The Rwandan Hostage

by Christopher Lowery

  “Sergeant Nwosu, how did you know so many details about my son? Like his name is Leo and he’s fifteen years old?” She looked intently at the policeman, to see his reaction.

  “His details?” Nwosu coughed and glanced across at Coetzee, who gave an imperceptible shrug without looking away from the image on the wall. “I’m not sure why that would be important, but of course Mr Coetzee informed me when he called. We’re both very concerned with your son’s wellbeing and all information is vital to finding him.”

  Emma’s brain was working overtime. Somehow this police sergeant had known about Leo without being told. He had known before they got there. Maybe even before the abduction. And Coetzee was involved. He hadn’t asked about Leo being black, not until later and now his lack of reaction to her question wasn’t normal, he’d never even turned his head. In case he gave something away.

  “Mrs Stewart? Emma?”

  “What did you say?”

  “I was asking about Leo’s father. I’d like to get some background on him. Where he came from, where he is now? Are you still together? Those kind of details can be vital to an investigation like this.”

  “Let me think for a moment. My son is missing and I’m trying to remain calm and rational and all you do is keep asking me questions about his father. Just leave me alone for a moment, please.”

  The two men sat back, Coetzee lighting up another cheroot, fiddling with his lighter, trying unsuccessfully to look nonchalant. Emma concentrated her mind, revisiting the last few minutes of conversation, trying to absorb and analyse what she’d heard, what she’d seen. Finally reaching a terrifying conclusion. CONSPIRACY. The word jumped into her mind. These men are conspiring together. The head of a security firm and a police sergeant. Conspiring to abduct my son. But why? What’s so important about a fifteen year old schoolboy? Why would anyone want to kidnap Leo?

  Old, almost forgotten memories came to her mind. Thoughts and worries she hadn’t entertained for many years came flooding back. She tried to push them aside. To concentrate on the present. On finding Leo.

  Her mind started racing again. This is just too far-fetched. Don’t let your crime novels start taking over your imagination. Conspiracies only happen in books and deranged minds. Kids just don’t get abducted in crowded football stadiums. There must be some reasonable explanation to all this. And the last thing you want to do is to alienate these men. They may be your only chance of finding Leo, or at least keeping in touch with events. But don’t answer any dangerous questions.

  Aloud she said, “Before we lose any more time we have to check with all the hospitals around. Leo must have been taken to a hospital or a clinic. If there was something wrong with him, he can’t be very far. And you can put out an ‘all points alert’, or whatever you call it here, for the other police forces to look out for him.”

  “I’ve already set the wheels in motion. My assistant is calling the medical centres as we speak. He’s also preparing a circular to email around. We do know what we’re doing, Mrs Stewart. We’re really quite capable.” Nwosu looked affronted at being lectured to by this young woman.

  Coetzee handed him his mobile phone. “Take this picture for the circular. Mrs Stewart took it just yesterday.”

  Emma was thinking furiously. “I want to call the British Embassy,” she announced. “We have to inform them in the event of an emergency. We were given strict instructions when we got the travel documents. Can you get the number for me please?”

  “Well, until we have some real information I don’t think we can classify this as an emergency yet. It’s only a few hours since Leo’s disappearance and it’s usual to wait twenty-four hours before taking that decision. Let’s wait until we get feedback from the hospitals.”

  “But that might take all night. And if you don’t think that a teenage boy being doped and kidnapped from your stadium is an emergency then I don’t know what would qualify.” She paused, trying to think clearly for a moment, then stood up and walked to the door. “Please call a taxi for me. I’m going back to my hotel. There’s nothing I can do here and I need to make some phone calls. You can contact me if there’s any news.”

  Nwosu looked worriedly at Coetzee. “But we still need a lot of information before we can carry out a proper investigation. Please sit down again Mrs Stewart so I can ask you further questions.”

  Emma struggled to remain calm and assertive. “Sergeant Nwosu. It’s now almost one in the morning and I’m exhausted. I don’t think anything I tell you tonight will change the situation. As you just said, let’s wait for the feedback from the hospitals and we’ll see what transpires before morning. If necessary I can come back and answer your questions then, but now I want to get back to my hotel.”

  DAY TWO

  MONDAY JULY 12, 2010

  SIX

  Johannesburg, South Africa

  Emma put down the phone in her hotel room. It was after three in the morning. Her last call had been to the British High Commission in Pretoria. Coetzee had dropped her off in front of the Packard Hotel after she had refused to answer any more of Nwosu’s questions and told her a car would come to pick her up at ten in the morning to take her back to the station. He drove off looking quite disgruntled. Barry Lambert, the manager, was waiting in reception for her and asked if there was anything he could do. It seemed the hotel staff had taken a liking to Leo and they were concerned for his welfare. He tried unsuccessfully to console her then she took the keys to both of their rooms and went up to the seventh floor.

  She entered Leo’s room. It was as untidy as his bedroom at home in Newcastle, books and papers scattered over the dresser and night table, shirts and shorts lying on the floor and on the bed, towels hung over the bath and his toilet things all over the place. She looked around at her son’s belongings and sat on the edge of the bed, tears pouring down her face. Taking one of his shirts she held it close, breathing in the familiar smell of his body, remembering the feeling of his energy and youth. Oh, Leo. Where are you? What’s happening to you?

