Lightseekers Page 7

  ‘I’ll come back for that one,’ he says as he passes by the Inspector and me.

  I start to protest. ‘I can bring –’

  ‘I’ll come back, sir,’ Chika insists as he leaves, and I’m now left with Inspector Omereji, whose face threatens to crack under the strain of fake conviviality. I try to help him out of his misery.

  ‘You know the officers well?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘The team who investigated the case. They’re still at this station, I presume.’

  ‘Only two are. The other was transferred out of here, but I heard he left the force.’

  I bite my tongue from commenting on the expedience of such a development. I look at the remaining box on the desk. ‘That’s a lot of paperwork to be generated by three investigating officers.’

  ‘Look around you, Dr Taiwo. This is hardly the kind and size of station that attracts the best of the best.’

  ‘And yet, you’re here,’ I retort before I can stop myself.

  ‘Since I had little choice in the matter, I’ll take that as a compliment,’ the Inspector says with a rueful smile.

  It’s time for my own fake smile, then a studied frown. ‘Given the magnitude of the case, and the media interest, I’d have thought the force would have deployed extra hands?’

  ‘No one wanted to touch it. And can you blame them?’

  ‘But you came.’

  ‘To clean up the mess and control the damage to the force and the town. There were too many ugly stories spreading about this town.’

  The switch is quick. Standing before me is an angry man, unpleased by my presence.

  My tone is more sympathetic when I say, ‘You didn’t have to come.’

  ‘My people needed me.’

  ‘It’s that bad?’

  ‘You can’t imagine. But it’s over now, thank God. The media is gone. The students are coming back little by little. There is some peace between the university and the town. People’s businesses are picking up. The trial is far away in PH. Slowly, things are getting back to normal.’

  ‘You’ll transfer back to Kano?’

  ‘I’ll transfer to wherever I can pursue my career in a more, well, dynamic space.’

  I acknowledge the diplomatic sound bite with a nod just as Chika returns, picks up the remaining box and leaves.

  I stretch out my hand. ‘I’m sure the people of Okriki appreciate your sacrifice. Not many people would care enough to come back and help rebuild a town tainted by the kind of horror that happened here.’

  ‘It’s my responsibility,’ Omereji says as he takes my hand.

  ‘Nonetheless, I applaud you. And when the investigating officers have the time, you’ll tell them to give me a call, right?’

  The fake smile again. ‘Of course. I have your number.’

  ‘Good. Thank you for the files.’

  I turn to leave.

  ‘Dr Taiwo …?’

  I stop and turn around.

  ‘Try not to open old wounds.’

  ‘If there are still wounds after all this time, maybe they need cleaning and dressing to heal properly.’

  I know I’m making light of a serious request, given what I now know of the Inspector’s origins, but it’s the only way I can deal with the intensity of his gaze.

  ‘This town was on edge for almost two years –’

  ‘And three young men were murdered in broad daylight.’ I instantly regret the sharpness of my tone.

  ‘I thought you were compiling a case study, not investigating what happened?’

  ‘Maybe there’s no difference.’

  Omereji returns to his desk and starts to shuffle some papers. I take it I am dismissed.

  I look at his bowed head. Perhaps he is a genuinely decent officer forced to truncate his ambitions to protect his town and people.

  But from what? I wonder as I leave the office.

  BOXFULS OF NOTHING

  ‘This is ridiculous!’ Chika exclaims and only just stops short of flinging the papers in the air.

  I had asked Chika to help me sort out the contents of the boxes, which are proving to reveal nothing worthwhile. It is mostly photocopies of eyewitness accounts, badly written and poorly spelt. On several, one can barely make out the names of the person giving the testimony. There are missing words erased by poor-quality ink toner or cut off by lousy placement on the copy machine, and in most, the grammar is so bad that whole statements make no sense. The police reports are even more pathetic. My thirteen-year-old daughter can construct sentences with greater clarity.

  ‘They did nothing!’ Chika waves paper, irritated.

  ‘Or didn’t want to do anything,’ I say as I stretch awkwardly from the lotus position I had assumed for almost an hour.

  ‘But, sir, they could’ve at least pretended to do some police work. Look at this.’ Chika reads aloud; ‘My name is Mr Peter A. Ofunsi. I was there when they catch thieves, but not see them burn. Signed on this Lord’s day of October two eight.’ He throws the sheets of paper on the floor, already strewn with many of a similar fate. ‘How is this even a statement?’

  I am looking at a large piece of paper I had to unfold several times while Chika spoke. It appears to be a building floor plan.

  ‘This might be useful.’ I stand and stick the architectural drawing on the wall facing my bed.

  ‘Is that –?’

  ‘The layout of Madam Landlady’s house,’ I announce.

  Chika joins me and waves his hand dismissively after peering at the document. ‘There’s nothing here.’

  ‘Look closely. Each of the rooms have the names of the people that stayed there.’

  ‘Most are initials, sir. It will take a while to figure out who is who. And even if this layout shows the names of the legal tenants, it won’t have the names of squatters sharing space with fellow students.’

  I shrug. I don’t tell Chika that it’s this kind of detailed work that excites me. It wouldn’t be any sort of investigation if everything is obvious. Besides, the floor plan tells me that the police knew how to put together the basics of an evidentiary trail and what to look for in a crime scene. Which makes the lack of detail in the files even more disturbing.

