at her blankly. “You mean Mumbai, India?”

  “That’s the one.”

  David gaped, absorbing the implications of her words. Naisha had worked for Home Affairs for years, but the last time they’d spoken, she’d mentioned that the branch where she worked was closing and that she was about to be transferred to the head office in Pretoria, where she would take up a management position.

  “That’s … that’s great. Well done. What happened with the Pretoria job?”

  “That’s still on offer,” she said slowly. “I haven’t made a decision one way or the other. I’ve been thinking it over. I’ll be much better off financially if I take up the offer to go to Mumbai. Renting a place to live in Pretoria will cost a fortune, and I haven’t been able to find any good schools in that area for Kevin.”

  Only then did the awful realisation hit David. “Hang on a minute. What about Kevin? If you’re working overseas, where’s he going to go?”

  Naisha didn’t answer immediately. She stirred some honey into her rooibos tea.

  “Kevin will come with me, of course. There’s a very good infrastructure in place over there for the children of embassy workers. Apparently they attend a great school for free in—”

  “Naisha, no! Wait. Listen.” David’s words were so loud that a couple of neighbouring diners turned and stared. He saw his wife frown and carried on speaking more quietly, although his heart was pounding just as fast.

  “Please. Don’t take him away.” He shook his head in frustration. “I don’t want to stop you from advancing your career, but if you take this job, I won’t see my own son for years at a stretch.”

  “That’s not true. Embassy workers and their children get two flights home every year, fully subsidised.”

  “Dammit, you know what I mean. At the moment I see Kevin at least twice a week. I need that contact with him and he needs it too. He needs a father figure.” Another thought occurred to David. “And what about crime? Wasn’t there a terrorist bombing in Mumbai a while ago? There was, I’m sure. I don’t want my son living in a place where there’s any terrorist activity.”

  “There’s crime everywhere,” Naisha reminded him gently. “You of all people should know that. The embassy is very secure, and so is the staff accommodation. Besides, Mumbai is an amazing city. Do you know it’s where Bollywood is located?”

  “No, I didn’t know that, and I don’t care.” Furious, David looked away from Naisha’s smiling face, crumpling the tablecloth in his fists so hard that when he let go he saw he had made jagged creases in the starched white fabric.

  “I knew this would upset you,” Naisha said. “Don’t think I haven’t been agonising over it too. I only have to give them my decision in December, so we both have more time to think about this.”

  “Please stick to your original plan.” David gripped the tablecloth again. “We’ll find a school for Kevin. Didn’t you tell me there was a good private school out in Irene somewhere?”

  Naisha laughed, shaking her head. “Devon Downs College? Even with the salary increase I’ll be getting, there’s no way we can afford that school.”

  “Oh yes, we can.” David contradicted her automaticall
y, his mind racing as he searched for facts to back up his argument.

  “How?”

  The answer came to him in a flash. “I’ll move back to Turffontein when you leave. We’re paying the bond on the house in any case. Then the money I’m saving on my rental can go towards Kevin’s school fees.”

  “Well, I don’t know. I thought you didn’t want to live in that area anymore. But if you’re prepared to do that, then perhaps it could work.” Naisha had given David a sidelong glance and for a moment he thought she was going to say something else. She didn’t; she just sipped her tea and stared off into the distance the way she did when she was thinking hard.

  To David’s relief, Naisha decided on the Pretoria job a couple of weeks later and enrolled Kevin at Devon Downs. Even so, he still couldn’t help feeling that there was a sword of Damocles hanging over his head. Naisha hadn’t mentioned the Mumbai job since, but David knew he wouldn’t be able to relax until December, when the offer closed.

  He also wondered if she had been deliberately toying with him, in order to show him what could happen if he chose to walk away from the marriage.

  David had spent many sleepless nights worrying about this, and every time he reached the same conclusion—he simply didn’t know.

  “Dad!”

