Chapter 3 THE PHOTOGRAPHS

Adesewa did not sleep in the west wing. She did not sleep much anywhere.

She lay awake in the four-poster bed with her phone’s flashlight under the pillow, listening to the house settle and tick like a cooling engine. At 11:47 p.m., the electric lights died. The generator coughed twice outside and did not restart. By midnight, the only illumination in the room was the lightning.

At 12:03 a.m., a voice began to sing.

It was very faint, coming from somewhere deep in the walls, a woman’s voice, low and unhurried. Adesewa sat up with every hair on her arms standing.

She knew the tune.

She had always known it. It lived at the back of her mind, a lullaby without words that sometimes surfaced when she was ill or sad. Aunty Bisi had never sung it. She had never learned it from a book or a radio. It was simply hers.

The voice sang on. Then it stopped, and into the silence it said, so softly that she nearly missed it:

“Sewa-baby. Sewa-baby, come and see.”

Adesewa did not scream. She had decided as a child that screaming was a waste of air. She slid out of bed, put on her slippers, and gripped her phone like a weapon.

There is no such thing as ghosts, she told herself. There is only a speaker, a wire, a person.

She opened her door. The corridor stretched away in both directions, black as a well. To her left, a distant flicker of lamplight. To her right, the corridor ended at a pair of tall double doors, closed, with a chain looped through the handles.

The west wing.

The voice came from there.

She took four steps toward it, and stopped. Something about the air was wrong. It smelled of warm wax. Someone had been burning a candle in the last hour, and a house that had supposedly been empty for twenty years had no business smelling like a church.

“Who’s there?” she called, and the singing ceased.

A long silence followed. Then, from behind the doors, came a sound she had not expected. It was a click, followed by a low mechanical whir, the unmistakable noise of a cassette player winding to its end.

Adesewa let out a shaky laugh.

“A tape,” she said aloud. “A tape.”

She crossed the remaining distance in six strides and pulled at the chain. It was padlocked from the outside, and the padlock was new. She could see the brass gleaming in her flashlight beam, bright, unscratched, unrusted. Nobody had chained these doors twenty years ago.

Somebody had done it this month.

“I see you,” she said to the dark. “Whoever you are, I’m not afraid of a tape recorder.”

Nothing answered. After a while the lamplight at the far end of the corridor swayed and Kola appeared, in a T-shirt and track pants, holding a lantern and breathing hard.

“What are you doing?” he demanded. “I heard you shout.”

“I didn’t shout.”

“You said something.”

“I said I’m not afraid.” She pointed at the padlock. “This is new. And someone is playing a recording of my mother’s lullaby behind that door.”

Kola stared at the brass lock. All the colour left his face. “That’s impossible.”

“Why? Who has the key?”

“The Chief. Only the Chief.” He swallowed. “His keys were locked in the study after he died. Barrister Okonkwo took them to Lagos for the inventory.”

“All of them?”

“I thought so.”

Adesewa met his eyes in the lantern light. “Then someone has a copy.”

They stood without speaking. Then Kola said, in a very low voice, “Go back to your room, please. Lock the door.”

“I’m not a child.”

“I know you’re not.” He seemed almost pained. “Which is why I’m asking you rather than ordering you.”

She went. She locked the door, wedged a chair under the handle, and lay on top of the blankets with her eyes open until the first grey light of dawn crept through the curtains.

At six o’clock, the birds started. At six-fifteen, Adesewa gave up and went downstairs to look for a cup of tea.

The house was quiet. Mama Ronke’s kitchen was empty, though a kettle steamed on the stove. Adesewa poured a cup, crossed the great hall, and stopped at a door she had not noticed the night before, a heavy oak door standing very slightly ajar.

A plaque beside it read: STUDY.

She pushed it open.

It was a beautiful room, with leather armchairs, wall-to-wall shelves, a massive desk, and tall windows that now framed a pale morning. Everything was covered in dust. The ink bottle on the blotter had dried to a black crust. An old fountain pen lay across a stack of papers as if the writer had stepped out for a moment and never returned.

