‘Excuse me?’
Kirsten checks the safe; it’s empty. Keke’s Tile is gone.
‘Maybe something spooked her and she ran for it,’ says Kirsten, more to reassure herself than anything else. ‘Maybe she’s hiding out, waiting for to hear from us.’
She dials Keke’s number, and they both jump when a disembodied voice starts singing from underneath the desk. Elvis Presley: A Little Less Conversation. Kirsten scrabbles around on the floor, and she finds Keke’s phone.
‘Fuck,’ she says again. Keke would leave a lot of things behind in a hurry, but never her phone. ‘They’ve taken her.’
All her contacts. More importantly: her SugarApp.
Seth scrunches up his face. ‘Elvis?’ he says, ‘really?’
While she is on the floor she spots the Beckoning Cat flash drive. Thank God, she thinks, they didn’t know it was a drive. She holds it up to Seth, pushes its belly to reveal the tail. ‘They left her flash drive.’ He takes it from her, plugs it into his Tile.
Kirsten uses her pocketknife to unlock the fridge. As soon as she opens the door she sees Keke’s insulin kit and there is another wave of cold water. She shuts her eyelids against the glow of the refrigerator, wishing the insulin away, but it’s there again when she opens them. She puts it on the desk in front of Seth.
‘We’ve got seven hours to find her.’
‘Hey?’
‘Seven hours to go,’ she says, ‘before Keke… gets really sick without her insulin.’ She says ‘really sick’ but what she means is: ‘die’ – she just can’t say it out loud.
‘She’s diabetic?’ he asks. Kirsten doesn’t answer. She sits back down on the floor and closes her eyes for a while. After a few minutes Seth is kneeling down in front of her. He touches her gently on the shoulder. It buzzes.
‘Kirsten?’ he says. ‘I think we’ve got something.’
THE SEVEN THAT WERE TAKEN
26
Johannesburg, 2021
There are two folders on Keke’s Maneki Neko flash drive. The first one is called ‘The Seven That Were Taken’ and has seven old, scanned and archived newspaper articles, dated from 1991. The second folder – ‘R.I.P.’ – contains four recent PDFs from Echo.news
They start with the folder called R.I.P. Kirsten recognises the first article immediately. She had read it a week or so before at her shoot at the aquarium, about Betty/Barbara being found dead in her flat.
‘This is – was – her,’ says Kirsten. ‘The crazy woman who gave me the key.’
‘The key?’ asks Seth.
‘The key that opened the safety deposit box at the seed bank that had the list in it. Look at the date of her birth, the colours are backwards.’
Seth frowns at her. ‘You are truly odd.’
‘Look,’ she says, and shows him that Betty/Barbara’s date of birth is backwards in the third line of numbers on the list.
‘So the one date is our birth date,’ he says. ‘What is the other?’
They open the next article. It’s about a well-known composer, found dead in his bathtub, by his lover. Drowned, it said, apparent suicide, or accident, although the lover wouldn’t accept it, said they had everything to live for. They were about to be garried: a trip to Paris planned for spring, after an intimate wedding in Paternoster. On finding the blue body, the lover had smashed up the apartment, destroying any evidence that may have existed. He swears foul play: Blanco’s most prized possession was missing: an antique ivory piano key from a Roger Williams piano. It had been his proposal gift. He required sedation, and was not being treated as a suspect. The musician was dead, their future washed away in a couple of inches of waxy grey liquid (Cold Dishwater).
‘It could have been suicide,’ says Seth.
‘He was first on the list.’
Seth hesitates, then opens the next document. A picture of a blonde woman laughing into the camera comes up on screen. Top executive dies in front of toddler son. The story is about a high-flyer corporate who accidentally ingested peanut matter – the source unknown – and went into anaphylactic shock and died in the kids’ park down the road from her office. The people at the park had tried to resuscitate her but her airways were swollen closed and CPR wasn’t successful. The white-haired child was taken in first by the paramedics, then the policewoman on the case, and eventually collected by the husband who had unplugged on the golf course and had heard about his wife’s death on the radio on the way home from the pub. The fourth article was Soraya’s organ failure. He had felt a connection to Soraya. Coincidence?
They move on to the second folder; there is a picture of an awkward little boy, a toddler, dressed in a brown suit, sitting on a piano stool in front of a baby grand. Baby Beethoven Kidnapped, reads the headline.
‘The drowned composer,’ says Kirsten.
Seth opens the other archived articles: they are all stories of abduction. Toddler Missing, about a too-blonde two-year-old who could speak 4 different languages. The executive.
Has anyone seen Betty Schoeman? A mug shot of a not-pretty baby dressed in old-fashioned clothes, frowning at the camera. Betty/Barbara.
Child Abducted from Nursery School, reads another, about Jeremy Bond, a two-year-old snatched from a crèche playground just minutes before his parents arrived to collect him.
Seth reads the fifth one:
Saturday Star, July 1991
Toddler Kidnapped While Father Shops
Tragedy struck in the friendly city today in the unlikeliest of places. Young Ben Jacobz (14 months old) escaped his pram in a department store at Green Acres Mall, Port Elizabeth. ‘He was always so fast,’ his mother told us, unable to keep from crying. ‘He started crawling at eight months, was walking by ten. He would just tear around the place like the Duracell bunny.’
Baby Ben managed to toddle out of the store while his father was standing in the queue to pay for some clothes for him. ‘It happened all the time,’ says Mrs Jacobz, ‘his uncle used to call him Now-You. Now you see him, now you don’t.’
‘We even tried one of those terrible things,’ said Mr Jacobz. ‘Those toddler leashes, but he would […] throw a tantrum. He hated it.’
As soon as the boy’s father spotted the empty pram he left the queue and started looking for him. ‘I wasn’t too worried yet,’ he said, ‘Ben did it all the time and we always found him.’ But then he saw a strange woman outside the entrance of the store pick the baby up. ‘I started shouting at her, and at Ben, but she didn’t look at me and hurried off […] and disappeared into the crowd. I started running after them, and that’s when the guards tackled me.’ Mr Jacobz was unknowingly still holding store merchandise when he ran out of the door, setting the alarm off. The security guards, not aware of the kidnapping, saw him ‘make a run for it’ and apprehended him. When he could finally explain the situation the baby was gone.
The police have launched an extensive search. They ask that the public keep a look out for anything suspicious.
‘We’re sure they’ll find him and bring him home,’ said Mrs Jacobz. It was then Mr Jacobz broke down weeping.
That had to have been William Soraya. Ben/Bill. They open the last PDF.
The Observer, 21 May 1991
Snatched
Twin tragedy hits small Durban suburb
After a gruelling 48-hour search in uncharacteristically cold weather for the missing Chapman toddlers of Westville, KZN, the South African Police called off the operation as of 2 a.m. this morning. The brown-eyed twins, Samuel and Kate, (3) were last seen in the front garden of their parents’ home before Mrs Anne Chapman moved inside to answer a telemarketing phone call on the landline. Less than a minute later the children had, according to their mother, ‘vanished’.