Chapter summary
Tobe counts contradictions, identifies Karo’s second hand, and exposes the evidence behind Sammy’s poisoning attempt.
TOBECHUKWU
Thursday night Tobe had spent her working life with numbers, and numbers are patient. They do not shout. They wait to be noticed.
She stood on the terrace with the envelope in her hand, listening to the girl in the white dress sob, and she began, without deciding to, to count.
One. The girl said that she had seen the woman in boots put something into the jug. But the woman had arrived at 8:26, and Baba Sule, who was standing in the doorway wringing his hands, had said she walked straight to the terrace. And the man in the chair had a glass beside his hand that was already half empty.
“Baba,” she said. “Who made the drink?”
“The young madam, ma. She bring am herself, five o’clock, from her bag. Oga was very, very touched, ma.”
“So the jug has been on this table since five.”
“Yes, ma.”
“And the lady in boots came in at half past eight.” Tobe turned to the girl. “When exactly did she put the tablets in the jug?”
The sobbing paused. “Just now. While you were running.” “I was ten metres behind you. She had the glass in her hand when you screamed.” Tobe said it kindly. “I am only counting.”
Two. “Baba, when did the young madam leave?”
Baba Sule blinked. “A quarter to seven, ma. I locked the gate behind her myself.”
“I came back by the beach,” said the girl quickly. “I wanted to speak to him.”
“By the beach.” Tobe nodded. “And you came up the steps at the exact moment she was alone with him. How lucky.”
The girl looked up. For one moment, and Tobe saw it, her face changed. Not much. Something behind it went quiet, like a room when a fan is switched off.
Three. Tobe took out her phone. She found the message from 6:31 on Wednesday evening, the number she had copied into a note, and looked at it for a moment the way you look at a name on a gravestone.
She dialled.
Nothing happened. The sea. The candle. Somewhere in the house a tap dripped. Then, from the small white handbag lying on the floor beside the cane chair, there came a muffled buzz, and another, and a thin electronic tune.
Nobody moved.
Please, thought Tobe. Please let it be what I think.
Dara got there first. She snatched up the handbag and tipped it out onto the white cloth, between the cake and the candle. A lipstick. A packet of tissue. A phone, lit and shuddering. And a strip of white tablets, mostly empty.
“That is not mine,” said the girl in white.
“It is ringing,” Tobe said, “because I am calling it.” She ended the call. The phone on the table went dark.
“The same number,” said Dara. She had her own phone out. She dialled it too, and it lit again, and between them the little strip of tablets shone on the cloth.
Four. Felix came forward. He did not look at anybody. He took Dara’s phone out of her hand, opened an email that had been waiting there since 8:10, and held it out for the rest of them to see.
“It’s all in there,” he said. “Every message. She is my cousin. I put a program on your computer, Dara, in the spring, because she asked me to. She told me the man who paid your rent was a fraudster. I believed her. I sent you the red email on Tuesday because she told me to. I am sorry. I don’t expect you to forgive me. I only wanted somebody to see it.”
Tobe scrolled the thread over Dara’s shoulder. The name at the top was Aburo. Beneath it, a column of cool, patient sentences. Send it red. Tomorrow, one small thing. I kept the messages. Do not be late. She read them with the part of her mind that was used to reading reports about other people’s mistakes.
“Sarah.” She heard herself use the name for the first time. The woman in boots turned her head. “Did you send an email to Dara on Tuesday afternoon, in red, with an exclamation mark?”
“I never write sentences,” said Sarah. “Only the one word.”
Tobe stared at her. The woman had just confessed to a crime, and her main concern was grammar!
“That is what I thought.” Tobe laid the envelope on the table. “I have been trying to understand this since Wednesday. There are two signatures. Yours is tidy. You take what you need and you sign with a single word. You never explained, you never threatened. The other one wrote ‘This is just the beginning’ and put an exclamation mark after it, because she wanted a frightened woman. That is the hand of somebody who was copying you, and copying you badly, because she wanted Dara to be afraid of you.”
She turned to the girl. “You are the second hand.”
The girl in white had got to her feet. She stood with her arms loose and her face composed, and she did not cry. The tap seemed to have been turned off. When she spoke, her voice was very soft and perfectly level.
“You cannot prove I did anything to him,” said Karo.
“No,” Tobe said. “I can’t. But the police can test that glass, and that jug, and those tablets, and both your phones, and they will.”
“I did nothing.”
“Then you have nothing to be afraid of.”
“He is drunk,” said Karo, to the room in general. Her voice had steadied into a kind of sweet reasonableness, like a nurse’s. “He drank too much. He fell asleep. You are all very upset, and I understand, because I am upset too. I was the first person that woman attacked. I had a calabash at my door.”
“You did,” said Tobe. “It was real. I believe you. That is what fooled me for a day. You were hurt on Sunday, and you were frightened. It is what happened on Tuesday that I cannot account for.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“On Sunday you were a girl who ran. On Monday you were a girl who came to a glass tower in a hoodie and cried. By Tuesday afternoon somebody was sending Dara an email in red with an exclamation mark. Something happened to you between Monday and Tuesday, Karo. Somebody told you something, or you worked something out. And after that you were not a victim any more.”
Karo’s face did not move. But Tobe saw her eyes go, for a fraction of a second, towards the dark beyond the terrace wall, in the direction of a market stall a long way off.
The silence stretched. And into it, from the cane chair, came a thick, slow voice, as if from the bottom of a well.
“Karo?”
Loose Ends · Continue reading
Continue to Chapter 37
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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