His assistant wheeled him down the first-floor corridor toward his office, while Clyde dé Crozon walked behind them. They reached it, and Efe unlocked the door, then began to wheel him inside.
“Efe, go and get me that printout I told you to get,” he said as they entered. “And don’t enter my office in the next one hour, at least.”
She wheeled him behind his table, then turned to leave. His assistant’s eyes rebuked him mildly; he had used her real name. As far as Tobi was concerned, that was her business, because she wasn’t serious if she thought he would go along with her lie. Evelyn ko, violin ni.
Mr Clyde had hung a long coat on the back of the seat across from his and sat down.
“Is your Chief of police in, detective?”
“Yes sir, he should be in his office.”
He nodded once. “I should like him to be present before I say another word.”
“In my office, or should we go back downstairs?”
“I should prefer here.”
Ehen? Tobi thought. He should call Chief Rikau to come up to his office? If the two of them were supposed to meet, it was supposed to be the other way around. Summoning his boss to his office wasn’t right. But if that was what Clyde dé Crozon wanted, Tobi didn’t see as he had any other choice.
He picked up his telephone and dialled the landline in the Chief’s office.
“Hello.”
“Yes, what is it?” came the brusque reply.
“This is Tobi, sir. I don’t know sir, can you please come up to my office?” Tobi had to continue quickly, before the Chief demanded why he was calling him somewhere as if he was now the new head of the department. “Mr Clyde is here, and he has something he said he wants to discuss. He requested your presence upstairs before he can start.”
A small pause. “Is that so? Okay, give me ten minutes.” The Chief cut.
Tobi set down the receiver. Mr Clyde had said he wouldn’t say another word until the Chief was here, and indeed he didn’t. He picked up a newspaper from Tobi’s table, an edition of The Nation that had the death of the defense minister splashed across the front page as the main headline with the literal crippling of LIPD’s head of Homicide under it, opened it and began to read.
Tobi wondered what exactly the man wanted to read the paper’s account of the assasination and attempted assasination for. He doubted if those journalists had documented how exactly he had felt when he got a bullet in his back which severed his spinal cord, or how he had bled out almost to death all over the front seat of his car. Or even how the car had been rendered useless because the whole engine and body and been shot full of holes.
Tobi shook his head, dispelling the thought. That incident wasn’t something he wanted to relive again.
But if Mr Clyde had wanted an accurate account of what happened, he could just have asked.
And those guys downstairs, those two who had come with him. Tobi wondered who they were, and why Mr Clyde hadn’t said why exactly he had brought them. Maybe he would talk, because Tobi didn’t get the feeling the man wanted him to ask again.
The Chief came upstairs around twelve minutes after Tobi called him. He exchanged pleasantries with Clyde dé Crozon, then took the small armchair to the left in Tobi’s office, though on Tobi’s right, because his own seat faced the entrance. He greeted the Chief as well, then faced Mr Clyde across his table just as he was closing the newspaper.
“So, Mr Clyde, where do you want to start? The files, the crime scene or our suspect profiles?”
Both he and the Chief had taken to calling Clyde dé Crozon by his first name. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know the spelling. Tobi could spell his full name, but it was the pronunciation that was the real issue. The name wasn’t even English. When he asked Cole why the name sounded like that, Cole had told him it was because the name was French.
Ride on.