Rift

  Beverley Birch

  RIFT

  Copyright

  Rift

  Copyright © 2006 Beverly Birch

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher

  Egmont UK Ltd

  239 Kensington High Street

  London

  W8 6SA

  Visit our web site at www.egmont.co.uk

  First e-book edition August 2009

  ISBN 978 1 4052 49362

  For my daughters, Kate and Rachel

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  first day: waking

  darkness

  first light

  7 a.m.

  8 a.m.

  3 p.m.

  second day: Chomlaya

  daybreak

  7 a.m

  8 a.m

  10 a.m.

  11 a.m.

  noon

  3 p.m.

  nightfall

  deep night

  third day: footprints

  new dawn

  Postscript

  first day: waking

  darkness

  Ella turned her head, listened. Only the faint tick of her wristwatch in the heavy silence, and the boy’s quiet presence. Darkness, thick and hot.

  The boy had not moved: she was mistaken. Stiffly, she shifted her legs. Knotted muscles throbbed. She was sweating, yet cold.

  How many hours till dawn?

  She rolled over. Her eyes, travelling the dark, found the pale square of the newspaper. It lay on the floor beside her camp-bed, next to the backpack and shoes. She couldn’t see the headline, but she didn’t need to. She knew it by heart.

  Front page, main story:

  MIRACLE RESCUE OF MISSING BOY

  Mystery deepens in ‘Chomlaya Vanishings’

  Missing British schoolboy, Joe Wilson, 14, has been found alive by young goat-herds at the base of Chomlaya Rocks.

  Joe disappeared two days ago from his camp at the southern base of Chomlaya. Two other young British visitors, Matt Fisher and Anna Benham, and a local boy, Silowa Asumoa, disappeared at the same time. British journalist Charlotte Tanner, 29, also vanished some time that day. It is not known whether the two events are linked.

  Children tending goats spotted Joe wandering in a dry river gully which descends from the steep north slope of Chomlaya. District Commissioner James Meshami told us, ‘It is many days’ travel from the students’ camp at the south of the precipitous ridge. We do not know how the boy could have reached the other side of Chomlaya, over such difficult and dangerous terrain.’

  Joe was flown by helicopter to the nearest hospital at Nanzakoto township, fifty miles west of the camp.

  Mystery deepens

  Hopes of clues to the location of the others have collapsed, however, as Joe has no memory of the past few days.

  Not a single trace of the other three youngsters or the journalist has been found. Police, game rangers and scores of local people continue to scour the area.

  In an effort to widen the search, the government has announced that two more army helicopters will be deployed and a senior detective, Inspector Simo Murothi, is being sent in to help the local team led by DC Meshami.

  Pictures, possibilities – terrifying possibilities – swarmed through Ella’s mind. She forced her gaze away from the newspaper. She fixed on the sound of the boy’s slow breathing: the one thread of hope, this stranger asleep in the bed across the hospital room.

  Joe woke. A river of sound surged round him, vast, wild. Yet already it was dying, no more now than the slow, soft ebb of a distant tide . . .

  He sat up. His throat was raw. His tongue traced his lips – dry blisters, cracked sores – he wondered at it, longed for water, wondered too at the small dark room cut by a shaft of moonlight through the window, crossing the floor and striping his sheets.

  He turned his head. There was a camp-bed against the wall, the shadow of someone on it. He tried to fix its meaning in his mind, failed.

  He fell back again and closed his eyes.

  Ella heard Joe move. She sat up.

  In the sudden wash of moonlight she could see his skin damp with sweat, bruises and scratches on his outflung arm. She eased herself off the camp-bed and went across to him, bent down, peered into his face. But he was still, seemed to sleep again, and there was nothing for her to do.

  A renewed, bleak terror rose – for this boy, rescued, but from what? For her sister, missing. For the others, missing.

  For herself.

  In sleep, she thought, the boy looks so young, younger than he is, younger than me, and he isn’t. She had the urge to touch him, to somehow soothe him as if he was a small child, as she wished someone would soothe her, stroking everything frightening away.

  Does he know what’s happened? Is he remembering, after all?

  She returned to the camp-bed. She lowered herself on to it, carefully, not wanting the creak or the scrape of the metal legs on the concrete floor to wake him.

  Joe’s eyes snapped open. A shadow had touched his face. He lifted his head: only the rush of clouds across the sky, shrouding the moon, passing . . . moonlight repaints the room, white bands rippled by the fitful pattern of trees.

  He felt a coldness now, a darkness nudging from memory, a glimmer of shape and shadow and flame –

  The echo swirls from the dark like the stroking wings of an insect, a boundless, urgent murmuring; he knows only its rhythm, the beat of his own heart, and the vast, soaring stillness beyond . . .

  first light

  Already the sky was paling. Hesitant bird cries sharpened Ella’s restlessness. She threw back the covers, leaned down and searched for the notebook in her bag on the floor.

  The photo came to hand first. Inspector Murothi had given it to her yesterday. She tilted it to catch the faint light from the window, and studied it again.

  Two faded green tents. Grass, trees – and beyond, the glint of water and yellowing reeds.

