“He's going to jail,”
The iciness in his tone made me know that this matter would be followed to the latter. I didn't know if to believe that he was a child and he probably didn't know the better thing to do.
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Johnny as we fondly called him was the young boy who was kept with my aging father to assist him with chores and errands. In return, my older brother paid his school fees and other related bills, bought him new clothes, and took him out during special events like Children's Day or his birthday.
He was well catered for during the 2 years that he stayed with my father and since we were not getting negative reports, we thought he was going to be able to stay with my father till he finished his secondary education and left for the university.
Everything was good as planned until one of those days when my father called us to say that the 165,000 naira he withdrew from his pension savings was suddenly nowhere to be found, and he hadn't seen Johnny since the day before.
We all thought there was a misunderstanding somewhere. Johnny never kept late nights or slept out of the house, neither had he ever shown signs of truancy.
We asked my father to wait for 24 hours and then go to the nearest police station.
“Why don't we check his village first? It's possible he was missing home and decided to go away for a few days” my older sister suggested.
“Johnny is 14 years old, how will he leave home without saying anything to Daddy?” My younger brother asked. It was the same question on all our lips but we decided to go over and check for him before my father made that report.
That afternoon as we arrived at his family compound, we saw that there was nobody in the house except for his grandmother who was elderly and didn't understand English. When we managed to communicate with her in the local Ibibio dialect, she said she saw Johnny briefly a few days ago and he had been staying at his friend's place since then.
She also said that his parents and siblings traveled for a burial. We didn't understand the whole situation.
When we went around asking people in the village and nobody was willing to say anything, we knew something fishy was going on.
Where could Johnny and his family suddenly have disappeared to?
My older brother called my father and asked him to go ahead with filing a police report. We had to return to our respective lives once the report was filed, hoping that the police would do their duty and help us get to Johnny or any of his family members.
3 days later, my father placed a call on the family group chat to say that Johnny had been found. We all hurried over to the police station and true to my father's words, there he was seated with his head to the ground, barely able to look at any of us.
“Please we would like to have a word with him in private,” my older brother told the officer on duty.
“Johnny, where have you been? It's been 6 days” my brother began. For the first time since we arrived at the station, Johnny looked up at us.
“I went to see my grandmother”
“Johnny. You're in the police station, if you lie now I'll hand you over to those policemen, and trust me, the police here are not your friend”
I could see his lips quiver in fear.
“I…It was not my idea. My mother said she owed 70,000 naira, she spent the money she was keeping for contribution on my father's treatment and she needed money to pay back”
“And you took 165,000?”
“I didn't know it was that much! I just wanted to take some money to help her”
I was too sure that was not the truth, where did he tell his mother he got such an amount of money from? And why were his parents suddenly nowhere to be found?
“But where are your parents at the moment?” I asked. Johnny bowed his head again, it seemed like he was looking for what to say next.
“You people are wasting time, let's take this boy back to the station. I'm sure he can tell the officers where they are” my father said. We all knew that those threats would get him to talk eventually.
Johnny suddenly leaped to his feet and began pleading with my older brother not to let the officers take him away.
“My mother is the one that asked me to take some money from Daddy. She said I should check around the house, and that he has money. I kept checking but couldn't find any. That day when I found the money in that envelope, I was cleaning the house. When I found it, I just carried it and went straight home”
“So where is your mother now?”
Johnny bent his head again.
“She must be at Aba, she wants to get some goods for her shop”
We couldn't close our mouths that opened in wonder.
My father took Johnny back to the front desk of the station and narrated everything he just said to us to them.
“We're going to use him as bait to get to his parents. If we keep him here, his parents will definitely come out of their hiding place” the officer on duty said.
True to his words, the news that Johnny had been arrested traveled round the village and soon his parents returned from their temporary disappearance.
We wanted to sue them but instead, the DPO advised that if they took the mother into custody, she wouldn't be released until the whole money was paid in full, so we agreed.
Immediately we left the station, we took Johnny's things out of my father's house and returned him back to the village. There was no amount of pleading that could make us take him back or release his mother from custody until the entire 165,000 was paid in full.