  After a while Emma pulled herself together and went next door to her to her own room, stripped off and ran a warm bath. Lying back in the foamy water she forced her mind to revisit the events of the evening. I’ve got to find out what’s going on. Leo didn’t just get sick and pass out, he’s never been ill in his life. And the whole thing’s just too slick. A wheelchair and two people appear from nowhere and push him out of the building. But to where, and why?

  A strange thought came to her mind. It’s almost like one of my thrillers, but the plot is backwards. I have to reconstruct it from scratch if I want to find my son. This isn’t going to be easy. I’ve got to find Leo without telling the police things they don’t need to know. Even if there was something going on between Coetzee and Nwosu, they had the resources and it wouldn’t do to get on the wrong side of them.

  She towelled off and sat in her nightdress by the bed with her notebook. The A4 notebook she used to outline the plots and characters for her novels. Only this time it wasn’t a novel, it was the real life disappearance of her only son. Emma had an almost photographic memory and formidable powers of observation. She cleared her mind then tried to dredge her memory of everything she had observed and remembered that evening, noting the events by time, by scene, by characters and by impressions or possible conclusions or motives for the abduction. For that was what she was now convinced had happened, her fifteen year old son had been abducted and she was perhaps the only person who could be trusted to find him. She started writing.

  After filling three pages of the notebook, she opened her laptop and entered the user name and password for the hotel WiFi network. They had been going to charge her a daily rate for usage but the manager gave her a free pass when he discovered she was a writer. She went online and typed in, Hospitals in South Johannesburg. The screen showed three establishments close to Soccer City; South Rand, Chris Hani Baragwanath and RLR Squalene. She noted down the phone numbers and picked up the hotel phone, it wo
uld be cheaper to make local calls than to use her UK mobile.

  The telephonist at South Rand asked her to hold on while she called the night duty supervisor to ask if he’d heard anything from the police about Leo. The answer was no. There had been no call or email from the Diepkloof police department or any other police department that night and there was no record of an admittance of a teenage English boy. The answer was the same from the other two hospitals. Emma had drawn a blank, but Nwosu had apparently done nothing.

  She looked up the other police stations around the neighbourhood of Soccer City. There were ten of them. Randomly, she chose Dobsonville, Kliptown and Meadowlands. Summoning up her best South African accent, she called the first precinct. “Sorry to ring you so late, but I’ve been circulating a message about a missing British teenager and I’m not sure if I sent it to you. Would you mind checking for me?”

  The operator came back after a few minutes. “We’ve had no emails or faxes about a missing boy. Why don’t you send it again and I’ll make sure it goes to the night sergeant right away.” She called the other stations, but they had received nothing either.

  Emma put the phone down after the last call and sat back, her heart in her mouth, stunned and scared to death by the implications of this news. Now she knew for certain there was a conspiracy to kidnap her son and the police were involved.

  She thought back over the evening’s events, putting the pieces together in her mind. Coetzee had taken her to see Nwosu, so they were definitely working together. Two people had taken Leo out and it was probably one of them who had put him to sleep. That’s at least four people and one of them was a policeman. How high up does this plan go? Nwosu’s a sergeant, would he act without the authority of his superiors? Who else is involved?

  And all this planning and people just to kidnap my fifteen year old son! What reason can there possibly be? We seem to be trapped in the middle of some elaborate scheme, but what on earth for?

  Emma assessed her situation. I’m all alone here in this foreign country, without friends or connections of any kind and for some reason that I can’t begin to comprehend, my son has been taken by a gang involving a police officer. She forced herself to think clearly about her options. How could she find out more about the abduction without going through Coetzee or Nwosu? There must be a way to get around them and find the truth. She needed outside help and she needed it now.

  She found the number for the British High Commission in Pretoria. This time she used her mobile, the hotel rates for long distance calls would be ruinous. A recorded woman’s voice, very English, advised her that the embassy was closed, but in the event of an emergency she could be diverted to speak to a Duty Consular Officer at the Foreign Office Global Response Centre in London. She pressed ‘one, hash’, and a man’s voice came on the line.

  If Emma hadn’t been so concerned and fearful about the fate of her son, she would have found the ensuing conversation almost amusing. After trying to convince Mr. Lawrence that a missing British teenager in Johannesburg who had been seen unconcious in a wheelchair being pushed out of Soccer City constituted an emergency, she finally gave up. And her refusal to answer questions she preferred not to answer didn’t help her case at all. She thanked the man and rang off after ten minutes when she saw she was getting nowhere.

  Emma lay back on her bed, her mind going over and over the problem, trying to find solutions until her head was splitting. If she couldn’t trust the police and if the British Foreign Office was incapable of acting without an in depth interrogation, who could she turn to? Finally, she just couldn’t think any more. Physically exhausted and emotionally drained, she switched off the light and lay in the dark, crying softly and thinking of her son. After a while, she fell into a troubled sleep.

  It was six hours since Leo had been taken.