  In the foreground, two boys. The boy here in the hospital bed is one: Joe. The second is also one of the missing English students. Both pose, laughing for the camera, gazing at distant frontiers, hands shading eyes, packs shouldered.

  Behind, two people sit cross-legged on the grass by the tents. They face each other: English girl and lanky, long-haired African boy. The girl’s face, turned slightly to one side, is unnaturally bleached by the harsh glare of the sun. The contours of the boy’s features are lost in shadow on his dark skin and he looks down at something small lying on the paler palm of his hand. The girl’s looking at the object too, her hand is underneath his, as if steadying it; with one finger of the other hand she seems to touch the shape: there’s that tilt of her head, as if she’s thinking about it, as if she’s on the point of speaking. Everything about these two suggests a taut, private alliance, uninterrupted by the antics of the others. Or by the approach of the woman walking between the tents. Though if you look closely you can see that she’s gesturing at them, probably talking. Short, bushy fair hair, baggy trousers, so familiar, so recognisable . . .

  Charly.

  Yesterday, showing her the photo, telling her that this was all of the five people who went missing, all together, the inspector had tapped the faces one by one, named them: the English students – Joe, Matt, Anna. The African boy, Silowa. And at the back, the journalist, Charlotte: I am told this is your sister, Miss Tanner, he’d added. Let me say to you that I am most extremely sorry.

  Charly.

  It’s important, this photo, Ella thought.
She’d said that to the inspector. But he’d answered: friends take pictures of each other, do you not think, Miss Tanner? I am not sure a photograph made weeks ago is of particular importance in these peculiar events.

  ‘Peculiar events’. The inspector’s phrase nagged at her, and his face after he’d said it, snapping his mouth shut as if he regretted the words.

  It is important! He’s got to see. I’ve got to get to Chomlaya, so I can see!

  She sat up. She swung her feet to the ground. She slipped the photo into the pages of her notebook and put it on her pillow, ready. She found her washing things, clean clothes, got up and went out into the corridor looking for a bathroom. She washed, changed, returned. Wondered whether to go in search of the nurse or the doctor to ask what would happen to Joe today. Catch them before the hospital clinics begin: on the way in yesterday, with the inspector, she’d seen the crowds. Afternoon: clumps of people sitting and leaning in deep shadows along outer walls. Waiting and waiting and waiting. Some of them walked days to get here, the inspector said, maybe fifty, sixty miles across plains, across relentless, waterless scrubland. He’d ushered her through them. She’d felt wrong, conspicuous, awkward. Unfair. Wanting to say I’m not jumping queues, not taking anyone’s place – just here to visit the English boy who was lost. They eyeing her, expressions unreadable.

  But not unfriendly, it occurred to her now. Not hostile. Curious, maybe, knowing; maybe they know why I’m here, maybe everyone knows, like they know why Joe’s here, and the stranger policeman: Inspector Murothi come all the way up from the city.

  She pushed the window wide. Outside the air was crisp. A light breeze carried a quickening chorus of birdwhistles and chirrups and throaty chuckles from the scrubby bush beyond the hospital grounds. Yellowing grass flanked a dirt road from the hospital to the narrow tarmac strip that was the main road north through Nanzakoto. A lone herdsman crossed the junction. The red dawn glow struck a glint from the point of his spear, and bony cattle ambled about the empty road ahead of him.

  Her gaze moved beyond, above the fringe of trees and the scatter of homes, to the blue-silver haze of the plain. But it would change, fast: yesterday she’d seen it burning rust-red to the walls of the distant, sculpted rock-face of Chomlaya.

  Up there, the search went on, helicopters going all through the night. ‘New hope,’ Inspector Murothi had said. He meant since they’d found Joe yesterday. He’d said it like a promise: New hope for your sister, Miss Tanner.

  A memory cut in: last night, a young nurse bringing her to this room, We must put you here with this boy, because there is no other place for you. This boy is apart in a room we keep for visiting doctors, because the police did not want anyone to speak to him until they learned what he remembered by himself.

  Why? Ella had asked. What do they suspect? The nurse just pursing her lips in a wordless answer that Ella couldn’t even begin to read.

  The memory spiked a prickle of fear. The inspector thought Charly and the others were just lost, not taken by anyone? Didn’t he?

  Loud in the quiet room, Joe turned over, kicked off his sheets. They slid slowly to the floor. Ella lifted them, covered him, wished he’d wake so they could talk.

  Instead she was left to fold up the bedding on the camp-bed. She rolled up the clothes she had travelled in from London and had now slept in. She pushed them into her pack. Then she took her notebook from the pillow and went to sit on the window-sill where the dawn light was strengthening.

  Joe senses her there. He senses the room, and the rising chorus of birds, and the brightening air. But he is moving beyond, into dark – into the rising murmur, into the pulse of the darkness, into the beat of his own heart, into the vast, calling echo beyond.

  Inspector Simo Murothi scraped the chair back and stood up. The yellow lamp-glow had obscured the arrival of daylight, but he was aware suddenly of the strip of brightness beneath the door. He needed to escape the rumpled bed, used for a few hours before his somersaulting brain had forced him up; the police files on the table, the morass of fact and speculation about these inexplicable Chomlaya vanishings. And escape his worrying about the young English girl, Ella, he had left in the hospital.

