The Third Door — Chapter 40: Wrong Woman

Chapter summary

Tunde confronts Tonye for stolen money, but Chief Amakiri exposes his corruption and forces retreat.

5.30am, Thursday 15 October 2026, Port Harcourt

She did not sleep that night, and in the morning she opened the shop at the usual hour, because it was the only thing she knew how to do.

The door had been bolted at ten. She did not remember bolting it. What she remembered was a woman in a red coat at the counter in the lamplight, with a dark halo of hair laid down beside her, and a voice reading from a book, steadily, gently, as one reads to a child; and herself on the cold tiles with her back against the glass. The stranger had come and knelt in front of her, and laid one hand against the side of her face, quite lightly, for the space of three breaths, and said nothing at all.

Then she had gone. The bolt had slid back. The bell had rung once over the door and been still.

Tonye had stayed on the floor until the clock on the wall said a quarter to midnight. Then she had got up, and washed her face at the little sink in the back, and driven home through the empty streets with the windows down and the wet air blowing on her face. She had not cried again. She had sat at the table by the window, in the chair that faced the door, with a cup of cold tea in her hands, until the sky went grey. She had said the name aloud twice. Eniola. Tonye. She had said a third, which she had heard only once, across a counter, and which would not leave her.

Ijeoma.

10.30am, Thursday 15 October

Oyin had just opened the new delivery of gloves when the bell rang, and a man came in out of the rain.

He was tall, in a charcoal suit that had been cut for him by somebody who knew what he was doing, with a lilac tie, a gold watch and a face that had been handsome for twenty years and was beginning to be tired. He stopped inside the door. He took off a pair of dark glasses with a leisurely motion and folded them into his top pocket. Behind him, at a respectful distance, a small round man in a brown safari suit with an ironed moustache stood and examined the vitamin shelf with elaborate absorption.

Tonye was behind the counter with a clipboard.

She looked up, and the room tipped.

It was not a thing she could have described. It was a pressure in the chest, as though a great hand had placed itself flat against her breastbone. A smell reached her over the counter, a clean, expensive, slightly sweet cologne, and with it, from nowhere, a whole afternoon: a green gate, a house with a rusted veranda, a table of eleven people, a hand that patted hers twice, in the way you pat a dog you do not intend to walk.

She did not know the man. She knew his hands.

“Good morning, sir,” she said. “How may I help you?”

He did not answer at once. He stood and studied her, quite openly, from the cropped red hair to the loose blue dress, with the keen, slow, calculating attention of a man looking at a house he has been told he owns. His eyes went to her mouth. They stayed there.

“Eniola,” he said.

It was not a question.

Oyin, at the shelf, stopped with a box of gloves in her hands.

“I am sorry,” Tonye said, in the polite, flat, level voice that she had spent four years learning. “I think you have the wrong person.”

“I do not think so.”

“My name is Tonye Briggs. I am the superintendent pharmacist of this branch. This is my shop.” She laid down the clipboard. “If you need a prescription filled, my assistant can help you. If you do not, I must ask you to excuse us.”

“You are very good.” He smiled, slowly, with great charm. “You were always very good. I used to think it was the most remarkable thing about you.”

“Sir…”

“Where is my money?”

The shop was quiet. It was the question of a man who had waited four years to ask it, and had decided to ask it politely, and had rehearsed it, on the way

from the airport, until it came out smooth as a coin. Behind him, Mr. Etim cleared his throat.

“I do not know what you are talking about,” said Tonye.

“Ninety-six million naira, three hundred and forty thousand. I know the figure. So, I think, do you.”

“You are mistaken.”

“Eniola.”

“You have the wrong woman.”

She said it quite steadily. Her own voice reached her as a voice does on a radio in another room, calm, even and far off. Her hands lay flat on the glass. She did not know whether she was lying.

“You have the wrong woman,” she said again, “and you are frightening my staff.”

Tunde Bankole did not move. His eyes, on her face, were bright.

“I am a patient man,” he said softly. “I have waited four years. I have not told the police. I have told nobody at all.” He paused. “But I think there are one or two people who would be interested to learn the whereabouts of a certain Mrs. Bankole.”

“Barrister.”

The voice came from the door, and it was deep, gravelly and polite. Chief Amakiri stood on the threshold in a gele of imperial purple, with a stick that she did not need and a retinue of two, one of them a lean grey man in a barrister’s collar who carried a briefcase like

an infant. She was not hurrying. She had never in her life hurried. She came forward across the tiles with her stick tapping, and stopped a pace from the tall man’s shoulder, and looked up at him, with every ounce of her sixty-four years.

“Mr. Bankole,” she said. “Good morning.”

“Madam, I do not think we have been introduced.”

“No. I have always preferred to be introduced on my own terms.” She smiled. “Chief Ibinabo Amakiri. I own the pharmacy chain in which you are standing. This is my lawyer, Barrister Harry. You may speak to him, if you wish. You will find him patient.”

“This is a private matter.”

“It was a private matter,” said Chief, “until you came into a shop of mine and accused a woman of mine of theft, in front of my staff and a customer. I think it is now a public one.” She tilted her head. “I had your wife looked at, Mr. Bankole. I thought you should know. Four years ago. By a very good man. He told me a great many things.”

He did not move. “I had you looked at too,” said Chief gently. “He was thorough. He found, among other things, a number of companies that have been generous to you. Coral Marine. Fidel Construction. Rivers Haulage. I understand that your employers would take a close interest in how such companies came to be so generous. I have never needed to ask.”

The silence in the shop was absolute.

The colour left Tunde Bankole’s face in a single smooth flush, as water goes down a drain. His hand, which had been resting easily on the counter, closed into a fist.

“If you accuse this woman again,” said Chief Amakiri, “of anything, anywhere, I shall ask my lawyer to prepare the necessary letters. To the police. To your bank. To the newspapers, if need be. I have never once in my life been afraid of a newspaper.” She smiled again, kindly. “Do I make myself clear?”

For a long moment he did not answer.

Then he turned and looked at the woman behind the counter. His face was grey and still and extraordinarily naked, and the charm had gone out of it as a light goes out of a room.

“You smiled at my mother’s table for twelve years,” he said, low. “I never knew you at all.”

“I do not know you, sir,” said Tonye. “I am sorry.”

She meant it. It was the worst thing about it. She found, to her own astonishment, that she did mean it.

He stood a moment longer. He put on his dark glasses. He walked to the door, not quickly, with his shoulders straight, and the small round man in the safari suit went out after him with an apologetic glance at the vitamins, and the bell rang, and the door swung to, and the rain came in for a moment and went out again.

Oyin put down the box of gloves. “Ma,” she said, in a whisper, “who be that?”

“A man who has made a mistake,” said Tonye.

She found that her hands were shaking again. She laid them on the counter and looked at them, and the whole shop began, slowly, to swim.

Chief Amakiri had come round the counter. She took her by the elbow, firmly, as a nurse takes a patient who has been sitting too long.

“Come inside, Tonye,” she said.

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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.