  His son’s voice interrupted David’s uneasy thoughts. The boy was pounding down the gravel drive towards him, his school bag bouncing on his back, his one-size-too-big soccer shorts flapping like white flags.

  “Kevin!” He braced himself for impact as his son’s head thudded into his stomach with the force of a small meteorite. “Did your game just finish?”

  “No. It ended early, but Mum said you were coming to fetch me and that you’d be late, so she told me to wait in the library until quarter past four.” Kevin beamed up at him proudly.

  David shook his head. He’d been snookered.

  “Let’s get you home.” He ruffled Kevin’s dark, shiny hair, noticing it was shorter. He’d had a haircut since David had last seen him. The clean lines of the new style made his son’s face appear different—a little stronger, a little more grown-up than his eight years.

  For some reason, he found that small detail disproportionately upsetting. Kevin was his son, dammit. He should be the one who took him off to the barber’s shop on a Saturday morning, the boy’s fringe still rumpled from sleep. He should be the one who took Kevin to the local bookshop afterwards for an adventure story and a chocolate muffin from the café, his hair crisp and short, a few stray snippets clinging to the nape of his neck.

  The small details of parenthood. The everyday episodes that marked the passage of time. Those were what tore at his heart when he realised he was missing out on them.

  On the way out of the school grounds Kevin wound the window down and waved enthusiastically at another similarly clad boy walking towards the school gates with a domestic worker in a pink uniform. The boy waved back, but the domestic worker stopped and regarded their car with suspicion.

  “Riaan!” Kevin shouted. “This is my dad!”

  Now the black woman relaxed. She waved and smiled.

  “That’s Riaan, my new friend,” he told David. “He lives in that house just round the corner, but Francina, she’s their maid, she comes and fetches him and walks home with him every day to keep him safe. Mum says I can go and play there next Friday.”

  “That’s nice, Kev. It’s good you’re making friends,” David said in a falsely cheerful tone.

  The boy chattered all the way to Naisha’s new home, a rented apartment in a newly built townhouse complex in Faerie Glen. It should have been a twenty-minute drive, but a multiple-vehicle collision on Atterbury Road had blocked access in both directions and the rush-hour traffic was now being rerouted down a series of increasingly crowded and chaotic minor roads. David followed the signs, trying not to swear as they crawled down the unfamiliar streets, relying on his somewhat fallible sense of direction to bring them out again in the right place. It would be really helpful, he thought bitterly, if the South African police service would shell out for gps navigation units in all their unmarked vehicles, instead of just a chosen few.

  Despite his best efforts, he lost his way, but Kevin spotted a nature reserve he recognised and directed him from there. After more than an hour behind the wheel, he pulled up outside Naisha’s townhouse complex. His heart sank when he saw her car was already parked outside. He’d been hoping he wouldn’t have to see her.

  She met him at the door, still in her work clothes with her dark hair pinned back, full of apologies. A kiss on the cheek for him, a warm hug for Kevin.

  “Thank you, thank you. I’ve had an impossible day. I’m so glad you could fetch him. We had a late meeting this afternoon, and with the traffic, I would never have made it out to Irene before dark. Come in, sit down. Let me get you a drink.”

  He was about to decline, but Kevin’s anxious face convinced him to change his mind.

  “A beer would be nice.” He lowered himself onto the couch in the sitting room and stretched out his long legs. He was stiff from the cramped confines of his car and his legs ached from working the pedals in the stop-start traffic. Kevin had disappeared into his bedroom. Listening to the muffled noises that emerged from the room, David guessed he was playing the Harry Potter computer game he’d given him for his birthday in June.

  Naisha poured him a cold Windhoek lager in a tall glass and he downed half of it in one long gulp.

  The flat was small but pleasant. Like the rest of the complex, it was fairly new. Everything was freshly painted, gleaming, and clean. There were ornaments on the sideboard, pictures on the mantelpiece. David glanced through the D-shaped archway into the open-plan kitchen where pots and pans hung from a rack on the wall. On the stove, a large saucepan of water was coming to the boil.

