Loose Ends — Chapter 30: The Camera He Lowered

Chapter summary

Felix sends Dara proof of Karo’s scheme, rejects filming, and approaches the unfolding dangerous confrontation.

FELIX

Thursday evening Felix had parked the Corolla at the end of the sandy lane at five o’clock, switched off the lights, and had not moved since. He sat with both hands on the wheel, as if the car might go somewhere without him.

He had watched Karo walk up the lane in the white dress and through the green gate. He had watched her come out again at a quarter to seven, in tears that she wiped away before she reached him. “Wait here,” she said, and went round the side of the wall towards the beach.

“Karo, what are you doing?”

“A favour for the family.” She smiled. “Now listen. At about half past eight a big woman in boots will arrive in a white Mercedes. You will film the gate, the terrace, anything that happens at all, from here, with the phone, and you will keep filming until I tell you to stop. That is the small thing. After that I will leave you and your Dara alone forever.”

“What happens at half past eight?”

“Nothing, cousin. A family matter.”

He had been a coward all his life, and he knew precisely how it felt, which was warm at first and then heavy. At eight o’clock he sat in the dark with his phone in his hand and did the only brave thing he had ever done. He opened the folder where he kept everything.

It had started in February, in the back room of her mother’s house in Isara, over a plate of fried plantain. Karo, who was twenty-one then, had said it the way she said everything, softly, looking at her hands. There was a man in Lagos who was cheating somebody close to the family. She needed to know where his money went. She needed a person who understood computers and who would not ask foolish questions. Felix owed her mother forty thousand naira and a good deal of shame. He said yes before she finished the sentence.

He told himself it was a favour. He told himself it was a few weeks. He moved into the flat next door at the end of the month, with a mattress and a laptop, and he put the program on the first afternoon, when a woman in a green dress with a quick laugh asked him to help carry her wardrobe. It took four minutes. He remembered thinking, with a kind of wonder, that it was the easiest thing he had ever done, and the worst.

Every message. Every voice note. The screenshot of the day she asked him to install the program. The photograph of her handwriting on the first list, which he had not meant to keep. The record of the red email, with the time stamp, from the account she had made. He had saved all of it, because a man who has been told I kept the messages had better keep some of his own.

He wrote one line to Dara. Read this before you go in. I am sorry. I should have told you in March. He attached the folder, and sent it at 8:10, and then he sat still, because it was done and could not be taken back.

She would not see it for a while. He knew that. She would be driving. She would be driving with a stranger called Tobe, to a house that he had been paid, in a manner of speaking, to watch.

At 8:26 headlights swung into the lane. A white Mercedes went past him at walking pace, tinted glass, a driver in a collared shirt with his eyes on the road. It stopped at the green gate. A woman got out in a biker jacket and boots, with a bag on her shoulder, and stood a moment looking at the gate as if it were a person.

Felix raised the phone. His thumb hovered.

She did not look like a monster. She looked like someone about to take a test that she had studied for too hard. He lowered the phone an inch. He thought, clearly, of Dara standing at her kitchen door with her palm stinging. He thought of the word fraudster.

At 8:38 a second car came up the lane, a small silver Toyota with a dented bumper that he recognised before he saw the driver. It stopped behind him. Dara got out of the driver’s seat. A tall woman climbed out of the other side, with an envelope in her hand.

“Felix?” Dara said. “What are you doing here?”

He opened his mouth. He had a sentence ready, one that he had been rehearsing for five months. And the night split in half with a scream from the beach end of the house, a long, high, young scream.

“What have you done to him?”

Dara ran. The tall woman ran after her. Felix sat in the Corolla with the phone raised and the red light of the camera glowing, exactly as he had been told.

Then he saw the girl’s white dress move across the terrace in the lantern light, and understood with a drop of the stomach what Karo had asked him to record, and for whom.

He stopped the video. He put the phone in his pocket. He got out of the car and walked towards the green gate.

Loose Ends · Continue reading

Continue to Chapter 31

The story continues in the next chapter.

Read Chapter 31 →

What stayed with you? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Featured and contextual photographs are used under the Pexels licence and are illustrative; the characters and events are fictional. Featured photograph source. Editorial design by akinakingbogun.com.