Loose Ends — Chapter 25: Two Women, One Photograph

Chapter summary

Tobe and Dara compare attacks, expose Sammy’s aliases, identify Sarah, and prepare Thursday’s confrontation together.

TOBECHUKWU

Wednesday morning Tobe went back to the glass tower on Wednesday morning, which she was not supposed to do, and sat in the staff café on the ground floor with a cup of tea and a newspaper held upside down. Some detective!

Bisola came in at 10:30, as she did every day, for her cappuccino. She was twenty-six, with long lashes and a short skirt, and she carried Madame Angelina’s diary in a leather folder against her chest like a hymn book. When she saw Tobe she stopped dead.

“Oh my God, Tobe. Hi.”

“Bisola. Can I ask you something?”

“Everyone is talking about it,” Bisola whispered, sliding into the chair opposite. “Honestly, I was so upset. Madam is furious with Mr. Briggs. She said you cannot suspend a girl on the strength of one email without an inquiry, it is in the Handbook, he has not even opened a file. She went red. I have never seen her go red.”

It was not the opening that Tobe had prepared. She cleared her throat. “Madame Angelina studied at Oxford.”

“Oh, the course!” Bisola laughed, and covered her mouth. “Three weeks, executive education, 2011. She keeps the certificate in a frame because she cannot stop talking about it. She says Oxford the way other people say Jesus.”

“Does she use a computer?”

“Madam?” Bisola’s eyes went wide. “Tobe, she types with two fingers. She does not know where the shift key is. I do all her passwords. I do her emails. I do everything. If you want to hack into Madam you will need a ladder and a miracle.”

“And on Sunday night around midnight?”

“I was at my fiancé’s family house in Ikorodu eating amala with forty people. There are photographs.” She stopped. Her face softened. “Tobe, did you think it was me?”

“I thought it might be somebody who knew how things worked.”

“Is that why you asked me about weekends in the lift last week?” Bisola said, and then, with a little squeak, “no, it was me who asked you. I wanted to invite you to the engagement party.” She dug in the folder and produced a cream card with a gold border and a drawing of two doves. “Please come. Please. It is on the twelfth. I was too shy to say it properly.”

Tobe took the card. She looked at the doves for a long moment. Then she began to laugh, quietly, helplessly, with her hand over her eyes.

“What?” said Bisola. “What is it?”

“Nothing. I am so sorry. I thought you were a master criminal.”

“I once locked myself out of my own Instagram,” said Bisola, with dignity.

Tobe walked out into the glare of the street with the invitation in her bag. In her head she drew a line through Bisola and another through Angelina (Oxford). That left one name on the envelope, written lightly in pencil. She did not like the way it fitted.

* * *

TOBECHUKWU

Wednesday evening The message arrived at 6:31 on Wednesday evening. Tobe was sitting on her bed with a calculator and a plate of cold rice, working out how a woman survives a month without salary, and how her family survives with her.

You are not the only one he lies to. Her name is Dara. Ask her about the pizza. A telephone number followed.

Tobe read it three times. She did not know any Dara. She did not know anything about a pizza. She also did not know who had the number of a woman she had never met, which was exactly the kind of question she had been asking herself for two days.

She called. A woman answered on the fourth ring and said, very low, “Who is this?”

“My name is Tobechukwu. Somebody sent me your number. They said I should ask you about a pizza.”

The silence at the other end was so complete that Tobe checked the screen. Then the woman said, “Where are you?”

They met at eight in a small café near Yaba, with plastic chairs and a ceiling fan that chased one fly in slow circles. Dara arrived in dark glasses at night, like a woman hiding from the moon. She sat down, folded her arms and said, “You first.”

“I was suspended on Monday for an email I did not write. A joke about my boss, from my private notes. Somebody walked into my account and sent it. Somebody also let the air out of my tyres. Your turn.”

Dara took off the glasses. Her eyes were red. “Somebody delivered a pizza box to me on Tuesday. It was full of faeces. There was a used pad inside, and a note that said Fatbabygirl.”

Tobe put her fork down.

“Why would a stranger hand us to each other?” Dara said.

