Emma sat quietly sobbing, the vivid memories of Leo’s birth and now his abduction overcoming her again. Jenny went over and put her arms around her and soothed her for a moment.
“No wonder you’re distressed after dredging up those fifteen year old memories. My God, that’s the most appalling story I’ve ever heard. You must have been heartbroken when that poor girl died. And she was only one of hundreds of thousands who perished in that dreadful genocide.” She paused, “Leticia’s parents have a similar story to tell about Angola, if ever we could get them to tell it. We never learn, do we? Humans. We never learn.”
She shook her head and pulled Emma to her feet and they walked into the kitchen. “You can tell me the rest over lunch, but now at least I know where Leo came from. It’s not at all what I imagined.”
“I know. You thought I’d had an affair with someone in Rwanda. Well, that’s also partly true, but that comes later.”
Jenny gave her a quizzical look, but said nothing. They still had plenty of time to finish the story.
Encarni served them lunch on the terrace. The sun was burning hot and a wide awning protected them from the direct sunlight. It seemed to Emma that it was as hot as Rwanda, but a lot more civilised. They chatted about inconsequential things, getting to know each other again after many years of little contact.
The housekeeper brought them coffee and Jenny said, “I’d better explain the situation here. It’s a bit complicated. When Charlie, Ron’s father died, he left his estate, including this house, to me and a young Angolan woman called Leticia da Costa. She became his companion after he lost his wife. She used to be his housekeeper then they fell in love and had a son together, a lovely boy called Emilio. Leticia actually owns half the estate in trust for him, but that doesn’t really change anything.
“Encarni is Leticia’s mother and she offered to become housekeeper so Leticia could spend more time with Emilio. He’s only four, so he still needs his mother with him. They’re on a two week holiday in France right now, with her fiancé, Patrice. He’s a banker, here in Marbella, a Frenchman. Very French, if you know what I mean.”
“Don’t you like him?”
“It’s not that. He seems like a sweet guy, but it’s just the way he dresses and talks, very ‘in your face continental’.” She grimaced then laughed. “Listen to me. I’m getting to be a bitchy old widow. They’re getting married in October and I’m probably just jealous. Anyway, the point is we’ve got the house to ourselves for another couple of weeks, so we can stay here to sort out this business about Leo. It’s an enormous place with everything we could possibly need; six telephone lines, speaker phone, cinema screen, Internet, Fax, you name it. Charlie ran his business from here. And it’s a lot closer to Africa than Newcastle.” She pointed across the swimming pool at the distant mountains vaguely discernible in the heat mist. “You can get a ferry to Morocco from just along the road. Not that we’ll need to, but that’s how close we are.”
“It’s a marvellous place Jenny and you were right to get me out of Johannesburg. I’m feeling more positive and relaxed and starting to think better already.”
“Good. So before you go and settle in and have a bath and a sleep or whatever you need to do, finish telling me about Leo.”
Emma took up her story again. “You were right about the affair, but it didn’t start in Rwanda, it started in London. It was a man who worked with SOS Médicale, Tony Forrester was his name. I met him before he joined them, when I was with the Red Cross. He was an assistant administrator at University College Hospital. I was renting a little studio flat in Marylebone then. That was before it became fashionable and impossibly expensive.
“We met at a fund raising event for SOSM at the Langham Hilton in Portland Place. He was mad keen on joining them and working somewhere exciting, but he hadn’t had the chance until the Rwandan atrocity occurred. Then, later on when he heard they were sending in five teams, he applied to go down as local administrator and got the job. He could speak three or four languages, he was very clever. That’s how I got the job too. We were going out then and he introduced me as an experienced nurse and they hired me, so we were able to go together.
“After Mutesi’s death, Dr Constance suspended me from maternity work. He thought I was too emotionally involved and would go to pieces if there was another death on my watch.” Emma sighed. “I hate to admit it, but he was probably right. I just couldn’t stand seeing these poor girls suffering because of what had been done to them by the genociders. If I’d had a machete I think I’d have run amok and killed half of Kigali. So, I was left in charge of Leopold until they could arrange to fly me back to London.”
