Rift (3 page)

In between: nothing. Blank. Blank, blank, blank.

Do you understand, Joe, that your friends, Anna, Matt, Silowa – all your friends – are not at the camp? The journalist, Charlotte,is not at the camp.
The words came to him in the measured tones of the policeman. As if explaining to someone stupid. The memory brought a clammy sweat and a churning somewhere deep in his gut.

He wished, suddenly, that the girl would come back. He wished he’d stopped her rushing off like that.

He got to his feet. He found his balance carefully, and made his way towards the door.

It snapped open. A nurse barred his way, half his height and twice his strength, sucking her cheeks in with disapproval, marching him back to bed, hijacking the next minutes with temperature and pulse-taking peppered with tongue-clicks of displeasure: at the marks on his legs, at the redness of his eyes, at whatever it was she read in the notes she carried on a clipboard, her face swept by concentration, puzzlement, irritation, finally, grudgingly, approval.

‘You are rested,’ she announced, gripping his wrist and pulling his arm out, then the other, turning each to and fro, inspecting briskly.

He said, ‘It’s only bruises.’

‘I know this!’ She flicked the clipboard with one finger. ‘Dehydrated. Exhausted. And what is this nonsense?’ She shoved the writing at him. He couldn’t read it – all scrawls, and anyway it probably wasn’t in English.

‘Lost memory,’ she enunciated each word separately, and sniffed. ‘This ridiculous walk you have done! Do you leave your brains in England?
Wisdom
is needed to do these things. Tch!
Tourists! Now all these people must run about searching for you! How many people must spend their time rescuing wandering children when there is other urgent work to do? Where are your teachers? I ask you this! What are
they
doing while you go around and lose yourselves? Dismiss them all – this
I
would do. Tcchk – tcchk – gone!’ With a flap of her hand she demonstrated them disappeared, and Joe didn’t try to protest that he wasn’t a child, hadn’t
tried
to get lost, for the prospect of certain teachers
dismissed
was spiced with a satisfying tang of vengeance.

The nurse stood back. She tilted her head to one side, surveying him. Then she swung round and went to the door.

‘The doctor will see you, when he is
free
to.
You
will wait here. Do
not
wander about like your friend. I cannot have strangers in my hospital getting “
lost
”.’ But the jibe was coloured by an unexpected, quick smile.

Through the door, briefly open as she left and clicked smartly shut behind her, he spied Ella being shooed away,
we are not a hotel!
When he yanked the door open again, there was no one in sight.

Why is this boy,
Silowa
, at the Chomlaya camp? The question plagued Murothi. Silowa is not part of this foreigners’ expedition. Yet he is a friend of those who disappeared. He disappears with them, all the evidence says this. How does he come there? Is the
how
significant? Murothi felt it was, but he did not know why.

He rubbed his hands across his face. Ah! To be waking in his own bed now, to have only the short walk to his own police post under the shade of the great fig tree! He had a sudden pang of guilt at the thought of Ella, waking alone in the hospital.
Two continents from her own home!
He could not imagine such a feeling.
It is not right to leave the child there
, he thought.
It is a cold thing I have done.

He stood, gazing down from the police compound across maize fields falling towards the river. Tea shacks clustered at the crossing point, and beyond crouched the brown hulk of the ferry. On both sides Nanzakoto township straggled along the riverbanks, little more than a meeting place and market for the hundreds of families moving animals about the plains. Yet
raised in importance because it also had the regional hospital and this police post, planted here because of the road and river crossing and the new landing-strip for small aircraft.

For all that, it was dwarfed by the immense, harsh sweep of the land, so unlike the moist green valleys of Murothi’s own, distant, home. In truth, he was exiled here: the price of his overnight climb to ‘Inspector’. Exile! In this place he could not
feel.
Until he found the vanished.
Repeat your success
the Minister instructed. But that ‘success’ was very different: a tourist disappearance on the coast last year. A murder hunt: a body, a culprit, evidence to be gathered. Nasty, but not complicated. Murothi had proved it was foreigner against foreigner. Sighs of relief all round: no dishonour to local people or Important Persons in charge of Tourist Places. Murothi’s skills had been discussed in very high places!

He turned, and went back into the room, to the table with its spread of police files. This was different. Very different. Where,
how
to begin?

Certainly, the investigations on this Chomlaya case were thorough: searches – a thirty-mile radius, air and ground; scores of interviews. DC Meshami’s team had talked to everyone at the camp, all six teachers, every one of the remaining twenty-seven students, the two wild-life rangers . . .

Painstaking work. Meticulous.
Laziness
, thought Murothi, is not why this Chomlaya case is unsolved. This DC Meshami is good. Good policemen work for him.

Yet nearly three days go by, and still four people are missing. A fifth reappears. Out of nowhere. Remembering nothing.

His eye fell on the interview transcript of one of the six British teachers, and he picked it up:

Ian Boyd (IB)

Date: 24/2/06

Time: 19.30

Place: Northern Province. Chomlaya, British Student Camp

Interviewed by District Commissioner James Meshami (DC), Constable Ndoto Lesakon (NL): Nanzakoto

Police Department.

Case No: 06574

Tape reference: 2006/Chomlaya/17

Thoughtfully, Murothi reread the last few answers. Then he looked for the DC’s interview of the teacher in charge of the camp, Elisa Strutton. He found the first question about the missing students.