Chapter 4 WHAT THE DETECTIVE BROUGHT

Adesewa did not scream. She did not faint. She stood in the middle of her bedroom with a bloody key in one hand and her heart doing something athletic, and she thought, with great clarity: Whoever did this wants me to be frightened. So I will be furious instead.

"Don't touch it any more," said Detective Bakare, arriving breathless in the doorway. He pulled a clear plastic bag from his jacket with the air of a man who had expected to need it. "Drop it in here. Slowly."

"It's only blood," she said, and heard how thin her voice sounded.

"It's only blood until a laboratory says whose." He sealed the bag, wrote the time across it with a marker, and studied the pillow. "Did you lock this room last night?"

"Yes. I wedged a chair under the handle."

They both looked at the chair. It stood by the window, neatly returned to its place.

"I put it under the handle," Adesewa repeated. "It didn't walk back by itself."

"No," Bakare agreed. "It did not."

The window opened onto a drainpipe and a long drop to the courtyard. The door had a modern lock. Neither showed damage. Whoever had entered had either come through the door with a key, or had been let in by someone who had one.

"Detective," she said, "you said you have a file."

He glanced along the corridor, then closed the door and set his leather satchel on the bed. "I'll show you, on one condition. You tell nobody in this house what is in it. Not Kola. Not Mama Ronke. Not the nephew. Not me, if I start behaving like I want to hide something."

"That last condition is a strange one."

"It's the most important one." He drew out a thick brown folder, its corners soft with handling. "I've carried this for six years. Nobody reads it but me."

Adesewa sat on the edge of the bed and opened it.

The first page was a photocopied police report from the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway. Vehicle: Peugeot 406, burnt out. Occupants: two adults, one male, one female, both deceased. Identification: by vehicle registration and personal effects. Remains: unrecognisable.

Adesewa read the last word twice.

"Unrecognisable," she said.

"They identified your parents by the car and by a wristwatch. No dental records, no fingerprints, no DNA. In 2006, nobody asked for them."

Bakare sat across from her on the wardrobe stool. "The burial was done within two days. The death certificate was signed by a Dr. Lanre Fashola. I went looking for him in my first year on this case. Dr. Fashola left Lagos a month after your parents' funeral and nobody has seen him since."

"A man who vanished."

"One of nine." He turned the page for her. A list of names ran down the sheet in his tidy block capitals, each with a date and a single line. Alhaji Musa Garba, business partner, drowned 1989. Mrs. Bukola Agbodemu, sister-in-law, fell from balcony 1994. Chief's driver, Sunday Ige, road accident 1999. Her eyes ran down to the sixth line.

Folasade Agbodemu (née Adeyemi), age 24. Reported deceased 2006.

And under it:

Adewale Agbodemu, age 29. Reported deceased 2006.

She knew those names the way she knew her own hands, yet seeing them typed in a stranger's list made them look like furniture.

"Why does a detective in the Lagos CID care about an old family in Oyo State?" she asked.

"Because the first body I ever worked was Dr. Fashola's receptionist," Bakare said. "She was found in a drainage canal in 2018. In her handbag was a note with two words on it. Agbodemu and Sewa." He met her eyes. "I did not know then what Sewa meant. I do now."

The air in the room seemed to thin. "That receptionist knew about me."

"She knew something about you. And somebody killed her before she could tell me what."

Adesewa closed the folder carefully, as if it might wake. She wanted to be sick, and she wanted to read it again, and she wanted, absurdly, a cup of Aunty Bisi's pap and Aunty Bisi's hand on her forehead. Instead she squared her shoulders.

"There's something else I need to tell you. In the study this morning I read the photograph's inscription. It says it was Sewa's first birthday, in April 2006."

"Yes. I saw that."

"I was born in April 2004. I have my birth certificate. In April 2006, I turned two."

Bakare did not move. "Say that again."

"The baby in that picture was one year old in April 2006. She was born in April 2005. The date on the back is wrong for me by a full year."

