The Weekend Before

Emmanuel called on Friday evening.

She was in Bello’s office when the unknown number came through, which was either bad timing or very good timing depending on how you looked at it. Bello saw her face when she checked the screen and immediately pointed at the recording app. She was already opening it.

She picked up.

“Your two days are up,” Emmanuel said. Same voice. Same calm. But something underneath it was different now, a tightness she hadn’t heard in the previous calls, the sound of a man who had received news he hadn’t expected and was working hard not to show it.

The CID filing. He knew.

“I’ve been thinking,” Funke said, keeping her voice soft and unhurried.

“And?”

“Two million feels low for land worth forty-seven million in federal compensation.”

The silence that followed was the most satisfying silence she had experienced in weeks. Long and uneven and full of a man recalculating everything he thought he controlled.

“Where did you hear that number?” he said finally.

“Government gazette,” she said. “Published eight months ago. Three months before my father died. The same month, interestingly, that you first contacted him on WhatsApp.”

Another silence. Shorter this time, tighter.

“You’re making connections that don’t exist,” he said, but the smoothness was gone from his voice now, replaced by something harder and less rehearsed.

“I’m reading a gazette and a phone,” she said. “The connections were already there.”

She heard him breathe. Heard him make a decision.

“Whatever you think you know,” he said quietly, the warmth completely gone now, “be careful what you do with it. Some things, once you pull at them, don’t stop unravelling. Families get hurt. Innocent people get caught in the middle. Think about your mother. Think about your brother.”

There it was. The soft approach exhausted, the threat underneath finally surfacing.

Funke kept her voice completely steady. “Is that all?”

A pause. “For now.”

He hung up.

She stopped the recording and placed the phone on Bello’s desk. Bello had heard everything from across the table. His expression was very still and very focused.

“He just threatened your family,” Bello said.

“Yes.”

“On a recording.”

“Yes.”

Bello picked up his own phone. “I’m calling the CID officer handling the case. You need someone watching your house this weekend.” He was already dialling. “This man is frightened and cornered and that makes him more dangerous than he was when he was confident.”

She understood that. A confident Emmanuel had offered money and patience. A frightened Emmanuel had just threatened a grieving family on a recorded line, which meant his judgement was slipping, which meant he was capable of something worse than a phone call if he felt the walls closing fast enough.

She drove home with one eye on the rearview mirror the whole way.

She told Tunde that evening, quietly, away from their mother. He listened and his jaw did the tightening thing and then he said, “I’ll sleep in the parlour this weekend.”

“Tunde, you don’t have to…”

“I know I don’t have to.” He looked at her with the eyes that had stopped being a teenager’s eyes weeks ago. “I want to.”

She didn’t argue.

She called Aunty Bisi in Ibadan and told her enough to keep her alert without frightening her into action. Aunty Bisi was the kind of woman who would drive to Lagos in the middle of the night if she thought her sister needed her, which was both a comfort and a logistical problem Funke didn’t need right now.

Saturday passed in the particular tension of waiting, the kind of day that stretches because your body knows something is coming and keeps bracing for it even when nothing arrives. She cleaned the house. She helped her mother cook. She sat with Tunde in the evening and they watched something on his laptop that neither of them fully paid attention to.

A CID officer in a plain car parked on their street both nights. Funke saw him when she checked at midnight on Saturday, a man sitting quietly in a dark saloon, just present, just watching. It should have felt strange, having a policeman outside your door. Instead it felt like the first time in weeks she could close her eyes without listening for something.

On Sunday morning her mother woke up early and went to church.

Funke hadn’t been since her father’s funeral. She wasn’t sure what she believed anymore about prayer and protection and the way the world was arranged, not after a ring from a dead grandmother, not after visions that cost her pieces of herself, not after learning that the universe had both the ability to warn you and the indifference to let terrible things happen anyway.

But she sat in the quiet of the empty house when her mother left and she talked to her father.

Not praying exactly. Just talking, the way you talk to someone you miss, the way grief makes you reach for a conversation that can’t be answered.

She told him what she knew. What she’d found. What was happening Monday. She told him about the ring, about his mother coming back, about the grey in her hair that she had stopped trying to hide. She told him that Tunde was sleeping in the parlour with the lights off and his phone charged and his shoes on, which was the most their father’s son thing she had ever seen Tunde do.

She told him they were ready.

The house was very quiet when she finished. The kind of quiet that feels full rather than empty, the kind that makes you wonder if the space between the living and the dead is thinner than anyone admits.

Then her phone buzzed.

A message from Bello. Rotimi arrived in Lagos this morning. Checked into a hotel in Ikeja. CID is aware.

She read it twice.

Rotimi had come to Lagos the day before the court case. Which meant he and Emmanuel were coordinating. Which meant they had a plan for Monday that she didn’t know about yet.

She typed back. What kind of plan can they still make?

Bello’s response came after a minute. Intimidation. Witness interference. A counter filing they’ve been preparing quietly. Or nothing, and they’re just scared and making bad decisions. We’ll know tomorrow.

She put the phone down on the table and looked at her father’s photograph on the wall, the one her mother had hung there after the funeral, him in his best agbada at somebody’s wedding, laughing at something off camera, completely alive, completely himself, completely unaware of what was already being planned against him.

She looked at him for a long time.

Then she went to iron her clothes for Monday, because whatever was coming, she was going to be dressed for it.

Court opened at nine.

She would be there at eight thirty.

And she would not be alone.

To be continued…