Esther heard voices as she opened the door at the foot of the staircase where she had her room.
‘I’ll leave you to get on then, Professor Danjuma.’ It was Mr Malpas, the head porter. ‘If you wouldn’t mind locking the room when you’re finished and dropping the key off at the lodge.’
‘Certainly! I will not forget. Thank you.’ That voice was new to her, but somehow familiar. It must be Professor Danjuma, Jibrilu’s father. It had the same deep tone, but was less strong – an older man, and one who had learned to be less arrogant and sure of himself.
She looked towards Jibrilu’s ground-floor room and saw the porter there in the act of pulling the door closed behind him. He nodded toward her as he passed her on his way back to resume his duties in the lodge.
‘Afternoon, Miss Orugun!’
‘Good afternoon, Mr Malpas. How are you?’
‘Not so bad, thanks. Been to your mothers meeting, I see,’ he added, looking towards Esther’s blue-and-white Mothers’ Union headscarf.
‘That’s right,’ she nodded, smiling back at him. ‘We had a very interesting speaker from a women’s refuge talking about how difficult it can be for women to escape domestic violence. It made me feel very blessed to be from a home where my father always treated my mother with respect.’
‘That’s right,’ the elderly porter agreed, picking up on a word that was one of his favourites. ‘There’s not enough respect these days. When I was a boy, I was taught to give up my seat to ladies on the bus, and my dad always carried the heavy bags for my mum. Nowadays, young people only think of themselves and what they want. I reckon you Africans could teach them a few things about respect. You understand that the old ways are often the best ways.’
‘Oh, I don’t know about that! Not all of the old ways are so good. The talk today reminded me about an incident at my church back home. My father is the vicar there. One day, one of the women in the congregation came to him, very upset because her husband had married another woman – a girl, half his age! She asked my dad to talk to him and tell him to send her away. But the man said it was their tradition to have many wives. He said his grandfather had been a tribal chief with ten wives and he was just sticking to the old ways, like him.’
‘Yes well, I meant the old British ways,’ the porter muttered. ‘Respect for authority, churchgoing, minding your language – like you, Miss Orugun. And Mr Danjuma,’ he added, glancing back at the closed door behind him. ‘I know he was a Muslim, but he was always very polite to me and I never got complaints from the scouts about the state of his room – not like a lot of the young men. It was a crying shame him being killed like that!’
‘Yes. I can agree with you on that,’’ Esther nodded. ‘Was that his father you were letting into his room just now? I was wondering whether to call and have a word.’
‘That’s right. He’s come to clear out his things. He says he’s flying out, back to Nigeria at the end of the week. Yes, I daresay, he’d be pleased to have you call in and give your condolences. Now, I’d better get on. Can’t stand around here chatting all day!’
Esther waited until the old man had gone past and the door had swung shut behind him, before approaching the room where Jibrilu Danjuma had lived up until his sudden death only a few weeks before. She raised her hand to knock, and then changed her mind abruptly and set off up the stairs to her room instead.
A few minutes later, she was back, standing outside Jibrilu’s door with a white envelope clasped in her hand. She stood for a few seconds, her hand poised to knock, her eyes closed.
‘Oh Lord,’ she prayed silently, ‘give me the right words to say to him. Do not allow me to make things worse for him than they already are!’
Then she tapped hard with her knuckles and stepped back a pace to wait for a reply.
The door opened and a man looked out at her. Esther stared back, momentarily lost for words. This could not be Jibrilu’s father. He was too young – forty at most, maybe less. And yet, there was something familiar about him. He was tall, like Jibrilu, but slimmer – wiry rather than muscular – and his face …? Something about his eyes and the set of his chin reminded her of the dead postgraduate student. Perhaps this was some relative who had accompanied the grieving father to support him. Not a brother – she knew that Jibrilu had no siblings – a cousin perhaps?
Then the man spoke, not in the northern Nigerian accent that she had been expecting, but in the “received pronunciation” of a native of the home counties. ‘Miss Orugun? Can I help you?’
