THE DRIVE HOME

Dami

We waited until the car had gone. Then we waited five minutes more, because Amanda said so, and because I couldn’t have stood up yet even if I was paid to.

When we finally crawled out from under the desk, she didn’t look at me. She checked the drawers instead. All of them. Twice.

“Still there,” she whispered. “Except the laptop.”

“Except the laptop.”

In the living room, Daniel was still asleep, one arm over his face. Amanda stood over him for a moment. Then she took the throw off the back of the sofa and laid it over him, all the way up to his chin.

I stared at her.

“I’m supposed to have stayed,” she said, low. “I’m supposed to be the girl who cooked with him and drank his wine and watched him fall asleep. That girl leaves a note.”

She found a pen in the kitchen and wrote on the back of a receipt, in her neat round hand.

‘You fell asleep. Didn’t want to wake you. Thank you for dinner. A.’

She left it propped against his empty glass.

It was the most frightening thing I’d ever seen anyone do.

……………….

We walked the two streets back to Tobi’s Camry without speaking. She carried her shoes in one hand. At the car, she put them on, both of them, very carefully, like that was the only thing in the world she had to get right.

I drove. Lekki to Surulere at midnight is forty minutes of empty roads and police checkpoints and men selling gala at the junctions to nobody.

Nobody mentioned the desk.

I didn’t mention the desk. She didn’t mention the desk. The desk sat in the back seat between us like an auntie who has come along uninvited and refuses to be dropped off.

At the Lekki toll gate, she said, “Who is Kunle Bakare?”

So we were talking about Kunle. Good. I could do Kunle.

“Bakare Secure Systems,” I said. “They put in my mother’s cameras. At the house, at the office, at the estate in Ikoyi. Six years ago.” I gripped the wheel. “I signed the contract.”

She turned to look at me.

“He knows every camera in your family’s house,” she said slowly.

“Every camera. Every blind spot. Every code.” I breathed out. “He’s how Daniel always seems to know where my mother is going to be.”

“And he calls Daniel Soma.”

“And he calls Daniel Soma.”

She was quiet for a long time.

“The package,” she said finally. “The night before the wedding. What package?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who’s ‘her’?”

“I don’t know that either.” I glanced at her. “I don’t like not knowing things.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s your whole personality.”

It was the closest either of us came, that night, to smiling.

I kept my eyes on the road after that. It was easier than the alternative, which was looking at her mouth and remembering exactly how far away it had been. Two inches. Less. I am a man who measures things. I had measured that.

……………….

Outside her building, I stopped the car and neither of us moved.

The street was dark. Somebody’s generator was humming. A cat was sitting on the wall like a security guard.

“Amanda.”

“Don’t,” she said.

I didn’t know what I’d been going to say. I suspected it would have been about the desk.

“Goodnight, Dami,” she said, and got out.

I watched her all the way to her door. She didn’t look back.

I wanted her to. I prayed she would. 

So I would know that I wasn’t alone in what almost happened under the desk. 

……………….

Tobi came to the Yaba office at nine the next morning with three phones, a laptop, and a bag of puff-puff from the woman downstairs.

“Fuji is very loud this morning,” he said, sitting down.

“He plays it louder on Saturdays,” said Bisi. “For the weekend.”

Amanda had sent him the photographs at one in the morning. He’d clearly been up since.

“Right.” He opened his laptop. “Good news, bad news, worse news.”

“Good news,” said Amanda.

“The passport and the licence are real. Not fakes. Genuinely issued. Marcus Lane was a real South African citizen. Theo Grant held a real UK licence.” He looked up. “Which means somebody very good got him real documents in other people’s names. That’s not a man working alone.”

“Bad news,” I said.

“The birth certificates.” He turned the laptop toward us. “Those blanks are from a batch stolen from a local government office in Enugu in 2019. Reported missing. Serial numbers on the record.” He tapped the screen. “Your photo of the top sheet shows the serial number. It’s on the list.”

Amanda went very still.

“So the papers he gave me,” she said. “For the registry. Daniel Cole, born in Enugu, 1994.”

“Forged,” said Tobi. “On stolen paper. If he files those for a marriage notice, that’s a crime. A real one. The kind with a courtroom.”

“He told me it was for the government,” Amanda said.

“It’s very much for the government,” said Tobi. “The government would be very interested.”

Bisi looked from one of us to the other. “So we report him. Now. Today.”

“If we report him today,” I said, “he walks out of the country tonight with a fourth passport, and Tiwa’s money, and my mother’s shares, and whatever Kunle has on that laptop.”

“And if we wait?”

“Then he files the notice himself,” said Amanda quietly. “At Ikoyi. And it’s on the public board for twenty-one days, with his forged name and Tiwa’s real one.”

Nobody said anything.

“That’s not my decision,” Amanda said finally. “It’s Tiwa’s life. And I’m still her planner.”

“Worse news?” I asked Tobi.

“Your old account. Okorie and Cole.” He scrolled. “I asked a friend at First Meridian to look, very unofficially. Two more deposits last night. One at eleven forty. One at twelve fifteen.”

“While he was asleep,” said Amanda.

“While he was asleep,” Tobi agreed. “So it isn’t only him pressing the buttons.”

Kunle, I thought. And a laptop with every account and every name.

Amanda’s phone buzzed on the desk. A message. She looked at it, and her face emptied. Then she read it aloud, flat.

‘Best sleep I’ve had in years. Did you tuck me in?’

Bisi said a word in Yoruba that I won’t translate.

Amanda put the phone face down on the desk, very gently, the way you put down something that might bite. Nobody touched the puff-puff.

I opened my laptop to check the cameras we’d planted. Two little squares of grainy footage. The study bookshelf. The corridor.

As I watched, the study feed went black.

Then the corridor.