I nodded. They both turned to stare at the locked front door. Paul went to wake up his mother while I went to check the back door. The door was shut, but when I turned the handle it opened. I stared at the narrow path between the dewy morning grass, leading to a wider path that met the tarred road that led to the Estate gates.

‘The back door is open,’ I said superfluously when they joined me.

Auntie Rosa brushed past me to stand in the grass outside, wringing her hands, looking up and down. Her eyes were red from yesterday’s tears and from lack of sleep. Her face sagged, lumpy, like clay. Her head was bare, her hair unkempt.

‘Where could he have gone to? Was he dressed? Does he have close friends around that he might have gone to? But why, so early in the morning, and without telling anyone?’ she poured out, speaking more to herself than to anyone else. I could see her lips quivering. Soon she’d start crying.

‘Let me get my shoes, then we’ll go to his friend’s house,’ I said to the twins.

But Muyiwa was away at school. His father stood at the door, blinking suspiciously at us. He was in shorts; his legs were thick and hairy.

‘You say you are Bola’s cousins? Why are you looking for him so early, didn’t he sleep at home?’

‘He did. He went out and we have to travel with him to Ibadan now,’ Paul improvised lamely.

We checked two more houses that I knew, but all in vain. On the way back to the house, Peter stopped suddenly and called after us, ‘What are we going to tell her?’

We turned back and took the road to the gate. The Estate was coming awake slowly. Boys washed their parents’ cars outside the houses; dogs stretched their stiff limbs before the front doors. At the gates, I stopped at the Meigad’s shed and asked him in Hausa if he had seen Bola. Bola often stopped at the man’s stall to sneak a cigarette and try a newly acquired Hausa word before passing.

‘Yes,’ the man replied in his halting English. ‘Now now he pass. He is wear am short knickers.’

We hurried up the road where the Meigad had pointed.

‘But where could he be going to?’ Paul asked wretchedly. We were almost running now. Market women with wares huddled in baskets before them waited at bus stops beside civil servants clutching thick folders, their broad neckties hanging before them like weights, bending them forward. Peter saw the crowd first, about a kilometre from the Estate gates.