The Arrivals area at the Cape Town International Airport is teeming with wannabe tour guides, all shouting, ‘Taxi, lady?’ and waving fliers for ‘all-inclusive Khayelitsha tours’ in my face. Despite the chaos, it’s easy to spot Vincent Xhati, the private investigator who’s agreed to escort me around Cape Town for a couple of days. At six foot four and weighing in at three hundred pounds, he towers over the taxi drivers and tour operators. He greets me with a wide grin, and immediately takes charge of my luggage. We make small talk as we push through the throng towards the parking lot. A couple of jaded male cops in blue uniforms saunter around, eyeing everyone with suspicion, but neither they, nor the signs warning new arrivals not to ‘go off with strangers’, appear to be deterring the tour hawkers. Vincent bats a couple of the more tenacious away with a snapped ‘Voetsek.’

Exhausted after the sixteen-hour flight, I’m dying for a coffee and a shower, but when Vincent asks me if I’d like to go straight to the Dalu Air crash site before checking into my hotel, I say yes. He nods in approval and ushers me towards his car, a slick black BMW with tinted windows. ‘No one will mess with us in this,’ he says. ‘We will look like a politician.’ He pauses, glances at me, and then roars with laughter.

I sink into the passenger seat, noting that there’s a copy of the grainy photograph of Kenneth Oduah–taken when he was four years old–mounted on the dashboard.

As we leave the airport behind and glide onto a slip road, I spot Table Mountain in the far distance, cloud dribbling over its edge. It’s heading into winter, but the sky is a perfect, eggshell blue. Vincent sweeps onto the highway, and I’m immediately struck by the obvious signs of poverty around us. The airport facilities may have been state-of-the-art, but the road is flanked by sagging shacks and Vincent is forced to brake sharply as a small child dragging a dog on a rope lead zigzags through the traffic.

‘It is not far,’ Vincent says, clicking his tongue as he’s forced to undertake a rusty mini-bus packed full of commuters that’s hogging the fast lane.

I ask him who has hired him to search for Kenneth and he smiles and shakes his head. The journalist who gave me Vincent’s details assured me that Vincent could be trusted, but I can’t help feeling a stab of unease. I ask him about the reports of the Kenneth hunters who have been mugged.

He sighs. ‘The press have exaggerated this. Only the ones who behaved in a stupid manner have had trouble.’

I ask him if he believes Kenneth is actually out there somewhere.

‘It doesn’t matter what I believe. Maybe the child is here somewhere, maybe he isn’t. If he can be found, I will find him.’

We pull off the highway, and on our right I make out the edges of a vast area crammed with small brick houses, tin and wood shacks, and row after row of outhouses that look like sentry boxes.

‘Is that Khayelitsha?’

‘Ja.’

‘How long have you been looking for him?’

‘Since the beginning. It has not been an easy ride. There was some trouble at first from the Muslim community who tried to stop people talking to those of us who were searching for him.’

‘Why?’

‘You did not have that in America? Ah. The troublemakers assumed that Kenneth was a Muslim boy, and they objected to the Americans coming here and claiming that he was one of their messengers. Then it was made public that he is from a Christian family, and now they don’t care!’ Another roar of laughter.

‘I take it you are not religious?’

He sobers up. ‘No. I have seen too much.’

He turns right, and within minutes we’re in the heart of the township. The dirt roads that weave through the endless rows of shacks are unmarked. There’s a proliferation of Coke signs, most attached to old shipping containers that I realise are makeshift shops. A group of small children dressed in dirty shorts wave and grin at the car, then whoop and chase after it. Vincent pulls to the side of the road, hands one of the children ten rand and instructs him to watch the BMW. The kid puffs out his chest and nods.

A few hundred metres from us, a tour bus is parked alongside a row of hawkers selling their wares. I watch as an American couple pick up a wirework sculpture of a plane and start haggling with a vendor.

‘We’ll walk from here,’ Vincent says. ‘Stay close to me and don’t make eye contact with any of the locals.’

‘Okay.’

Another laugh. ‘Don’t worry, you’re fine here.’

‘Do you live here?’

‘No. I live in Gugs. Gugulethu.’

I’ve seen the aerial footage of the place where the plane went down, tearing a jagged passage through the landscape, but the people here are clearly tenacious, and already there is little sign of the devastation. Construction is starting on a new church and shacks have already grown up all over the sites where the fires raged. A gleaming black glass pyramid, engraved with the names of those who lost their lives (including that of Kenneth Oduah), sits incongruously in the centre.

