II

Rebecca took a moment to calm herself before she took the phone. ‘This is Rebecca Kirkpatrick,’ she said.

‘You have the money?’ A man’s voice, but the signal was too weak and the crackle too loud for her to tell much more than that.

‘Yes,’ she lied. ‘Yes I do.’

‘You have one hour. There is—’

‘I want to speak to my father.’

‘You have one hour. There is a sheet—’

‘I speak to my father or you get nothing,’ she yelled. She ended the call and stood there clutching the phone in trembling hands, waiting for it to ring again, praying for it to ring. The phone’s owner reached tentatively to take it from her. She held up a palm to fend him off. They’d call back. For five hundred million ariary, they’d call back. If they didn’t call, it meant they didn’t have Adam and Emilia, it had all been a sham. She’d go straight to Andriama and tell—

The phone jumped suddenly in her hand. She almost spilled it. ‘Do that again,’ said the man, when she answered, ‘and we kill them both. You understand?’

‘I want to speak with—’

Another man’s voice came on. ‘Rebecca,’ he said. ‘Rebecca, my darling.’

The sound of his voice transfixed her. She’d have recognised it anywhere. ‘Dad!’ she wailed. ‘Dad.’

‘Please, Rebecca. Do as they ask. We’re both well but—’

There was the sound of scuffling and then the kidnapper came back on. ‘You have one hour,’ he told her curtly. ‘There’s a map beneath your windscreen wiper. Follow its directions to the place marked. Travel alone. We will be watching. You understand?’

‘Yes.’

‘You will find a yellow bag there. Put the money in the bag then return to Tulear. Tell no one. If the money is all there, we will release your father and sister. If not—’ The phone went dead. Rebecca stared at it dumbly. The trader took it back from her, asked apologetically for money. She reached into her bag and thrust some banknotes at him. She couldn’t concentrate, she couldn’t think of anything but the echo of her father’s voice. Rebecca, my darling! He’d never called her that before! Yvette had always been his one and only darling. She felt euphoric, drunk and terrified all at once. Rebecca, my darling! He was alive. Emilia was alive. She was going to get them back. She walked unsteadily to the Jeep. A map. The man had said something about a map. But where? She couldn’t remember. She searched anxiously until she found it tucked beneath her wiper.

‘Hey!’

Rebecca turned to see Andriama hurrying towards her. She threw the map on to her passenger seat, climbed in and roared away. Andriama chased her for a few paces before giving up and waving down a taxi. She swung left at the first opportunity, left again, hiding herself in the maze of streets. She looked in her rear-view, couldn’t see anyone following. She unfolded the crude map on her steering wheel as she drove, but it was difficult to read, what with her eyes blurred and the roads bumpy and her hands shaking wildly. She pulled to the side. It directed her to take Route Nationale 7 through Andranohinaly, past an orange road-side stall and then down a track to her right. Andranohinaly was on the way to Ilakaka, the same road Mustafa would currently be driving along in the other direction. A stroke of luck at last! She took out his card and dialled his mobile. It rang and rang but nobody answered. She called his home instead and made Ahdaf describe her father’s car: a blue Mercedes 4x4 with tinted windows. She was putting her phone back in her bag when she noticed the GPS transmitter. She’d forgotten all about it, but now she switched it on and put it in her pocket, set off again for the Ilakaka road.

Traffic was mercifully thin, but she’d only driven about eight miles when the Jeep began to limp and then she heard the distinctive flapping of a flat tyre. She gave a cry and pulled to the side. The Jeep’s tyres had been popping forever; she’d changed them often in the distant past. She fetched the spare and kit. The bolts felt welded on. She had to stamp down with her foot on the very end of the spanner to get them loose. And the ground was so soft that her jack kept giving a little under the Jeep’s weight. Haste and the trembles caused her to fumble and drop the spanner and the nuts, but at last she was done. Half an hour wasted. Half an hour! She tossed everything in the back and raced away, still scanning the road for Mustafa’s blue Mercedes. When finally she saw it, she flashed her lights and tooted until he pulled to the side. She parked across the road from him, jumped out, ran across. ‘The money?’ she cried. ‘Have you got the money?’

‘Of course,’ he said, getting out and going around to his boot. ‘I gave you my word.’

‘I’m late. I’m dreadfully late.’

‘Calm down. Please. You must be—’

‘Calm? Don’t tell me to be calm! Andriama knows. He’s on to us.’

Mustafa’s face fell. ‘But you promised to say nothing.’

‘It’s not my fault. He heard you’d been raising money.’

‘Oh.’ He stroked his chin, shook his head. ‘If that is all he knows, then he knows nothing.’ He threw open his boot, unzipped and pulled open the mouth of a black holdall, stuffed with thick bundles of banknotes. ‘Count,’ he told her.

‘There’s no time.’

‘You must count,’ he insisted.

She shrugged her shoulders helplessly, tipped the money out, stacked up the bundles. She kept glancing down the road, expecting the police at any second. There were fifty bundles in all, five piles of ten. She tested two at random. Each comprised ten wads of twenty brandnew 50,000 ariary notes stapled together. It took her a few moments to do the arithmetic, then she nodded at Mustafa. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now you remember what I told you about interest?’

A knot of stress tightened in Rebecca’s nape. ‘Can’t we sort this out later?’

‘I had to sign a contract to get this money,’ he told her. He took two sets of papers from his jacket pocket, rested them on the side window. ‘That is what took me so long, because my lawyer had to make sure—’

‘For heaven’s sake!’

He said apologetically: ‘Please. You must understand my situation. This is a great deal of money. I had to give certain undertakings before I could borrow it. I need to secure myself against any loss, but I wouldn’t want you to think I’d take advantage of you. If you read then sign each of the pages, as I’ve already done, then we can—’

‘I don’t have the time.’

Mustafa spread his hands. ‘I’m sorry, but I must have some form of receipt. Surely you can see that.’

Rebecca put a hand to her forehead. ‘What does it say? Tell me what it says.’

‘Certainly.’ He took one of the contracts and began to read it aloud.

‘No!’ she cried. ‘How much interest?’

‘Ah. Let me see.’ He leafed through the pages. ‘Yes. Here it is. Five per cent, with two weeks to repay. But if it goes over two weeks, there are certain penalties.’

‘What penalties?’

‘Give me a moment,’ he said, shuffling through the pages.

Rebecca shook her head in dismay. She had no time for this. ‘Your pen,’ she said.

‘But you should read this before you—’

‘Give me your fucking pen!’ She peeled the bandage from her right palm, signed the pages of both contracts, stuffed one copy in her holdall. The fresh air felt sharp and good upon her lacerated but healing palm, so she tore the bandages from her left hand too, then packed the money back in the holdall. It was so heavy she had to heft it across to the Jeep. She threw it on the passenger seat, ran round to the driver’s door. Mustafa came across. ‘Thank you,’ she told him.

He waved it away. ‘Is there anything else I can do?’

Rebecca shook her head. ‘They told me to go there alone. They said they’d be watching.’

‘Good luck, then.’

She nodded and sped away, horribly aware that she was already late, praying that the kidnappers would cut her a little slack.