TWENTY ONE: No secret stays hidden forever

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Kangwa was standing at the front of her classroom watching a situation that had officially crossed a line.

What had apparently started as a disagreement during break had escalated, in the finest tradition of eight-year-olds, into a full contact wrestling match. Girls versus boys. The girls had won comprehensively. The boys were now in tears and disputing the result on the grounds that it had not been a fair fight.

Kangwa pinched the bridge of her nose.

‘Right.’ She folded her arms. ‘Everyone. What is the first rule of this school?’

Thirty children looked at the floor. A chorus of reluctant mumbling filled the room as they recited it.

‘Good. So would someone like to explain to me why, knowing that rule, you all decided a fist fight was a reasonable idea?’ She waited. Nobody volunteered. ‘Since this is your first offence, I will go easy on you. Every single one of you will sweep the school yard and shine the corridors for one week. If this happens again I will double the punishment and personally call each of your parents. Are we clear?’

A deflated chorus. ‘Yes, Miss Chomba.’

Her phone rang.

She held up one finger to the class and stepped to the side of the room. She did not recognise the number. She answered anyway.

The voice on the other end was her neighbour, speaking too fast, words tripping over each other.

The phone slipped from her hand.

It hit the floor and cracked along the screen. The classroom went silent. Every child stared at her. Her colleague at the back of the room stood up slowly.

‘Ms. Chomba?’

Kangwa looked at her. She was not entirely sure where she was for a moment. Then she moved, heading in one direction, stopping, turning, walking the other way towards the staffroom. One of the children near the front quietly picked up the cracked phone and carried it to the other teacher, who listened, dismissed the child, and turned to the two ringleaders.

‘You two. Supervise your classmates and sit in silence until I am back. If I hear otherwise there will be consequences.’

She found Kangwa in the staffroom pulling on her jacket with shaking hands.

‘I am driving you,’ she said. It was not a question.

Kangwa did not argue.

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Dr. Henry Chomba was walking out of the hospital entrance with a colleague.

‘It was good having you consult with us. You had some challenging cases this week.’

‘Your team handled them well. I was merely a second opinion.’

They pushed through the main doors into the afternoon light just as a pick up van skidded into the ambulance bay with its sirens still wailing.

People moved fast. A body was being carried – bloodied, unresponsive. The nearby doctors broke into a run.

Henry’s eyes followed the movement on instinct.

Then he stopped walking. He had recognized the van. It was his fathers Ford Ranger Raptor.

‘Dr. Chomba?’ his colleague said beside him.

Then the second vehicle arrived.

A police pick up van.

It hit the ambulance bay at speed, siren still wailing, and before it had fully stopped the doors were open and people were moving with the kind of urgency that Henry recognised in his bones before his mind had caught up.

He froze.

An elderly woman was being helped out of the car by a female officer, barely able to stand, holding something wrapped in a bloodied cloth tight against her chest. Something small.

He then heard a sound.

A sound a child should never hear from their parents. It was a heart-wrenching cry, like her soul had been ripped apart.

Maybe it had. The blood smeared across her skin told him everything.

Forty years he had lived, yet nothing had ever made his spine shiver like this.

He spun on his heel and ran to her, his heart hammering against his ribs.

‘Ma.’ He reached her. ‘Ma, what happened, what -‘

‘Your father.’ She could not finish. ‘Luthanda.’

He did not wait for the rest. He and his colleague took the child from her arms and ran.

Behind them, Mrs. Irene’s legs gave way. The female officer caught her before she hit the ground.

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In the hospital chapel, Gershom was on his knees.

He had been there for over an hour.

‘Take me instead,” he said quietly to the empty room. ‘She’s just a child. She has done nothing to anyone. Take me instead… please.’

He pleaded with the heavens, tears rolling down his face, his voice breaking.

He pressed his forehead against his hands and stayed there.

Kangwa appeared in the doorway. She watched her brother for a long moment, her arms crossed over her chest, tears tracking silently down her face.

She did not go in.

She could not go in.

She turned and leaned her back against the wall and slid down it until she was sitting on the corridor floor with her knees pulled to her chest.

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The family waited outside the operating room.

