Borrowed Light, Episode 12: The Man in Abeokuta

Previously: The market nearly turned on Ada when the traders' savings froze. Mama Ngozi finally told the truth: Ada's father, Emeka, was a Crestline auditor who found a ₦2.1 billion fraud running through Temi's father's company, and died on Third Mainland Bridge in March 2016. Kolawole said Sikirat made the phone call that sent the killers. Then Mama and Sikirat disappeared with a note: "Do not hate her until you know." And Temi's phone rang. Daddy (Houston). The first call in ten years.

---

Yaba, 1:24 PM

Temi did not answer it.

She held the phone in both hands and watched it ring like it was a bomb with a timer on the screen.

"Answer it," Ada said.

"I can't."

"Temi."

"Ten years, Ada!" Her voice cracked in half. "Birthdays. Christmas. When my mother had the operation. When they took our house. Not one call. Not one message. I used to look at his profile picture every night. The cap. The sunlight. I used to tell myself he was happy over there and that was enough." She was shaking. "If I answer it and it's really him, I don't know what I'll do."

The phone stopped ringing.

The silence afterwards was worse.

Then it started again.

Ada reached over, took the phone gently out of Temi's hands, and pressed the green button, and put it on speaker, and laid it on the bed between them.

For three seconds there was nothing. Just a hiss. The sound of a bad line a long way away, like wind blowing across the open top of a bottle.

Then a man's voice.

Not old. Not American. Low, careful, and Igbo underneath the English like a river under a bridge.

"Temiloluwa?"

Temi put both hands over her mouth.

"Temiloluwa, I am sorry. I am not who you think. Please. Is Adaeze with you? Is Adaeze Okafor there?"

Ada's heart stopped.

She did not decide to speak. Her mouth did it without her.

"Who is this?"

A long, long breath on the line. The kind of breath a man takes before jumping into water.

"Nwa m," the voice said softly.

My child.

Ada had been nine years old the last time anybody called her that. She had been lying on a mattress on the floor, half asleep, and a tall man with soft hands had bent down to fix the blanket over her shoulders and said nwa m, sleep, and she had not opened her eyes because she was too lazy, because she thought there would always be another night.

The line went dead.

Ada called back. This number is not reachable.

She called again. And again.

Temi sat beside her on the bed with her hands still over her mouth, staring at the profile picture of a man in a baseball cap who was not, it turned out, her father at all.

---

Kolo Office, 4:50 PM

"It's not Houston," Tobe said.

He had been tracing the number for three hours, with his headphones on and a look on his face Ada had not seen before. Not guilt. Not fear. Something closer to anger, like the problem itself had insulted him.

"It's a VOIP number. American code, but it's a cheap app. Anyone can buy one. The call was routed through a server in Lagos and before that..." He tapped the screen. "Before that, a mobile network in the Republic of Benin. Cotonou, most likely. The account that owns the number was created in April 2016."

"April 2016," Ada said.

"One month after the accident."

Temi was sitting on the floor of the office with her back against the wall, knees up, staring at nothing. She had not said a word since the call.

"Temi," Ada said quietly. "When did your father leave for Houston?"

"March 2016." She did not look up. "He packed one bag in the night. My mother woke up and he was gone. The next week he sent a message from that number. I'm in Houston. I'm sorry. Don't look for me. And then nothing. Ever."

"The same month."

"The same month," Temi whispered. "The same week."

Nobody said what all three of them were thinking. It sat in the middle of the room like a fourth person.

---

Channels TV, Live, 7:00 PM

Ada did not watch television. She found out because Uche called her screaming.

"Channels. Now. Put it on now."

Tobe found the live stream on his laptop.

And there she was.

Folasade Adeyemi-Cole, in a soft grey suit, no jewellery, no glasses on a chain. Hair pulled back simply. Sitting opposite the most famous news anchor in Lagos, under warm studio lights, with her hands folded and her eyes wet.

"I trusted my brother," she was saying. "That was my mistake. My only mistake. He came to me in 2019 with what he said was family money. Our father's estate. I invested it in good faith. When I discovered, recently, where that money really came from..." She paused. Her voice broke, perfectly. "I went straight to the EFCC. I handed over everything. My own brother."

"And the reports," said the anchor gently, "that you yourself were taken from your boardroom this week..."

"I went voluntarily to assist. I have been released without charge." She looked straight into the camera. "And tonight I want to make a promise to the market women of Lagos. Every naira my brother stole from you in 2019 will be repaid. Personally. By me. From my own pocket." A small, brave smile. "Women like us have to look after each other."

