The Cellar (3 page)

Some were harder because Yetunde had told such ill-considered lies at the start. What is the name of the woman who comes to teach you each day?
There is no woman
. Why did your mother say there was?
She was afraid
. Of what?
That you’d make me go to school
. Don’t you want to learn?
My parents teach me. They are kind about my slowness
. Wouldn’t you rather go to class as your brothers do?
Not if I’m teased
.

The most dangerous questions concerned what Muna had been doing on the day that Abiola disappeared. Had she stayed in the house after Mrs Songoli left to meet her friend? What did she do to occupy her time? Muna told the truth.
I cleaned and tidied for Mamma
. Why didn’t you notice that Abiola hadn’t come home at his usual time?
I can’t tell the time
. Weren’t you worried when Olubayo came back alone?
I didn’t know he was alone
. Why not?
I didn’t see him. I was in Mamma’s room, trying on her gold necklaces
.

The conversation seemed interminable, but when it ended the translator turned to Inspector Jordan and said she didn’t believe Muna was lying. ‘She’s too unsophisticated to fabricate stories. She has trouble speaking at all so I imagine it was the left side of her brain that was damaged. The words she uses are very simple but her mouth finds even those hard to form.’

‘But she sits so still and shows so little expression. Every instinct I have says something’s wrong. She’s small for fourteen … and her skin’s a lot paler than her parents’. She doesn’t smile … doesn’t frown … barely reacts to anything, in fact.’

‘I doubt she goes out much. You’ll have to ask her mother. It may be that the motor function in the muscles of her face are impaired.’

‘Her eyes work well enough. Why won’t she look at me?’

‘She leads a closeted life. Strangers frighten her.’ The Hausa speaker studied Muna’s bent head. ‘She comes from a different culture. You may not be reading her correctly.’

‘Except I had the strong impression she was afraid of her mother that first night. I’m certain she knows more than she’s telling us.’

‘Do you really think Mr and Mrs Songoli are involved in their son’s disappearance?’

‘It depends if Abiola ever left the house that morning. There are several witnesses who remember seeing Olubayo in the road but none who remember his brother.’

‘What about the woman who saw a black boy being put in a car?’

‘The description she gave doesn’t match Abiola’s.’

‘Whites are notoriously bad at describing blacks. Most of you can’t even differentiate between shades of brown.’

A smile entered the Inspector’s voice. ‘Maybe so, but it’s hard to confuse a slender boy with a ten-year-old so grossly overweight that he had to walk with his legs apart. According to the school, he weighed in excess of eleven stone. It’s hard to imagine anyone lifting him … let alone a predatory paedophile looking for an easy target.’

‘A dead weight’s even heavier. If he died in this house, who carried him to the car? It would have needed both parents, wouldn’t it?’

‘And both to pull him out at the other end when they found a place to hide the body,’ the white agreed. ‘If one’s involved, it’s almost certain the other is as well.’

Muna would have feared for herself if Inspector Jordan and the Hausa speaker hadn’t been in the house when Mr and Mrs Songoli returned. Ebuka’s anger was terrible to behold, and he would have taken it out on her if he hadn’t had to pretend she was his daughter. He accused the police of being racists for putting him and his wife through the indignity of an interrogation, and raged at Scotland Yard for appointing a woman to run the investigation.

How dare such an insignificant person suggest that he or Yetunde had had anything to do with Abiola’s disappearance? A woman’s job was to run her kitchen, not exercise authority in a police force.

The translator took him to task in Hausa. In this country it was an offence to make sexist remarks, she warned sternly, and Mr Songoli showed his ignorance by doing so. As father to Abiola, he would have been interviewed in the same way whatever his colour for it was a sad – but true – statistic that children were more in danger inside their own homes than on the street.

Ebuka ignored her. ‘Abiola was loved and treasured by his family,’ he roared at the Inspector. ‘My mistake was to cancel the taxi that took him to school. My son was taken because he was walking. Are you too foolish to understand that?’

‘We have only Olubayo’s word that he ever reached the end of the road, Mr Songoli. Despite numerous pleas for witnesses, no one has come forward to say they saw Abiola.’

‘And because of that you accuse us? Why? You’ve searched our house from top to bottom and brought dogs into our garden … and you’ve found nothing. Have you done the same with the other properties in this road?’