Mrs. Irene sat rigid in the plastic chair with both hands in her lap, her eyes fixed on the door. She was still wearing the clothes she had been wearing when she and Luthanda came back from church. There was blood on the front of her blouse. Kangwa had tried three times to get her to change.

‘Ma. Come. I brought clean clothes.’

‘I cannot leave.’

‘He is in surgery, Ma. The doctors will come and tell us. You do not have to sit here in – ‘

‘I can’t leave this spot.’ Her voice was very quiet and very final. ‘I need to be here when your father comes out.’

Kangwa sat back down beside her without another word.

When the surgeon finally appeared in the doorway, Kangwa stood immediately. She read the man’s face before he opened his mouth. She reached for her mother’s hand.

The surgeon shook his head slowly.

Mrs. Irene Chomba made no sound. Her body simply stopped holding itself up.

She fell sideways.

Kangwa caught her.

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Joseph Junior was in chambers.

It had been a long and gruelling negotiation and he was, by every measure, winning. His opponent sat across the table looking like a man who had run out of moves. The judge was beginning to show the particular kind of patience that meant he had already decided and was waiting for the correct moment to say so.

JR’s phone buzzed in his jacket pocket.

He glanced at it beneath the table. Henry. He never called during work hours unless it was urgent.

He typed quickly under the table. In chambers with the judge. What is it?

The reply came in seconds.

Dad is gone.

JR read it twice. He typed back. What is that supposed to mean?

Henry’s reply was a single line. Hit and run.

JR pushed his chair back from the table and stood up. He was redialling before he was fully on his feet.

It rang twice. Then he heard his brother.

He had not heard his brother cry since they were children. Henry was forty-three years old. He was a doctor. He had seen things that would have broken most people.

He was crying.

‘JR, I am sorry. I am so sorry.’

JR sat back down. He was not sure exactly when he did it. He became aware that everyone in the room was looking at him. The judge. The opposing counsel. The clerks.

‘Attorney Chomba?’ the judge said carefully.

The opposing attorney opened his mouth with something ready. He closed it when his assistant put a hand on his arm and slid her phone in front of him. His smile died. He read it and slowly stood.

‘Attorney Chomba.’ His voice was different now. ‘I am sorry. Please accept my sincere condolences.’

JR looked at him without quite seeing him and nodded.

The video was already everywhere.

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Mrs. Irene woke to a white ceiling.

She blinked and turned her head. Her children were seated around the bed – Kangwa on one side, Henry on the other, JR at the football with Gershom All of them watching her with the same expression.

‘Ma.’ Kangwa leaned forward.

Mrs. Irene looked at them one by one. Then she looked towards the door as if she expected someone else.

‘Your father,’ she said.

‘Ma.’ Kangwa’s voice broke. ‘I am so sorry.’

The sound that came out of Mrs. Irene Chomba was not a cry. It was something older and deeper than that. Her children moved towards her at once and she wept in the middle of them, and they wept with her.

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Two officers came to the funeral the following day. They met the family in seclusion.

They spoke quietly and carefully. The investigation was ongoing. The vehicle had been found; a stolen Subaru Forester, reported missing several days before the incident. There were no plates.

The driver had not been identified. However, given the nature of the impact, the angle of the vehicle, and the fact that it had reversed and left the scene deliberately, they were treating it as homicide.

Did the family have any enemies? Anyone who might wish them harm?

The family looked at each other.

‘We do not,’ JR said.

Kangwa looked at the officer directly. ‘Start with Yolanda Nyoni. His wife.’ She corrected herself. ‘His estranged wife.’

A heavy silence fell over the room.

‘Kangwa.’ Gershom’s voice was quiet and controlled in a way that meant it was not.

‘Someone needs to say it.’

‘Why does every bad thing that happens in this family have to be Yolanda’s fault?’

‘Because I cannot think of anyone else with a more diabolical mind than her.’

‘It is not her.’

Kangwa looked at him steadily. ‘She wants a divorce and you will not give it to her. She is about to become the wife of one of the richest men in this country and you are the only thing standing in her way. Dad is dead, Gershom. Dead. Do you want Luthanda dead for you to finally take the blinders off?’

