Soft Ground
827 Words
The portfolio wasn't ready by morning.
Chisom arrived at eight. Godwin arrived at eight-forty, unhurried, with the particular ease of a man who had decided overnight that the timeline was a suggestion. He came with apologies already assembled — the document system, a staff member who had taken ill, the sheer volume of active contracts that made compilation take longer than expected.
She listened to all of it without interrupting.
"End of day," she said when he finished.
"Miss Chisom, realistically—"
"End of day, Mr. Amasike."
He left her in the conference room.
She sat there for twenty minutes before someone thought to offer her coffee. The office moved around her with the careful energy of people performing normalcy — keyboards clicking, phones ringing, conversations dropping to lower registers whenever anyone passed the glass partition and saw her still sitting there.
She was being managed. She recognized it the way you recognize a smell — immediately, without having to think about it.
The question was who was doing the managing.
At ten, she walked the floor herself.
No announcement. No escort. She simply stood up, opened the conference room door, and walked away.
The accounts' office first — three staff members who introduced themselves too quickly and smiled too broadly. Then procurement, where a young woman named Blessing gave her a tour with the rehearsed confidence of someone who had been briefed on exactly what to show. Then the project coordination unit, where a man named Tunde spoke for six minutes about systems and workflows without once making eye contact.
"Show me the Rumuola file," Chisom said.
Tunde's hands paused over his keyboard. "The physical file is with Mr. Amasike."
"Then pull it up on the system."
"The access system for that project is—" he stopped. Started again. "There are some access restrictions on active tenders."
"I'm the head of this vertical."
"Yes." He looked at his screen. "I'll need to get authorization from—"
"From who?"
Silence.
"From whom, Tunde?"
He said nothing. And in that silence she had her answer — not a name, but a shape. Someone above Godwin, or beside him, or threaded through this office in a way that didn't appear on any org chart. Someone whose authorization still mattered even after Edirin Oboro was eleven days on the ground.
She walked back to the conference room without another word.
The portfolio arrived at six-fifteen. Forty minutes before close of business, which she understood was its own kind of message — compliance, but barely.
She took it home and spread it across the dining table of the house she was staying in, a short-let apartment in GRA Phase Three that her father had kept for visiting business associates. She made tea she didn't drink and went through the documents page by page.
Three active contracts. Two pending tenders. Four sites in various stages of completion.
The Rumuola housing project was there, thin compared to the others — progress reports that were vague where they should have been specific, contractor invoices that didn't align with the site visit logs, a timeline that had been revised four times in fourteen months without any attached explanation.
She turned to the contractor's name.
Deltabuild Limited.
She sat back.
She pulled out her phone and searched for the name. A website, sparse and recently updated. A registration number. A director listed as one E. Nwosu.
She searched E. Nwosu, Deltabuild, Port Harcourt.
Nothing useful. Which was itself useful — companies that did significant government-related construction work and left no trail were either very new or very careful. Deltabuild had been operating for nine years.
Nine years of careful.
She wrote the name down.
Then she went back through the invoices and found something she had missed the first time — a signature on three of the approval documents that wasn't Godwin's. Smaller. Hurried. A different pen.
She didn't recognize it.
She photographed it.
She called her father's personal assistant — former personal assistant now, a quiet woman named Mrs. Ifeanyi who had worked for Edirin for nineteen years and who Chisom had always suspected knew more about Oboro Holdings than most of the board combined.
The phone rang seven times before she picked up.
"Mrs. Ifeanyi. It's Chisom."
A pause that lasted one second too long, "Miss Chisom. Good evening."
"I need to ask you something. About the construction vertical. About a company called Deltabuild."
Another pause. Longer this time. When Mrs. Ifeanyi spoke again, her voice had changed — not much, just enough. Pulled inward, like a door not quite closing.
"I don't think I'm the right person for that question," she said.
"Who is the right person?"
"Miss Chisom." Her voice was careful now, deliberate. "Your father loved you very much. Please remember that whatever you find, that part was always true."
The line went quiet.
Chisom stared at the documents spread across the table.
Whatever you find.
Not if.
- Writer
