The Face I Knew

The name sat in her chest like a stone.

She hadn’t said it out loud yet. Not to herself, not to the mirror, not to the dark quiet room around her. Saying it out loud would make it real in a way that seeing it hadn’t fully done yet, and she needed one more night before she let it become real.

She lay on her bed without sleeping, staring at the ceiling, replaying the vision the way you replay something you wish you had misread. Looking for another explanation. Another angle. Some detail she had gotten wrong.

There was none.

The face was the face. The hands were the hands. The room was her father’s room and the bottle was her father’s medication and what she had seen was what had happened.

Her father had not died of cardiac arrest.

He had been helped toward it.

By someone who had sat at his funeral and wept.

She got up at five in the morning and made herself tea she didn’t drink. She sat at the kitchen table and wrote the name on a piece of paper, just to see it outside of her own head.

Uncle Rotimi.

Her father’s younger brother. The one who had driven from Ibadan for the burial. The one who had held her mother when she collapsed at the graveside. The one who called every Sunday to check on them and always ended the call with your father would be proud of you.

Uncle Rotimi, who had grown up on the same land her father owned. Who had always believed, according to things she was now remembering in a new light, that their father had divided the inheritance unfairly. Who had complained for years, quietly, in the way family members complain when they don’t want to be seen as complainers, that her father had gotten the better plot.

Uncle Rotimi, who knew Emmanuel. She was remembering now, a Christmas visit years ago, the two of them talking outside by the car, voices low. She had been a teenager and hadn’t thought anything of it. Adults talked.

But now she thought about it differently.

They hadn’t just known each other.

They had been working together.

Emmanuel with the lawyers and the forged documents and the land registry. Rotimi with the access, the trust, the key to her father’s house, the knowledge of which medication sat on which shelf.

Two men. One plan. Twenty years of patience finally running out.

Funke folded the paper and held it between her palms and breathed.

She called Bello at eight o’clock.

“I know who killed my father,” she said.

A silence on the line. Then, carefully: “Funke. That is a serious thing to say.”

“I know.”

“Do you have evidence, or…”

“I have the medication bottles from the village house. They haven’t been cleared out yet. If someone tests them, they will find something that shouldn’t be there.” She paused. “And I have a connection between the man who filed the land claim and my father’s brother. They knew each other. I think they planned this together.”

Another silence. Longer. “Your father’s brother.”

“Yes.”

She could hear Bello thinking on the other end, the particular quiet of a man reorganising everything he thought he understood about a case.

“Okay,” he said finally. “Okay. The medication is the most important thing right now. Nobody should touch those bottles. Can you get to the village house before anyone else does?”

“I’ll leave today.”

“Go quietly. Don’t tell the family you’re going. If Rotimi has any sense he has already thought about those bottles and if he hasn’t moved them yet it’s only because he thinks no one is looking.” A pause. “Take someone with you. Not family. Someone you trust completely.”

Funke thought for exactly three seconds. “Tunde,” she said.

“I said not family.”

“He’s seventeen and he’s the only person I trust completely. He’s coming.”

Bello sighed. “Fine. Go today. Call me when you have the bottles.”

She told Tunde in the car on the way to the park to board a bus to the village. She told him everything, the ring, the visions, the grey hair, the cost, and finally the face she had seen in the last vision. She told him in a flat, steady voice, watching the road, letting the words land where they landed.

Tunde didn’t speak for a long time.

Then he said, “Uncle Rotimi was at our house two weeks ago. He came to check on Mama.”

Funke’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “I know.”

“He went to the kitchen alone to make tea. He was in there a while.”

Funke looked at her brother.

Tunde looked back at her. His eyes were not the eyes of a seventeen year old boy anymore. They were something older, something that had just lost a second thing it had trusted.

“We have to move fast,” he said.

“Yes,” Funke said.

“And Funke…” He looked at her grey hair, the wide silver sweep of it, and his voice came out younger for just a second, just briefly, just enough for her to hear the boy underneath the stillness. “I’m sorry the ring did that to you.”

She almost said she was fine. That was her default, her reflex, the thing she said when she didn’t want people to worry.

Instead she said, “Me too.”

They drove the rest of the way in silence, the road opening up ahead of them, the village getting closer, the bottles waiting in a dead man’s room with the truth sealed inside them.

And somewhere behind them, without knowing it yet, Uncle Rotimi was running out of time.

To be continued…