Adesewa heard herself speak very quietly. "Either whoever wrote it made a mistake, or the baby isn't me."

For a long time neither of them spoke. A bird sang in the courtyard, brash and ordinary.

"Then who is she?" Bakare asked finally.

"I don't know." She pressed her palms together to stop them shaking. "But my mother's handwriting calls her Sewa."

He rubbed his unshaven jaw and wrote in his notebook, very slowly.

Two children? Same nickname? One alive, one erased? Then he looked up, and his face had changed. It was the careful face of a man deciding to trust a stranger.

"Miss Agbodemu, I'll tell you what I would not tell my own superior officer. I believe somebody in this family has spent twenty years replacing people. Names, dates, faces. And I believe the Chief was trying to undo it before he died."

"Then why did he not simply tell me?"

"Because," said Bakare, "whoever he was afraid of lived in this house with him."

A knock came at the door. They both started.

"Miss Adesewa?" Kola's voice. "Mama Ronke says breakfast. And Mr. Folarin has called the family together in the parlour. He says it is urgent."

Bakare slid the folder back into his satchel and tucked it beneath the mattress, then stopped himself and took it out again. "Never mind. I'll carry it." He rose, pulled on his jacket, and hesitated at the door.

"One more thing," he said, low. "You mentioned the keys. Kola said Barrister Okonkwo took all the Chief's keys to Lagos."

"Yes."

"I read Okonkwo's inventory on my way here. Eleven keys on one steel ring." He paused. "In the Chief's study, there is an old photograph of that same ring, taken last year, at the Chief's birthday. Twelve keys."

"Twelve."

"One key is missing from the official list." His mouth was a hard line. "And I believe you just found it under your pillow."

He opened the door and walked out into the corridor, polite and expressionless, leaving her in the room with the chair that had walked by itself and the smell of rust on her fingers.

Adesewa looked at her left thumb, at the small crescent scar, and for the first time in her life she wondered whether it belonged to her alone.

### Episode 5: The Last Agbodemu

The parlour was a long room at the front of the house, crowded with heavy sofas under crocheted covers and a glass cabinet of unused china. By the time Adesewa arrived, the family had already started to fill it.

She counted eleven people.

There was an elderly man with a walking stick and a cloudy left eye whom everybody called Baba Alani, and who sat in the best chair without being asked. There were two middle-aged sisters in matching ankara who whispered behind their hands. There were three young men in tight shirts, cousins of cousins, who had clearly come from Ibadan on the strength of rumour. And in the centre of the room, enthroned on the longest sofa in a gold lace buba and a towering gele, sat a woman of sixty who looked at Adesewa the way a market woman looks at a ripe pawpaw.

"Come, come, my daughter," she cried, arms opening. "Is this the child? Is this our Adesewa?"

"Good morning, ma."

"Ah ah, ma indeed! I am Titilayo, your aunt. Folarin's mother. My husband was the Chief's younger brother, may his soul rest." She embraced Adesewa in a cloud of perfume and gold bangles that clinked like coins. Then, still gripping her shoulders, she lifted her voice for the room. "Look at her, all of you! The last Agbodemu! God has been merciful to this family!"

Something cold slid down Adesewa's spine.

And never trust anyone who calls you the last Agbodemu.

She smiled, because a smile cost nothing, and said, "Thank you, Aunty. I'm only here to understand things."

"Of course, of course. We will explain everything."

Folarin entered behind her, in the same navy agbada as yesterday, and the room quietened. He took a position beside the cabinet and clasped his hands like a pastor.

"Thank you all for coming. The burial of our father, the Chief, will hold on Saturday, as is our custom. There are things that must be settled before then. The land. The house. The accounts. The traditional rites." His glance rested briefly on Adesewa. "And the matter of the new arrival."

"The new arrival is sitting right here," Adesewa said, "and can hear you."

Titilayo laughed shrilly. A cousin coughed. Baba Alani turned his good eye toward her with something that might have been approval.