“And that suited you perfectly?”
“I loved it. I felt so fulfilled and I believed I was keeping my promise to Mutesi. And Tony was a great comfort in helping me get over her death. He was based in Kigali, but we saw a lot of each other and he was fantastic with me after my spat with Dr Constance. We were very much in love and by this time, we were talking about getting married.”
“What was Tony doing in Rwanda? What was his job?”
“He was in charge of all the administration; travel, security, buying equipment, managing the budget, reporting to Head Office in Paris, all that administrative stuff. And, crucially, he was responsible for registering births and deaths at the clinic and making contact with the orphanages when it was necessary. But everything was delayed and complicated because the whole system was in chaos. The hospitals, morgues, schools, orphanages, nothing was working, so Leopold’s birth and Mutesi’s death hadn’t yet been registered.
“Then after a couple of weeks, I began to feel quite maternal towards Leopold. He was beautiful, the loveliest baby I’ve ever seen. He hardly ever cried and he seemed very contented when I held him, as if I was his mother. Tony loved him too. He was made to be a father. A very soft and loving man and he was happy that I had the baby to look after because of Mutesi. So, I started to imagine he was my son, that I could keep him. That Tony and I could begin our married life with a gorgeous baby boy.
“I couldn’t bear the thought that he’d have to go to an orphanage. Can you imagine, a tiny baby in a Rwandan….” She suddenly looked at her sister. “Oh my God, Jenny, I’m so sorry. I wasn’t thinking. I’m rattling on about the baby and I just wasn’t thinking. Please forgive me, I feel terrible.”
“It’s fine, Emma. That was a long time ago. I hardly think about it anymore.” Jenny tried to bluff her way around the subject, but her sister had seen the tears that had come to her eyes as she remembered the pain of losing her baby and never being able to have another. The beautiful, helpless children she’d seen when she visited the Bulgarian orphanage, lost in a vortex of despair and desperate for love and affection, from anyone. “Don’t worry, I’m fine. And this is not about me, it’s about Leo. Tell me how you got him out of Rwanda and into the UK.”
“Well it was really Tony who did it. First, he had to arrange for Leo not to appear in the system.”
“So he somehow managed to register Mutesi’s death without registering Leo’s birth?”
“That’s right. But he didn’t tell me all the details. He just said we had to find a way to get Leo out of the country and nobody would ever catch on.”
“And that was difficult, I suppose?”
“Yes. Getting him out of Rwanda was the main problem. Kigali airport was hardly functioning and was under military control, so we couldn’t just turn up with an African child and fly off without a qualm. We’d have been slapped in prison and neither of us would have been heard of again and I don’t know what would have become of Leo. So, Tony came up with a plan, which actually turned out to be fairly easy. Although I was terrified something would go wrong.
“He was in charge of transport, so he could arrange the flights to make it work. He booked me on a flight to Nairobi, then to London, to send me home. His thinking was that it’s only two and a half hours to Nairobi, so if the baby’s asleep, he won’t be heard or spotted and he can
’t come to any harm in such a short time. Then he organised to send some medical samples for testing in Paris on the same flight. They were in big, insulated cases, a lot bigger than a little baby.”
“And I suppose they treat these samples cases with extreme care?”
“Exactly. Leo couldn’t have been safer than in one of those well-padded boxes with lots of air vents. They’re marked all over with stickers like, ‘Handle with Care’, ‘Right Way Up’ and ‘Do NOT Damage’.”
“But I don’t understand the Paris bit when you were going to London?”
“We couldn’t send the boxes to London, because the SOSM testing clinic is in Paris. And we couldn’t send Leo all the way to London, it would have been too dangerous for him. So when we put Leo in the case, just before he supervised the loading, Tony changed the cargo manifest and marked that box, ‘Unload in Nairobi’.”
“And he didn’t wake up and give the game away?”
“We gave him the tiniest dose of sedative, just in case, and he slept for almost five hours. Right until I got on the plane to London.”
