TWENTY FOUR: Diabolical minds

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‘Here. Take this.’

The command came from Grace Bweupe, Fiona’s aunt. Six months had passed since her parents died and her uncle Collins Bweupe and his wife had taken her in when nobody else was willing to. Grateful for their generosity, the orphaned girl had not known that paradise would turn into a nightmare barely a month after she moved in.

‘What is that?’ fifteen-year-old Fiona asked.

‘What does it matter. Take the pill.’

‘But I am not even sick.’

‘Goddamn it, Fiona. Take it or so help me God I will come over there and shove it down your throat.’

‘I just want to know what it is for,’ Fiona said quietly, her hand closing around the pills.

‘It will get rid of the thing growing inside your womb,’ Grace replied. ‘How could you do this to us? What were you thinking?’

Fiona stared at her aunt in horror. She was the victim. How could she be made to look at fault when before she came to live with them, boys had been the last thing on her mind?

She had had plans. She had wanted to make something of herself. She had been the pride of her parents. As an only child she had put double the effort into her schoolwork, never wanting to disappoint them.

But because of the aunt and uncle who had pretended to love her, she had found herself here.

If someone had told her a year earlier that her father’s young brother would traffic her, she would have laughed. Collins was her father’s only surviving sibling. The two had been close when her father was alive.

To have their debts written off, they had sold her to the loan shark they owed money to. Pregnancy had never been part of the arrangement.

‘Aunt, no. I cannot do this. You can’t make medo th’

It wasn’t kind. It wasn’t warm. It was the kind of smile that made your stomach twist.Grace’s hand snapped forward, gripping her chin and forcing her to look up. Her nails dug in just enough to sting.

Slowly… she smiled.

A beautiful smile. A terrifying one.

“Oh, my dear,” Grace said, her voice silky and calm, “did you really think your wishes mattered?”

She tilted the girl’s face from side to side, inspecting her like something she owned.

“ You lost the right to want anything the moment I took you .” Her eyes darkened, the sweetness in her tone turning sharp. “ here, nobody cares about what you want…I brought you here because you’re useful.”

She leaned in closer, her voice dropping to a whisper.
“And if you know what’s good for you… you’ll remember that.”

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For almost four years she stayed by the man’s side as his possession.

She tried to run twice. The first time she went to her uncle’s house. He apologised and promised to send her somewhere safe. In her desperation she believed him. She was still at the table when Jeffrey walked through the door.

Collins welcomed him like a king. He apologised to the loan shark on Fiona’s behalf, explained that she was young and foolish and did not understand the consequences of her actions. The sudden reversal left Fiona speechless, a knot forming in her throat. She could only look at him with tears she refused to shed.

Six months later she tried again. She made it to the bus terminus. The bus had not yet pulled out of the station when Jeffrey’s men found her and brought her back.

Jeffrey was furious. To make his point, he had his men beat her aunt and uncle while Fiona and their three children watched. She cried and begged until her voice was gone. Even though she hated the couple for what they had done to her, she could not bear to watch it. Twice Grace had to be revived.

When his men were finished, he had the couple tied to a pole for three days. No food. No water. Fiona was made to kneel on the bare concrete facing them for the same duration.

After three days he released all of them. For Fiona, the punishment had only just begun. He sent her to work in one of his brothels for over a month. This became the pattern — whenever he decided she was acting out, she was sent back.

Of the many pregnancies she was forced to end, she never knew who the fathers were.

Almost two and a half years after her failed escape, her uncle had still not come once to check on her. Her anger and hatred for him grew steadily.

In the same period she had only seen Grace twice, when the pills failed and Grace had to perform the procedure herself. This was the last time Fiona would ever feel a child growing inside her.

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As Jeffrey’s forty-fifth birthday approached, four years since Collins had sold her, he decided to throw an extravagant party. He invited her uncle and aunt among the guests. Believing he had tamed her completely, he allowed her to oversee the preparations.

He would come to regret that decision with his life.

On the eve of the party, early guests had already arrived and were in a celebratory mood. Jeffrey sat in the garden discussing business with his friends as they feasted and drank. Despite everything he had done to her, she served them without complaint. If he had been paying attention, he would have noticed that with each sip of vodka Jeffrey took and each bite of meat he chewed, the left side of her mouth lifted into the faintest smirk.

By mid-morning the following day, he was fatigued and listless with flu-like symptoms. As the day progressed, everyone who had been at the gathering the night before was affected. By nightfall he could barely form a sentence. His vision was failing. He was vomiting. Halfway through the birthday celebration itself, he lost the use of his legs. While his men were still trying to understand what was happening, he collapsed in his chair convulsing violently.

He was unconscious by the time the ambulance reached him. He fell into a coma shortly after arrival.

Elsewhere in the city, two of his friends who had attended the gathering were pronounced dead on arrival at their respective hospitals. The news reached those still at the party quickly.

The food had been poisoned. Before they had fully processed what that meant, more casualties followed. Grace was among them.

By the time the medical team identified the poison as engine coolant, two more had died and a dozen more were admitted.

In the confusion, Travis Mogae , one of Jeffrey’s supposed business partners — helped Fiona slip out of a side exit.

An hour after she left, acting on an anonymous tip, police, DEC, and immigration officials raided most of Jeffrey’s establishments, which operated as guesthouses, motels, and lodges. By sunrise, several arrests had been made. Among those taken in were high-ranking government officials and prominent businessmen.

