Chapter 1: The Missing Poster

Thursday, 17 September 2026 | 22:11

The woman at the charge office had not come to report someone missing. She had come to ask why the police were already looking for her.

Warrant Officer Ruben September read the poster twice before looking at the woman on the other side of the glass.

MISSING, it said in thick black letters. Beneath the word was a photograph of her: dark hair across one cheek, eyes closed, the white edge of a pillow behind her head. She had been asleep when the picture was taken.

NADINE VAN HEERDEN. THIRTY-SIX YEARS OLD. LAST SEEN: FRIDAY, 18 SEPTEMBER 2026 AT 06:40.

September glanced at the clock on the wall. It was Thursday night, 22:11.

“Where the hell did you get this?”

“On my house.”

“One poster?”

Nadine pulled her phone from her handbag. Her hand was shaking, but her voice was steady. “One hundred and seventeen.”

She opened a photograph and held the screen against the glass. The outside wall of her complex in Lynnwood was white with posters. They had been pasted in perfect rows, each sheet exactly the same distance from the next. Not one was crooked.

September moved his chair closer. “You counted them?”

“The security guard did.”

“Do you know who took the photograph?”

“If I knew who the fuck did it, I wouldn’t be sitting here.”

The answer was sharp, but the woman’s lips had lost all colour. September had spent long enough in a charge office to know the difference between anger and fear. Anger made people lean forward. Fear made them sit dead still, as if moving would wake whatever stood behind them.

He pushed the poster back through the opening in the glass. “I’m taking a statement. Any ex giving you trouble? Someone at work? A neighbour who doesn’t understand the word no?”

“I’ve never been married. I live alone. I work at an estate agency. People get angry about deposits and leases, but not this angry.”

“Threats? Calls? Messages?”

She hesitated.

September put down his pen. “Nadine, if anything made you uncomfortable, tell me now. Even if you think it sounds stupid.”

“Someone came into my flat in January.”

“Was there a break-in?”

“Nothing was stolen. The security gate was locked. The alarm never went off.” She folded her arms across her body. “Someone took clothes from my cupboard and laid them out on my bed. A dress. Shoes. Underwear. Like an outfit.”

“Did you report it?”

“At Garsfontein. The officer said there was no forced entry. He asked if I’d taken the clothes out myself and forgotten.”

September said nothing. He opened the station system and typed in her ID number.

Behind him, a man with a blood-soaked towel wrapped around his head was loudly insisting that his girlfriend had attacked him with a wooden spoon. Two constables dragged a drunk student down the corridor between them. A telephone rang until somebody answered it and immediately put it down again. The station had the restless, exhausted sound of an ordinary Thursday night.

When the old complaint appeared on the screen, September leaned forward.

“It’s recorded as an enquiry.”

“Exactly.”

“Not a criminal case.”

“Because nothing was stolen.”

September picked up the poster again. “Where is this dress now?”

Nadine stared at him.

“The clothes on the bed. Do you still have them?”

“The dress is hanging in my cupboard.”

“What colour?”

“Red.”

He turned the poster over. At the bottom, in smaller print, was a description he had missed the first time.

LAST SEEN WEARING A RED DRESS, BLACK SHOES AND A BLACK COAT.

September stood up.

Captain Jana Viljoen was halfway through a cold coffee when he found her in the corridor. She wasn’t on duty. She had come in to sign for a docket that had to be in court on Monday morning, and her car keys were already in her hand.

“Captain, you need to see this.”

“If it’s the student, let him sober up first.”

“It’s not the student.”

He handed her the poster.

Jana read it standing up. She was short, with grey already working through her cropped dark hair. She wore nothing people associated with detectives on television. No leather jacket. No heavy boots. Just black trousers, flat shoes and a shirt with the sleeves rolled to her elbows.

“Where is she?”

“Charge office.”

“And the original digital file?”

“She only has the paper.”

Jana turned the poster over. “No printer mark. No dirty fingerprints. Have you got an evidence bag?”

September was already pulling one from the supply cupboard.

When Jana sat down with Nadine, she didn’t ask about a jealous boyfriend. She didn’t tell her everything would be fine either.

“The date on this poster is tomorrow,” she said. “That doesn’t mean somebody can see the future. It means the sick fucker wants us to know he’s in control.”

Nadine held her gaze. “You believe me?”

“I believe somebody got into your home in January. I believe the same person photographed you while you slept. And I believe he expects you to wear that red dress tomorrow morning.”

“Why the fuck would someone do that?”

“That’s what we’re going to find out.”

Jana enlarged the picture Nadine had taken of the wall. The posters had been printed on ordinary white paper. Each row began at exactly the same height. Pasting one hundred and seventeen sheets that neatly would have taken time.

“When did the guard notice them?”

“Just after nine. He phoned while I was driving home from work.”

“When was the wall last clear?”

“When I left for work this morning.”

“Are there cameras?”

