Satisfying answers are stopping rules

Kelechi was one name. Kelechi was, in the technical sense, the operational name — good for ₦3.7 million of unauthorised disbursement, good for a headline, good enough to close the smaller hole.

But Kelechi was twenty-three and had left in September, and there was a considerably larger absence in the reconciliation that had accrued after September, and it needed a second story that did not touch a man who had been gone for six months.

The founder, isolated by grief after the loss of a close friend, was systematically defrauded by two people who inserted themselves into his life during a period of documented ill health.

It was a good story. It was better than good — it was true, or would be, and shortly, and without any effort from him at all. It explained a missing quantum. It made Tobi a victim, which kept Tobi cooperative and kept him from looking too hard in any other direction. It even had a supporting document already in existence, in the form of eleven weeks of Vera's signatures on things she had no business signing.

And it had the property Bunmi valued above all others, which was that he would not appear in it anywhere. The victim would name his own predators. The predators would be genuinely guilty. The investigators would find exactly what they were looking for and stop, because an investigation stops when it finds a satisfying answer, not when it finds the whole one.