Cloudburst

by Wilbur Smith

  At breakfast the following morning, after an awful night’s half-sleep, I guess I looked pretty ragged. Xander tried to take my mind off things by telling me about a dream he’d had in which our school had been relocated to the rainforest, but right now I wasn’t interested. Though I knew he meant well, I couldn’t help cutting him off, saying, ‘The funny thing about other people’s dreams is that even at the best of times they’re pretty boring.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Amelia.

  ‘They just sound so made up. No offence, Xander, but even the wildest dreams dreamed by someone else are a bit whatever to hear about. In the unreal world of your dream, our headmaster has turned into a silverback. Who cares? Nothing turns on it.’

  ‘Actually you’re wrong,’ said Amelia flatly. ‘Neuroscientists now reckon a person’s dreams reveal a great deal about –’

  I banged my palm on the table hard enough for the couple seated over by the tree with enormous yellow leaves to look up.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said to Amelia. ‘But.’

  ‘But what?’

  Xander answered for me. ‘Jack’s right, Amelia. Now’s possibly not the time for an update on cutting-edge neuroscience or my stupid dreams. I’m sorry.’

  I felt guilty after that. Xander was the one with the broken leg; the pain medication he was on had probably prompted his dream. I should have been gracious enough to listen to it at least. But I was worried out of my head. I didn’t know where to put myself, so stood up and walked out into the hotel lobby, did a tour of the stupid pool area, and was surprised, stomping back into the restaurant, to find that Uncle Langdon and Caleb had turned up in my two-minute absence. My heartbeat sped up. I jogged over to the table and asked, ‘Any news?’

  Langdon smiled weakly and said, ‘Yes and no.’

  ‘Is it good? Bad? What?!’

  ‘A bit of both, I suppose. I’ve finally got through to my people. That’s good, in that it means we have a proper channel of communication again …’

  There was a but coming. I said it ahead of him. ‘But what?’

  ‘It’s not that Nicholas and Janine took a detour after visiting the mines, as I imagined.’ He shook his head in apparent wonder. ‘It turns out they went off-piste from the get-go and never showed up there.’

  Amelia muttered, ‘He said he had good and bad news. In fact the good news seems to have been that he managed to speak to someone who gave him bad news. It doesn’t add up.’

  Caleb, who had some sort of gel in his hair this morning, shrugged in agreement, as if Amelia was addressing this thinking-out-loud to him. His father noticed and shot him a look.

  ‘Unless of course he’s relying on the no-news-is-good-news adage, which would be ridiculous, given that we’re talking about a missing-persons case here.’

  ‘Never showed up?’ I repeated.

  Langdon softened. ‘Apparently not,’ he said, pulling out a chair for me. ‘But look, you know your mother better than anyone. If she says a thing, she does it. She said she wanted to do her own research, as good as told me she wouldn’t just be taking my word – and the example of my company – as gospel. I admire that, in a way. I’ll bet they’re just doing their own digging. It’s a nuisance that they’ve gone AWOL for now, and a worry, I’ll admit it, but let’s not overreact.’

  Amelia’s words – missing persons case – were rattling round my head unhelpfully. They sounded ominously official. But if Mum and Dad hadn’t arrived at Langdon’s mining operation it meant they’d been out of contact for nearly a week, without apparently having told anyone where exactly they were going. That meant they were indeed missing.

  To make matters worse, Amelia was still doing her thinking-out-loud thing: ‘Janine and Nicholas were due to meet some pretty important people in the run-up to the vote. By important I mean powerful, and by that I mean ruthless. We’ve discussed the endemic corruption in the DRC, its lawlessness. They could have crossed some proper villains, people prepared to go to any lengths –’

  I cut her off. ‘We need to tell someone, raise the alarm,’ I said.

  Langdon shifted in his seat.

  ‘They wouldn’t just go silent like this. Not if everything was OK. Even if their own phones weren’t working, after this long they’d have found a way of getting a message through.’ I bolstered myself with this, unable to look directly at Langdon as I built up to say, ‘I want go to the police. Right now.’

  ‘I understand,’ he said.

  Caleb’s chin dropped and his head bobbed backwards, as if to say, Come again?

