The Lost Wallet

Dennis had been driving a black cab in London for twenty-two years, and people left all kinds of things in the back seat: umbrellas, phones, a guitar, once even a wedding cake. But at eight o'clock on a rainy Tuesday morning, he found something different. Under the seat there was a brown leather wallet, and inside it there were six hundred pounds in cash.

He sat in the car and looked at the money for a long time. It had been a bad year. The cab needed new tires, and his daughter's school was asking for money for a trip to Paris. If he kept the wallet, nobody would ever know. If he were a different kind of man, he thought, he wouldn't even think twice.

But Dennis wasn't a different kind of man. His mother used to say, "If you wouldn't do it in front of me, don't do it at all." He sighed, put the wallet on the passenger seat and started looking for clues.

There was no ID, only a library card with the name "T. Okafor", a receipt from a hotel in Bloomsbury and a small photo of an elderly woman in a garden. Dennis remembered his last passenger: a young man in a suit, nervous, talking on the phone about a job interview. He had dropped him at King's Cross station.

First he drove to the hotel. The receptionist checked the computer. "Mr. Okafor checked out early this morning," she said. "I'm afraid we can't give out his phone number." Dennis left his own number, just in case. Then he tried the library, which was closed until ten, and the police station, where the queue was so long that he would have lost a whole day's work.

By lunchtime, he had earned almost nothing and his radio kept telling him about passengers he was missing. "If I had any sense," he said to himself, "I would give up and take it to lost property." But he kept thinking about the photo of the old woman.

At three o'clock, his phone rang. It was the young man, Tunde Okafor, almost crying with relief. The hotel had given him the message. The money, he explained, was for his grandmother in Lagos; he was going to send it to her that afternoon for an operation.

They met outside King's Cross. Tunde counted the money, then tried to give Dennis a hundred pounds. Dennis shook his head. "If I took that," he said, "my mother would never forgive me, and she's been dead for ten years."

Tunde laughed and insisted on one thing: he paid for a full day's fare, plus a ride across London to send the money. On the way, he told Dennis that he had gotten the job. When Dennis got home that night, he didn't have six hundred pounds, but he felt richer than he had in a long time.