The anchor nodded, moved.

"And Kolo Technologies? Where the traders' savings are now frozen?"

Sade's face became sad and careful.

"I invested in that company because I believed in its founder," she said. "I still want to believe in her. But I have seen things in their books, as a director, that worry me deeply. The mixing of investor money and traders' savings in one account. That is not a small error." She sighed. "I pray the EFCC finds that it was only inexperience."

Uche, on the phone, said a word that Ada had never heard a lawyer use.

By 7:30, a clip of the interview had a hundred thousand views. By 8:00, the comments under Kolo's Instagram page were a war zone.

Market women pay for this girl's iPhone.

Mrs Adeyemi-Cole is a QUEEN. Protect her at all costs.

Iya Sikiru and the fintech girl. Same film, new actors.

Ada closed the laptop.

"She's not running," she said. "She's rebuilding. She's making herself the hero and me the thief."

"She's very good at it," Tobe said quietly.

"Yes," said Ada. "She is."

---

Abeokuta, Ogun State, 8:15 PM

The printing press was at the end of a red-earth road behind a church, and it smelled of ink and kerosene and something burning in a pot next door.

The sign on the gate was hand-painted and faded. OJO & SONS PRINTING. Wedding Cards. Burial Programmes. Posters.

Mama Ngozi had been standing at that gate for four minutes without knocking. Sikirat stood behind her in the dark, holding the travelling bag with the zip, her face lit orange by a neighbour's lantern.

"Ngozi," Sikirat whispered. "If you want to go back, we can go back. I will understand."

"I have been going back for ten years," Mama Ngozi said. And knocked.

---

Dele Ojo was sixty now, and half bald, and wore reading glasses held together at one hinge with thread. In 2016, he had been an investigative reporter at a Lagos newspaper, the kind who wore a press badge to weddings and made politicians nervous.

Now he printed burial programmes.

He looked at Mama Ngozi for a long time in the yellow light of the press room. Then at Sikirat. Then back.

"Mrs Okafor," he said finally. "I wondered if you would ever come."

"You know me."

"I came to the funeral. I stood at the back. I didn't come to greet you. I was too ashamed."

"Ashamed of what?"

He did not answer that. He looked at Sikirat instead.

"And you," he said, almost gently. "You're the market woman. The one who made the phone call."

Sikirat's knees almost gave way. Mama Ngozi caught her elbow.

"Tell her," Mama Ngozi said. "Tell her what you told me last night, Sikirat. All of it. In front of him."

So Sikirat told it.

She told it sitting on a stack of paper reams, with her hands in her lap, in a voice so quiet Dele had to turn off the press to hear.

How Emeka used to wait with her in the canteen on Fridays, while the counting machines ran. How he was the only person at Crestline who called her madam instead of market woman. How in February 2016 he started looking sick, and one Friday he asked to borrow her phone, because he thought his own was being listened to.

"He called a journalist," she said. "I heard him. He said: Mr Ojo, I have it all. The Bakare loan. Where it went. Whose accounts. Tomorrow night, 2 AM, Third Mainland, Oworonshoki end." She looked at Dele. "That was you."

"That was me."

"And I was afraid." Sikirat's hands twisted in her lap. "Not for me. For him. I knew how my husband talked about people who made trouble at the bank. So I did what I thought was the right thing. I called the only person I thought could protect Emeka. The good one. The clever one. The sister who went to London and talked about justice at church harvests." She closed her eyes. "I called Folasade. I told her everything. Where he would be. What time."

The press room was completely silent.

"She thanked me," Sikirat whispered. "She said, Sikirat, you have done a very brave thing. Leave it with me." Tears were running down her face now. "Two hours later the car was burning."

Mama Ngozi did not move. She had heard it the night before. It did not make it easier.

"That is why I let Kolawole lock me up," Sikirat said. "Not because I was weak. Because I thought I deserved it. Seven years in that room, I thought, this is what God gives a woman who sends a good man to die."

For a long time, nobody spoke.

Then Dele Ojo took off his broken glasses and wiped them on his shirt.

"Madam," he said. "You did not send a good man to die."

Sikirat looked up.

"Emeka never got into that car," Dele said.

---

"He called me at 11 PM that night. From a call box. He said he thought he was being followed. He said he couldn't bring the documents himself. So he had found someone else to drive them to me, in his car, with his bag on the seat. Someone nobody would follow, because nobody cared about him." Dele put his glasses back on. "Someone who owed him. Someone who was in the documents himself and wanted to confess before it was too late."

Mama Ngozi's voice came out of somewhere very deep.