  SEVEN

  Johannesburg, South Africa

  It was seven fifteen in the morning. Emma was hanging on for grim life as Coetzee drove his Land Cruiser at over one hundred forty kilometres an hour down the De Villiers Graaff Motorway towards Diepkloof. Coming off the highway to the left they flew past Ridgeway and Glenanda, then turned up towards the South Rand Hospital. Coetzee stopped in front of the A&E Department and they jumped out of the car.

  “Leo Stewart?” He called to the attendant, who pointed down the corridor to the right, “Room seven.”

  They sprinted down the corridor and pushed the door open. The room was full of equipment; pulleys, automated medicine dosage machines, monitors, breathing apparatus, some of them making strangely musical sounds, like slot machines in an amusement arcade. A doctor was standing by the side of the bed, making notes on a tablet. The sheet on the bed was pulled up over the head of the occupant, who was lying motionless. There was no sign nor sound of breathing.

  The doctor looked over at them. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re just too late.” He pulled back the sheet to reveal the young boy lying there, still and lifeless.

  “NO!” Emma sat up, sweat pouring down her face. “NO!” She cried again, then fell back on the bed, her body convulsed with helpless sobbing, her tears seaping into the bedsheets, already soaked from the sweat of her nightmare. She lay crying for several minutes, a vision of Leo in the wheelchair, unconscious and helpless, burning in her memory. Finally, she wiped away her tears on the bed sheet. I must stay in control, she told herself. It wouldn’t help Leo for her to lie there wallowing in self pity. She got up to shower and clean her teeth. It was just before seven, she’d been asleep for less than four hours, but she had too many things to do to waste time on sleep.

  Emma made herself a cup of tea with the hotel kettle and tea bags. There was no sugar, but a plastic capsule of cream and a biscuit. She realised she was starving. It was over twelve hours since she and Leo had shared a pizza in one of the cafés at the stadium. There was fruit in the room and she peeled herself a banana and went next door to her son’s room. There was nobody about, but she locked the doors just in case. The empty room seemed dark and oppressive and she opened the curtains to let the early morning light in. She went through Leo’s things meticulously, looking for anything that seemed out of place or unusual. Folding up his clothes carefully and gently, she placed them on the bed, unwilling to pack them into his suitcase. She found nothing untoward in the room that might explain his disappearance. Looking at the small pile of her son’s belongings, tears started to prick at her eyes again but she overcame her emotion and went back to her room.

  Emma finished the fruit while she went back through her notebook. Rereading her notes from the previous night, she was even more convinced that Coetzee and Nwosu were involved in Leo’s abduction. What was more, they hadn’t made a very good job of covering it up. Presumably they didn’t expect to be challenged by a feeble English woman who wrote crime novels for a living. Their positions as security chief and police officer were guaranteed to give them credibility over a distraught mother crying conspiracy.

  As she progressed with her line of thought and notemaking, her mind went off on another tack. Kidnappers didn’t take people without a reason and the most common reason was money. In Leo’s case there couldn’t be any other explanation. He wasn’t a celebrity or socially important, mixed up with a terrorist group or had any political connections. He’s just a bright schoolboy who likes football. But why would they assume I’ve got money? They must think crime writers make a fortune selling TV rights and movie scripts to Hollywood all day long. I wish! But I suppose as long as these people, whoever they are, think they can get money, Leo will be safe and looked after. You don’t damage your only asset if you’re putting it up for ransom. Ransom, that must be what we’re looking at here. How am I going to face up to negotiations over the value of my son’s life?

  Another thought suddenly came to her mind. A worrying detail she’d buried beneath the events of last night. She opened the safe in the wardrobe and took out their travel documents. Their BA return flights via London were booked for Wednesday e
vening, the day after tomorrow, and she was certain they were not flexible and non-refundable, even though they’d cost a fortune. She looked at her watch, it was now after eight. Quickly going online she got the BA office number at Johannesburg airport and called. The employee informed her that the bookings could only be changed in the event of a death or with a doctor’s certificate of illness causing inability to travel. If she and Leo didn’t turn up for the departure, they lost their tickets. One way tickets at short notice would cost almost a thousand pounds each, but all the flights were full for the next few days, it was World Cup week. Emma thanked her and rang off without trying to explain the circumstances, it was just a waste of time.

  She took up her notebook again, assessing her financial situation. The cost of changing the tickets was more than she had with her and would eat up most of her bank account balance in Lloyds. In her purse she had almost four thousand rand - about three hundred pounds, plus another hundred and fifty in sterling. Four hundred and fifty pounds total, plus about seventeen hundred available in her UK account and a thousand on her credit card. This trip had cost her almost two thousand pounds, so she was getting very low on available funds. Her pension plan had been hammered by the crisis in 2008 and was starting to build up slowly again, but definitely not a cash option. Her apartment in Newcastle had a fairly low mortgage but raising money on it would take time she didn’t have. She was due some royalties on September 30th and the first draft for her new novel was almost finished. That would bring in a deposit of forty or fifty thousand, which would assure their solvency until the end of the year, but in terms of ready cash, she had just over three thousand pounds.