IV

La Terrasse proved to be a chic sidewalk café with glossy white furniture beneath a blue-and-gold striped canopy. Rebecca parked on a nearby side street, took a table facing the square and watched the traffic, constantly checking the time, praying that Mustafa would arrive with the money before the kidnappers got in touch. The town and its people seemed extraordinarily vivid to her, as though burnished by her adrenaline. She found it hard to stay still. Her father and her sister were just one hurdle away. She kept daydreaming about their reunion but then she’d panic about everything that might still go wrong. She tried to quash any negative thinking before it could take root, for it was like woodworm: once it was inside you, it never seemed to go away.

Her café-au-lait arrived, a jug of steaming black coffee, a small steel bowl of condensed milk. She scooped up a bulb of the sweet white treacle with her teaspoon, dangled a thin strand to make patterns in her coffee. She wiped it off with her finger, then licked it clean: sickly yet delicious, just what her body craved. She stirred in a whole spoonful, gulped the coffee down greedily before it lost its pleasurable heat.

Rebecca had suffered several bouts of negative thinking over the years, but the worst had been during her first few months in England. She’d never before spent time in a town larger or more sophisticated than Tulear. Oxford had bewildered her. All those brilliant, beautiful, shiny and learned young people. Adam’s old friends had tried to make her welcome, but it wasn’t the faculty who determined your acceptance, it was your peers. And she simply hadn’t known how to behave around them. The humiliations had piled up. Many now seemed trivial. In retrospect, they were trivial. But, at the time, they’d been mortifying. A buffet dinner had been thrown in her honour. She’d been invited to serve herself first. Everyone had gawped when she’d piled her plate high with rice from the bowl, as you did in Madagascar. A fellow guest had remarked upon it in that peculiarly hurtful put-down manner of the pompous Englishman. It hadn’t sounded like an insult, except that everybody had sniggered. And when another guest had later earned laughter by telling everyone that his grandfather had left him nothing but invoices in his will, Rebecca had tried to redeem herself by joking that her grandfather had left her only bills. The embarrassed silence had been broken by a law student with wretched skin who’d explained with great gentleness that invoices were bills. Rebecca had smiled blandly as though she’d known this all along, had spent the rest of the evening in tears in an upstairs bathroom. It had been like that for weeks. In her imagination, her fellow students had spent their lives trading jokes about her behind her back.

Rebecca didn’t crack easily; she’d have ridden her blues out in time. But while at her lowest ebb, something else had happened, rooted in an incident from the torrid years after her mother had died, during which Rebecca had sought solace in the beds of the local Malagasy boys. Shortly before her sixteenth birthday, she’d realised she was pregnant. Jean-Luc was the most likely father, but he’d denied it furiously, denied even having slept with her. He’d been sufficiently fearful of her father finding out, however, that he’d taken her to an elderly Sakalava witch east of Tulear. She’d spilled hot wax upon Rebecca’s thigh while examining her with a candle. A candle for Christ’s sake! She’d stirred a white powder in a dirty glass of water. It had tasted so bitter that Rebecca had had to hold her nose as she’d chucked it down, but she’d aborted in agony that same night.

At the end of her first term in Oxford, Rebecca had picked up an abandoned magazine from a bus seat, just for something to read. She’d chanced upon an article about women who’d had botched abortions and then subsequently been unable to conceive. She’d tried to set it aside, but she hadn’t been able to, she’d had to know the worst. Some of the women in the article seemed blasé, as though it didn’t impinge on their life-plans, but Rebecca had always yearned for children. She’d gagged suddenly on the remembered wormwood of that poison, had doubled up with cramps so violent that she’d collapsed to the floor of the bus. A passenger two rows back had pulled the emergency cord. In hospital, with trepidation bordering on despair, she’d revealed enough about her situation to a nurse with huge, empathetic eyes for a gynaecologist to be summoned. When she’d learned the news of her own likely barrenness, it had pushed her into something of a tailspin. It being the Christmas holidays by now, she’d taken to her bed, had barely got up for a fortnight. She’d felt gutted. Such an expressive word. It had left her hollow, and she’d needed something, anything, to fill her up again, to give her the sensation of substance. Her landlady, a kindly Caribbean widow, had provided her with a portable black-and-white TV that she’d kept by her bed. She’d watched it all the time, forever adjusting the wire aerial to improve the reception. It had given her an excuse not to think. And gradually, watching day after day, she’d come to realise something that everyone in England took for granted, but which had been alien to her until then. She’d realised what a wonderful thing celebrity was, the respect it commanded, the doors it opened, the insulation it offered. And just like that, her ambition for a career in television had—

‘Salaam, Rebecca!’

She looked up, startled. A man had appeared at her table, beaming warmly down at her, rocking back on his heels. Without his uniform on, it took her a moment to recognise him: Andriama, Tulear’s chief of police. She stared at him in horror. Mustafa was about to arrive with the money, and the kidnappers should already have contacted her. And if any of them saw her talking with this man, it would wreck her chances of getting Adam and Emilia back alive.