Stolen Lives (28 page)

Edmonds had woken herself up shouting in fright.

Now, in the grim reality of a wet morning, her dream seemed silly. She wasn’t going to tell anybody else about it. They’d think she was mad.

Edmonds heard footsteps outside, and Richards came in, followed by a waft of cigarette smoke. He shrugged off his jacket and Edmonds saw the front of his shirt was drenched.

“Not very nice out there,” he said. “It’s enough to make me want to give up the habit.” He patted his pocket where Edmonds saw, beneath the sodden fabric, the outline of a cigarette packet. “Waiting for your interview?”

She nodded.

“I hope it goes well. I’ll be watching from the observation room.”

“I hope so too,” Edmonds said. “I’m starting to feel as if this case will never be solved. Or maybe it’s me. Perhaps I’m not cut out for this work. I don’t know if I have the right instincts.”

“No. Don’t say that.” Richards moved closer to her, and for a moment she actually thought he was going to take her hand in his. To her astonishment, she realised that she wouldn’t have minded if he had.

Stocky Richards with his smoking habit and his infectious laugh and his carrot-coloured cow’s lick. Not the type of man she’d ever gone for.

But then, seeing she had been determinedly single for a long time now after a disastrous relationship, Edmonds had to acknowledge that perhaps she had never gone for the right type of man at all.

“You’re a fantastic detective. Why do you think you got this promotion? Mackay wanted you right from the start. You know that test you had to write, with all those questions on what you’d do in various situations?” Seeing her nod, he continued. “Well, you got the highest marks out of all the applicants. In fact, I overheard Mackay telling his boss that you got the highest marks that he’s ever seen.”

“Oh.” Edmonds’ face felt suddenly hot. Was she blushing, she wondered.

“So don’t doubt yourself. You’ve just got a doozy of a case, that’s all.”

“I’d feel better if I could get hold of Amanita. I tried phoning her again this morning, on all three numbers, but no one answered this time, either.”

“Perhaps there’s a network problem in Dakar or something. You know what I think?”

Edmonds never found out what Richards thought, because the shrill ring of the telephone interrupted him.

It was Mackay, informing her that Fariah had arrived, and was waiting in the interview room.

Sending up a short prayer to whatever god was listening that this might finally represent a turning point in the case, Edmonds grabbed her jacket and headed for the lift.

Fariah looked exhausted. She was flopped on the couch facing the door with her feet tucked up underneath her, her arms crossed on the round, padded arm of the chair, and her head resting on them.

Edmonds noticed her hair first. Once long and beautiful braids that must have cost a fortune to attach, they were now loose and uneven, with knotted, clumpy roots that had tangled as they had grown out.

When Fariah heard the door open, she pushed herself upright, blinking. Her eyes were puffy, and there was a dull resignation in her expression that worried the police detective. Her denim-clad legs looked thin, and Edmonds saw that her wrists, jutting out of the sleeves of the brand-new fleecy tracksuit top she wore, were bony and fragile-looking.

“Hello there,” Edmonds said, with a welcoming smile. “I’m Eleanor.”

She wasn’t used to using first names during working hours anymore. Nobody called her by her first name apart from the victims. Not even Richards, whose first name she’d found out by chance a few weeks ago. It was, rather oddly, Stavros. Perhaps he had a Greek mother?

“I’m Fariah,” the black girl said, holding out her hand. Her handshake was gentle.

The girl yawned widely, covering her mouth with her other hand, and on the tips of her fingernails Edmonds could see the remnants of the pink nail polish she must have applied before she left South Africa and ended up in hell.

“I’m sorry,” Fariah said. “I’m so tired. The nurse gave me a pill before we left. It was a tranquilliser, I think.” Her voice was soft, and although she spoke with a noticeable accent, her English was good.

“That’s ok,” Edmonds said. “We’ve got lots of time. We don’t have to talk about anything much today if you don’t want to. We can just have a little chat, and then you can go back to the safe house and sleep.” She sat down on the other couch and adopted the same position as Fariah. Legs curled up, arms on the armrest. Comfortable and non-confrontational.