The victims — mostly teenagers and young women — were taken to a safe house run and funded by Travis’ company. It provided counselling, rehabilitation, and life skills to help them reenter the world outside its walls.

The nightmare was over for Fiona and many others. For Travis, who had only infiltrated the organisation to find his missing sister, the search continued.

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Years passed. Fiona rebuilt her life with great difficulty. She completed her schooling, went to college, and took a job as a receptionist at the safe house. It was there that she met Marion.

Theirs was love at first sight. They were married within two months.

Fiona wanted nothing to do with her family. Marion urged her to forgive and mend what could be mended. Knowing she was marrying a wealthy man, relatives who had closed their doors to her when her parents died suddenly remembered her name. Others who had learned what had happened to her in those four years attempted to dissuade Marion from marrying her and pushed their own daughters and nieces forward instead.

Marion tolerated none of them.

Even after the wedding, the attempts did not stop. The list of shameless relatives included Collins and Grace — who were Sofia’s parents. Sofia had grown into a beautiful young woman and her parents believed she was a far better candidate for Marion.

Marion saw her intentions from the beginning. When he turned her down she began sending other women. The first time Sofia introduced a friend to him and he told Fiona, she told him to go ahead and let things play out.

He thought she had lost her mind.

He refused. She insisted. They did not speak for two days.

It was only a week after they had received news that Fiona would never be able to carry a child of her own. He thought she was trying to push him away. Travis had to intervene for the two of them to sit and talk properly.

Even after she explained – that she was at peace with the medical report and that her urging had nothing to do with it – he remained uneasy.

In the days that followed, he allowed Sofia to believe she had succeeded. Then Fiona found them at a drinking spot and beat the woman to a pulp.

It was a side of her Marion had never seen. He loved it entirely.

After that he would let Sofia parade her candidates and smirk to himself, already knowing what was coming. Sofia had eventually concluded that her cousin had bewitched Marion. She could not understand how a man could love a woman with a past like Fiona’s or tolerate what she considered savage behaviour. The last one Sofia sent ended up in hospital with broken ribs. Sofia stopped trying.

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A few years later the couple moved to the United States. They had planned only to attend the memorial for Travis’ father. It was there that Marion ran into Sofia, and Travis finally got the lead he had been searching for across fourteen years.

With Jeffrey dead and Grace permanently dependent on a dialysis machine, Fiona believed she had found some measure of peace with her past. Then she discovered that her uncle Collins had played a role in the death of Travis’ elder sister, and it felt like someone had torn the scab from every wound she thought had healed.

She cried the whole day for a girl she had never met but understood completely.

Katrina Mogae had been twenty-two when she had the misfortune of encountering Collins. He had worked as a bench jeweller at her shop — Trinny’s Jewels, which used locally sourced rubies, sapphires, emeralds, garnets, and tourmaline to design exquisite handmade pieces. According to the information Travis’ private investigator had gathered, Katrina discovered Collins had been substituting her real pieces with fakes.

When he was caught, he begged for leniency and promised to recover everything. She gave him a week. After five days he called to say he had retrieved nearly all of it and arranged to meet her at the shop after hours. He arrived. He returned what he claimed to have found. She told him the only path away from prosecution was to return the remainder and compensate the customers who had been sold the fakes.

He left with excessive gratitude.

What the twenty-two-year-old did not know was that he had no intention of honouring that agreement. He also had an accomplice inside the store.

Thirty minutes after Collins walked out, Katrina’s vision began to blur. Her balance gave way beneath her. A wave of nausea hit and she tried to make it to the bathroom. A pair of arms caught her before she reached the door. The last thing she saw was Collins’ face before she lost consciousness.

She woke on a worn mattress in a small, dark, windowless room.

Days passed before anyone came despite her pounding on the door and screaming until her throat gave out. She could hear voices and footsteps on the other side but no one entered.

The first person she saw when the door finally opened was Davies — her assistant at the jewellery store, and Collins’ accomplice. Behind him stood one of the most striking men she had ever seen, with eyes that held nothing human in them. She came to know him as Jeffrey. He welcomed her to his five-star hotel with the barrel of a gun levelled at her face.

As a reward to Davies and Collins for his latest acquisition, he offered her to Davies.

Just like that, the young woman who had only ever dreamed of crossing the Zambezi to a better life found herself trafficked into prostitution, sexual slavery, violence, and forced drug dependence.

Katrina was moved from one brothel to the next until her death from AIDS three years ago.

Fiona was not the first of Collins’ victims handed to the loan shark. The only difference was that Fiona was family.

The reunion of two supposed college classmates in Barbados, and Marion’s introduction of Travis to the money-hungry Sofia, had never been coincidence. It was the closing movement of an elaborate and patient plan.

What none of them had anticipated was that Yolanda’s own insatiable greed would hand them Davies and Collins on a silver platter, when she hired them to murder her daughter.

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© Ponda

VOCAB

Engine coolant— antifreeze, a toxic liquid used in car radiators; colourless and sweet-tasting, historically used as a slow poison

Bench jeweller — a craftsperson who makes and repairs jewellery by hand at a workbench

DEC— Drug Enforcement Commission; the Zambian government agency responsible for investigating drug-related and related criminal offences