On the desk, in the center of that thick grey dust, stood a framed photograph.

And around it, in the dust, was a perfectly clean ring.

Adesewa did not touch it at first. She stared at the clean circle, the way her accounting lecturers had taught her to stare at a column of figures that did not add up. The dust is thick everywhere else, she thought. If the frame had stood here for twenty years, the dust would have settled around its base in a fine, even line. This ring is sharp. Crisp. Somebody has wiped around it this week.

The picture itself showed a young woman holding a baby.

She was laughing, her head thrown back, and one hand raised to shield her eyes from the sun. The same woman as the portrait on the landing. The same crescent scar on her left thumb.

The baby in her arms had a gap-toothed grin and a tuft of hair tied with a red ribbon.

Adesewa picked up the photograph with trembling hands and turned it over. Written on the back in blue ballpoint was a date, 14 April 2006, and a line in a woman’s handwriting.

“Sewa’s first birthday. Wale says she looks like me. I say she looks like trouble.”

Her knees gave out. She sat down hard in the Chief’s leather chair.

Wale.

Her mother’s name had been Folasade. Her father’s name had been Adewale.

She had known the dates her whole life. Her parents had died when she was two. She was now twenty-two. That was twenty years ago, and the date on the back of the photograph read April 2006, when she was one.

So far, so good, she thought wildly. The date could be right. It’s a birthday picture. It’s from before the accident.

But then she looked closer at the paper.

The photograph had been printed on glossy inkjet paper. She could see the faint horizontal banding of a home printer, the telltale artefact of a cheap cartridge. It had been printed from a digital file, enlarged and printed within the last year or two.

Someone had made this picture recently. Someone had cleaned the dust. Someone had put it where she would find it.

“Beautiful, isn’t she?”

Adesewa nearly dropped the frame. A man stood in the doorway, mid-thirties, tall and sunburned, wearing a rumpled grey shirt and a lanyard that read NIGERIA POLICE FORCE - CID. His eyes were red-rimmed, as if he too had not slept, and he carried a battered leather notebook.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Detective Tunde Bakare.” He flashed a badge, then tucked it away. “I came to ask Mama Ronke some follow-up questions about the Chief’s death. And you must be Adesewa.”

“How do you know my name?”

“Because I’ve been looking for you for six years, Miss Agbodemu.” He nodded to the photograph. “Please. Put that down gently. It’s evidence.”

“Evidence of what?”

“That is the question, isn’t it?” He stepped into the room, shut the door softly behind him, and lowered his voice. “Let me tell you three things quickly, because there’s no time for politeness.

“One. Your parents’ deaths were not a car accident. I have a file on them that says otherwise.

“Two. At least nine people connected to this family have vanished or died in the last forty years, and every one of them was officially recorded as accidental.

“Three.” He glanced at the ceiling, at the closed door, at the dust-ringed frame in her hands. “Someone in this house wanted you to find that photograph. And I do not think it was the person you’d expect.”

Adesewa stared at him. Her throat felt tight. “Why would anyone do that?”

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

A sudden cold pressure seemed to settle on her skull. She realised that she had been very afraid for a very long time, and that she was now, for the first time, truly angry.

“Detective,” she said, “I need to look at that file.”

“You’ll have it.” He hesitated. “But first, Miss Agbodemu, I need you to go back to your room and check your bed.”

“My bed?”

“I came up the back stairs, and I saw someone leaving your room.” His voice was grim. “Whoever it was, they were in a hurry.”

She ran.

She took the staircase two steps at a time, flung open her bedroom door, and stopped dead.

The bed was exactly as she had left it, a tumble of blankets over the pillow. She crossed to it with her heart hammering, lifted the pillow, and froze.

Beneath it lay an old iron key, heavy, rust-brown, tied with a faded red ribbon.

It was sticky.

She touched it, and her fingertip came away dark and wet. She did not need to smell it to know.

On the iron bow of the key, someone had scratched three words with a nail.

FOR THE WEST WING.