“At the gate and in the parking area. Not along the outside wall.”

“Who has access to your flat?”

“Me and the complex manager. The cleaner comes on Tuesdays, but I let her in.”

“Has anyone followed you recently?”

Nadine slowly shook her head. Then her face changed.

Jana saw it. “What?”

“There’s a man who sometimes stands outside my work.”

“Sometimes?”

“Three times. Maybe four. Across the street at the bus stop. He never looks directly at me.”

“Can you describe him?”

“Average height. Cap. Sunglasses.”

“Race? Age?”

“I don’t know. He stands in the shade. The one time I walked towards him, he got into a white car and drove off.”

“Registration?”

“No.”

Jana wrote it down. Average height, cap, sunglasses and a white car. That could be any fucker in Gauteng.

“You’re not going home tonight. God knows what could be waiting for you there.”

“I have nowhere else to go.”

“Family?”

“My mother is in George. My sister is overseas.”

“Friends?”

“No one I want to arrive at after eleven at night with the police.”

Jana looked at the date on the poster. Seven hours and twenty-nine minutes remained.

“Then you stay here. You don’t walk around alone. Understand?”

The victim-support room was small and too warm. It held a brown couch, two plastic chairs and a box of blocks and crayons for children. The room smelled of instant coffee and disinfectant. It wasn’t a cell; Nadine could leave whenever she wanted. Jana asked her not to move through the station alone.

Just before midnight, a patrol vehicle took Jana and September to Nadine’s complex.

The security guard, a broad man named Themba Mhlongo, was waiting at the gate with the visitors’ register open on the counter.

“Nobody signed in to put those posters up,” he said. “I’ve been here since six.”

“Can someone get in another way?” Jana asked.

“Only this gate. The back wall has electric fencing.”

“Deliveries?”

“Same gate.”

“Any power cut?”

Mhlongo shook his head. “Not tonight.”

The CCTV showed Nadine driving out at 07:14. The day then carried on like hundreds of others: residents returning, a delivery motorcycle, a gardener leaving with a black bag over his shoulder. Nobody went near the wall.

Yet by 21:03, it was covered with Nadine’s face.

“Play it again,” Jana said.

Mhlongo rewound the footage.

At 18:47, a white panel van stopped at the gate. No logo. The driver didn’t turn in. He waited just long enough for a silver car behind him to hoot, then pulled away.

“Stop.”

The camera was too far away to show the driver’s face. Jana could only make out the line of one shoulder and something pale against his chest.

“Can you enlarge the registration?” September asked.

Mhlongo tried. The pixels broke into blocks.

“There’s something over the plate,” Jana said. “Looks like mud.”

They removed one poster from the wall and packaged it separately. Then they went to Nadine’s flat.

The front door and security gate were undamaged. Inside, everything was neat: grey couch, white kitchen, a row of shoes aligned against the passage wall. Nadine had the kind of home in which every object knew its place.

Jana found the red dress in the bedroom.

It hung on the outside of the cupboard door.

“She said it was inside the cupboard,” September said.

Jana moved closer without touching it. The dress reached the knee, with short sleeves and a narrow belt around the waist. On the bed lay black shoes and a black coat.

Exactly as described on the poster.

“Call the crime-scene team.”

September had his phone out when Jana noticed something on the bedside table. A Polaroid photograph stuck out from beneath a book.

She put on gloves and pulled it free by one corner.

In the photograph, Nadine was sitting in the victim-support room at Brooklyn Police Station, head lowered, hands wrapped around a plastic cup.

The photograph was less than an hour old.

Jana looked at September. For a second, neither of them spoke.

Then her phone rang.

It was the station.

“Captain,” the duty officer said too quickly, “someone just asked to see the woman.”

“Who?”

“Says he’s her brother.”

“She doesn’t have a fucking brother.”

There was a noise on the other end, as if the officer had covered the phone with his hand. When his voice returned, it was softer.

“He’s gone.”

Jana was already at the door. “Lock the fucking station. Now. Nobody goes in or out. Find Nadine and stay with her until I get there.”

“Captain, wait—”

“What?”

“She’s gone. The whole damn room is empty.”

The drive back took six minutes.

Jana did it in four.

By the time she stormed into the station, the front security gate had been locked. Two officers were searching the parking area. September ran around the back to check the boundary wall. Inside, the drunk student had stopped shouting. Even the man with the wooden-spoon injury had gone quiet.

The door to the victim-support room stood open.

The brown couch was empty. Nadine’s handbag was under one of the plastic chairs. Her phone lay beside the half-full cup of coffee.

“Who saw her last?” Jana asked.

“Me,” Constable Lindi Mabuza said. Sweat shone on her face. “At thirty-six minutes past six. She was sitting here. I brought her water.”

“Did anyone leave with her?”

“No, Captain.”

“Back door?”

“Locked.”

“Window?”

“Burglar bars.”

“Cameras?”

“We’re pulling the footage now.”