Chapter summary
Tobe and Dara decline prosecution while Inspector Danjuma traces Karo’s calculated disappearance and drug theft.
TOBECHUKWU
Friday morning The police station at Lekki had a verandah with plastic chairs, a ceiling fan that did not turn, and a notice in red paint that said DO NOT GIVE BRIBE. Beneath it, a man in a blue shirt was negotiating with an officer about a goat.
Inspector Danjuma, who was forty, with a moustache and the tired, scrupulous look of a man who has taken statements from every kind of liar, put the two of them in a small office with a desk, three chairs and a calendar from a tyre company. Dara had slept for two hours. Tobe had not slept at all. Both had brought their phones, charged, as if for a long siege.
He took Tobe’s statement first. It was a clean one. She had worked on it in the taxi, with a pencil and the back of the envelope. Times, dates, names, the three minutes, the sign-in, the machine name, the message from the unknown number and the phone that rang in a handbag. When she finished, Inspector Danjuma set down his pen and looked at her for a while.
“Madam, you should have been a police officer.”
“I am in sales.”
“It is the same thing,” said the Inspector, “with better shoes.”
Then Dara gave hers, which took longer, because every few sentences she said something that was not for the record, and had to be asked to say it again in another way. When she reached the pizza she stopped and put a hand over her mouth. The Inspector waited. Outside the goat dispute rose to a crescendo and abruptly died.
“Now,” he said at last. “The lady in the boots. Mrs. Sarah. She has made a full statement. She has confessed to the email, the tyres, the pizza and the calabash. You are both entitled to make a complaint against her. Do you wish to?”
Tobe had thought about it all night. “No.”
“No?”
“I would like my job back and my name cleared, and I think I have got both of those. She has written to my company. I do not need her to go to prison.” She paused. “I need her to have understood what it was like.”
“And you, madam?”
Dara considered the question with great seriousness. She looked at the ceiling fan. She looked at the calendar. “A little,” she said.
“A little?”
“I would like to press charges a little. Is there a way? And then drop them?”
“It is not a legal arrangement.”
“It is a Nigerian one,” said Dara. “Write down that she owes me seven thousand eight hundred naira for the pizza, a cleaner, a carpet, and some compensation for my nose. And that I will not insist if she pays.”
He wrote it down. It occurred to Tobe that he was trying not to smile.
“The girl,” said Dara. “Karo. Have you found her?”
“We have found her flat. It was empty by seven o’clock this morning. The landlord says she paid a month in advance and left without a word. We have her student card. She works at a pharmacy on Saturdays.” He tapped his pen. “The lab says a strip of tablets is missing from a drawer. Their log, which nobody read, shows the same girl taking one strip every few months, for eight months. She is a careful person.”
“She won’t come back,” said Tobe.
“They always come back.” He said it as one says a thing that one has said many times. “Everybody does. A phone, a mother, a hospital, a bus ticket. I have been doing this for nineteen years.”
“Inspector,” Tobe said slowly, “I don’t think you have met her.”
He looked at her. Something in her face made him write it down.
Loose Ends · Continue reading
Continue to Chapter 44
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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