Chapter 6 THE WEST WING

Detective Bakare had swabbed the blood from the key, sealed the swab, and handed the key back to her at noon with the face of a man doing something he did not entirely approve of.

"The lab only needs the stain," he said. "The key is yours. It belongs to this house, not to my evidence room. But if you hear anything tonight, you call me. My number is in your phone."

"You put your number in my phone?"

"While you were reading the file." He had the grace to look uncomfortable. "Habit."

She did not tell him about Mama Ronke's instructions. It felt like a betrayal, and she disliked how much she disliked it. All afternoon she walked the compound pretending to look at the roof and the cracked fountain while she rehearsed what she would say if the west wing held a person, a machine, or a body.

Dinner was a stiff affair in the long dining room. Titilayo talked about the burial arrangements. Folarin talked about the price of diesel. Kola ate silently at the foot of the table and left early. Mama Ronke carried in dishes and carried them out again and did not once meet Adesewa's eyes.

At 11:40 p.m., the lights died.

The generator coughed outside, and this time Adesewa listened carefully. It did not stall. It was switched off. She heard the distinct click of a heavy lever, followed by the long descending groan of an engine winding down.

Someone is turning it off by hand. Someone who wants the house dark.

She put on dark trousers, a cardigan, and flat shoes. She slipped her phone into her pocket with its torch lit, then put the iron key into the other pocket, wrapped in a handkerchief. She opened her door and stood listening to the great black silence of the corridor.

Nothing moved. Then, from far below, a floorboard sighed.

She went toward the west wing in her socks, carrying her shoes. The corridor floor was cold. Her torch painted a trembling circle ahead of her, picking out the carved panels, a long mirror clouded with age, and a row of nails where portraits had once hung. At the end, the double doors waited with their new brass padlock.

The key fit. She had half expected it not to.

It turned with a heavy, oiled click. Someone had greased this lock recently, as they had the hinges. The doors swung inward without a sound, as if they had been waiting.

The air that came out was warm.

It smelled of beeswax, of Dettol, of boiled rice. It was not the smell of a place twenty years abandoned. It was the smell of a place where somebody lived.

"Hello?" Adesewa said into the dark. Her voice came out smaller than she meant. "My name is Adesewa. I have a key. I'm not here to hurt anyone."

Nobody answered. She stepped in and closed the doors behind her.

A long hall ran ahead, lined with shut doors, each with an old brass number. At the far end, a faint yellow light leaked under one. She went toward it, slowly, with her torch pointed at the floor. Halfway there she passed an open doorway and glanced in.

It was a nursery.

A narrow iron cot stood against one wall. A rocking horse with a missing eye leaned in the corner. On a small table lay a stack of children's drawings, held down by a smooth stone, and she bent over them without meaning to.

They were drawings of a house. The same house, over and over, in crayon and pencil, with a tall woman beside it and a small woman beside the tall one. Each drawing was dated in a child's hand, but not a young child. A teenager's cursive. March 2019. June 2020. August 2023.

Somebody has been drawing this house for years, Adesewa thought. And she's been drawing it as a child draws it.

The last drawing, dated that very month, showed three figures at a window. Two stood upstairs. The third, very small, stood outside the gate in the rain, holding a suitcase.

It was her.

She dropped the paper as if it burned.

A voice spoke softly in the corridor behind her.

"Do not be afraid. She's only shy."

Adesewa spun around, her torch swinging. Nothing stood in the doorway. Nobody was in the hall. But from the shadows near the stairs came the faint pad of bare feet, retreating.

"Wait!" She ran into the hall. "Please! I only want to talk!"

The light at the far end went out.

Her torch caught a sliver of movement and she plunged after it, down the hall and around a corner into a narrower passage she had not seen from the entrance. It was a servant's passage, low-ceilinged and bare, running behind the wall of the main house. At its end stood a tall wooden panel, slightly ajar.

She shouldered through.

She was in a very small room, the size of a pantry, with a single bed, a bucket, and a camp stove. A woman's cardigan hung on a nail. On the bed lay a cassette recorder, its tape spooled out like a ribbon of dark water. And in the wall opposite, set at eye level, a hole the size of a coin allowed a thin beam of lamplight from the other side.

Adesewa put her eye to it.

She was looking at the great hall. She could see the foot of the staircase, the scratched portrait on the landing, and a small heavy door she hadn't noticed before, set into the underside of the stairs.

The room beneath the stairs.

She had found the other end of it.

Behind her, the panel creaked. She turned very slowly.

A woman stood in the doorway, and she was holding a lantern.

She was thin and middle-aged, in a plain grey housedress, her hair wrapped in a faded scarf. Her face was in shadow. But the lantern swung, and the beam crossed her left hand, and on the thumb of that hand, pale and unmistakable, was a small crescent scar.

Adesewa's lips moved. No sound came out.

The woman took a step into the room. Her mouth trembled. She whispered one word, as if she were afraid it might break.

"Sewa?"

Then the lantern flew from her hand.

It did not fall. It was knocked from behind, with a crack of metal on bone, and the woman cried out and crumpled. The lantern hit the floor and the oil spilled and the flame ran in a bright line across the boards, and in its light Adesewa saw a figure in a black hood standing over the fallen woman, holding an iron bar.

The hooded head turned toward Adesewa.

She could not see a face. She saw only the glint of eyes, and the iron bar rising again.

"Run," the woman on the floor gasped. "Sewa, run."

Adesewa grabbed the burning lantern, flung it at the hooded figure, and ran.