The Third Door — Chapter 23: The Night She Took It

Chapter summary

Eni opens Tunde’s hidden safe, takes his illicit fortune, and finally stops fearing her husband.

11.20pm, Monday 14 February 2022, Ikoyi, Lagos

It was Valentine’s Day, and her husband was at a client dinner.

Eni had almost laughed when he told her. He had said it at breakfast, over his egg, with a contrite look that he had once practised in a bathroom mirror. Client dinner, love. I will make it up to you. She had smiled the right-bending smile, and passed him the salt, and thought: Thank you.

The house was quiet. The housekeeper had gone home at six. Baba Gate was asleep in his plastic chair, with the radio muttering on his chest. In the kitchen, a cup of tea that Eni had made an hour ago stood on the counter, cold and untouched, with a skin forming on its surface.

She washed her hands. She dried them. She looked at her watch.

Then she walked down the corridor to the study.

The study smelled of leather, polish and her husband’s cologne. It was a handsome room, lined to the ceiling with books bound in dark green and oxblood, with a desk the size of a small car and a lamp with a brass base. On the wall, in a heavy frame, a photograph of Tunde’s father in a three-piece suit looked down with the stern, unsmiling gaze of a man who had never been asked a question he did not like.

On the east wall stood the mahogany bookcase.

She had noticed it years ago, the way you notice a crooked picture. It stood perhaps four inches too far from the corner. Its shelves ran deeper than the books required. And the third volume from the left in the second row of an expensive encyclopedia had a spine with no dust on it.

She had watched him reach for it once, on a call, absently, without even looking, as a man scratches an itch. She had not asked herself what the volume was. She had been careful, for thirteen years, not to ask herself a great many things.

She took it down.

Behind it, a brass catch. She pressed it.

The whole bookcase gave a soft, oiled sigh and swung outward on a hidden hinge, the way a door opens in a house where nobody has ever thought to knock. In the dark space behind it, in the wall, a grey steel door waited with a keypad in its centre, lit a faint cold green.

She stood in front of it for some time.

There were four small numbers she had never needed. She knew them anyway, as one knows the lyrics of an old song one has never liked. His phone. His bank card. His mother’s birthday.

She typed them in.

The keypad gave a polite little chirp, and the door opened.

She had imagined many things. A jeweller’s box. A few bundles of notes.

She had not imagined this.

The safe was deep and well-lit, with three shelves of grey steel. On the top shelf lay bricks of American dollars bound in rubber bands, stacked as neatly as bread in a bakery. Beneath them, on the second shelf, the naira, bundle upon bundle of it in clear plastic, thick as bricks. On the bottom shelf, between a velvet pouch and an envelope of old photographs, lay a black notebook with a red ribbon marker.

She took out the notebook first.

It was a ledger. Of course it was a ledger. He had always been the sort of man to keep one. A neat hand, small and slanted, in blue ink. Columns. Dates. Initials. And in the right-hand margin of every page, a figure, with a circled letter beside it.

C.

She turned the pages slowly. ATL/2019/Coral Marine. ATL/2020/Fidel Const. ATL/2020/Rivers Haulage. Names of companies. Names of directors. Loans approved by a man in a good suit in a quiet office on the ninth floor of a bank, and beside each loan, a small number, and beside that, the circled C.

Commission. She understood it in thirty seconds. It was the kind of thing that thirteen years of marriage had not been enough to teach her, and that one cold bookcase had taught her in half a minute. Every small gift. Every holiday he had insisted on. Every house, every

car, every school fee for a cousin’s child, every blessed Sunday lunch in Surulere with the roast lamb. It had all been C.

He could never go to the police.

The thought arrived quietly, like a guest in a hallway. It sat down. It made itself comfortable.

If she took what was in this safe, her husband would not be able to say a single word. He could not report a theft without explaining the money. He could not explain the money without opening this book.

She stood with the ledger open in her hands.

She thought of her father. A man who had also kept a ledger, in a way. A man who had kept an account of his small lies until the account came due, one terrible night, in a one-bedroom flat in Ogba.

Then she closed the book and laid it back on the bottom shelf, exactly as she had found it, with the ribbon in the same place.

A ledger was evidence. Evidence was how people ended up in the dock. She had watched what that did to a family. She was not here to put anyone in a dock.

Money was only money.

11.50pm She fetched the grey holdall from the wardrobe upstairs and brought it down in the dark, and she worked in the green light of

the keypad with the flat, quick, practised fingers of a woman who had counted tablets for twenty years.

She did not rush, and she did not take what she could not carry. The dollars went in, and the naira. She left the velvet pouch alone, and the photographs, and the old steel watch that had belonged to his father, which she had always known was the only thing in this house he truly loved.

She counted as she packed. She could not help it. It was the only language she had ever been fluent in.

Ninety-six million, three hundred and forty thousand naira, at this morning’s rate.

She counted it again, to be certain, and then once more.

It was a great deal of money. It was less than it ought to have been. It was exactly enough.

When she lifted the holdall, her arm shook. She stood for a moment with the handles in both hands, breathing, and she felt the weight of it settle into her shoulders. It was the weight of thirteen years. It was the heaviest thing she had ever carried.

It did not feel like stealing. It felt like finally being paid. She shut the door of the safe the way one closes the door of a sleeping child’s room: slowly, gently, with a hand flat against the steel until the latch had caught without a sound. She pressed the brass catch. She pushed the bookcase back against the wall until it sat, once again, four inches too far from the corner.

She replaced the third volume of the encyclopedia. She straightened its spine.

She stood in the middle of the study in her stockinged feet, in the quiet, with the stern photograph watching.

1.10am

She heard the car at ten past one.

She was already in bed, on her side, with the sheet to her chin and her eyes closed and the holdall zipped inside the wardrobe behind a row of winter coats that nobody in Lagos had ever needed. She listened to the gate, and the engine, and a slightly unsteady tread on the stairs.

The bedroom door opened.

“My wife,” said Tunde, in a voice thick with wine. “Na you dey wait for me? Happy Valentine, my love.”

He fell on the bed beside her like a tree. He smelled of whisky and someone else’s perfume and the faint stale smell of a man who had been lying all evening. He kissed the back of her neck, clumsily, and was asleep in less than a minute.

Eni lay in the dark. She waited for it. The fear. The cold, familiar rope that had tied itself around her chest on a bathroom floor in January and had not loosened since. She waited for her heart to start to race, her palms to go wet, her throat to close.

Nothing came.

Somewhere between the first bundle and the last, she had stopped being afraid.

She did not trust it. It was a feeling she had not had since she was nine years old, and it felt strange and wide and a little frightening, like standing at the top of a stair in the dark with one foot already over the edge.

And for the first time in her life, she did not reach for the rail.

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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.