On the wall opposite Fariah was a painting of a wooden wheelbarrow surrounded by colourful beds of flowers. Above this was what appeared to be a light, but which was actually a video camera.

Edmonds really didn’t want to think about how much footage the Human Trafficking department had of her discussing movies, books, clothes and food. Hundreds of man-hours would be spent fast-forwarding over the bits where Edmonds was agreeing enthusiastically that yes, Lady Gaga was incredibly talented, and no, she didn’t believe for one minute that she was a hermaphrodite.

“I don’t mind talking,” Fariah said. She picked at the polish on one of her nails, then stared at Edmonds.

Her gaze was flat and blank, like the light had been switched off behind her eyes.

“Where would you like to start?” Edmonds offered. “From the beginning, where you were first recruited? Or when you met Amanita?”

“The other girls haven’t told you anything, have they?” Fariah asked, but Edmonds knew from the tone of her voice that it wasn’t really a question at all.

Oh God, she thought with a sinking heart, not another one.

“They’ve helped us as much as they felt comfortable doing,” she said. “It’s important for you to remember, though, that your testimony will help us to send Salimovic and his accomplices to prison for a long time. The stronger the case we can put together, the longer their sentence will be.”

Fariah gave a tired shrug.

“I will start by telling you why the other girls will not talk,” she said.

“Thank you. That’ll be helpful.”

“When we arrived in England, we were taken to a house, somewhere in London, I think. There, we were put in separate bedrooms while the men took turns to rape us.”

Edmonds nodded. So far, her story matched up with Amanita’s.

“Then, some time later, I am not sure how long, they said we were ready to start work. But first Sam said that they were going to show us something. A motivation, that’s what they called it. A motivation to obey the rules and not to run away. He brought us all into the lounge and he told us all to sit in front of the big movie screen.”

Edmonds swallowed. She didn’t like this. She had a bad feeling about what she was about to hear.

“Go on,” she said. She leaned forward and took a sip of water from one of the glasses on the coffee table.

“The movie started playing,” Fariah said in the same dry, flat voice. “I looked at the screen and I saw my mother.”

“Your mother?” Edmonds couldn’t keep the surprise out of her voice.

The young woman nodded. “My mother was in the film. First they showed her outside our house in Boksburg, getting out of the car. She was coming back from church, I think. Then they showed her again. It was dark this time. They had taken her somewhere, inside a building, and tied her up. They had put a piece of black cloth over her mouth. At first I was afraid they were also going to rape her. But then the person—the people—I could not see them, but they started burning her with hot coals.

“They were burning her and she was screaming so loud, and so was I. I saw the red coals touching her skin. Her arms, her stomach, her breasts.”

Fariah wrapped her arms around her knees, huddled deeper into the corner of the couch, and squeezed her eyes shut.

“They burned her in so many places,” she whispered. “They burned her, and they made us watch, and they told us that they knew where all our family and our friends lived, and if any of us tried to escape, or gave any trouble, or ever talked about what had happened here, then the same thing would happen to them.”

Fariah was crying now in great gasping sobs. Edmonds was off the sofa before she could think about what she was doing. She took the girl in her arms and Fariah sobbed harder, burying her face in the policewoman’s shoulder.

Edmonds rocked her back and forth, offering reassuring words, saying that no, it hadn’t been her fault at all, that she had been brave and strong, that she had done the best she could do in those terrible circumstances.

“It was all my fault!” Fariah voice rose to a harsh shriek. “All my fault that she died!”

Died?

By the time the young woman could speak again, Edmonds’ own vision was blurring with sympathetic tears which she tried to blink unobtrusively away.

“She died from her injuries?” Edmonds asked softly.

The girl shook her head. “When I phoned her last night to tell her that I was safe, her friend answered. She told me that my mother had been in a car accident. She had been going to hospital three times a week to get her burns treated. On the way back from the hospital one night, the taxi was in an accident and she was killed.”

Edmonds reached for the box of tissues that was a permanent fixture on the coffee table, and handed a thick wad to Fariah.

