30.

I imagined Langdon would take charge at the police station, that the whole conversation would be in French and that I’d have to rely on Xander to translate, but I was wrong on all counts. Langdon led us into the breeze-block building and asked the sergeant on the desk if he could find someone who spoke English. When, some minutes later, a Detective Hubert arrived on the scene with a very clear, ‘How can I help you?’ Langdon flipped his thumb in my direction and said, ‘This poor boy has lost his parents and wants to report them missing.’

Detective Hubert’s sympathetic face made something well up inside me. I struggled to hold it together: the last thing Dad would want me to do in this situation is blub like a baby. But Langdon saying out loud that I’d ‘lost’ my parents brought it all home. It stoked my fear, clouding my head with panicky sparks. I tried to stay focused. The policeman picked up a laptop from a nearby desk awash with papers, snapped it shut, tucked it under his arm and took us to an interview room. Somebody in the station evidently liked spider plants. The one shelf in the room, high on the back wall, was a forest of them. Spider plants spread by growing new miniature versions of themselves at the end of long thin droopy stalks. All those spider-plant offspring searching for soil in mid-air made the panic roar up inside me again. My face grew red with it. Detective Hubert offered me a glass of water before we began.

I liked him. He let me explain who I was, who my parents were, what they were doing here in Kinshasa, why they had decided to head east, without interrupting me, despite the fact that not everything I said was relevant. I could tell that by watching his fingers. They tapped away at the keyboard when the detail was useful, and sat calmly on the tabletop when it wasn’t. To his credit, Langdon didn’t interrupt me either. Not until I petered out with a vague, ‘They didn’t leave me a message and I don’t know exactly where they were going.’

Then he said, ‘They left a message through me, Jack.’ To the policeman he added, ‘I offered to organise their transport, but my sister-in-law had already made arrangements. She’s a formidable woman and her husband – my brother – a most capable man. They had the address of my business operation. I understood that’s where they were headed. But either voluntarily or otherwise, they’ve clearly been … waylaid.’

Detective Hubert said, ‘Most worrying for you, Jack. I’m sorry.’ His voice was deep and smooth as treacle, at odds with his thin frame and scrawny neck. Yet the sorry was sincere, no doubt about it, and his, ‘We’ll do our utmost to help end the uncertainty for you, I promise,’ was reassuring. I hadn’t realised it, but I’d been gripping the desk hard as I said my piece. Now I let go. It wasn’t long before I was clamping the thing tight again, however, thanks to Amelia.

‘Excuse me,’ she piped up, ‘but I have to point this out –’

‘You’re sure about that?’ muttered Xander.

‘Yes. You two –’ she nodded from Langdon to the police detective and back again – ‘are using deliberately wishy-washy words. Voluntarily or otherwise waylaid and end the uncertainty skirt round Jack’s real concerns. He’s worried someone has got hold of his parents and hurt them, or worse. What he wants is for you to find them and bring them back to him, not pretend everything’s OK.

Amelia was totally right – as usual – and totally wrong at the same time. Of course I wanted my parents found. But a bit of reassurance in the meantime from the policeman had actually made me feel better. I wouldn’t have minded the ‘better’ bit carrying on for a while. She meant well though, so I shot her a grateful smile and asked Detective Hubert, who was actually scratching his head while looking at Amelia askance, what would happen next.

‘I need photographs of them,’ he said. ‘For identification purposes.’

I’d thought of that and had two good headshot portraits I’d taken ready on my phone. The policeman gave me an email address to send them to, but it turned out that either his laptop or the police station’s Wi-Fi was on a go-slow; though the email showed as sent on my phone, for ages it didn’t show up in the relevant inbox on his screen. I counted the spider plants – parents and sprouting offspring – while we waited. There were fifty-nine in total.

‘Not exactly confidence-inspiring,’ Amelia stated after the detective had apologised a second time for the continuing delay.

‘These things happen. It’ll work eventually.’

‘Do you want me to have a look at the router configuration, help pinpoint the problem?’ Amelia offered.

‘Thank you, but no,’ said Hubert with a smile.

‘Why not?’

‘It’s a police computer, Amelia,’ Xander said patiently. ‘As a rule they’re not just handed over to the public.’

‘I suppose not,’ she conceded. ‘But at least he should turn everything on and off at the wall.’

‘I suppose he should,’ said the detective. ‘In the meantime he could also ask Jack to text the photographs, or share them on WhatsApp.’

‘You do know I’m talking about you, don’t you?’ asked Amelia.

‘Amelia’s smart in a particular way,’ I told the policeman. ‘What’s your number? I’ll text them through.’

I’d just pressed send when the Wi-Fi kicked back in, so now detective Hubert had the photographs twice. Why that made me feel better I don’t know. In his smooth, deep voice he said he’d share them with the authorities in Goma and beyond, and he tried again to reassure me that, in his experience, communications difficulties were generally just that in the DRC. While he and his colleagues would launch an urgent search, he’d fully expect, on the balance of probabilities, Mum and Dad would call me or turn up of their own accord soon.

‘What are you basing your probability-balancing on?’ asked Amelia.

Without missing a beat the policeman, who seemed now to have figured her out, said, ‘Twenty-two years of experience.’. To me he wrapped things up with, ‘Rest assured, Jack, we’ll leave no stone unturned.’

‘Is that a joke?’ asked Amelia.

She was sincere, but sincere for her sometimes comes out hostile. The policeman bristled. Seeing his friendly face tighten, Amelia tried to right the situation. ‘Because, as Jack said, his parents were off to visit a bunch of mines. Lots of stones to look under there. I just thought –’

Xander said, ‘There’s a real joke here about digging yourself out of a hole, but in the circumstances I won’t make it,’ which was funny, because as always happens when a person says, ‘There’s a joke here but …’ he’d basically made it anyway.

I managed to laugh somehow.

Detective Hubert did too. ‘We’ll do everything we can,’ he told us all. ‘I’ll initiate our missing-persons protocol. As soon as I have any news, however small, I’ll be in touch.’ He handed me a card with his contact details written on it in a startlingly green font. ‘And you do the same for me, OK?’

The phrase missing-persons protocol sounded so official. My gaze fell to the floor as he said them. I fought back the fear, tried to put some steel in my voice and failed. ‘Sounds a fair deal,’ I whispered.