The next morning, Amara expected resistance. It came before breakfast. Her access to three archival databases had been suspended overnight. The message from IT called it a permissions conflict. The permissions conflict affected only the years in which Matteo Greco had been alive. Amara stared at the screen until the coincidence became insulting.
She called Kolade.
He answered on the first ring. “I know.”
“Do you?”
“My father’s office requested a review of your historical access at six-fifteen this morning.”
“On what basis?”
“Data-security concerns.”
“Convenient.”
“Yes.”
Amara closed the laptop. “If you cannot guarantee the access in my engagement letter, the audit stops.”
“I’m restoring it.”
“By when?”
“Give me an hour.”
“I am not asking for a favour, Kolade.” It was the first time she used his first name. She heard it only after it was out.
He heard it too. His reply came quieter. “I know.”
Forty-one minutes later, the databases returned. At ten-thirty, an email arrived from Ade Senior’s legal counsel requesting that all forensic work involving pre-2005 records be routed through the chairman’s office for context before inclusion in any report. Amara read it twice, then forwarded it to Kolade with one line.
No.
His reply came almost immediately.
Agreed.
By noon the legal request had been withdrawn. That should have reassured her. Instead it sharpened the question that had been forming since she entered the building: why commission an independent audit and then obstruct it when it looked backward? Kolade met her in the lobby at two for the drive to Apapa. He had changed out of his suit jacket and rolled his sleeves to the forearm. Amara noticed that his hands were steady even though the rest of him seemed more tightly held than usual.
“My father knows where we’re going,” he said when they were in the car.
“Did you tell him?”
“No.”
“Then somebody did.”
“Yes.”
The traffic thickened around them. For several minutes neither spoke.
“How long have you been fighting him?” Amara asked.
Kolade looked out of the window. “That assumes I understood it as a fight.”
“What did you think it was?”
“Succession. Governance. The normal ugliness of a founder who does not know how to become less important.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m not sure what I’ve been calling normal because it was easier than naming it.”
She carried that answer with her into Apapa. The storage facility sat behind a metal gate in a quieter part of Apapa. It was unimpressive, almost aggressively so: concrete, dust, rows of old units holding paper the company had never digitized and never quite decided to destroy. Kolade unlocked one of them. The overhead bulb flickered before settling. Boxes lined the shelves from floor to ceiling.
“You found it here?” Amara asked.
“Three years ago. I was looking for the original title documents for a disputed property. My father’s assistant told me this unit had not been opened in years.”
“And you believed him.”
“At the time.”
Kolade walked to the back and removed a faded manila folder from the third shelf.
Across the spine, in blue ink, someone had written:
G.M. CORRESPONDENCE.
“My father’s handwriting,” he said.
He held the folder for a moment before giving it to her. Amara did not open it immediately.
“You’ve had this for three years.”
“Yes.”
“And commissioned the audit only now.”
His face tightened. There it was: the first answer she did not trust.
“Why?”
Kolade looked at the shelves rather than at her. “Because finding something and being ready to know everything inside it are not the same thing.”
It was honest enough to be true and incomplete enough to be a lie.
Amara accepted the folder.
“Then let’s find out what you were afraid to know.”