Loose Ends — Chapter 44: The Next House

Chapter summary

Felix surrenders his surveillance evidence, accepts possible prosecution, and warns that Karo always plans escapes.

FELIX

Friday morning

They took Felix into a different room, with a different calendar, and he gave them everything, in order, in a flat voice, like a man reading out a will.

The Samsung phone. The program, which he wrote himself in March, which logs the screen and the typing of a computer and sends it, at midnight, to an address. The thread called Aburo, with its soft, patient sentences. The photograph of the first list. He laid his own laptop on the desk and told them the password. He wanted them to have it.

“You are not obliged to say these things,” said the officer at the keyboard. He was young, with a careful moustache. “You have a right to a lawyer.”

“I know.”

“It might help you to have one.”

“It might,” said Felix. “I have not earned the help.”

The officer looked at him for a moment and went back to typing.

“Where might she go?” said Inspector Danjuma, in the doorway. He was a large calm shape against the light. “You know her best, Mr. Felix. Where does she go, when there is a door that is closed?”

Felix thought. He thought of Karo at fifteen in the back of her mother’s house, her face quite empty, counting something on her fingers. He thought of the lorry and the sack of beans, and of the way she told him the story once, at a wedding, when she had been drinking, in a voice like someone reading a menu.

“To the next house,” he said.

“Which house?”

“I don’t know. A rich man’s, with a wife.” He rubbed his face. “But she will have a plan. She always has a plan, Inspector. I have never once seen her walk anywhere without one.”

The Inspector wrote down plan. Then he crossed it out and wrote it again, larger, as if the word might have changed.

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