‘Luthanda is her own daughter. She carried that child for nine months.’

‘A child who was never supposed to be anything more than a means to an end. You know that. We all know that.’

‘Enough.’ Henry’s voice came down like a door closing. ‘Both of you. This is not the time. Ma needs us. We have a funeral to prepare. Let the police do their work.’

Kangwa held her brother’s gaze for a moment longer, then turned back to the officers. ‘If you want to find who did this, start with her. That is all I will say.’

Gershom stared at his hands.

But she watched his face. And she saw the doubt beginning to move behind his eyes, slow and terrible, like something waking up.

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Two days later…

He found her at The Eleanor Hotel.

He stood in the lobby for a moment after the lift doors opened, taking in the marble, the vaulted ceilings, the particular quality of silence that only extreme wealth can buy. Even when he had money he could not have afforded a single night here. The thought landed somewhere painful.

She was in a suite on the fourteenth floor. The door opened before he could knock a second time.

She was wearing an ivory silk robe and no expression.

‘Gershom.’

‘We need to talk.’

She stepped back and let him in.

The suite was enormous. The windows looked out over the city. She went to the chaise near the window and sat down.

She reached for a cigarette from the case on the side table, lifted it to her lips, then stopped. Set it back down. He noticed her hand move briefly to her stomach before she folded her arms.

He stood in the centre of the room.

‘You think you can walk out on me after everything,’ he said. ‘After what you did to my life?’

‘What I did to your life?’ She tilted her head slightly. ‘Gershom. Your lust did this. I did not ask you to leave your wife. I did not ask you to ruin your business. I did not ask you to do any of it. You did all of that yourself.’

‘Fine.’ His jaw tightened. ‘Do your worst. I am not signing those papers. For better for worse – your words, remember?’

She looked at him for a moment. ‘Do not try my patience.’

He looked at her for a long moment.

‘Did you do it?’

She held his gaze without flinching. ‘Do what?’

‘Did you try to kill your own daughter to cut ties with me?’

Something moved behind her eyes. She said nothing.

The realisation settled over him slowly, then all at once. She was not even denying it. She was not surprised by the question. She was waiting for him to finish.

He crossed the room in three steps.

His hands were around her throat before either of them had registered he was moving.

She went backwards against the cushions, her hands clawing at his wrists, her face shifting from shock to terror. The colour drained from her. Her mouth worked soundlessly.

‘You killed my father,’ he said, his voice shaking. ‘You nearly killed my daughter. You heartless – ‘

The door burst open. Two men from her security detail were on him immediately, hauling him backwards, prying his hands loose. He fought them with everything he had. It was not enough. They pinned his arms and dragged him back.

Yolanda sat up, gasping, one hand pressed to her throat. Her chest heaved. She stared at him across the room.

‘You sound desperate,’ she said when she had enough breath to speak. Her voice was raw but her eyes were steady. ‘Clutching at straws. Do you have proof? Because if you do not, do not come into my hotel room making accusations you cannot support.’

‘Yolanda! ‘

‘Get him out.’

‘Murderer,’ he said, from the floor, his voice breaking apart. ‘Murderer.’

The men moved him towards the door. He twisted against them, his eyes locked on hers.

‘Yolanda!’ He glared at her, his nose flaring.

The door closed.

He was hauled into an suv and beaten an inch within his life. When they finally dropped him, he lay on the cold pavement, looking up at the night sky, trembling with fury and grief and a helplessness so complete he could not find the bottom of it.

Somewhere inside the house, behind the lit windows, his family was mourning his father.

And his daughter was in a hospital bed with a broken skull. Her future uncertain .

And he had nothing.

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He was found two hours later by the neighbourhood’s watchmen and helped inside.

Kangwa sat across from him in the sitting room with a cloth pressed to the cut above his black. She did not ask what happened. She already knew. She just sat with him in the quiet of the house that still smelled faintly of their father, and did not say a word.

After a long time, Gershom spoke.

‘How could she? That’s her own daughter…how could have been so wrong about her?’

Kangwa did not answer. She pressed the cloth a little more firmly to the cut.

Outside, the night was very still.

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© Ponda