He was walking back to his car when his mobile rang and, when he saw an unknown number and answered, a woman’s voice said, “Is that Winston Nkata?” and when he said yes, she went on to identify herself with the name Zawadi and then to tell him, “Tani Bankole’s told me you have the passports. We’ve the emergency protection order in hand and I need them off you. Stoke Newington Police Station’ll hold them. That’s where the order will be.”
“I got ’em safe,” he said.
“I expect you do, only they need to stay with the protection order so when it’s lifted, if it ever is, the passports can go back to the family.”
He told her they were stowed at his home but he could fetch them, as he wasn’t far. He’d take them to Stoke Newington if that was helpful. She said she’d come to fetch them. She told him that, given the address, she would set off at once.
So he went home to his parents’ flat. No one was there, but no one would have been there at this time of day. His dad was at the wheel of a Number 11 bus while his mum would be at Alice N’s, probably doing the post-lunch clean-up with Tabby and Monifa.
He’d left the passports in the breast pocket of the jacket he’d worn on the previous day. He went to his bedroom, where a set of perfectly folded sheets and another of towels formed a neat stack at the end of the bed Monifa was using. Inside the clothes cupboard, his jacket hung. He took it out and slipped his hand into the jacket’s inner breast pocket. But what he brought forth was a single passport where there should have been four. He opened it to see it belonged to Tani. He looked through the other pockets in the jacket, and, finding nothing, he frowned and returned to the cupboard, where he looked on the floor although he couldn’t work out how the other passports might have fallen there. He could, of course, have somehow dislodged three of the documents when he placed his jacket in the cupboard, although he didn’t see how. Nonetheless, he checked the floor to make sure they weren’t lying in the shadows.
They weren’t. He lowered his head. He thought back carefully. He knew he’d been given all four. Deborah St. James had wiped each off individually once she’d removed them from the wrapping that had protected them at the bottom of the cat’s litter box. She’d given all of them to him and he’d put all of them into his jacket. He’d known they’d be perfectly safe there. Abeo Bankole was in the hands of the Belgravia police at that point, so it was impossible that he’d somehow not only concluded that Nkata—whose name he did not even know—had the passports, but that he’d also managed to discover where Nkata lived, broken into this flat, and found the passports without leaving the slightest indication that he’d been there in the first place. Even had that been the case, it stood to reason that only two passports would have been missing: his and Simisola’s.
In his peripheral vision, Nkata saw those sheets and towels, and he considered them in an entirely different light. He’d concluded at first that his mum had left them for Monifa’s use later that night, but now he saw them as something that could be quite different. He went to the head of the bed, pulled back the thin, striped summer duvet, and saw that the bed had been stripped. He touched the towels and found them still slightly damp from use. He moved them, examined the sheets, and realised they’d been used as well.
He fumbled for his phone and punched in the familiar number. Tabby answered at the café. He asked for his mum. In a moment, he heard her say, “Jewel, you all right, love?” and his mouth was like a sandpit when he replied. “？’S Monifa with you, Mum?”
“She’s left to fetch Simisola, love,” Alice said. “She had a phone call. She was told that Abeo—that’s her husband’s name, yes?—had been released. She was in such a state that he’d go straight down to Chelsea that I arranged a taxi for her. To fetch Simisola here, that is. She was meant to come back directly, Jewel. Hang on, love. Let me ask Tabby . . .”
Nkata heard his mother ask Tabby if she recalled the time that Monifa had left the café. Tabby could only guess at it. They’d been so busy with the lunch crush, hadn’t they. He knew how it was at the café during lunch: packed with people eating in with a queue for takeaway meals stretching out of the door and down the pavement past at least two shops.
“It’s been several hours, Jewel . . . Oh, Lord. Now I think, Abeo could have managed to get to Chelsea before her . . . What, Tabby?”