Stolen Lives (17 page)

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 automatically, 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 passports 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.”

“Well, yes,” he’d replied, confused. “That’s what I do.”

“I don’t want to hear about it!” She’d stormed out of the lounge and gone to comfort Kevin, who’d been two at the time, who had started to cry when he’d heard his mother’s raised voice.

And now here she was, seeking to curb the criminal activities of people who were potentially just as evil as those he hunted every day.

“So what are you going to do about this?” he asked.

“I’m implementing new systems. The new blanks are under much tighter security, so I don’t think an incident like that will happen again. But I’m more worried about the other type of fraud.” She arranged the salad on a plate, and began squeezing lemon juice over the avocado. “I’ve had a look at the computer statistics for the last few months, and something’s not adding up. I’m positive there’s a syndicate working out of head office.”

“What’s your plan for them?” David rotated his glass slowly in his hand, watching the foamy residue trickle round its sides.

“This afternoon I put a freeze on all new passport and id book applications received in the last ten days and disabled all the passwords that allow staff to change existing computer records or add new ones. Nothing will be approved or dispatched without being personally checked and authorised by myself or my assistants every step of the way. Not until I’ve completed my investigation into the irregularities I’ve found.”

David’s mouth was starting to water as a fragrant whiff of spices wafted across the room.

“Are you going to stay for supper?” Naisha asked. “It’s your favourite. Chicken korma.”

He struggled out of the chair, which seemed reluctant to release him from its comfortable embrace.

“Thanks, but I really must go. I’ve got a stack more work to do before I can call it a night.”

To his surprise, she didn’t argue.

“Next time, then.” She walked through to the lounge, put a hand on his shoulder, and stood on tiptoes to kiss him goodbye. Her lips felt soft against his, and for a heart-rending moment he thought of Jade.

David stared down at his wife’s upturned face. She’d had the affair; she’d insisted on the separation. But now he was the one who felt guilty, as if, through his actions since then, he had betrayed her.

Before he left, he stuck his head round Kevin’s door. As he’d guessed, the boy’s attention was focused on the computer screen, his hands poised over the keyboard, engrossed in his game. David heard tinny explosions from the speakers, and a sound that might have been a dragon’s roar.

“I’m going now. Make sure you kill all the bad guys.”

As he realised what he’d said, David winced at his unwise choice of words. He could see Jade looking at him with her right eyebrow raised in her favourite “Oh yeah?” expression, as if to say, “Look what you just told your son to do.”

Kevin glanced up at him, frowning. Had he been doing anything else, David knew he would have been in for a few minutes of intensive grilling. Where are you going, Dad? Why do you have to go back to work? Are you coming here again afterwards? Why not? Questions that he always found difficult or impossible to answer. Today, though, David had timed his departure well. Another screech emanated from the speakers, and Kevin hurriedly returned his attention to the game, with a distracted, “Bye, Dad.”

“Stay safe, hero.”

Naisha was at the front door. She’d taken the key ring from the ceramic dish on the hall table and was opening the security gate for him.

“Well,” David said, “see you soon.”