  Ignoring Caleb I said, ‘Good,’ before Langdon could change his mind.

  It seemed he wasn’t about to do that. In fact he gave his best impression of a sympathetic smile instead, saying, ‘I’m not sure they’ll be able to help, but if it will help put your mind at rest, Jack, that’s what we should do.’

  It might just have been that I noticed Langdon was wearing a relatively sober, blue-on-blue patterned shirt that morning, but he sounded measured and sincere, and when he answered Amelia’s ‘Unless reporting them missing to the police makes the situation worse, we should do it even if the likely gain is minimal’ with, ‘You’re right, Amelia. It can’t hurt, can it?’ I realised I’d been holding my breath, and let it out. He patted me on the shoulder then, before leading us out to his SUV, parked across the street with its engine running, and even followed up with an offer to oversee the process.

  Langdon’s truck was some sort of Hummer, I think, with three rows of seats. Caleb and I climbed into the back, leaving Amelia and Xander – struggling with his crutches – to the middle two seats. Caleb sat beside me with his head bowed. He seemed to have shrunk. Langdon rode up front next to the driver. He checked his watch before turning to explain that we’d head straight to the police station just as soon as we’d dropped off Caleb.

  ‘That’s not “straight” then, is it?’ said Amelia.

  Langdon chuckled. ‘I suppose not, but you know what I mean. He’ll miss his plane though, if we don’t take him first. Not a good start to the world of work.’

  ‘Why did he come to the hotel with you in the first place?’ Amelia asked Langdon, though Caleb was right there with us.

  Craning to see his son, Langdon smiled. ‘Something to do with wanting to say goodbye to his newfound friends in person. That was it, wasn’t it, Caleb?’

  Xander turned to me and muttered, ‘That’s touching,’ as Amelia, apparently intent on changing the conversation, said, ‘When I was small I had an ammonite collection. I used to go looking for them on the beach in Lyme Regis with my uncle. Fossicking, it’s called.’

  Caleb has small ears. The one nearest me was definitely turning red, as was the side of his neck. I’d not seen where Amelia was going with her strange fossil anecdote, but perhaps he had. She brought it round to his impending work experience, with, ‘What I mean is that rocks can be very interesting: I hope you have as good a time down the mine as I did on the beach.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he grunted.

  Amelia generally talks with the certainty of a newscaster, but now she was almost stuttering. ‘I’d certainly b-b-be interested in seeing a mine myself, one day.’

  ‘I’m sure Caleb will report back,’ said Langdon slyly. ‘No doubt you’ve got each other’s numbers.’

  It seemed Amelia might nod her head off in front of me. My mouth tasted stale all of a sudden. I’d brought my camera with me and raised it to my eye now, wanting to distract myself. On the kerb opposite a man was selling long loaves of French bread from a plastic crate between his knees. He had this slick way of flipping the sticks out of the crate and into a long thin plastic bag in one movement: it was mesmerising to watch. We worked our way into a district full of taller buildings, and within a few minutes pulled up in front of an office block. It had mirrored windows and sat behind railings. To one side of the entrance stood an SUV identical to the one we were sitting in. ‘There’s your ride, boy. Better get going, if you can tear yourself away,’ said L
angdon. In order for Caleb to climb out of the SUV Amelia had to scoot her seat forward and shift sideways so he could reach the door. In the end she stepped down to the tarmac with him and waited there while he retrieved his luggage, a sort of camouflage-patterned military kitbag. Ridiculous. Willing him to be gone, I was surprised when he reached back into the truck and thrust his hand at Xander and me in turn.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, shaking mine.

  I gave him a whatever shrug.

  ‘And … sorry.’ Saying the word seemed trickier for him than coughing up a lump of concrete would have been.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I mean it. I apologise, and I’m grateful,’ he said more emphatically, before turning away.

  He’d stopped short of saying he owed me one, but it felt as if that’s what he meant, and for a second I thought he might actually have come along simply to admit he’d been at fault and to show he was grateful I hadn’t mentioned his bloody machete to anyone. But did he have an ulterior motive? Something about the bashful look on Amelia’s face made me suspect so. All her life she’s stared straight at anyone she’s talking to, but today, saying goodbye to Caleb, she was fixated by the SUV’s aerial. Caleb’s ears were pretty much purple now. In what seemed to me slow motion, he leaned towards Amelia and kissed her on the cheek before swinging his stupid kitbag up onto his shoulder and walking away.

