Stolen Lives (16 page)

She blinked rapidly. “I was wishing I could do something to get away, but I did not. I was too scared he would hurt me again.

Fariah was on the floor crying, and I think the man knew she would not fight him.

“So he raped her first,” she said, in a small, husky voice.

Over the next half-hour, Amanita related more of her story. Edmonds listened intently, checking the recorder from time to time, struggling to maintain a level of professional distance and a sympathetic manner, to conceal the shock she felt.

Fariah had been taken to another room soon after that, and Amanita had been entirely alone. Her “breaking-in” had been brutal and methodical. If she complied, she was left alone; given food, even offered alcohol and over-the-counter drugs like painkillers or tranquillisers if she wanted them. If she resisted, she was beaten.

Either way, she was raped repeatedly by the cruel-faced Salimovic and her other tutor, who, from the description Amanita gave, Edmonds recognised as Rodic.

“Smile,” Salimovic had told her. “For every client, you will smile.”

When Amanita refused, he had grabbed the corners of her mouth with his thumbs and index fingers, and pulled them painfully upwards, then leered at her and pointed to his own expression.

“Smile,” he had said again.

They moved her at night, she said, in the back of a car. She was not restrained, but she was blindfolded, and Sam sat next to her in the back seat as Rodic drove. Not a long ride, ten minutes perhaps; but she had no idea where they were taking her. No one in the car said anything during the journey. Still blindfolded, she was taken into a house, led up a flight of stairs and put in the tiny bedroom that, for the next few months, would be her home.

After the first client had raped her, Amanita cried. She told Edmonds she was punished for her tears with yet another beating. After that, she learned not to cry, but just to smile. To smile as man after man entered her little room and forced himself on her. Usually ten men a day; sometimes as many as twenty.

Food was brought to her room twice a day, but she felt constantly sick and had no interest in eating. When he saw the plates of congealing food on the rickety table next to the bed, Rodic had sat down beside her and put his pudgy arm around her. He told her in his broken English that if she did not eat, she would receive more beatings, and although he did not want that to happen, he would not be able to stop it. And, pointing to the toilet, he indicated that if she flushed the food away and pretended she had eaten, that would also not be wise. He poked her in her ribs, pinched her hipbones. Thin is not good. The clients will think you have Aids.

The universal terror.

So Amanita had choked down the meals, forced herself to swallow the overcooked meat and anaemic mixed veg, the hard bread rolls and the dry scrambled eggs. Every night, when “work” was finally over, the ancient, unsmiling receptionist—Rodic’s mother, who was also under arrest and also refusing to cooperate—would bring her an alcoholic drink in a plastic cup.

Those, Amanita always flushed down the toilet. She was convinced that the drinks were spiked with drugs or sleeping pills.

“I drank only water,” she said.

Edmonds took a deep breath. It was time to move on with the questioning now, to try and find the answer to a question that had been perplexing the team.

“Amanita,” Edmonds said gently, “I have another question for you now.”

“Yes?”

“We received the phone records for Number Six yesterday.”

The landline records had proved to be disappointing. Apart from a few calls to Salimovic’s home numbers in South Woodford and Sarajevo, most of the other numbers were for local fast-food outlets and pizza parlours.

Except for one.

“We saw that somebody phoned your grandfather’s mobile number in Senegal a few days before the police raid. Do you know anything about that call?”

In the silence that followed, Edmonds realised how quiet the ward was. The only sound was the muted hum of the air conditioning doing its best to keep the room at the requisite comfortable temperature, despite the grim weather outside which heralded the fact that summer was well and truly over.

Then, in a whisper, the girl replied.

“I called that number. I phoned him.”

Her eyes locked with Edmonds’, and once again the police officer was surprised by the strength she saw there.

“How did you manage to get to a phone?”

“The man I was with, he was very drunk. He fell asleep. They did not lock our doors when the customers were there, so I went out. I saw there was nobody in the office, so I quickly made the call.”

“What did he say when you spoke to him?” This was the question that had been puzzling Edmonds the most. If the girl had managed to get a message through to him that she was in trouble, why hadn’t he called the police immediately? The raid had been pure coincidence; as a result of an anonymous but well-informed tip-off.

“I did not speak to him.”

“You didn’t speak to him? But the call went through.” And it lasted for five minutes, Edmonds thought. Long enough, surely, for Amanita to have described her predicament.

Amanita turned her head to the right, looking away from Edmonds. Her fingers touched the white dressing on her cheek.

“He was at a jazz club in Dakar with his friends. I could not speak loudly because I was scared somebody would hear, and he could not hear properly because it was a noisy place. Because of that he did not know it was me at first. Then he said he would go outside and find somewhere quieter to talk. He did not know that it was urgent. I heard him telling his friends to wait and then walking through the club. Lots of voices and loud music. Then he was outside, I think, because the noise stopped. He said, “How’s my girl?” Then Sam came back into the office and I dropped the phone.”

“Then what happened?”

“He hit me many times. Then he pushed me down onto the floor and kicked me. I was screaming, but he would not stop. I thought I was going to die.” She raised her hand to her cheek again and Edmonds saw that she was trembling.

“Did your grandfather phone back?”

“He tried to. But Sam saw a number from another country on the display, so he just carried on hitting me. Then he said that they were going to sell me and Fariah to another place, a place where the men do not use the condoms and all the girls soon die. A man came to look at me the next morning, but he said I was too hurt. He did not want to take me until my face was better. He told Sam that he would come back in a week. But you came first.”

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
M
1 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?”