"Olumide Bakare."

"Olumide Bakare," Dele said. "The man who signed for the loan. He wanted to make it right. He took Emeka's car, Emeka's bag, Emeka's route. And somewhere between Ebute Metta and Oworonshoki, a lorry with no lights came out of nowhere." He spread his hands. "The car burned. The body was not recognisable. The car was registered to Emeka. The police said it was Emeka. Everybody said it was Emeka." He looked at Mama Ngozi. "You buried Olumide Bakare under your husband's name, Mrs Okafor."

Mama Ngozi sat down on the floor of the printing press because her legs would not hold her any more.

"And Emeka?" she said. "Where was my husband?"

"Waiting for Bakare at the other end of the bridge," Dele said. "He saw the fire from Oworonshoki. He knew what it meant. If they thought he was dead, they would stop looking. If they found out he was alive, they would come for you. For Ada." He swallowed. "So he walked into the dark and he did not come back."

"Ten years," Mama Ngozi whispered. "Ten years and he did not come back."

"He sent money. Every month. To two families. Yours and Bakare's widow. Through a church in Badagry, so nobody could trace it." Dele opened a drawer, took out an old envelope and held it out to her. "He sent me this, three years ago, in case anything happened to him. An address. He told me only to give it to you if you ever came looking. He said if you came, it meant you were ready to know."

Mama Ngozi took the envelope. Her hands could barely hold it.

On the front, in a handwriting she would have recognised on the moon, was one line.

Akpakpa, Cotonou. Ask for Monsieur Emmanuel, the carpenter.

---

Yaba, 11:40 PM

Ada was asleep for the first time in two days when the knock came.

Not three small taps this time. One knock. Firm. Patient. The knock of somebody who has never in their life worried about whether a door would open for them.

Temi sat up on the mattress, instantly awake.

Ada went to the door with her phone in one hand and a pestle from the kitchen in the other, which was ridiculous, and she knew it was ridiculous, and she held it anyway.

She opened the door.

Folasade Adeyemi-Cole was standing in the dim corridor of a Yaba face-me-I-face-you building, in a plain black dress and flat shoes, with no driver, no bodyguards, no glasses on a chain. Holding a small brown envelope. Alone.

In the room behind Ada, Temi made a sound like an animal.

"Good evening, Miss Okafor," Sade said quietly. "I won't come in. I know you don't want me in."

"Get away from my door."

"In a moment." She held out the envelope. Ada did not take it. Sade kept holding it out anyway, perfectly steady. "Your mother is in Abeokuta. By tomorrow afternoon she will be on the Seme road to Cotonou with my brother's wife, looking for a carpenter called Emmanuel. They will cross the border without papers, through the bush route, because they are frightened and they don't trust anybody. And the people who were looking for your father in 2016 are still looking."

Ada's blood went to ice.

"How do you know that?"

"Because I'm the only reason those people stopped looking in the first place," Sade said. "I didn't kill your father, Adaeze. I saved him. I got him out of Lagos in the back of a fish lorry with forty thousand naira and a fake name, and I have kept those people pointed in the wrong direction for ten years." Her voice did not change at all. "And now your mother is going to lead them straight to his door."

"You're lying."

"Sometimes," Sade agreed. "Not tonight." She finally lowered the envelope. "There is a car downstairs. It leaves for the border at 5 AM. If you want to reach Cotonou before your mother does, be in it." She paused. "And Adaeze. You have a ₦412 million problem, and a frozen account, and a market that thinks you're a thief. I can fix all of it with one phone call. We'll discuss the price in the car."

She turned and walked away down the dark corridor.

At the top of the stairs she stopped, without turning around.

"Bring the Bakare girl," she said. "Her father's name is on the documents too. She has a right to see them."

Then she was gone.

Ada stood in the doorway with a pestle in her hand and an envelope on the floor at her feet.

Behind her, Temi was crying silently, both hands pressed over her mouth.

"Your father," Ada said slowly. "Temi. The coffin my mother buried in 2016..."

"Don't," Temi whispered. "Please don't say it."

Ada bent down and picked up the envelope.

Inside was a single photograph. Recent. Taken from far away, through a long lens. A small wooden workshop on a dusty street, with a hand-painted sign in French. A tall man in a carpenter's apron standing in the doorway, grey-haired, thinner, older. Squinting into the sunlight.

Exactly like the man in the baseball cap.

On the back, in elegant slanted handwriting, the same handwriting as the green ledger:

Taken last Tuesday. I was not the only one who took it.

---

To be continued in Episode 13.