  30.

  I imagined Langdon would take charge at the police station, that the whole conversation would be in French and that I’d have to rely on Xander to translate, but I was wrong on all counts. Langdon led us into the breeze-block building and asked the sergeant on the desk if he could find someone who spoke English. When, some minutes later, a Detective Hubert arrived on the scene with a very clear, ‘How can I help you?’ Langdon flipped his thumb in my direction and said, ‘This poor boy has lost his parents and wants to report them missing.’

  Detective Hubert’s sympathetic face made something well up inside me. I struggled to hold it together: the last thing Dad would want me to do in this situation is blub like a baby. But Langdon saying out loud that I’d ‘lost’ my parents brought it all home. It stoked my fear, clouding my head with panicky sparks. I tried to stay focused. The policeman picked up a laptop from a nearby desk awash with papers, snapped it shut, tucked it under his arm and took us to an interview room. Somebody in the station evidently liked spider plants. The one shelf in the room, high on the back wall, was a forest of them. Spider plants spread by growing new miniature versions of themselves at the end of long thin droopy stalks. All those spider-plant offspring searching for soil in mid-air made the panic roar up inside me again. My face grew red with it. Detective Hubert offered me a glass of water before we began.

  I liked him. He let me explain who I was, who my parents were, what they were doing here in Kinshasa, why they had decided to head east, without interrupting me, despite the fact that not everything I said was relevant. I could tell that by watching his fingers. They tapped away at the keyboard when the detail was useful, and sat calmly on the tabletop when it wasn’t. To his credit, Langdon didn’t interrupt me either. Not until I petered out with a vague, ‘They didn’t leave me a message and I don’t know exactly where they were going.’

  Then he said, ‘They left a message through me, Jack.’ To the policeman he added, ‘I offered to organise their transport, but my sister-in-law had already made arrangements. She’s a formidable woman and her husband – my brother – a most capable man. They had the address of my business operation. I understood that’s where they were headed. But either voluntarily or otherwise, they’ve clearly been … waylaid.’

  Detective Hubert said, ‘Most worrying for you, Jack. I’m sorry.’ His voice was deep and smooth as treacle, at odds with his thin frame and scrawny neck. Yet the sorry was sincere, no doubt about it, and his, ‘We’ll do our utmost to help end the uncertainty for you, I promise,’ was reassuring. I hadn’t realised it, but I’d been gripping the desk hard as I said my piece. Now I let go. It wasn’t long before I was clamping the thing tight again, however, thanks to Amelia.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she piped up, ‘but I have to point this out –’

  ‘You’re sure about that?’ muttered Xander.

  ‘Yes. You two –’ she nodded from Langdon to the police detective and back again – ‘are using deliberately wishy-washy words. Voluntarily or otherwise waylaid and end the uncertainty skirt round Jack’s real concerns. He’s worried someone has got hold of his parents and hurt them, or worse. What he wants is for you to find them and bring them back to him, not pretend everything’s OK.

  Amelia was totally right – as usual – and totally wrong at the same time. Of course I wanted my parents found. But a bit of reassurance in the meantime from the policeman had actually made me feel better. I wouldn’t have minded the ‘better’ bit carrying on for a while. She meant well though, so I shot her a grateful smile and asked Detective Hubert, who was actually scratching his head while looking at Amelia askance, what would happen next.

  ‘I need photographs of them,’ he said. ‘For identification purposes.’

  I’d thought of that and had two good headshot portraits I’d taken ready on my phone. The policeman gave me an email address to send them to, but it turned out that either his laptop or the police station’s Wi-Fi was on a go-slow; though the email showed as sent on my phone, for ages it didn’t show up in the relevant inbox on his screen. I counted the spider plants – parents and sprouting offspring – while we waited. There were fifty-nine in total.

  ‘Not exactly confidence-inspiring,’ Amelia stated after the detective had apologised a second time for the continuing delay.

