MARCUS LANE

DAMI

She called at 10:46 p.m.

I was still in my study, reading a port tender nobody would ever finish reading. I picked up on the first ring.

“My chair,” she said.

That was all. Two words, very calm, the way people speak when the alternative is screaming.

“Where are you?”

“In the office.”

“I told you…”

“I know what you told me. My laptop was dying.” A breath. “Dami, he’s been in here. Tonight. He turned my chair to the window. That’s what he used to do. He’d sit in my chair and look at the road and say he was thinking.”

“Is anything missing?”

“No. Nothing’s missing. That’s the point. He wants me to know he can.”

“Go down to your car and lock the doors. I’m coming.”

“You don’t have to…”

I had already hung up. It’s rude. It’s also faster.

……………….

Third Mainland Bridge at night is the only part of Lagos that ever feels empty. I made it to Yaba in twenty-two minutes. My driver didn’t speak once. He has driven me for eleven years. He knows the difference between urgent and important, and he had never seen this one before.

She was sitting in the Corolla under the pharmacy sign, doors locked, engine running, clipboard on her lap like she might need to invoice someone.

I tapped on the window. She unlocked the passenger side. I got in, because apparently that’s what I do now.

“You came,” she said.

“I said I would.”

“I didn’t believe it.”

“Better start believing when I tell you something.”

She looked at me for a second too long. Then she looked away, out of the windscreen, at the dark stairs.

“I went back up and checked everything,” she said. “Twice. Folders, petty cash, the mood board. He didn’t touch a thing. Just the chair.” She laughed, very small. “Three months, and in all that time, he could’ve come back. He could’ve left a note or something, but he didn’t. And now, he lets me know that he could’ve with a chair. A fucking chair.”

I went up anyway. She came with me, because she doesn’t take instructions. Nothing was missing. The chair stood where she’d left it, still facing the road.

She pushed it back in herself before we left.

Downstairs, I put my hand on the Corolla’s roof. “He has a key to this too.”

“It’s the only car I have.”

“My driver can take you home. Mine can sit here.”

“And tomorrow? And next week?” She opened her door. “If I start running from my own car, Dami, he wins. He gets to rearrange my whole life and I don’t even get a text.”

I had no argument against that. I hate when that happens.

I followed the Corolla to Surulere, saw her inside, asked her if she wanted me to stay. I didn’t even know why I had asked. She stubbornly refused.

Leaving me no choice but to sit in the car outside her building until her light went off at 1:12.

I don’t know why I’m even admitting that.

……………….

At 7:00 the next morning I was back on those stairs with a camera in my hand.

Bisi came up five minutes later with her bag on one shoulder and plantain chips in her hand. She stopped when she saw me.

“Good morning, sir.”

“Good morning.”

She looked at my hand. “So it’s really true.”

“That oloshi has been asking for it for a long time. Wait till I see him again.”

Amanda arrived at 7:10 with a bottle of water, her clipboard gripped tightly over her chest and the face of someone who’d slept four hours and decided to be fine about it.

I took out the camera. Black. About the size of a matchbox.

She took it from me, turned it over, and looked around the office with that planner’s squint. The one she uses to decide where a cake table goes.

Then she walked to the snake plant by the window, tucked the camera between two leaves, angled it at both desks, and stepped back.

“There,” she said. “Nobody looks at a plant.”

It was a good spot. Better than the one I’d picked.

I didn’t tell her that. She’d have made me initial it.

I synced the feed to my phone. A grainy little square of her office. Two desks. One fan. Her, frowning at me from the screen.

“Locksmith?” she said.

“My assistant called four of them. The earliest is tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow, at nine.”

“So tonight he still has a key.”

“Tonight,” I said, “he has a key and an audience.”

She didn’t smile. But she stopped holding the clipboard so tightly.

“Registry documents are due today,” she said. “If he sends them, they come here. To this desk.”

“Then this desk is now the most watched desk in Lagos.”

“Bisi will be thrilled. She’s been wanting a reason to wear make-up to work.”

From the doorway, Bisi said, “I heard that,” with her mouth full.

……………….

I paid her rent from the car at 7:40. The landlord, Mr. Fashola, answered his phone with “Who is this and what do you want,” and when I told him, he went silent for so long I thought he’d fainted.

“All of it?” he said finally.

“And the next six months.”

“Sir. God will bless you.”

“Take the notes off her door.”

“Which notes?”

“All of them.”

……………….

Tobi called at 8:15, while I was walking into the boardroom.

Tobi Adeyemi has been my investigator for nine years. He used to be a journalist. He still talks like a headline.

“Your groom has been to South Africa,” he said.

“He told Amanda he’s never left Nigeria.”

“Then he lied to her with a passport in his pocket. I’ve got immigration footage from O.R. Tambo, six years ago, through a friend who owes me. Same face, younger, shorter hair. Same smile, which frankly should be illegal.” A pause. “He came in on a South African passport. Name of Marcus Lane.”

I stopped in the doorway of the boardroom. Eleven people looked up at me.

“Marcus Lane,” I repeated.

“Marcus James Lane. Born in Durban, if you believe the paperwork, which I don’t. He left two years later and never came back. Something happened down there, Egbon. People don’t drop a name that clean unless the name got dirty.”

“Find out what.”

“Already on it.” He hesitated. “You said a camera went into that office this morning?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Watch it.”

……………….

At 9:14, I was in a board meeting about a port expansion when my phone lit up with a motion alert.

I angled it under the table.

The feed was grainy but clear. Amanda at her desk, frowning at a spreadsheet, pen in her mouth. Bisi gone, her chair empty.

The door opened behind her.

She turned.

Daniel stood in the doorway in a white shirt, holding two paper cups of coffee. He smiled at her, slow and warm, like he’d never left. Like he’d just popped out for ten minutes.

He held one cup out.

“Still take it with two sugars?”