“So, you took him out of the case in Nairobi and I suppose the controls there were pretty non-existent, so you just carried him onto the flight?”
Emma nodded. “That’s right. They took the case out and I told them I needed a room to check the samples. I had a big carry-on bag with me, like a carpet bag, with a small box with tissue samples in it, the same weight as Leo. I took him out, he was still fast asleep, and I laid him in the bag and put the samples box into the case, to compensate the weight. Then I told them to put the case on the flight to Paris with the others, so the right number of cases would arrive in Paris and avoid any suspicion. Then I just carried Leo onto the plane in the bag.”
“How ingenious. You’re right, Tony was very clever. But then how did you get him through immigration into England?”
“That part was down to me. Luckily, I still had my Red Cross passport. It’s a kind of ID card that shows you’re a trusted employee and you deserve protection, respect and all that. I was shaking like a leaf, but the immigration people are trained to trust us and they did. I told them I’d had the baby in Nairobi and he wasn’t yet on my passport. We chatted for a while then they wished me well and sent me through into London. I was so relieved that I sat on a seat in the arrivals hall with Leo on my knee and cried and cried my eyes out.”
“I’m not surprised. You must have been absolutely terrified. I don’t think I could have carried it off.” Jenny thought for a moment, “Let me see Leo’s passport. Have you still got it with you?”
Emma reached for her handbag. “Here. I’ve had it with me since we left England.”
“His birth place is registered as London. How did you manage that?”
Her sister took a deep breath. “I hope you’re not going to despise me for this, but it’s the only part of the plan which was really illegal. That’s why I’ve never talked about it before.”
Jenny shrugged and said nothing, so she continued, “Tony came back to Paris on SOSM business after I’d returned and he arranged a meeting in London so he could fly over to see me. We talked about the problem of registering Leo’s birth, because we didn’t want any mention of Rwanda, for obvious reasons. The next day, he had to go out for his meeting and when he came back, he just said, “Problem solved.”
“He gave me a photocopy of an entry in the birth’s register at University College Hospital Maternity Ward, confirming the birth of a boy to Emma Stewart on April 23rd, 1995. It was an absolutely genuine copy of a real entry, signed by Dr A. Forrester. I have no idea how he did it, but when I read it I almost fell over with happiness.
“I went along to the registry office in Marylebone Road and registered Leo’s birth, with parents as myself, single mother, and father unknown. It was a bit mortifying, but they just gave me a knowing look and stamped the form and gave me a copy and that was that. I doubt we could have got away with it now. They’d have asked for DNA tests or some kind of paperwork introduced by Brussels to prove I was the mother, but it really was that simple at the time. I had a beautiful son, all legal and proper and I was over the moon.”
“And that’s why you didn’t want to give any information to the Foreign Office in South Africa. I don’t blame you. They might have dug deep into Leo’s dossier and put two and two together.”
“Are you upset with me, Jenny? I know what Tony and I did wasn’t legal, but it wasn’t like robbing a bank, or killing someone. For us it was the opposite. We were saving a life, a life that might be lost if we didn’t do something. And we were keeping faith with Mutesi. We were looking after her son, just as she asked me.”
Jenny put her arm around her sister. “I think what you did was marvellous and I’m delighted you got away with it. You saved a life and now you have a wonderful son, so how can that be illegal? Well done you and Tony!”
Emma breathed deeply again and said, “Now, before you ask, I have to finish the story. The part about Tony. It’s not a story with only happy parts.”
She steeled herself. “Tony went back to Paris, then down to Kigali again. He had another four months to do on his contract before his first break. We were going to get married when he came back. He had two weeks off, so we’d do it in a registry office then take a week’s honeymoon in Ireland. It would be July, the weather would be nice and Leo would be three months old, so we’d be able to do a lot of things together. We’d found a flat in Marylebone with two bedrooms so I rented it and moved in with Leo the week after Tony went back down.