  In the short time she’d been living there, Naisha had transformed the place into a home. It didn’t feel like David’s home, though, and he guessed it never would.

  “What was the meeting about?” he asked Naisha as she bustled back through the lounge to the kitchen. She’d taken off her work jacket, changed into a casual top.

  “I requested it,” she said. There was an element of pride in her voice. She bent down to open the freezer, and after some consideration, pulled out one of the labelled Tupperware boxes and popped it in the microwave to defrost. “I’m implementing some drastic changes in the department this week, and I wanted to get my bosses’ input, and their permission to go ahead with the next step.”

  “Changes?” he asked. “Your water’s boiling, by the way.”

  “Oh. Thanks.” She added some brown rice to the saucepan and turned the heat down. “We’ve got two big problems. Apathy’s the first one—I’ve never seen such poor performance in a department—and corruption’s the other. They’re both serious and they’re obviously related to each other, but the corruption needs to be addressed right now.”

  She took a tomato from the basket on the window sill and began slicing it, punctuating her words with decisive strokes of the knife. “In theory, it costs less than two hundred rand to get an official South African identity document or passport. In practice, corrupt officials are charging our uneducated citizens ten times that, or more, if they want their documents within a year.”

  David nodded. “I heard a news story a while ago about a man who committed suicide after waiting for more than eighteen months to get his id book.”

  “Yes. The Home Affairs worker who was supposed to help him tore up his application form right in front of him and accused him of being a ‘makwerekwere’, you know, a foreigner. It happens because the staff are too lazy or too corrupt to do the necessary work to process the forms. And as you can imagine, that’s led to a whole syndicate of illegal document providers springing up.”

  Naisha reached for another tomato. “Now those documents are starting to cause trouble. Britain’s Home Office informed us yesterday that as far as they’re concerned most South African pa
ssports they see aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.”

  “Ouch. That’s a bloody insult.”

  “I know. They’ve just made it compulsory for South Africans to get a visa before they travel to the United Kingdom. Obviously, I can’t do anything about that.” She bent over the chopping board and started sawing at an onion with what seemed to David like unnecessary force. “But by God, I can turn the department around. I can show the world that our Home Affairs is not going to backslide any further. My aim is to get that visa requirement reversed in the next five years.”

  “They must have had problems, then, if they’re insisting on visas now.”

  Naisha nodded, her expression serious. “Last week they arrested two suspected terrorists in Yorkshire. They were travelling on fake South African passports.”

  “How’d they spot the fakes?” David watched her pick out an avocado from the fruit bowl and prod it gently with her thumb before quartering and peeling it.

  “Well, those passports were blanks, from a batch that was stolen out of a diplomatic bag last year. We managed to trace most of the reference numbers, but not all, so those two men just got lucky. British Home Office couriered the documents back to us yesterday and we had a look. They were good forgeries, but there were a couple of details that they’d got wrong.” She glanced up at him, her eyes alight with enthusiasm, and with an expression David recognised well—the thrill of the chase.

  “What were the details?”

  “Firstly, the forgers had used the wrong version of font on the title page. If the immigration officials at Heathrow had been more on the ball they’d never have been allowed into the uk in the first place. We checked the names against our database, and of course they didn’t match up to anything. Then, when we looked at the date of issue, we discovered it was actually Easter Sunday.”

  David finished the last of his beer. It was ironic, he thought, that their marriage had originally run into problems because Naisha had been disturbed by the police work he did. He recalled one conversation in particular from long ago, where he’d been telling her about a fingerprint he’d discovered that had cracked a case and led to the arrest of a serial killer operating in the Wemmer Pan area. Halfway through his story, Naisha had burst into tears. “Please,” she’d sobbed, “I can’t bear to hear anymore. This is all you do, all the time. You investigate these terrible acts, and you track down evil people.”