Chapter summary
Dami traces Eni’s decoy phone to Abuja, uncovering deliberate misdirection and Hakeem’s troubling hidden knowledge.
6.40pm, Wednesday 23 March 2022, Lekki, Lagos
Chidi would not look at her.
He sat across from Dami in the back booth of a bukka on the Lekki-Epe expressway, with a plate of pepper soup going cold in front of him and a laptop angled away from the other diners. He was a small, nervous man with glasses that kept sliding down his nose, a senior engineer at one of the big telecom networks, and he had a wife, three children and a very sincere fear of losing his job.
“Madam Dami,” he said, “na your life you dey ask me to risk o.”
“Chidi.”
“I dey talk true.”
“Chidi, at midnight on the fourth of June two years ago, your daughter’s temperature was thirty-nine point eight and every pharmacy in Lekki was shut.” She kept her voice level. “Who opened?”
He closed his eyes.
“Na you.”
“I have never asked you for anything.”
“No.”
“I am asking now.”
He breathed out through his nose. Then he turned the laptop around.
It was a map of the western coast of Nigeria, grey and green and blue, and across it ran a thin red thread of dots. Each dot carried a small black label, a time and a mast.
“You never got this from me,” Chidi said. “I was at home. I was watching Arsenal.”
“Understood.”
“The phone was on at three fifty-eight in the morning. Ikoyi. Then twelve minutes of nothing. Then here.” He tapped the screen. “Ojota. Four-twelve. Then it starts moving. Fast. Fifty, sixty kilometres an hour. North, along the expressway. Here, Ibadan, eight-forty. Here, Ilorin, one-thirty. Mokwa. Suleja. And here.”
His finger rested on a tight cluster of dots near the top of the map.
“Abuja. Kubwa, to be exact. Eight-fifteen that night. Last ping at eight forty-seven. After that, nothing.”
“Dead.”
“Battery,” Chidi agreed. “Or somebody switched it off.”
Dami looked at the thread of red dots for a long time. It ran up the country like a vein.
Abuja.
She had called the number three hundred and eleven times. She knew, because she had counted, the way her sister would have counted. Every call had ended in the same smooth, empty voice.
“So she went to Abuja,” Dami said.
“Or her phone did,” said Chidi, and pushed his glasses up his nose.
10.20am, Saturday 26 March 2022, Kubwa, Abuja
Abuja in March was a furnace wearing a clean shirt.
The flight from Lagos had been an hour of cold coffee and bad turbulence. The drive from the airport had been another hour of wide, neat, empty roads, and then, in Kubwa, the city lost its manners all at once and became a market. Tarpaulins. Motorcycles. Mounds of pepper and tomato. A man carrying a mattress on his head and a goat under his arm. Everywhere the sound of horns, hawkers, generators and a speaker playing Hausa pop at a volume that rattled the teeth.
Dami stood in the middle of it with her handbag clutched against her and a photograph of her sister in her hand.
She had thought of everything. She had printed the picture. She had written down the model of Eni’s phone, the colour, the cracked corner, the cartoon cat on the back. She had a story ready, for the sort of people who needed one.
The third stall she tried, a narrow wooden booth at the edge of the phone market with a glass counter full of cables, belonged to a heavy man in a white cap.
“Sannu, madam.” He did not look up from the screen he was soldering. “You dey buy or you dey sell?”
“Neither, sir. I’m looking for a phone.”
“Madam, na for here phone plenty pass people.”
“A black one. A cracked corner on the left, a little cat on the back.” She held out the photograph, and then, because she was a pharmacist and thorough, she took out the box with the serial number printed on its side. “This one.”
He glanced at the number. He glanced again.
The soldering iron went down.
“Wait.” He rubbed his chin slowly. “This one, I fit don buy am.”
Her heart did something painful and quick.
“When?”
“Five weeks? Six? A boy bring am come. Small boy, university boy, with a hoodie. He say na for him bag e dey. He say he no know how e take enter.” The man shrugged. “E no get password. I clear am, I sell am to one customer for thirty-five thousand.”
“A boy.” Dami leaned over the glass counter. “Did he say where he got it?”
“He say na bus.”
“Which bus?”
“The one from Lagos, to Utako motor park. The big white one.”
“Was there a woman with him? On the bus?”
“Madam, I no dey ask. The boy say na man and man dey inside. All men. Nobody wey fit give phone like that.” He looked at her face and, perhaps from some old, unused kindness, softened. “Madam, I dey sorry. Na your sister?”
“Yes.”
“She no dey for bus,” said the man, with the grave courtesy of someone who has seen many people searching. “Phone dey for bus. Your sister, no.”
Dami stood very still.
Somebody had put the phone there. Somebody had slid it, on purpose, into the bag of a stranger who would carry it a thousand kilometres north while the owner went some other way. It was not an accident, or a robbery, or a kidnapping. It was a trick. Small, careful, practical, a thing you would do if you had thought it through.
It was the sort of thing Eni would do.
1.30pm, Utako Motor Park
She sat on a concrete kerb in the shade of a bus and tried not to cry in front of strangers.
She had found the coach company, a yellow shed with a faded sign, and a clerk who told her that nobody took names. She had found the conductor, a thin man in a vest who remembered nothing. She had found the boy’s department at the university, but the boy had left for a family wedding in Kaduna. Every door she knocked on had been, as the saying goes, politely closed.
The heat pressed on the back of her neck like a hand.
Her phone rang. Hakeem.
She let it ring four times, then answered.
“Babe, where are you?”
“Abuja.”
A pause, long enough for her to hear a car horn from his end and the faint chime of a lift.
“What are you doing in Abuja?”
“Looking for Eni.” Her voice cracked on the name. “The phone came here, Hakeem. Somebody put it on a bus. She wasn’t on it. She planned this. She planned it, and she didn’t tell anyone, and I…”
“Dami.”
“I don’t understand. She is the most careful person I know. She doesn’t just…”
“Dami. Come home.”
The words were quiet and very tired.
“Why?” she said. “What do you know?”
“Nothing.” Too quickly. “I know nothing. I’m saying… come home. You left this morning and didn’t even tell me.” A pause. The lift chimed again. “Maybe,” Hakeem said, so gently that she almost didn’t hear it, “maybe she doesn’t want to be found.”
It was not a thing a man says on the spur of the moment.
It was a sentence that had been rehearsed. She could hear it, folded and smooth and carried a long way, like a stone that had been turned over in someone’s pocket for weeks.
The Third Door · Continue reading
Chapter 16 is the next door
The story continues. Follow the next chapter through the door.
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Cover and contextual photographs are used under the Pexels licence. Cover source; cover design for The Third Door by akinakingbogun.com.
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