(Some scenes have been fictionalized for dramatic effect.)
⸻
I. The Man Who Wore the Uniform Like a Second Skin of Dust
He had long accepted his role as one of Lagos’ faceless guardians — a checkpoint fixture, planted like a termite-bitten totem on the margins of the city’s rage.
Drambi Vandi.
A name no one said twice. A man no one remembered.
Twenty years in the Force and nothing to show for it but a rifle too old and a spine too stiff. He had not risen through the ranks, not because he was incompetent, but because he was forgettable — the kind of man who rarely made noise unless someone else was bleeding.
He was the shadow Lagos ignored until it needed a scapegoat.
But his invisibility had teeth.
And they grew sharper each year.
⸻
II. She Walked Past Like a Poem Never Meant for Him
(Fictionalized.) The first time he saw her, she had stepped out of the High Court, files in one hand, phone in the other. She was arguing with someone over speakerphone — calmly, like someone who expected to win. Not angrily. But with a poise that made argument feel like seduction.
Her name came later — Bolanle Raheem — when he searched the court calendar, then her LinkedIn, then found her photo on an alumni page. Her face looked softer there, unguarded, like someone had caught her mid-laugh. He saved the photo.
It became a kind of shrine.
“She walks like a judge among ants,” he would later write.
“Like Lagos was built just wide enough for her steps.”
She became a study.
Her voice.
Her silence.
The careful intimacy she carried in the way she greeted strangers — polite but impenetrable.
She was not flirtatious. And yet…
She moved in a way that made him ache to be noticed.
To be more than background.
⸻
III. He Fantasized Not About Her Body, But Her Attention
Most men, when they speak of desire, speak of bodies.
But for Vandi, it wasn’t lust in the way of bare thighs and bitten lips. It was something deeper — the eroticism of relevance.
He wanted her eyes on him. Just once.
Not the polite glance women give uniformed men out of caution.
He wanted recognition.
That quiet, sacred gaze that said:
“I see you. And I choose to keep looking.”
But she never gave it.
She never saw him.
She saw the badge, the rifle, the street.
Not him.
“She peeled power off men with her silence,” he scrawled once in his notebook.
“She made men feel naked by merely existing.”
He knew what this was. He wasn’t completely mad.
It was longing.
And rage.
⸻
IV. Christmas, Red Cloth, and the Moment the Earth Paused
It was the 25th of December — a Sunday soaked in carols and sweat. The road was drowsy. The city pretending to rest.
She wore red.
Of course she did.
Not just red, but that red. The red that makes men forget their names. The red that mothers warn daughters about. A red that says:
I am not here to hide.
Her SUV approached. He recognized it immediately.
He didn’t need to check documents.
He didn’t need to hear her voice.
He stepped forward.
She leaned slightly — to greet him, to offer the customary “Officer, good afternoon.” There was a child in the backseat, a husband at the wheel. Church still in their breath.
And then, a pause.
An unbearable, intimate moment in which she smiled. Not for him. Just… around him.
That was what shattered him.
She smiled the way people smile at things beneath their notice.
At objects.
At checkpoints.
“She still didn’t see me,” he thought.
So, he did the only thing he thought could make her remember.
He lifted the rifle.
And fired.
One shot.
She fell.
Silently.
As if her body had long known this was how it would end.
⸻
V. He Believed Her Death Was a Kind of Communion
In the stillness that followed, he didn’t flee.
He stood there, rifle lowered, watching the blood bloom into the red folds of her dress — colour melting into colour, as though fabric and flesh had finally agreed on something.
In his head (fictionalized), he whispered:
“Now you know. Now you feel what I’ve felt. To be dismissed. Erased.”
⸻
VI. The Trial Was an Autopsy of Desire
The courtroom was packed.
The prosecutors brought science. Trajectory. Forensics. Ballistics.
Her husband brought grief.
But it was the discovery of the notebook — Vandi’s personal ledger of thoughts — that turned the case from legal to mythical.
In it were lines that made even hardened journalists hold their breath:
“She disarmed me with calm. Her presence was a mirror I could not bear. So I shattered it.”
“If the law could touch me, she would have reached out by now. I reached first.”
The judge called it premeditated madness.
The journalists called it femicide.
The people called it Nigeria.
The sentence was death.
By hanging.
As if rope could reverse obsession.
⸻
VII. What the City Learned
They buried Bolanle quietly.
A woman who had done all the things she was told to do — be educated, be soft-spoken, be respectable, be obedient at checkpoints.
Still, she died.
Still, they wrote “accident” in the early reports.
Her daughter still asks why.