Vincent sinks to his haunches and runs his fingers through the soil. ‘They still find bits. Bones and pieces of metal. They worm their way up out of the earth. You know like when you have a wound? A splinter? The earth is rejecting them.’

The mood is subdued as we retrace our steps and head back onto the highway. More mini-buses whiz past, packed full of people heading into the city. Table Mountain races towards us, the cloud now obscuring its trademark flat top.

‘I will take you to your hotel and then we will go hunting tonight, okay?’

Cape Town’s Waterfront area, where my glass and steel-skeletoned hotel sits, couldn’t be more of a contrast to where I’ve just been. It’s almost like being in a different country. Hard to believe that the designer stores and five-star restaurants are just a short taxi ride away from the poverty of the township.

I shower, then head down to the bar and make some calls while I wait for Vincent. There are several middle-aged men hanging around in small groups, and I do my best to eavesdrop. Many are American.

I’ve been trying to secure an interview with the South African Civil Aviation Authority’s head investigator, but her office has declined to talk to the press. I dial the number anyway. The secretary I speak to sounds weary. ‘It is all in the report. There were no survivors.’ I am also stonewalled in my efforts to talk to the aid workers who were first on the scene after the crash.

Vincent breezes into the hotel as if he owns the place; equally at home in this extravagant luxury as he is in the heart of Khayelitsha.

I tell him about my strike-outs with the CAA.

‘You can forget them. But I will see what I can do about getting others to talk to you.’

He gets a call on his cell. The conversation is brief and in Xhosa.

‘My associate has rounded up tonight’s boys.’ He sighs. ‘It will come to nothing. But I must follow them up. My boss wants a full report every day.’

We head down towards the docks, slowing when we reach an underpass. The area is gloomy and ill-lit and I feel another stirring of unease.

Vincent’s associate, a small wiry man called Eric Malenga, is waiting for us under a partially completed flyover. He’s surrounded by three scruffy boys, all of whom appear to be unsteady on their feet. I learn later that many street kids are addicted to sniffing glue, and the solvent they inhale makes them uncoordinated. Vincent tells me that these children scratch a living begging and hustling in the town centre. ‘Sometimes they get tourists to buy them cereal and milk, and then they sell it to the backpackers,’ he says. ‘Others sell their bodies.’

As we approach, I notice a fourth child sitting apart from them on an overturned crate. He’s shivering, but I can’t tell if this is from fear or the bite in the air.

The tallest of the kids–a skinny boy with a runny nose–perks up when he sees us approach and points to the child on the crate. ‘There he is, boss. That’s Kenneth. Do I get my reward now, boss?’

Vincent tells me that the latest ‘Kenneth’ isn’t even Nigerian. He’s the racial classification known as ‘coloured’, a word that makes me wince.

Vincent nods wearily at Eric, who ushers the small child towards his car.

‘Where is Eric taking him?’ I ask.

‘One of the shelters,’ Vincent says. ‘Away from this bunch of skebengas.’

‘But he said he was Kenneth, boss,’ the boy with the runny nose whines. ‘He told us, I swear.’

‘You know why everyone is looking for Kenneth?’ I ask.

‘Ja, lady. They think he is the devil.’

‘That’s not true,’ says another boy. ‘He needs to go to a sangoma; he’s possessed by the spirit of a witch. If you meet him, then you don’t have long to live.’

‘He only comes out at night,’ the third one chimes in. ‘If he touches you, the part of the body he touches will die. He can spread Aids even.’

‘Ja. I heard that too,’ the tall boy–clearly the ringleader–says. ‘I know someone who has seen him, lady. If you give me a hundred, I’ll take you.’

‘These boys don’t know anything,’ Vincent says, but he hands them each twenty rand, and sends them on their way. They whoop and run off unsteadily into the night. ‘This is what it is like all the time. But I have to be thorough, make my report every day. Most days I check the morgue in case he shows up there, but I won’t take you there.’

The next day Vincent meets me at my hotel to say that he’s heading out to the West Coast to ‘follow a lead’. He puts me in touch with a cop at a Khayelitsha police station who he says will talk to me, gives me the name of a paramedic who arrived at the scene minutes after the crash, and passes on the cellphone number of a woman who had lost her home in the devastation. ‘She knows something,’ he says. ‘Maybe she will talk to you. A foreigner.’ Then, with another wide grin and a complicated handshake, he leaves.

(Ten days later, I’m at home in Manhattan, when I receive a text message from Vincent. All it says is: <they got him>)