"Our cousin is sharp," Folarin said. "That is good. I will be direct, then. This house is the family's. It has always been the family's. The Chief, in his old age, did not always think clearly. He may have signed things. He may have promised things to a girl he never met." He spread his hands. "I propose we handle this as a family, quietly, with dignity. We will offer Adesewa a settlement. In return, she signs a paper acknowledging the house is held in trust for all of us."

"What sort of paper?" Adesewa asked.

"A simple one."

"May I see it?"

He hesitated, a fraction. "It is being prepared."

"Then I will wait until it is prepared, and read it with a lawyer." She kept her voice pleasant. "I am an accounting graduate, cousin. I have been trained to distrust simple papers."

Somebody laughed outright. It was Baba Alani, a rusty cackle. "Folarin, my son, she is Akinwale's blood. Do not be a fool."

"Baba-"

"I am eighty-four, and I knew your uncle before your father was born. If that girl says she will read the paper, she will read the paper."

Folarin's jaw tightened. His mother touched his arm and said something in rapid Yoruba under her breath. Adesewa caught only fragments. Not now. Patience. Wait for Saturday.

When the meeting broke up, she stayed in her seat a moment longer, watching them file out. Titilayo's bangles chimed down the hall. The cousins argued about where to sleep. Baba Alani rose slowly, leaning on his stick, and as he passed her, he stopped.

"Daughter," he said, so quietly that only she heard it. "Which room did they put you in?"

"The east room. The one overlooking the courtyard."

"Good. Stay in the east wing." His cloudy eye drifted over her face. "Your grandmother slept in the west wing, and she was the last who did."

"Baba, what happened to her?"

"Ask Ronke." He tapped his stick twice against the floor. "And ask her why she keeps two plates for dinner."

He shuffled away before she could answer.

Adesewa sat very still. Two plates. In the kitchen last night, she had seen a tray prepared for her. Pounded yam, egusi, zobo. A second tray had been on the counter, covered with a white cloth. She had assumed it was for Kola.

She got to her feet and went to find the kitchen.

It was a long room with a stone floor and a wood-fired stove beside a modern gas cooker. Mama Ronke was alone at the table, shelling beans with the rhythm of a woman who had done it ten thousand times. She did not look up.

"Mama," Adesewa said gently, "may I sit?"

"This is your house, my daughter. You may sit where you like."

She sat. For a moment she only watched the old fingers snap pod after pod. Then she said, "Baba Alani says you keep two plates."

The fingers stopped.

"I only want to understand," Adesewa said. "I'm not accusing anybody. But I have been in this house for less than a day, and a voice has sung my mother's lullaby, a key has been placed under my pillow, and a family I never knew has started calling me by a title I was warned against. If there is somebody in the west wing, I need to know who they are."

Mama Ronke set down the bowl. Her hands were trembling. When she finally looked up, her eyes were wet, but her mouth was set like iron.

"I cannot tell you."

"Cannot, or will not?"

"Both." The old woman reached across the table and took Adesewa's hand, turning it palm up, tracing the crescent scar on the thumb with one cracked finger. "Child, I carried your mother on my back when she was small. I swore an oath to the Chief that I would keep a certain secret until a certain day. I have been keeping it for twenty years. If I break it too soon, someone will die."

"Who?"

"I cannot say." Her grip tightened. "But hear me. I am not your enemy. I have never been your enemy. Whatever Folarin says, whatever Kola says, whatever the police say, I have only ever tried to keep you alive."

"Then give me the truth."

"The truth will come to you." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Tonight, if you are brave. After the generator goes off, take the key and go to the west wing. Alone. Tell nobody. And do not bring the policeman."

"Why not the policeman?"

For answer, Mama Ronke shook her head slowly, and the grief in her face was so naked that Adesewa had to look away.

"Because there are things even good men should not be asked to see," the old woman said.

She picked up the bowl again and resumed shelling beans, and the conversation, Adesewa understood, was over.