Inspector Jordan nodded. ‘All your neighbours gave my team permission to enter.’

‘And have you found Abiola?’

‘No.’

Ebuka jabbed a finger at her chest. ‘Then I’m proved right,’ he declared. ‘My child was taken by a stranger on his way to school.’

Muna watched the Inspector take a step backwards. ‘We think it more likely Abiola stayed here, Mr Songoli. His teachers say he was a reluctant student, and they all agree he would have chosen a day at home over one in class, particularly as he knew his mother would be out.’

Ebuka glared at her angrily before turning on Yetunde with a raised fist. Does she speak the truth? he demanded in Hausa. You said you were in this house for an hour after the boys left. Were you lying? Did you see him return?

Yetunde flinched. Of course not, my husband. Would I stay silent over something so important?

Inspector Jordan caught Ebuka’s wrist and forced his arm to his side. ‘You have a bad temper, sir. I suggest you bring it under control before you give your wife even more cause for anxiety.’ She turned to the Hausa speaker. ‘What did he say? Why was he threatening her?’

The woman’s translation was precise.

The Inspector nodded. ‘This is what we know, Mr Songoli. Your son hid in the summer house at some point. It may have been Wednesday evening or Thursday morning. We found sweet wrappers and empty crisp packets on the floor with his fingerprints on them. Your contract gardener swears they weren’t there on Wednesday afternoon … and we have no reason to disbelieve him since I understand Mrs Songoli is very particular about litter.’

‘But the gardener’s not a man to be trusted,’ wailed Yetunde. ‘I have to watch him all the time to make sure he does as he’s told. Who’s to say he didn’t take my child?’

‘You and the elderly couple who employ him on Thursdays. You say Abiola left this house at eight fifteen last Thursday morning – the day he went missing – and the couple say the gardener was with them, some
twelve
miles away, from seven thirty until four in the afternoon.’

There was a long pause before Ebuka sank into a chair with a groan, clapping his hands to his head as if he were in pain. ‘Is this why I’ve been interviewed so harshly today? And why my car has been impounded? Do you think Abiola was here when I came home from work that day? Do you think I lost my temper with him when I learned he’d been truanting?’

‘You waited a long time to contact us, Mr Songoli. Your wife says she phoned you at your office at six when she came home and discovered Abiola wasn’t here … yet your emergency call to us wasn’t made until eight twenty-three. That’s almost two and a half hours unaccounted for.’

Muna listened to Ebuka huff and puff about being caught in traffic and taking time to search the house himself, claiming it would have been foolish to summon the police if Abiola had been hiding under a bed. He made no mention of clearing the cellar of Muna’s mattress and possessions or having to wait while Yetunde unpacked trunks of her old clothes, looking for a kaba small enough to fit the girl. Even then the yellow garment had been too big, and the woman had hissed with fury at having to sacrifice one of her scarves to create a sash about Muna’s waist. All these things had taken time.

Inspector Jordan stayed silent until Ebuka drew breath. ‘Are you saying you knew before you called us that Olubayo hadn’t taken Abiola to school?’ she asked.

Ebuka looked confused. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Why bother to look under beds if you believed what Olubayo told you? The first thing you said to us was that a stranger must have abducted your son – and you’ve continued to repeat that accusation all week – yet now you want me to believe you wasted over two hours looking for Abiola here. Why, Mr Songoli?’

Ebuka didn’t answer.

‘You’d do better to tell us the truth, sir.’

Ebuka looked to his wife for help, and Yetunde pointed a trembling finger at Muna. ‘This girl can tell you if Abiola was here when Ebuka came back.’

‘She says he wasn’t.’

‘Then why do you doubt my husband?’

The Inspector glanced at Muna’s bent head. ‘Your daughter’s word isn’t good enough, Mrs Songoli. We need provable facts, not hesitant responses from a child with learning difficulties. At the moment, we don’t even know if Abiola was alive on Thursday morning. The last sighting of him by anyone other than this family was at three thirty the previous afternoon, the
Wednesday
… some twenty-nine hours before your husband reported him missing.’

Four

Muna thought Ebuka very foolish to lose his temper again. Perhaps he felt free to do it because the Hausa speaker had left, but he should have learned by now that the white was cleverer than he was. While he shouted angrily that his word could be believed, Inspector Jordan took some papers from a case on the table and showed them to him. She said they were copies of the witness statements he and his wife had signed after their interviews at the police station.

