Show Me the Sky - Nicholas Hogg [57]
And it breaks my heart to see children the same age as Gemma begging barefoot, rifling the bins like stray dogs. I make another promise to be a better man, a better father, once this chase is over.
But there’s money here too, in the armoured limousines and mirrored office blocks, the international banks protected by guards with machine guns. And this isn’t a country I can track a man by his electronic footprint. Needs good old-fashioned detective work here, favours and kickbacks. Threats. Maybe that’s why I buy a panama hat from a market stall. I feel like a character who has wandered from the pages of a Raymond Chandler novel.
I arrange for a car to drive me to Mombasa in an hour, then ask around the taxi stand if a Peter Cornell had booked a ride south. Futile. I’ll need more than luck to catch a man with a week’s head start.
The Reverend McCreedy Orphanage was relocated from the old church to the outskirts of Mombasa in the 1960s. A brass plaque has survived the moving, inscribed: Reading, Writing, Love and Care, since 1841.
Miss Oburu, a large, beaming woman, with a gaggle of children swinging from the hem of her dress like satellites, welcomes me through the gates. We walk across a football pitch without a blade of grass, the children running up to shake my hand giggle and say, ‘How do you do?’ Open doorways on to silent classrooms show students bent at their desks, copying sums from a blackboard. Chickens and goats scatter as we turn into the playground. Children too young for schooling follow Miss Oburu into her office like the Pied Piper. I take off my hat, slip my hand into my top pocket and switch on the Dictaphone.
‘Sorry it is a little untidy.’
‘Not at all.’
‘Hello.’
‘Hello.’
‘Hello.’
‘Children. I have business. Out.’
‘Hello.’
‘Out I said!’
‘Bye bye.’
‘Goodbye.’
‘Away from the window! Have you collected the eggs yet?’
‘No, miss.’
‘Well, go now. They’ll be cooked before dinner if you leave them in the sun. Very sorry, Mr … ?’
‘Nash. Charles Nash. Thanks for seeing me.’
‘Away from the window, George! I told you! Sorry, Mr Nash, I’m a very busy mother with two hundred children.’
‘Two hundred! That’s quite a handful.’
‘In fact, can you shut the door?
‘Sure.’
‘Otherwise the children will just stand and stare, probably interrupt me to practise their English with you.’
‘I imagine the Reverend McCreedy would be very happy to know his legacy has lasted over, what, 160 years?’
‘Oh yes, yes. Well if the reverend is upstairs watching over us, I hope he puts in a good word for me to the Lord. I need a peaceful spot in heaven after taking care of a family this size. But anyway, don’t get me started, Mr Nash, I’m sure you’ve not come all the way to Kenya to hear about my troubles, not that they are worth much next to the trials of these dear children. How can I help you? You said something on the phone about your nephew? I can’t say we’ve ever had an English boy at the orphanage. Why are you asking here?’
‘He’s twenty-three, so I guess he’d stand out from the other kids. No, he had an argument with his father, a fight.’
‘And came here?’
‘Well, to Mombasa. The last thing he said to his father was that he had no family, and that maybe he belonged in an orphanage.’
‘I think he’s a little old.’
‘No, to work as volunteer. Have you had any enquiring recently? I saw on the website you have university students placed here.’
‘This is basically a big house, with a big family and many mouths to feed. I have as many volunteers as possible. Nobody is paid a wage. And visitors, whoever and whenever, so when they leave they drop some coins in the collection box.’
‘Any foreign volunteers this week?’
‘Let me think a moment … Until Tuesday we had three doctors from Sweden, testing the children. But they’ve gone now. Of course, yesterday a busload of Seventh Day Adventists from