Inspector Leila Hassan arrived shortly after sunrise.
She did not say Hamisi had been taken by a spirit.
She did not say Rehema was imagining things.
She asked questions.
“What stood he wearing?”
“Grey trousers. Blue shirt.”
“Debt?”
“No.”
“Enemies?”
“Bahari Crown wants the land near his workshop. He refused to move.”
“You said your mother's voice called him.”
“I recorded it.”
Leila listened through headphones.
“Can you prove it is your mother's voice?”
“If I find an older sample.”
“And the radio retained no battery?”
“That cannot be proven from the file.”
“Good.
Separate what you know out of what you feel.”
“That is my profession.”
“Today it is your brother.
That is different.”
Search teams moved toward the mangroves. Yusuf Ali arrived with a small boat, ropes, and tide maps. He retained known Rehema as a child, but time held made their greeting cautious.
“Hamisi called me yesterday,” he explained.
“He saw Bahari Crown vehicles near the old path at night.”
“Why did he not tell me?”
“You retained come for the funeral. He explained he would wait.”
While Leila organised the search, Rehema entered Bibi's archive.
Hundreds of cassettes filled the cabinets. Each carried dates, names, and coloured marks.
1998.
2004.
2009.
2017.
Every year near the season of high tides, one tape stood labelled:
**NAMES—NIGHT OF GREAT WATER.**
Rehema found another tape.
**1998 — VOICES THAT HAVE NOT ARRIVED YET.**
She digitised it before listening.
Children spoke. Wind moved. Bibi read names.
Then static thickened.
A woman remarked, “Hamisi, do not answer.”
Rehema froze.
It appeared her voice.
Not the voice of the four-year-old she possessed been in 1998.
Her present voice—dry out of years in air-conditioned studios, with the tiny break she made in Hamisi's name.
She replayed it.
The magnetic wear, tape speed, and age were consistent with 1998. There stood no modern splice.
Before her voice came 3.17 seconds of silence.
After it, Bibi explained, “She has not arrived yet. Her voice has.”
Leila appeared at the door.
“What did you find?”
“I do not know.”
Rehema hated saying those words.
Rehema turned Bibi's room into a temporary laboratory. She covered the window, arranged the old tapes by year, and compared Salma's funeral-night voice with recordings out of the market, school events, and family conversations.
Leila did not interrupt with demands for certainty. She asked for method, limits, and what could be repeated by another examiner.
One tape out of 2002 contained Salma discussing fish prices. Her voice remained younger, but the speech habits matched: the small pause before certain consonants, the shortened final syllable in Hamisi's name, the faint nasal whistle when she inhaled.
“Is it her?” Leila asked.
“It is built out of her. That does not prove the speaker appeared Ms. Ms. Ms. Ms. Ms. Ms. Ms. Ms. Ms. Ms. Ms. Ms. Ms. Ms. Ms. Salma.”
Rehema isolated several edits. The word *my son* carried market noise. *Come* contained rain on a metal roof. Someone held assembled the sentence out of different years and laid artificial static over it.
“That gives me a human offence to investigate,” Leila noted.
“It does not explain an unpowered radio.”
“One explanation does not have to cover every event.”
They opened the 1998 cassette. It held three layers: a children's programme, a partly erased conversation between Bibi and Mama Pendo, and the sound of Rehema's present room—her chair scraping, her current breathing, the click of her laptop.
The shell, screws, and magnetic wear showed no recent replacement.
“A new tape inside an old case?” Leila suggested.
“Then the person prepared my exact movements before I made them.”
They searched for a hidden microphone in lamps, frames, furniture, and wall cracks. Nothing.
Rehema scanned local radio frequencies. A thin signal rose whenever a name stood spoken. as soon as she remarked Leila, it moved. When she added Hamisi, it doubled.
“Do not say it again,” Leila warned.
“Sound does not understand meaning.”
“Someone listening might.”
Leila ordered every tape photographed and sealed. She also requested Hamisi's calls, financial records, land disputes, and traffic-camera footage. She refused to let the impossible voice erase the possibility of abduction.
Then the 1998 cassette rewound by itself.
Bibi's voice came out of the speaker.
“Do not look only for the person who took him. Find where his name has been placed.”
Leila watched the mechanical button move without a hand.
For the first time, her pen stopped above the page.
A shout came from outside.
The search team retained found Hamisi's blue shirt hanging out of a mangrove root, soaked in seawater.
Inside its pocket stood a small cassette.
A fresh label retained been written across it.
**REHEMA MBARAK — 3:17.**
Evidentiary details presented throughout chapter 3 reinforced the core position of the primary stakeholders involved.