The Village House

The village looked the same as it always did.

That was the thing about places where terrible things had happened, they didn’t change their face for you. The mango tree was still in the same spot. The red earth road that led to her father’s compound was still uneven in the same places. The neighbours still waved from their verandas the way they always had, warm and unhurried, living at the pace that cities forgot existed.

Funke waved back and kept moving.

They had taken the early bus, the one that left Lagos before the traffic woke up, and arrived just after noon. She had told her mother they were visiting to collect some of her father’s things, which was true enough. Her mother had said okay with the kind of trust that made Funke’s chest hurt.

The compound was unlocked. It was always unlocked during the day, the village way, the belief that open doors meant nothing to fear. She pushed the gate and walked in and the smell hit her immediately, old wood and dust and something faint underneath that she recognised as her father and had to stop for a second to let pass through her.

Tunde put his hand briefly on her shoulder. Then dropped it. They kept moving.

Her father’s room was at the back of the house, the corner room with the window facing the mango tree. The door still creaked the same way it had in the vision, and hearing it in real life after seeing it that way made her stomach tighten.

She went straight to the side table.

The medications were still there.

Six bottles in a loose row, exactly as they had been in the vision. She pulled on the thin rubber gloves she had bought at a pharmacy in Lagos that morning and picked up each bottle carefully, reading the labels, looking for the one she had watched Rotimi open.

She found it on the third try. Blood pressure medication. The bottle her father took every evening before sleep.

She held it up to the light from the window.

There was a faint residue on the inside of the cap. Almost nothing. The kind of thing you would miss if you weren’t looking for it, if you didn’t already know what you were looking for.

She placed it carefully in the small cooler bag she had brought, sealed it, and put it in her backpack.

“Got it,” she said quietly.

Tunde exhaled from the doorway where he had been standing watch.

She took the other bottles too, all of them, bagged separately. Bello had said everything. Take everything.

She was zipping the backpack when she heard the gate.

Footsteps in the compound. Confident, unhurried, the walk of someone who belonged here.

Funke straightened and looked at Tunde. His eyes had gone alert, his body still in the doorway.

The footsteps came closer.

Uncle Rotimi appeared in the doorway of the room.

He was wearing a plain kaftan, reading glasses pushed up on his head, car keys in his hand. He looked exactly like someone’s friendly uncle. He had always looked exactly like someone’s friendly uncle, that was the thing, that had always been the thing.

He saw Funke.

He saw the backpack on her shoulder.

Something moved behind his eyes, fast and small, and was gone before most people would have caught it.

But Funke caught it.

“Funke,” he said warmly, opening his arms slightly the way he always did. “What are you doing here? You should have told me you were coming, I would have…”

“I came to collect Daddy’s things,” she said. Her voice was steady. She was surprised by how steady it was.

“Of course, of course.” His eyes moved to the side table, now empty, then back to her face. The warmth in his expression didn’t waver but something underneath it was working, calculating, moving fast behind the smile. “You took his medications too?”

“The pharmacist said some of them can be reused. No point wasting them.”

A pause. Half a second. The length of a lie being accepted or rejected.

“Smart girl,” he said. “Your father always said you were the practical one.”

He said it with a smile. The smile of a man who had just made a decision.

Funke smiled back. The smile of a woman who had made hers three hours ago.

“We’re not staying long,” she said. “Just picking up a few things. Mama needs some of his books.”

“Of course.” He stepped aside from the doorway, gesturing for her to pass. “I’ll wait in the parlour. I came to check on the compound, make sure everything is maintained. You know how these things go if nobody is watching.”

“I know,” Funke said.

She walked past him with the backpack on her shoulder and Tunde behind her and she did not look back and she did not hurry because hurrying would tell him something and she needed him to believe, for the next thirty minutes at least, that she was just a grieving daughter collecting her father’s books.

They spent twenty minutes in the parlour pretending to look through shelves. Rotimi made small talk from his chair, easy and comfortable, asking about her mother, about Tunde’s school, about whether they needed anything.

Funke answered everything. Warmly. Normally. The performance of her life.

When they left he walked them to the gate and waved them off and told her to greet her mother.

“I will,” Funke said.

She didn’t look back as they walked to the road.

“He knows,” Tunde said quietly beside her, barely moving his lips.

“Yes,” Funke said, just as quietly.

“What will he do?”

“Try to get ahead of it. He’ll call Emmanuel. They’ll adjust their plan.” She kept walking, eyes forward, pace normal. “Which means we have less time than we thought.”

They got to the main road and flagged down a passing bike to take them to where the buses gathered and it was only when they were moving, wind loud around them, the village shrinking behind her, that Funke allowed her hands to shake for a moment inside her jacket pockets.

Just a moment.

Then she pulled out her phone and called Bello.

“I have the bottles,” she said. “And he saw me take them. We need to move the court date up or do something now because he knows we’re coming.”

Bello was quiet for two seconds. “Can you be in Lagos by evening?”

“Yes.”

“Come straight to my office. I’m going to make some calls.” A pause. “Funke, you did well. But from this point, let me handle the next steps. Don’t confront him, don’t call him, don’t let him know what you have.”

“I know,” she said.

“And Funke…”

“Yes?”

“Lock your doors tonight.”

She hung up and watched the road blur past and held the backpack straps tight and thought about her father sleeping in that room, trusting the people around him the way you trust the people who have always been around you, never imagining that trust could be turned into a weapon.

She thought about Rotimi’s eyes when he had seen the empty side table.

She thought about what a man like that did when he realised the walls were closing.

She held the backpack tighter.

To be continued…