“We didn’t have mobile telephones then and in any case the phone system in Rwanda was terrible. He sent letters to me almost every day through the SOSM London office and I would go in and collect them. After about a month, the letters came less frequently, every week, then every other week. I knew there was something wrong, but I couldn’t afford to go down and see him. Besides, I couldn’t leave Leo, there wasn’t anyone I could trust to leave him with. I remember you were on a project in France for the LSE then, and Mum was living in that dreadful council flat in Sunderland. Anyway, you know I couldn’t have left him with her in the state she was in, so I just sat there and replied to his letters until I got the last one.”
“The one you’d dreaded?”
“Yes. He told me it was over. He’d been offered a job with the Flying Doctors, in Australia, based out of Sydney. I remembered he’d always been going on about Australia, ‘Opportunities as vast as the country’. But he didn’t think it would work, taking me and Leo there. It would be ‘too disruptive’, was his phrase, and it was best to call the whole thing off. He was happy that he’d helped me get to England with the baby, but he couldn’t foresee any future for us.
“Of course, I was sure he’d met someone else and I wrote and asked him. For the sake of honesty in our relationship I wanted to know the truth, and I was right. He told me a French girl had come down to take my place in the clinic. I remember her name, Nicole Charpentier. He’d fallen in love with her, just like he did with me and they were getting married and going together to Sydney. Afterwards I found out that she worked at SOSM in Paris, so I’m sure they were having an affair and he arranged for her to go to Rwanda to be with him.
“So, that was that. Leo and I were on our own and I just had to get used to it. Fortunately, I was still on salary from SOSM for another two months and I’d saved a little money, so I had time to find a job. It wasn’t as if I was condemned to the poor house. But it broke my heart at the time. I was in a terrible state.
“You know that feeling, Jenny. You know what it’s like. It’s just so final, so out of your control. You want to blame someone, to fight against it, to change what’s happened and get on with the life you’d planned. But there’s nothing you can do, is there? Except get on with the life that’s left to you. But I had Leo and that was worth more than anything to me.”
Jenny’s mind was back in Ipswich, after the death of Ron, her husband, killed by a pathological murderer and mad
e to look like a hit and run accident. She did know how Emma had felt, losing the man she loved, under any circumstances. Starting life again, making the most of what’s left for you to enjoy. Although she had no child to share her life and love with.
She pushed the thoughts aside. “I’m sorry, Emma. I had no idea you’d had such a disaster in your life. You could have confided in me, it might have helped, but I understand why you didn’t. You couldn’t take the chance that the truth about Leo’s birth and his British nationality would get out.
“But the main thing is that you managed to save him and you’ve loved and looked after him for the last fifteen years and he’s a son to be proud of. Now we’ve got to get through this latest episode and get him back. We’ve got to dissect your story about Mutesi and look for clues that will lead us to Leo. I’m sure his abduction is directly connected to your story and we’ve got to work out why.”
She led Emma into the office, opened her laptop and went online. “Are you up to it now, or do you need to lie down and rest while I start looking up stuff from my notes? Emma?”
Her sister grasped her by the shoulders, tears pouring down her face. “Oh, Jenny. You have to help me get Leo back. He’s my entire world. He’s all I’ve got. Since I lost Tony, I’ve built my life around him. The only reason I write those dreadful books is to make enough money to look after him, educate him and see him do well. I miss him desperately and I’m so frightened when I imagine where he might be. Who he’s with. What’s happening to him. Why he’s been taken. Please tell me we can find him and bring him back safe and sound.”
“Emma. I promise we’ll get Leo back. I promise you we will.” She tried to make her tone sound convincing, but she had no idea of what lay before them.
It was forty-two hours since Leo had been taken.
TWENTY-THREE
Johannesburg, South Africa
He was swimming. Swimming underwater. The water was thick and treacly and he couldn’t make any progress. He struggled against the weight of the water trying to drag him down but it got heavier and heavier and he slowly sank deeper and deeper, threshing around like a drowning shark. It became dark; pitch black. The pressure of the water on him was unbearable. He couldn’t breathe, his lungs empty of air, he was pulled down into the thick, watery bottom of something, something evil, a deathly place.
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