  ‘These things happen. It’ll work eventually.’

  ‘Do you want me to have a look at the router configuration, help pinpoint the problem?’ Amelia offered.

  ‘Thank you, but no,’ said Hubert with a smile.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s a police computer, Amelia,’ Xander said patiently. ‘As a rule they’re not just handed over to the public.’

  ‘I suppose not,’ she conceded. ‘But at least he should turn everything on and off at the wall.’

  ‘I suppose he should,’ said the detective. ‘In the meantime he could also ask Jack to text the photographs, or share them on WhatsApp.’

  ‘You do know I’m talking about you, don’t you?’ asked Amelia.

  ‘Amelia’s smart in a particular way,’ I told the policeman. ‘What’s your number? I’ll text them through.’

  I’d just pressed send when the Wi-Fi kicked back in, so now detective Hubert had the photographs twice. Why that made me feel better I don’t know. In his smooth, deep voice he said he’d share them with the authorities in Goma and beyond, and he tried again to reassure me that, in his experience, communications difficulties were generally just that in the DRC. While he and his colleagues would launch an urgent search, he’d fully expect, on the balance of probabilities, Mum and Dad would call me or turn up of their own accord soon.

  ‘What are you basing your probability-balancing on?’ asked Amelia.

  Without missing a beat the policeman, who seemed now to have figured her out, said, ‘Twenty-two years of experience.’. To me he wrapped things up with, ‘Rest assured, Jack, we’ll leave no stone unturned.’

  ‘Is that a joke?’ asked Amelia.

  She was sincere, but sincere for her sometimes comes out hostile. The policeman bristled. Seeing his friendly face tighten, Amelia tried to right the situation. ‘Because, as Jack said, his parents were off to visit a bunch of mines. Lots of stones to look under there. I just thought –’

  Xander said, ‘There’s a real joke here about digging yourself out of a hole, but in the circumstances I won’t make it,’ which was funny, because as always happens when a person says, ‘There’s a joke here but …’ he’d basically made it anyway.

  I managed to laugh somehow.

  Detective Hubert did too. ‘We’ll do everything we ca
n,’ he told us all. ‘I’ll initiate our missing-persons protocol. As soon as I have any news, however small, I’ll be in touch.’ He handed me a card with his contact details written on it in a startlingly green font. ‘And you do the same for me, OK?’

  The phrase missing-persons protocol sounded so official. My gaze fell to the floor as he said them. I fought back the fear, tried to put some steel in my voice and failed. ‘Sounds a fair deal,’ I whispered.

  31.

  Langdon ran us back to the hotel. En route he made it clear that he’d intended to fly east with Caleb that morning but would be staying in Kinshasa to help deal with what he called ‘the situation’. He said he was pleased I’d persuaded him to go to the police. It felt like he was on my side, genuinely trying to be helpful: there was no hint that he resented the inconvenience of my absent parents, but I still felt the need to apologise on their behalf for mucking up his schedule.

  He waved the apology away. ‘I’ve got bags of things to be getting on with here,’ he said. ‘And anyway, it’ll be good for Caleb to make a start without me breathing down his neck.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, meaning it.

  ‘That’s OK. You have my number. Use it if you need to. I know it’ll be tough waiting here, but try not to worry. Think how much they’ll owe you when they show up again!’

  With that he was off, leaving us on the steps of the luxury hotel I’d grown to hate more than boarding school. At least the days pass quickly there. That afternoon and evening in the hotel dragged by tortuously slowly. We were all up at daybreak, and after a morning spent failing to think of anything constructive to say to one another Amelia announced that she was going to cool off in the pool. She proceeded to swim lengths very quickly for a long time, which I happen to know is her way of venting her frustration. I sat with Xander, who pretended to read a book. He’s normally so laid back that some of it rubs off on me, but perhaps because his leg was hurting, he was in no mood to talk. I gnawed on the inside of my lower lip until it bled, trying to make myself believe in what Langdon and Detective Hubert had insisted, that Mum and Dad would stroll through the lobby doors any moment, or at least that the phone on my lap would light up with one of their numbers, but of course neither of those things happened. I could not will away my fears.