  He had persuaded the nurses to lodge her for the night. But what now, what today and tomorrow and the day after that? What did you do with a foreign child, an orphan foreign child, just fourteen years old, flying 6,000 miles from home, alone, on an impulse, into the middle of Africa? Such foolishness! Such obstinacy. He’d had to wrestle the truth out of the child!

  Who knows you are here?

  I left a note for my friends.

  What about your family?

  Charly’s here.

  Yes, of course, Miss Tanner, but I mean your family at home.

  There isn’t any.

  Where are they, then?

  They aren’t anywhere.

  I do not understand.

  I live with Charly.

  No one else?

  My mum and dad are dead.

  Ah! Ah! I am sorry – I am very sorry –

  They were in a car accident when I was seven.

  And so now you live with your sister?

  Well, see, Charly was twenty-two when it happened, and she wanted to look after me, so they let her.

  And your sister is twenty-nine now?

  Yes.

  So what happens when your sister – Charly – when Charly is away working? Like now.

  There’s our friends, Holly and Christine. Holly’s my best friend, Christine’s her mum.

  So they come to stay with you?

  No, see, they live next door . . .

  Challenging him, all the time. That direct, unblinking stare daring him to send her back.

  A nightmare, this Chomlaya case! Wandering orphans looking for only sisters. Thirty British youngsters, a handful of teachers, at the foot of a wild rock-face, in the middle of a hot, arid plain, a day’s driving at least from the nearest road. What are you doing there? he wanted to demand. Apart from losing people? The police enquiries so far did not tell him, not really, not in a way that satisfied.

  He pulled the room door wide. It brought a flood of bright warmth, dawn air spiced with a lingering dewy dampness. He ducked below the overhang of the veranda roof and stepped out into the compound. The square of beaten earth was neatly swept, empty, except for the flagpole spearing upwards, silhouetted against the rim of the sun and topped by the still, hunched figure of a crow. Below, the flag hung motionless. Not a breath of wind, not a breath of sound: his own footfall on the earth was an intrusion.

  Suddenly, this unnerved Murothi. Where he came from, police stations were always open, a constable on duty at least. Here, no one moved in the sleeping quarters or the small stone building of the police station – office and cell. Even the dogs were silent. Maybe he was alone here, in a place where policemen expected not one single problem during the long hours of darkness and went comfortably home, letting trouble wait till the morning. Maybe he was imprisoned here, in a half-world between night and day, until someone chose to rescue him!

  He was stooping slightly. He straightened to his full height. Murothi, you become ridiculous, he rebuked himself. Always, you leap to stupid thoughts! Of course these people will ignore you. They think you are a big puff adder lying in their path. They do not disturb you in case you bite. District Commissioner Meshami’s face had said it: ‘We will find these vanishing foreigners without upstart outsiders like you, sent by the Minister. Do not hurry into my place, Inspector Murothi, to prove your cleverness and the stupidity of the police of the Northern Province.’

  Vanishing foreigners. Murothi turned and looked east, into the flare of the climbing sun. Somewhere in that immense wild place below, four people had utterly vanished. At some time no one could pinpoint. For reasons no one could guess.

  Be quick, Murothi! the Minister had instructed. Silence the newspapers. Vanishing foreigners meant Falling Tourist Bookings and Wild Speculation: animals, snakes, kidnap,
armed gangs, ivory poachers, a rogue army unit from across the western border . . .

  Be quick! How? Snap his fingers, like some god, and the lost will be found?

  ‘Why me?’ he had asked. ‘That Chomlaya place is not my place. I do not understand it. There is the District Commissioner there. There are the game rangers there. They know that place –’

  But you are very clever with journalists. Very clever with hysterical relatives.

  But what if the story is bad? Murothi thought. What if the story is just bad?

  Sitting at the hospital window, Ella stared at her notebook, still empty. She’d meant to shape the clutter of questions in her head into some kind of plan. Instead, yesterday crowded in: the airport in Ulima; the taxi launched like a battering ram through thick city traffic; its driver, fretting: The search for vanished people is famous! In the newspaper I read it! You must go to the police post, I will take you fast, straight now! Escorting her in, pushing her to the enquiry desk, tapping for attention, drawing only the disdainful glare of the policewoman: I know nothing; I hold out no hope.

  That apology on the taxi driver’s face! She’d trailed him back to the door, struggled to make sense of the coins, let him pick them from her palm, show her, squealing at the tip she offered: No, no! SUCH a child you are! DO NOT BE SO FOOLISH! To come to this country alone! You must pay just the fare or you will have no money, you must not be CARELESS like this! Wait here, wait, talk to the policemen. Thin, elderly, he’d climbed stiffly into his taxi, nudged it back into the clatter of the street, swung out of sight. And for a moment, aloneness had paralysed her. She’d forced herself back to the waiting-room where people wandered in and out, slept on benches, the place heavy with a sultry, drifting mood that said there’d be days and days spent here –