Now she understood why the nurse had administered a tranquilliser. To have had to live with the awful guilt that she had inadvertently caused her own mother to be tortured, and then to learn that she had died on her way back from treatment, without knowing where her daughter was.

Edmonds had seen people pushed mentally over the edge after going through far less than this.

She could see how the shocking footage of Fariah’s mother being tortured with smouldering coals would have intimidated all of the victims into remaining silent forever.

For the sake of their families.

Edmonds doubted whether the traffickers would have bothered to track down all the families and friends of the girls they had captured. That would surely have been an expensive waste of time, when all they needed to do was find one.

In the observation room, Richards reached for the telephone and dialled Patel’s number to inform him about this latest development in the case.

As soon as he put the phone down, it rang again. Mackay was on the line and he sounded excited.

“You need to get to the airport straight away,” he said. “You and Edmonds. I’ve booked you on a flight to Cyprus. We’ve had another breakthrough. I’ve found out where Xavier Soumare and Mathilde Dupont’s home base is.”

36

Deep frown lines carved furrows between David’s elegant brows. His eyes were haunted and his shoulders were hunched over as if he was carrying the weight of the world on them.

“I can’t believe this has happened,” he said softly. “I just can’t believe it.”

He was slumped in a chair at Jade’s kitchen table, staring down at his hands.

Jade was sitting opposite. She had her notepad in front of her; a pointless gesture, since she hadn’t taken any notes. All she’d done was to listen as David had told her, in an unsteady voice, what had happened earlier that morning.

When she’d heard Kevin had been kidnapped, Jade had felt as if she’d been punched in the stomach.

“It’s crazy, Jade—I mean, for years Naisha has been on at me about how dangerous my job is,” David continued. “How, one day, one of the criminals that I’m after is going to target my family.”

Jade nodded. She had also assumed, at first, that this was something to do with one of David’s cases.

“And now it’s happened, and it’s bloody well happened because of her. Which still means it’s my fault. If I lose him, it’s all my fault.”

David raised his head and looked over at her, desperation in his eyes.

“It’s not your fault,” Jade said gently. “It’s no one’s fault. Don’t blame yourself.”

“I—I haven’t told you any of this, but a while ago Naisha dropped a bombshell on me. She said she’d been offered a job working at the South African embassy in Mumbai. I begged her not to take it up, because Kevin would end up spending most of his time overseas, and that would have meant that I’d hardly ever have seen my own son.”

David stood up, pushing his chair back so hard that it fell over. Apologising, he righted it again and began to pace up and down the little kitchen.

“I persuaded her to apply for a promotion to Pretoria head office instead,” he continued. “I told her it would be better for Kevin; that we could manage to get the money together to send him to private school, to Devon Downs. And Naisha agreed. She made that decision because I wanted it. And now look at this mess. Dammit, I should never have interfered. I should have let her go to Mumbai.”

“You couldn’t have known this was going to happen,” Jade said.

David leaned over the table and slammed his fists down on the wooden surface. “Shit, shit, shit! Why didn’t the guards at the gate notice that somebody arrived with no child, then drove out with one?”

Jade shrugged helplessly.

Stewart the bodyguard trainer had loved quoting statistics.

“D’you know that about ninety per cent of kidnapping attempts are successful?” she’d told the class. “Ninety per cent. And of those, about eighty per cent take place on weekday mornings. What does that tell you?”

Her words had been followed by a resounding silence. Jade could see her fellow students weighing up the consequences of admitting they didn’t know against the potentially more serious consequences of giving the wrong answer.

Jade had cleared her throat. “It means your principal shouldn’t leave the house at the same time every day, because it will make the kidnappers’ job easier.”

“Exactly!” Stewart had stabbed the air with her finger. “That’s exactly right, lassie.”

She’d gone on to explain that routine was the kidnapper’s greatest friend. The work run and the school run provided the best opportunities for a target to be snatched. “Remember, the kidnappers are not interested in taking the guard along too,” she had warned. “That means unless you stay super-alert at all times, you’ll either be jobless or dead.”