When they arrived in September 2005, she thought they had come to help her. After all, her post office branch in Gillingham, Kent, was recording huge and inexplicable shortfalls.
Yet, hours later, without a lawyer present and faced with the threat of jail for the disappearance of £53,000 from her accounts, she was confessing to stealing it.
“I started talking rubbish,” says Adedayo. “Anything to fit in, because two or three years in prison is not going to happen, I said to myself, not with three young children, not in my life.”
"The day Post Office investigators paid me a visit - and destroyed my life'
Adedayo, who is nearly 60, has lived in the shadow of that day for 20 years, and it shows. Her eyes glisten with tears. Leaning forward, she sighs deeply and looks down at her feet. “They just turned our lives upside down. I swear. They are bastards. I’m telling you. They’re rubbish. ”
Although her conviction was quashed in 2021, the confession she says she was coerced into making means she has been denied the compensation awarded to others whose lives have been upended by the affair.
Adedayo, who came to the UK from Nigeria as a teenager, is the kind of person who greets new people with a hug and tries to insist on buying the tea . She frequently makes reference to her religious faith as she tries to make sense of the trauma inflicted on her and her family through her involvement in the Post Office Horizon scandal. As a result of her conviction, she says she lost her home and her business, her marriage foundered, she was left suicidal and has never worked since.
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