Chapter summary
Dara encounters Sarah, unmasks Fatbabygirl, witnesses confessions, then faces Felix’s urgent warning about Karo’s scheme.
DARA
Thursday night Dara had never run in sandals before, and she discovered that it can be done, in the same way that you discover you can swim when the boat sinks.
The terrace was lit like a stage. There was a table, and flowers, and a cake with a toy bicycle on top, and a man sagging in a cane chair. There was a girl in a white dress with both hands pressed to her mouth. And in the middle of it all, with a glass in her hand and her feet planted apart, stood a woman in a biker jacket and boots.
Dara stopped so hard that Tobe walked into her back.
The boots. She did not need to see the face. She knew the boots, the way you know the shoes of a person who has stood on your foot.
“You,” she said. “The pizza lady.”
The woman looked at her. She was bigger than Dara had pictured, not fat, but big, with a heavy plait coiled on her neck and a face that was calm in the way a locked door is calm. And Dara smelled it. Even out here, even over the sea. Soft, powdery, sweet, with cream underneath. Flowers like a church wedding.
“She poisoned him!” The girl in white ran forward and almost into Dara’s arms. “I saw her! She put something in the jug! Please, somebody call an ambulance, he’s not waking up!”
Tobe was not looking at the girl. She was looking at the laptop bag on the chair, at the sticker on its lid. Her face went white and then very still. “Dara,” she said. “Look at the bag.”
BODLEIAN-7.
It was her! It was actually her!
“Fatbabygirl,” Dara said.
The woman set the glass down on the table, very gently, as if it were the last clean thing in the house. “I did not poison my husband,” she said.
“Her husband!” cried the girl. “She is his wife! She came here to kill him!”
“I did not touch my husband.” The woman’s voice did not rise. It had the dry, level sound of somebody reading a statement she had prepared. “I did the pizza. I did the email. I did the tyres. I did the calabash. I will stand in any court in this country and say so. I did not touch him.”
“The calabash?” said Dara.
“That was me,” said the girl in white, and burst into tears.
Nobody spoke. The sea went on. Dara looked from the girl to Tobe, to the woman in boots, and then to the four of them reflected in the dark glass of the terrace doors, standing in a rough circle around a sleeping man like mourners at a strange wake.
“Is this a support group?” she said.
“How many of us are there?” said Tobe, very faintly.
“Three,” said Sarah. “And me.”
“Four.” Tobe gave a short, cracked laugh. “He had four.”
Dara had a great deal to say, and none of it was going to fit into one sentence, so she did the only thing that she had been wanting to do since Tuesday afternoon. She crossed the terrace and slapped the woman across the face, once, very hard.
“Dara!” said Tobe.
“I told you I wanted to.”
“You said not before the proof.”
“She has just given me the proof. She said it herself.”
The woman’s head had turned with the blow. She straightened it slowly. A red mark came up on her cheek in the lantern light. “I had that coming,” she said, and for some reason that made it worse.
“Do not thank me,” said Dara.
“I wasn’t going to.”
The girl in white had dropped to her knees beside the cane chair. She was holding his hand against her cheek, saying his name, Sammy, Sammy, please, and sobbing in great even sobs. Dara watched her. It was the oddest thing. There was something wrong with the crying. It was good crying, and it came very regularly, like water from a tap. Baba Sule appeared in the doorway in his football jersey. “Madam, what is happening?” “Call the ambulance!” the girl shouted. “Call the police! Nobody leave this place!”
“I am not going anywhere,” said the woman in boots.
She meant it. Dara could see that. She stood with her back to the sea and her hands loose at her sides, the way a person stands who has finished running.
Behind them the French doors opened, and a tired voice said, “Dara.”
She turned. Felix stood in the doorway with his phone in his hand and a face as grey as a wet wall. “Dara,” he said. “Check your email.”
Loose Ends · Continue reading
Continue to Chapter 34
The story continues in the next chapter.
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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.
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