The Lubetkin Legacy

Violet: The Chair

Thwack! The blow jerks her into consciousness. She can feel a bruise starting to form.

‘Tell us where you put the papers. Else we kill you.’

The older man is standing over her, while the younger one is tying her to a chair from behind. The third man, the van driver, has disappeared.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. My office is full of papers.’ She struggles to control the wobble in her voice. Did Queenie or someone else in her office betray her? Lynette? Could Marc have alerted his client?

‘We know you got papers about Nzangu. You better tell us where you put them, else we rape you then we spoil your pretty face, white bitch.’

She feels something cold and smooth like a blade against her throat. She feels it move upwards until it rests on her cheek. Her heart is thumping like a fish on a deck, but she digs her fingernails into her palms and orders herself to stay cool. Breathe deeply, she tells herself. Keep breathing, in and out, don’t let the fear take over.

‘We already got Queenie,’ says the first man.

‘We gonna kill her too, if you don’t talk,’ adds the other.

Have they really kidnapped Queenie, or is Queenie part of the plot? Who told Nzangu about the photocopies? Her brain is fuzzy from pain and terror.

‘I … I can’t remember. Mtu ni utu, be human, brothers,’ she pleads, playing for time. Her voice echoes back to her against the bare walls.

‘This’ll help you remember!’

Thwack! A jab of pain rushes down her left temple to her jaw. If only they would stop hitting her, she would be able to think what to do.

The blow has dislodged the blindfold, and she can see that she is in a long low-ceilinged room with a square window at one end. It looks like some kind of storeroom, with things shrouded in plastic stacked up against the walls. What things? She tries to make out the shape. They look like buckets. Hundreds of buckets. The window is closed, and the air is thick and humid. She can smell the men’s sweat and the sharp scent of her own fear. A warm trickle runs down the inside of her leg.

‘Waga got your key. He gone search your office. If you tell us, it will go better for you.’ It is the older man talking. His voice is less aggressive than the young man.

‘They’re not in the office. I … I posted them. Didn’t Queenie tell you?’

She hid the copies so casually inside the computer manual that a thorough search of the office would surely uncover them, if somebody knew what they were looking for. She thinks of the re-invoices she posted to Gillian Chalmers in London. She will have got them by now, but has she read them? And even if she has, will she do anything about them? Or might she just as well have posted them to Marc himself?

‘You’re lying, white bitch.’ The younger man is short and heavily built, with a sneering twang to his voice.

She feels his rough hand cover her breast. She shudders. No one has ever called her white before. Nor a bitch, for that matter. In different circumstances it might amuse her.

‘Who you post them to?’ asks the older man, who is thin with greying hair and deeply lined cheeks.

‘I posted them to the office of the corruption investigator of course.’ She wonders who, if anybody, occupies that precarious post at present, since the resignation of Johnny Githongo. ‘On Friday. On my way home.’ She hopes they don’t press for details, or they will soon realise she’s bluffing. ‘Whatever you do to me, he will get them tomorrow. Nzangu and his hangers-on will be in prison, and nothing you can do will save him now. But if you let me go at least you will save yourselves.’ Her voice doesn’t sound as confident as she intends, but at least she is managing to hold back her tears.

The two men speak together in their own language. She catches the word ofisi — office — and the name Waga. Their talk is interrupted by the sound of a mobile phone ringing — ping-ping-ping, ping-ping-ping — she listens to it for a few moments before she recognises the ringtone as her own. They must have got the phone from her bag. She hears them muttering as they fumble to switch it off behind her back; the ringing stops, and her grandmother’s voice, faint from a few metres away but still distinct on speakerphone, says, ‘Mpenzi, where you got to? When you coming for your lunch?’

The men listen but neither of them speaks.

‘Who is it?’ asks the older one in a whisper.

Without answering him, she heaves herself forward, dragging the chair on the ground in the direction of the phone and screams, ‘It’s Violet! Help! Help! Help!’

Thwack! Her head jolts back as it takes the blow, and darkness falls.