Chapter summary
Kamsi manipulates Tunde’s search for Eni, seduces him, then returns home beneath her deception’s weight.
11.40pm, Tuesday 29 March 2022, Ikoyi, Lagos
The investigator’s report was eleven pages long, bound in a blue plastic folder, and it said nothing at all.
Kamsi read it by the light of her phone while Tunde drove. She turned the pages the way you turn the pages of a menu in a restaurant you have already decided to leave. Subject last seen on the morning of 15 February. Mobile telephone traced northward. No passenger matching the description identified at Ojota motor park. CCTV unavailable. Mr. Ubong Etim wrote like a man who was paid by the word and ashamed of it.
“Anything?” Tunde asked.
“No.”
He made a small sound in his throat and tightened his hands on the wheel.
They had spent the whole evening at Ojota, among the buses and the touts and the roasted groundnuts, showing Eni’s photograph to sleepy men who looked at it for one second and said, “No see.” Tunde had been recognised twice by people who wanted money. He had been called Oga by boys who would have robbed him in a darker corner. He had stood under a sodium lamp in a suit that cost more than the conductors earned in a year, holding his wife’s picture like a man holding a stranger’s baby.
Kamsi had watched him do it, and had felt nothing she could name.
He pulled into the car park of a supermarket on Awolowo Road, long closed, and killed the engine. A single lamp lit the empty rows. The tarmac was still wet from an afternoon shower.
“I have checked everywhere,” he said, to the windscreen. “Her friends. The pharmacists. The church. The gym. The woman at her hairdresser’s. Nothing.”
“Maybe,” Kamsi said gently, “there is a man.”
“Eni?” He turned. His face, in the lamplight, was genuinely surprised. “She is not that type.”
“There is no type, Tunde.”
“You don’t know her.”
She let the silence answer him.
It had taken her three weeks to plant that idea, a word at a time, in the soft ground of his pride. Never a direct claim. A small question over dinner. A remark about how quiet women always had the most to hide. She had watched it take root, and she had watched his eyes begin to move toward every man who had ever stood within ten feet of his wife.
“A man,” he said slowly. “Who?”
“I don’t know. That is why we ask.”
He stared at her. Then, with the sudden, boyish helplessness that she had learned to read like a clock, he reached over and took her face in both hands.
Heat, Kamsi had found, was an easy thing to fake once you had studied the faces of people who felt it.
She knew where the breath should catch and where the eyes should close. She knew how to turn her mouth so that a man’s hand went to her neck of its own accord. She knew exactly how long to wait, and how softly to say his name.
The windows fogged. The glass went milky and then blind, and the lamp outside bloomed into a smudge of yellow. The car, which smelled of leather and cologne and rain, filled with the sound of two people breathing.
She wore the red coat and the wig. He had run both hands up into the thick dark cloud of it and said, in a voice she barely recognised, “You look like somebody from a film.”
I look like somebody who is dead, she thought.
His mouth was warm. His hands were certain. He kissed like a man who was used to being given what he asked for, and he took everything she allowed him with an unselfconscious greed that she found, to her own surprise, almost sad. A man in a car park at midnight with a mistress and an empty house and a wife who had walked out of both.
She let her head fall back against the seat. The heat of it was real. That was the part she had never needed to pretend. She had always known that heat did not need a heart.
A torch beam swung across the glass.
There was a sharp knock. Three raps, impatient, on the window.
“Oga. Oga! Una dey alright for there?”
Tunde swore and rubbed a patch clear with the heel of his hand. A security guard in a grey cap stood outside with a torch and a very suspicious moustache.
“No wahala,” Tunde said, winding the glass down two inches. “We dey go.”
“Oga, na private property o. Make una move.”
A folded note passed through the gap. The guard’s moustache relaxed.
“Goodnight, sir. Goodnight, madam. God bless una.”
The light swung away, and Tunde burst out laughing. It was a real laugh, helpless and unguarded, and it did something strange to her chest. For a second, a very short second, she saw how a woman might have loved this man.
Then it was gone, and she was a woman in a stolen face in the dark.
12.50am
He drove her home.
In front of her building in Yaba, a three-storey place with a leaking water tank and a gate that did not close, he stopped the car and held her hand for a long moment.
“Thank you,” he said. “For coming with me tonight. I could not have done it alone.”
“You don’t have to thank me.”
“I do.” He looked tired and young and very much in need of someone to blame. “I keep thinking that if I find her, it will all be… that I will understand.”
“You will,” Kamsi said. “I think you will understand everything.”
He smiled. She kissed him on the cheek and got out and let herself in through the broken gate. She stood at the bottom of the stairs and watched the red tail lights of the car swim off down the street, and then she took off the wig and held it in both hands.
It was heavier than it looked. It always was.
She climbed the stairs to her flat. She laid the wig on its stand beside the mirror, in the same place her mother had once kept hers, and looked at her own face in the glass, bare and plain and tired.
He thought he was chasing his wife.
He was only following the story she had told him.
The Third Door · Continue reading
Chapter 17 is the next door
The story continues. Follow the next chapter through the door.
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Cover and contextual photographs are used under the Pexels licence. Cover source; cover design for The Third Door by akinakingbogun.com.
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