Loose Ends — Chapter 5: A Crime Committed in Socks

Chapter summary

Sarah invades Tobe’s account, weaponises a private joke, then discovers revenge leaves no satisfaction behind.

SARAH

Sunday night

Sunday dinner was fried rice and a film the boys had seen four times. Sarah sat on the sofa between them with a bowl on her knee and laughed in all the right places. At nine she carried them up to bed. At ten, Sammy, who had spent the evening on the veranda glued to his phone, the real one, kissed her on the head and said he was turning in early because of the flight on Wednesday.

“Of course,” said Sarah.

At a quarter to twelve she sat down at the kitchen table in her socks, with the radio on low, and woke BODLEIAN-7.

She had learned the password by accident. Sammy could not remember his own mother’s birthday, so he wrote everything down. In March he had set up a phone for somebody he called a friend from work, and, being a man who trusts his own cloud, he saved the new password in the notes app of his own account. Heading: T phone.

Six months later his wife found it by scrolling. Men!

She logged in at 11:49. A long way off, behind a wall of anonymous servers in a country she had never seen, the stranger’s account opened without a murmur.

It was the first time she had ever walked through another woman’s house. She was surprised at how tidy it was. Emails sorted into folders with names like Q3 Pipeline and Mama School Fees. A notes app full of bullet points, a grocery list, a quarrel with a landlord. And in the Sent folder, two minutes old, a presentation sent to somebody called Briggs. Sarah read the title of the slide deck. It was good. It was, in fact, very good.

Then she found the joke.

It had been written on a Saturday, at 10:12 in the morning. I can bet my two-month salary on the fact that Mr Briggs penis is smaller than my pinky finger. A silly, bawdy, private thing, scribbled by a tired woman on a toilet, never meant to be read by anybody. Sarah read it twice. She laughed once, a short sharp bark in the quiet kitchen, and was astonished at herself. Below it she found the other note. Sunshine List. She opened it. Names of companies. Deal sizes. Dates.

A sour taste rose in her mouth. Every entry was a lead, and every lead was one that Sammy would have known about before the market did. He had fed this woman, deal by deal, for six months, and she had turned every one into money. Clever girl, Sarah thought. And she hated herself for thinking it.

Sarah did not copy the list. She told herself she had no right to it. She noticed that she had read every line of it first.

At 11:52 she selected the joke, pasted it into a new message, and addressed it to Briggs. It was not a cruel thing. That was what she told herself with her finger on the key. It was a joke. It would embarrass a woman and cost her a job, perhaps, and that was all. Humiliation, not injury.

She sent it.

At 11:55 she logged out and shut the lid and sat still, listening to the rain and the radio and her husband’s snoring through the ceiling. She had committed her first crime in her own kitchen, in her socks.

It had not felt like a victory. It had felt like opening somebody else’s diary and finding that she liked the writing.

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The featured photograph is used under the Pexels licence. Contextual scene illustrations are original editorial artwork created for this serial; the characters and events are fictional. Featured photograph source. Editorial design by akinakingbogun.com.