Loose Ends — Chapter 34: The Gateman Who Saw Everything

Chapter summary

Baba Sule’s testimony exposes Karo’s timeline and strengthens the truth gathering around Sammy’s collapse tonight.

BABA SULE

Thursday night Baba Sule had kept the gate of that house for nineteen years. In that time he had seen a bishop’s second wife, a minister’s daughter’s secret wedding, and a banker who cried all night on the terrace in his socks over a dog. He was not a man who was easily surprised.

But he had never before seen four women and a sleeping man on the same terrace in one hour.

He had opened the gate at a quarter to seven for the young madam in the white dress, who had been crying. He locked it behind her. He watched her walk down the lane to the little silver car at the end, stand with the driver for a few minutes, and then walk away along the wall towards the beach path. He thought nothing of it. A gateman learns early that what he sees is not always what he is asked about.

But he saw her again. At about a quarter past eight, going round with the key to switch off the generator, he noticed a pale shape at the head of the beach steps, standing still in the shadow of the wall. She stood there for twenty minutes, hands folded, looking at the lanterns on the terrace, like a woman waiting for a bus.

It had made the hair rise on his arms. He did not know why. He told himself it was the sea air.

Then Oga’s wife arrived in her boots. He let her in as he had been told. She looked at him with a gentleness he did not expect and said, “Thank you, Baba.” No woman about to do something terrible had ever thanked him at that gate, and he was sure that she was not about to.

And then the scream.

He ran. When he reached the terrace there were four women and Oga in his chair, and he stood in the doorway wringing his hands. Nineteen years of gate-keeping had not prepared him for this. The tall one slapped the one in boots! The girl in white screamed for an ambulance. He called one, and the police, on his old Nokia, shouting the address three times into the phone like a prayer.

Ah-ah! What kind of trouble is this?

The ambulance came in eighteen minutes, which was a miracle for Lekki. The paramedic, a calm young man, took Oga’s pulse and said, “Sedative. He will wake.”

“It is the red drink,” Baba Sule said. “The young madam made it herself. She brought it at five o’clock.”

He had not meant to say it aloud. He saw four faces turn to him in the lantern light. He saw the face of the girl in white, and he remembered, too late, that a gateman is not paid to see things.

But he had said it. And standing in the doorway, with the sea behind him and his old heart going like a drum, he knew that he would say it again, in a police station, in the morning, in a clear voice. It would be the best thing he did all year.

Loose Ends · Continue reading

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