Tom closed Ben’s bedroom door inch by silent inch until it finally clicked shut. Nothing woke that child faster than the sound of a door closing.

He’d gone back to sleep again after waking up barely an hour after Tom had put him down in the first place. It seemed to be mosquitoes that were bothering him tonight. Unfortunately, he’d made the connection between the whining noise he heard circling his bed at night, and the itchy bumps he found all over his legs and arms in the morning.

Now the merest hint of a mosquito in his room was enough to set him off yelling. Tom longed to shut his son’s window at night, but then he woke up because he was too hot. Early tomorrow morning – the second the shops opened, in fact – Tom planned to be first in line to buy a fan. One of the parenting websites he frequented suggested a fan as the best way to discourage mosquitoes while still keeping a child cool in summer.

His breath caught as he heard a slight moan coming from Ben’s room. He stood dead still in the passage, one foot raised on tiptoe.

All was quiet.

Relieved, he crept down the stairs and put his ear to the baby monitor to confirm that it was working properly. And speaking of work, he should probably spend the evening taking notes from the new book on cyber-policing he’d downloaded. But he really didn’t feel like it. He wished Jamie would come over. He knew he’d be able to settle down to work if she were only sitting next to him, tapping away at her laptop, preparing her blog post for the next morning, or browsing through one of her many social media accounts.

It was ridiculous how much he missed her when she wasn’t there. Ben missed her too. He kept asking for her when she wasn’t around. They were both becoming too dependent on her. It was time to claw back some of their self-reliance.

Tom opened the book on cyber-policing on his iPad and started skimming through it, but his concentration was lousy. Because Jamie wasn’t answering her texts, he’d checked her Facebook page, so he knew that stocktaking was going on longer than expected. She must be really preoccupied, because she usually answered a text within minutes.

Tom thought he might pour himself a whiskey and take his iPad up to bed with him.

––––––––––

“What do you want with us?”

The man smiled, enjoying the note of panic in Pumla’s voice. “Now that depends. At the moment, all I want is to chat to you. I feel as though I’ve got to know you both so well over the last few months. We have lots to talk about. And there are always points of clarification.”

“Look,” said Jamie. “You haven’t done anything wrong yet. You can still walk away from this with no charges against you, no police coming after you…”

She broke off when he burst out laughing. “What’s so funny?”

“The thought of the police coming after me. This is South Africa, Jamie. People get away with murder every day. The police will pretend to investigate for a while. And when the media interest dies down, they will quietly let it go.”

“You’re forgetting how double standards work in this country,” Pumla said. “You come into the suburbs and kill a white girl and a middle-class black girl, and the police will be breathing down your neck until the day you die.”

His sniggers deepened into chuckles. “You let me worry about that.”

“Is that what you’re going to do with us?” Jamie asked. “You’re going to kill us?”

“You know…” He smiled at them. “I wasn’t sure I could. I’m still not completely sure. I’ve never killed a person before. But if I do, would you like to know how I’m going to do it?”

His eyes, Jamie thought. His eyes are like blank, shallow pools of water. Nothing behind them.

“If I hadn’t killed those animals to scare you, Jamie, I might never have known what it’s like to open an abdomen with your knife and feel the guts spill into your hands. They don’t die immediately. It can take minutes, but eventually you see the eyes go dull and you know they’re gone. It’s an intimate moment to share with another creature. I saved the rat for you. I left it alive so you could share that special moment with it. How you screamed when you found it, Jamie. I thought I’d crack a rib laughing.”

“Sicko,” Pumla whispered in Jamie’s ear.

Jamie didn’t dare nod. Her vision had gone grey around the edges, and there was a whining noise in her ears. She stumbled backwards towards a chair.

“So let’s talk then,” Pumla said, giving Jamie a chance to pull herself together. “Shall I make you some coffee?”

He started to say yes, until he caught the flicker in Pumla’s eyes. “I’ll watch while you make it. If you try slipping something into it, you’re really going to annoy me.”

As Pumla and the man went to the coffee machine, Jamie put her head between her knees and took deep breaths. It was nearly an hour since she’d posted that Facebook update. Nobody had come, nobody had called. She had to face the fact that nobody was going to. They were on their own. This wasn’t a movie. There would be no eleventh-hour rescue.

Pumla’s idea of tampering with his coffee was a good one, but he’d seen through it. Still, they were in a working restaurant with access to all kinds of sharp implements. If he wanted to talk, they’d talk. As long as they were talking, he wasn’t thinking about gutting them like fish.