I HAVE VOLUNTEERED my services to Nathan as a carrier pigeon. He has warned me that this is dangerous work. It is the least I can do.
The gods have decreed that my daughter shall be returned to me, but Roxy is not back. She has disappeared into the black hole that opened up around Simone. I cannot help feeling that Roxy is Simone’s proxy, and that means Georgie is my proxy. Georgie is bereft but she is brave, and she tries not to hate me for what I have regained and what she has lost. I tell her that Detective Olmi has important informants in a witness programme and that Roxy will be found. I do not tell her about the young woman with the shorn head who held me trapped in her gaze, and then vanished. As time passes I find myself believing more and more that it was a trick of the light and that to even mention it would be a mistake.
Some days Georgie does not mind me too much. When she lets me, I go and watch her surf. She has started teaching Josh to surf. Occasionally Simone comes along and goes surfing with Georgie, which seems to do them both good. Some things remain the same: Josh does not like his hair to be cut by anybody except Simone. To watch her flourish the scissors around Josh’s bushy halo and to watch the blond fuzzy curls fall softly to the sunlit floor as she hums is to regain some kind of fragile equilibrium.
Mostly Simone goes climbing. Every day if she can. She climbs the climbing wall with the ferocity of a lynx, as if she is not only establishing tenuous holds on vertical faces but is scaling mountains inside her mind that only she can see. She has grown more sinewy and her skin is now almost pimple free, unless it’s her time of the month.
Soon after we returned from Paris, a headshot of Patrick Qamarana, a wanted suspect in the sensational case of the abduction of minors, masterminded by an international criminal ring with a halfway house in the Cape winelands, was carried on the front page of all the daily newspapers. Simone admitted to Klaus that Qamarana was the driver who’d picked her up, laughing and talking all the way, telling her how he bought cocaine and motorbikes with the money he made from bringing girls to Volkov.
Now, under Nathan’s guidance and with Igor’s tutelage, I have been exposed to an invisible web that lies layers deep beneath the privacy and anonymity objectives of law-abiding citizens who use CAPTCHA and robots.txt. With the help of the Dark Web browser Tor, we work on an encrypted network and are truly anonymous. I am seething with urgency, but Nathan will have none of what he calls ‘your impatient white woman ways’. He has overridden all my objections and insisted on a gradual immersion approach. Igor takes me through it, layer by layer, into a sleazy, clandestine world of illicit transactions. Like spelunkers we delve deeper and deeper. While my daughter climbs upwards to the light, I climb downwards towards the deepest, most hidden archives of the human experience.
We work in the investigators’ laboratory that Elijah Bloom set up. When Nathan finally judges me to be ready, I am shown murky subterranean chambers seething with bizarre predilections. Fights to the death between paramilitary types who have nothing to do but win or lose. A glimpse of human and animal grappling, teeth bared. Gladiators of a deep, dark world hidden to normal mortals. Torturer and tortured. Predators and Prey. Impossible to tell who is who sometimes. Other times all too clear.
We share Elijah’s control room with the Intergalactic Investigators. It’s not such an unlikely alliance: together we dare to explore where others will not go. Trawling the Deep Net is not for the faint-hearted.
It is my job to plant traps on various hidden notice boards on the Dark Web, advertising very specific services, invisible to conventional search engines and random curiosity. Nathan says these honeypots attract the badgers. Nathan and his underground team watch and wait, and as soon as there’s any movement on a titbit planted by a carrier pigeon, they go after the predators that are always out there and have to be flushed out. The idea is to track them down and, over time, gather enough information to create a profile. When the profile is solid, they hand the information over to the special investigation units in whichever country has jurisdiction. As Nathan once warned me, it is soul-destroying work that only uncovers the tip of the iceberg.
‘But I’ll take whatever I can get,’ Nathan says with his characteristic maddening nonchalance. He doesn’t let it get to him. Nathan has the attitude of a Mossad agent. He tackles each new case with the same bloody-minded commitment and drive. He says he can’t lose sleep over the ones he can’t save because maybe next time he’ll get lucky.
Simone knows nothing of my courier work.
Another envelope has arrived. Sender is again left blank. Limbo’s Bride is a work in progress; completion does not concern you for now. I sense you are unmoored, drifting, wary of what awaits beyond the present moment. The proposed epilogue is not entirely unexpected. The mother’s act of love rings true. This is what Enid meant when she said that I knew ‘almost everything’.
Simone sleeps easier now that I have shown her the letter that your mother Marie preserved. She no longer rages against you. You will understand that it was necessary to show her the excerpts of Limbo’s Bride to ensure that she never tries to go back to the cult. It has been a letting go, a lessening of the many secrets in our family. We are like persistent life forms hanging on, inching forward towards the light.
You should know that Simone leaves the lamp on your desk lit. She says she does this so that you know which is our apartment if you come back at night.
Yesterday on the balcony, between spoonfuls of muesli and yoghurt, Simone casually announced that she would be joining her climbing team on an expedition to Rocklands on the long weekend coming up. She needed practice on real rock faces.
‘I’ll be fine, mom-person,’ Simone said kindly. ‘I can look after myself now.’
‘I know you will be,’ I replied, and it seemed possible.
Truschka, who was on her mistress’s lap with one stiff back leg hanging down, watched me with interest, a flickering, yellow gleam in her eyes.