At the sound of his voice, the penny dropped. Of course! The man’s face was familiar because she had met him before. This wasn’t some member of Jibrilu’s family, it was the police officer who had investigated his death. He had interviewed her, because she lived on the same staircase and was a fellow student.
‘Inspector!’ She tried to gather her thoughts, taken aback at seeing him there. What was his name, now? Lepage! That was it: Detective Inspector Andy Lepage. ‘I’m sorry. I thought … I was looking for Professor Danjuma. I wanted to …’
‘Pay your respects?’ Lepage smiled back kindly. ‘Of course! Come in. I’m just here to help him collect his son’s belongings.’
He ushered her inside the room and closed the door behind her.
‘Professor! Let me introduce Esther Orugun. She has a room just above here, on the first floor. Miss Orugun – this is Professor Yakubu Danjuma.’ The inspector introduced them and then, seeing that Esther was struggling to know how to begin a conversation with the bereaved father, went on, ‘I’ll just pop back to the car and get those boxes,’ and left the room.
‘So, you knew Jibrilu?’ The professor’s voice was deep and resonant, just like Jibrilu’s. ‘Why don’t we both sit down and then we can talk.’
‘Thank you.’ Esther subsided into one of the two standard-issue easy chairs, identical to the ones in her own room, and sat fiddling with the envelope in her hands. ‘I – I … Professor Danjuma-’
‘Yakubu, please,’ he interrupted. ‘I hope that you consider us to be friends. Any friend of Jibrilu’s is a friend of mine.’
With a great effort, Esther forced herself to speak steadily. ‘Yakubu, I wanted to say how sorry I was about ….’
‘Thank you.’
‘And I – I – I wanted to apologise.’
‘Apologise? Why?’
‘I wasn’t always very fair towards Jibrilu. In fact, I said some very unfair things. I – I wrote this letter, apologising, but I never gave it to him.’
Esther held out the envelope. Yakubu looked at it for several seconds before putting out his hand and taking it from her.
‘Please! Read it!’ Esther urged. ‘I wish I’d given it to him before … and I should have apologised to his face. It was cowardly to write a letter, but … Well, I’d feel better if I knew that you at least ….’ She trailed off into incoherence.
Yakubu opened the envelope and unfolded the single sheet of writing paper inside. He read it in silence and then re-folded it and put it back in the envelope.
‘Thank you.’ He hesitated and then put the letter into the inside pocket of his jacket. ‘Jibrilu spoke of you,’ he went on, after a short pause. ‘He told me that you had family who were killed by Boko Haram.’
‘My aunt and uncle and cousins, yes; but it was wrong of me to suggest that Jibrilu supported them, just because he was a Muslim and-’
‘And liked to tell other people how to behave?’ Yakubu cut across her. ‘Yes. I can see why you were angry with him. He saw everything in black and white and thought it was his duty to point out to people when they were offending against the will of Allah. It is my fault. I’m afraid that, when he was a child, I encouraged him to think that way. I was not very religious when I was young, but after Jibrilu’s mother died, I became convinced that losing my family was a judgement on me for my lack of devotion. I started praying five times a day and going to the masjid every Friday without fail. It was a comfort to me to feel that I was doing something to …
‘To atone?’ suggested Esther timidly.
‘Yes. Yes, perhaps that is the right word. I had not been a good Muslim and I think I was not a good husband either. I tried to cover my guilt with religious zeal. And of course, Jibrilu grew up thinking that was all very important – which it is, but not … Allah says, in the Holy Qur’an, “There is no compulsion in religion.” And yet Jibrilu always felt obliged to correct those whom he thought were doing wrong.’
‘You must have been very close,’ Esther suggested, unsure how to respond to this unexpected disclosure. ‘I can’t imagine how you feel now that he’s gone.’
‘When the police arrived at my office and told me, I did not know how I would go on living,’ Yakubu admitted. ‘But, Alhamdulillah, this tragedy brought me something totally unexpected. To my utter amazement, I lost one son and miraculously found another!’