What the Land Was Worth

She found out about the land on a Thursday morning and had to sit down when she read it.

She had spent the previous evening searching, the way you search when you have a feeling and you need the internet to either confirm or embarrass you. She searched the area, the local government, any development news connected to that part of Osun State, any government announcements, any real estate activity near Ijebu-Ode Road.

She found it buried in a state government gazette from eight months ago, three months before her father died.

A federal road expansion project. A new highway connecting three states, cutting through Osun, with a planned route that ran directly through land on Ijebu-Ode Road. Properties along the corridor were marked for acquisition by the federal government, with compensation packages for verified landowners.

The compensation figure for a three-plot holding in that corridor was listed as forty-seven million naira.

Funke read the number three times.

Forty-seven million.

Her father had owned three plots on Ijebu-Ode Road.

Her father, who had died four months after that gazette was published, leaving behind a family with ₦4,700 and unpaid rent, had been sitting on land worth forty-seven million naira in federal compensation and had never known it.

But someone had known.

Someone had read that gazette, or been told about it, or had connections in the right places, and had looked at Funke’s father and seen not a man but a number. Forty-seven million reasons to move fast, forge a document, tamper with a medication bottle, and be at the funeral looking sorrowful.

She forwarded the gazette link to Bello with one line of text. This is why.

Bello called her back in four minutes.

“I’ve seen it,” he said, and his voice had the energy of a man who had just watched a case transform in front of him. “This changes everything. This is no longer about land inheritance or a family dispute. This is premeditated. They identified the compensation value, they planned the transfer, and they removed the obstacle. Your father.” A pause. “Funke, with this, the WhatsApp messages, and a clean toxicology report, we are not talking about a civil court case anymore. We are talking about murder for financial gain.”

She had known this. She had felt the shape of it for days. But hearing it said out loud in a lawyer’s voice made it land differently, made it concrete and heavy and real.

“The court date is in six days,” she said.

“Yes. And we will fight the land case and we will win it. But simultaneously I am taking everything to the CID, not the local police, the Criminal Investigation Department. This needs to go above the level where connections can bury it.”

“Okay,” she said.

“And Funke, once we file with CID, Emmanuel and Rotimi will know within hours. People talk. Which means the window between filing and their reaction is very small. Are you prepared for that?”

She thought about what prepared meant. Whether you could be prepared for the moment two men who had killed your father understood that the walls had finally closed.

“Yes,” she said.

She wasn’t entirely sure that was true. But she said it anyway.

She told her mother about the forty-seven million over breakfast. She said it quietly, the way you say things that are both wonderful and terrible at the same time, because the money was wonderful and the reason they almost lost it was a thing she still couldn’t fully hold.

Her mother put down her spoon.

“Forty-seven million,” her mother said softly.

“Yes, Mama.”

Her mother looked at the table. At the plastic tablecloth with the faded flower pattern that she had owned for eleven years and kept meaning to replace. At the chipped ceramic mug she was drinking tea from. At the small kitchen that had fed a family for years on careful budgets and careful portions.

Then she looked up and her eyes were wet but her jaw was set.

“Your father worked his whole life,” she said. “And they killed him for what he worked for.”

“Yes.”

“They will not get away with it.”

It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t even really a statement. It was something older than both of those things, the kind of thing that comes from a place in a person that has moved past grief and arrived somewhere harder and quieter.

“No,” Funke said. “They won’t.”

Tunde came in from his room in his school uniform, looked at both of them, read the room the way he always did, and sat down without asking. He poured himself tea and waited.

Funke told him about the forty-seven million.

He was quiet for a long time. Then, “So they killed Daddy for money they haven’t even collected yet.”

“Yes.”

“And they thought nobody would ever find out.”

“Yes.”

He wrapped both hands around his mug and stared into it. “They didn’t know Daddy’s mother was watching,” he said quietly.

The table went silent.

It was the truest thing anyone had said in weeks.

Her grandmother had seen it coming from wherever she was, had come back in the body of an old woman wrapped in plain white, had stood at a gate in Mushin and waited for the right person to walk out. Had given a ring that cost the wearer pieces of herself because the gift had to cost something, because nothing that mattered ever came free, because that was the rule of things on both sides of whatever line separated the living from the dead.

She had chosen Funke.

Not because Funke was the strongest or the bravest or the most prepared.

Because Funke was the one who would not stop.

The toxicology results came that afternoon, two days earlier than promised.

Bello called while she was on the third floor of a shopping mall in Ikeja waiting for her mother who had insisted on coming along to run an errand, as though normal life had to continue alongside everything else, as though you still needed to buy detergent and body cream even when your world was rearranging itself.

“The results are back,” Bello said. “The medication was tampered with. They found traces of digoxin in the blood pressure bottle, added in concentrated form. In a man with his heart history, a sustained overdose would have triggered cardiac arrest within days. It would have looked completely natural.” His voice was careful, clinical, the voice of a man delivering a fact that was also a devastation. “Funke, your father was poisoned.”

She stood in the corridor of the shopping mall, people moving around her in both directions, someone’s child running past laughing, the smell of fast food coming from somewhere below, life happening in every direction, completely indifferent.

She pressed her back against the wall and breathed.

“Okay,” she said.

“Are you okay?”

She almost laughed. “No. File with CID today. Don’t wait.”

“I’m filing in an hour. The land case proceeds as planned on Monday. I need you in my office tomorrow morning, nine o’clock, we go through everything together.”

“I’ll be there,” she said.

She hung up and stood against the wall for another minute, just breathing, just letting it move through her, the confirmation of the thing she had known since the vision, the thing that had lived in her chest as suspicion and was now a fact with a name and a compound and a legal classification.

Her father had been murdered.

By his brother and an old enemy.

For land worth forty-seven million naira that he had never even known he owned.

She found her mother coming out of a shop with a small bag, looking almost ordinary, almost like a woman on a regular Thursday afternoon errand, and Funke walked toward her and her mother looked at her face and knew immediately.

“The results,” her mother said.

“Yes.”

Her mother nodded once. Adjusted the bag on her arm. Straightened her back the way she did when she was refusing to fold.

“Then let us go home and prepare,” she said. “Monday is coming.”

They walked to the exit together, mother and daughter, moving through the ordinary noise of an ordinary day, carrying something extraordinary between them, and outside the sun was doing what Lagos sun always did, burning bright and indifferent and relentless.

Four days to court.

Two men who didn’t know the ground was already gone beneath them.

And a family that had lost everything once and was not prepared to lose again.

To be continued…