‘The highlighted paragraphs show where your stories differ. You couldn’t even agree on the events of Wednesday evening, Mr Songoli. You described prayers, followed by a formal family dinner and bedtime at eight o’clock. Mrs Songoli said Olubayo and Abiola ate supper in front of the television before going upstairs when their father came home. Which is true?’

Yetunde answered. ‘My husband confused Wednesday with Tuesday. The explanation I gave is the correct one.’

Inspector Jordan selected another paper from her case. ‘My team is studying footage from every CCTV camera in the roads around this house, your sons’ school and Mr Songoli’s office. This is a photograph of Abiola crossing the High Street at three thirteen on Wednesday afternoon. Shortly afterwards one of your neighbours claims to have seen him turn into your gate. She says it was around three thirty which supports the time stamp on this still.’

Yetunde bridled. ‘Isn’t that what I told the interviewer?’ she demanded. ‘Did you think I was lying?’

‘I’m simply demonstrating how easy it is for us to prove or disprove what people tell us, Mrs Songoli. For example, you said your sons went to their bedrooms when their father came home … but that isn’t true. We have Mr Songoli’s car on camera, passing the traffic lights two streets down at six thirty-seven that Wednesday evening, and Olubayo’s computer showing unbroken usage from five until just before midnight. I can even tell you what he was looking at.’

Olubayo was sitting next to Muna on the sofa, and she felt a shiver of alarm run through his body. It pleased her to have the police know he was a dirty boy as well as a liar. Muna had seen what he was watching when Yetunde ordered her to take a tray of food to his room – naked white ladies in strange positions – and, though she’d averted her gaze from Olubayo as she put the tray on the bed, she’d heard his animal grunts as he worked on himself. It had made her afraid that it wouldn’t be long before he tried to leak his filth into her the way his father did.

‘Abiola’s computer wasn’t used at all that day,’ the white continued, ‘yet his normal practice was to switch on at around four o’clock. Both boys’ hard drives show a habit of doing a half to one hour’s homework each night but neither followed that pattern on Wednesday. Do you have an explanation for that? Perhaps Olubayo can tell me.’

Ebuka spoke to his son in Hausa. Say nothing, boy. I will do the speaking for all of us. ‘Why do you take no account of our distress at the loss of our son?’ he demanded. ‘If my wife and I are confused about that evening, it’s because we haven’t slept since Abiola was taken from us. How can we remember details from a week ago when our hearts and minds are broken with grief?’

‘Most parents do, Mr Songoli. They agonise over everything said and done in the hours before a son or daughter goes missing. Even when they know the fault’s not theirs, they still feel guilt for what’s happened.’

‘I’ve already admitted my mistake in cancelling the car.’

The Inspector nodded before holding up two more photographs. ‘This is yours passing through the Crendell Avenue junction at six thirty-seven on Wednesday evening, and this’ – she held up the second – ‘is the same car driving through it in the opposite direction four and a half hours later. The time stamp says eleven seventeen. I believe you’re the only driver in the house, sir. Do you want to tell me where you were going so late on the night before you say Abiola vanished?’

From beneath lowered lids, Muna saw fear in Ebuka’s face and shock in Yetunde’s. Neither answered.

‘Mrs Songoli said she went to bed early and was asleep by ten thirty. You agreed with her – it’s one of the few details that isn’t in dispute – but you claimed you followed shortly afterwards and were in bed by eleven. And that’s not true, is it, sir? Where did you go? We’ll examine the footage from every camera within a ten-mile radius if we have to.’

It was Yetunde who spoke. You mustn’t answer, she whispered in Hausa. This white has set a trap for you but she can’t do anything if you refuse to speak. Phone your employer and ask him to send a solicitor.

Ebuka, paler than Muna had ever seen him, nodded. He left the room to make some calls and an hour later a man came to the house. He gave his name as Jeremy Broadstone and showed no fear of the Inspector when he accused her of trampling on his clients’ rights. He ordered her and her colleagues from the room, and Muna was frightened by the power he had to make them leave when she heard the sound of tyres on the gravel outside. She feared the police had gone for good, and it caused her to dislike Jeremy Broadstone.