abducted

My husband's face is white when he finds me, somewhere near the second-hand shoe stall. "Where've you been? You said you'd be back in half an hour," he says.

To be honest, I'd lost track of time. The vendors at the flea market have been opening new bales, tipping out mountains of used clothes onto huge tarpaulins.

"New order," they sing (actually, it's a kind of rap). "New order. Dollar - dollar." US, they add, just in case anyone thought they might get away with using now Zimbabwe dollars.

There's a technique to clothes-hunting on new order days. You pick a corner of the tarpaulin, check your handbag's tucked securely under your arm and you shovel through the fabric nearest to you. Then you fling what you're discarded into the centre of the pile and dig deeper. Another kind of mining, I guess, in diamond country. A tailor has set up shop with an ancient black Singer under an adjacent tarpaulin.

Women sit on the dust beyond the edge of the pile, munching what smells like chicken.

I find a black top with a teardrop back to it and a fitted black jacket from Australia, both for US 1. For 2 US, pyjama bottoms, almost new and a weeny bit too long, for my child, in a pile still flecked with washing powder. The skeleton-printed swimming trunks I've been eyeing I discard, after the vendor suddenly hikes his price to US 3 when he spies a murungu showing interest.

I'm just thinking of shoes when I spy my husband.

"Abducted? Don't be paranoid," I say. "This isn't South Africa." My brother-in-law is terrified to see me walking on my own in the smallish market-town they live in in the Orange Free State. "It happens," he insists.

But then, this morning, I open Zimbabwe's state daily. A women has been abducted in broad daylight from a busy market in Machipisa, Harare. She's bundled into the back of a car with blacked-out windows. One of the abductors stuffs a hanky laced with something into her face so she loses consciousness. She comes to, she tells police after her escape, in a building "filled with human heads."

Police say they believe the building is somewhere near the city centre.