“Because we have something in common.”

“Do we?”

“A man.” Tobe said it quietly, the way you say a word in church. “Probably. I am guessing. Is there a man?”

Dara’s jaw tightened. “His name is Ernest. Tall. Beard. Vice President of something. Married, two children, always busy. He pays my rent.”

A waiter passed with a tray of bottled water. Neither of them looked up. “Mine is called Sam,” Tobe said. “Tall. Beard. Private equity. Married, two children, always busy. He gave me my targets.”

They stared at each other.

Dara found her phone first. The photograph was of a man laughing across a restaurant table with a glass in his hand. Tobe did not need to look twice. She opened the gallery on her own phone, to the picture she kept in a folder with a boring name, a man asleep on her pillow in the morning light.

“Oh my God,” said Dara.

“He told me his name was Samuel.”

“He told me Ernest.”

“Which one is real?”

“Neither,” Dara said. “Both. I don’t know.” And she began to laugh, a high, ugly laugh, and then Tobe was laughing too, and then somebody was crying, and the waiter came and looked at them and went away again.

When it was over, Tobe took the envelope out of her bag, with her list. She laid it flat. It had names crossed out and names underlined and, at the bottom, in pencil, the line she had written on

Tuesday.

“I think we should do this properly,” she said. “What do you know?”

Dara told her about the woman in the helmet, the okada, the white E-class with the tinted glass, the driver reading a newspaper. Tobe told her about the sign-in, the three minutes, and the name of a machine.

“BODLEIAN-7,” she said. “It is a library in Oxford.”

“A woman with a driver,” Dara said slowly, “and Oxford.”

“And a pet name.” Tobe tapped the envelope. “Fatbabygirl. That is not a name you give a stranger. That is what you call somebody in bed. Or after twelve years of marriage. What did he call you?”

“My pepper.”

“Tobe darling.”

“So Fatbabygirl is his.” Dara swallowed. “It is hers.”

“It is the wife.” “I never looked at her,” Dara said. “I was careful never to look. Now I want to see her face.”

“I want proof,” said Tobe. “And I want my job back.”

“And I want to slap her.”

“Not before I get the proof.”

Dara held out her phone. The message had come at 6:40.

Thursday. Lekki. 9pm. Come and see her face. Tobe had the same, word for word, ten minutes later than hers. They looked at the two screens, side by side, the same cold sentence waiting in both of them.

“Whoever sent this knows more than we do,” Tobe said.

“It might be my neighbour. Felix. I slapped him this morning. I think he is working with her.” Dara paused. “He is an IT programmer, and he installed my computer.”

Tobe frowned. “My person typed one line, took what she needed, and left. No flourish. What was in your email?”

“This is just the beginning! In red.”

“With an exclamation mark.” Tobe sat back. “Nobody who plans the way mine planned puts an exclamation mark on anything.”

“What are you saying?” “I don’t know yet.” She folded the envelope. “I am saying I would like to know.”

They exchanged numbers. They agreed to meet at the Yaba junction at half past seven on Thursday, and Dara would drive. “Mine has two new tyres and a grudge,” said Tobe, “but yours has a better engine.”

It was the first time in three days that either of them had laughed with her whole chest.

* * *

DARA

Wednesday night Dara walked home slowly with her sunglasses in her hand. It was past eleven and the street lamps were doing what Lagos street lamps do, which is to make a decision and then change their minds.

At the foot of the stairs she looked up. Felix’s kitchen window was lit. A shadow passed across it and came back, restless, the way a man walks when he is carrying something heavy that he cannot put down.

She stood there with her key in her hand. She thought about knocking. She thought about the second slap. She thought about the sentence he had begun and she had refused to let him finish.

For the first time since Tuesday she was not the only person in the world with the smell in her nose. It made her braver than she wanted to be.

She looked at his light and she looked at her pride, and for the first time they were not the same size.

Then she went inside.

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The featured photograph is used under the Pexels licence. Contextual scene illustrations are original editorial artwork created for this serial; the characters and events are fictional. Featured photograph source. Editorial design by akinakingbogun.com.