  ‘But it’s a good place to start,’ I say. ‘We have affidavits with names, we can match them to the ones on this floor plan, and if we hit a jam, we can approach the landlady for –’

  I am about to jokingly add that I wouldn’t mind signing a rental agreement when I see Chika shaking his head. ‘The word on the streets of Okriki about your presence must have reached her by now. I don’t think she’ll be renting you her house for anything.’

  I nod, but I am undaunted. This floor plan has data that I can use. How? I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure it will come in handy at some point. It’s an intuition I’ve honed with experience.

  Chika walks back to the papers and starts packing them into the boxes. To his credit, he is arranging the papers with more reverence than his opinion of their contents warrants, but his irritation is evident.

  I understand Chika’s frustration, but I had come prepared. The day after I finally agreed to take on the assignment, Abubakar had called me into his office and warned me not to expect much cooperation from the local police.

  ‘They want this to go away quickly,’ he had said as he dragged on a cigarette, still the only officer who dared to smoke in his office.

  ‘Can’t they see Emeka won’t let it go?’ I had said, praying for my lungs.

  ‘Yes, but it’s been more than a year of nothing. Feeful are porgetting, testimonies are becoming blurred, and the frosecution cannot build a case due to lack of credible evidence.’

  ‘So, I’m going in blind?’

  ‘Not really.’ Abubakar had pulled open a drawer and brought out a flash drive, which he placed on the desk.

  ‘What’s that?’ I had asked.

  ‘Some reports from the independent investigation Emeka has conducted over the last year and a half.’


  ‘Why’s he not giving it to me himself?’

  ‘Because I asked him not to.’

  I had frowned at this bluntness. ‘Why?’

  ‘For one,’ Abubakar had puffed and continued, ‘because I wanted to spare Emeka the agony of walking you through it, and second, because a lot of the inpormation is biased towards Emeka’s theories and I wanted us to separate the porest from the tlees.’

  After two hours of Abubakar blowing smoke in my face and talking me through several of the documents, I could see why I needed the guidance. Newspaper articles, pictures of the victims alive and post-mortem, court hearings, Internet downloads and videos of the killings in different formats filled several folders. I was impressed with the detail and how much information a private individual could garner independently and had said as much to Abubakar.

  ‘Emeka is a very driven man,’ Abubakar had replied.

  ‘Some would say obsessed, but I don’t blame him. If either of my sons …’ An involuntary shudder had stopped me. While I couldn’t tell Abubakar about my conversation with my dad, I was genuinely curious about this case. The sadness in Emeka’s eyes and the unimaginable thought of losing any of my children in such a horrible manner would have been enough to make me commit to the assignment if I wasn’t already dealing with Folake’s betrayal.

  ‘You have to understand that the police force in Okriki is full of locals. They were frejudiced from the get-go, and it didn’t make it easier when one of them was seen with the mob.’

  ‘You think they closed ranks to protect him?’

  ‘Maybe at the beginning but soon it became to frotect the whole town.’ He had ejected the flash drive and handed it to me. ‘Study it. I know you won’t get much from the police reports.’

  ‘I still need to see the reports.’

  ‘But I just told you what’s on this drive is much more comfrehensive.’

  ‘I want to see the leads the police didn’t follow or refused to.’

  It was Abubakar’s turn to frown. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because if they didn’t follow up on a lead, then maybe that’s where I should be looking.’

  ‘I knew you were the right man for the job,’ Abubakar had said as I stood, shook his hand and made a quick getaway with the flash drive in hand. My discomfort with second-hand smoke outweighed the boost to my ego.

  ‘It’s not as useless as you might think,’ I say to Chika now, surrounded by police reports that confirm the wisdom of Abubakar’s words.

  ‘But, sir, there’s nothing here that’s not in the public record,’ Chika says.

  I wave him over as I click open the folder containing the material from Emeka on my laptop. ‘I’ll read out a piece of evidence off the screen and you look for corroborating or contradictory evidence amongst the pile of police reports, okay?’

  ‘Okay, sir.’

  We work late into the night and try to match accounts of what we know happened with what’s included in the police reports. Most of them cover the basics: when Winston, Bona and Kevin left the campus, the time locals claimed to have seen the three come into the town, and the the number of gunshots that were heard from Godwin’s compound.

  We have a breakthrough in matching some of the names on the affidavits with the initials of residents listed on the floor plan. Unfortunately, all claimed to be at school when the incident happened.

  We also single out information that contradicts Emeka’s independent report. For instance, many of the witnesses in the police reports claimed to have seen the three boys come into town together, yet some were clear that Winston was with Bona, and Kevin only joined them later.

  The testimony of Kevin’s girlfriend, Mercy, is particularly relevant since she claimed that Kevin had been at her parents’ house to visit her and couldn’t have come into town with Winston and Bona. Yet there’s no record of Mercy’s testimony in the police reports. Even more curious, Godwin’s written testimony claimed that he didn’t know how Kevin became part of the Okriki Three.

  ‘There are enough contradictions for them to have investigated further,’ I say, bending my neck left and right to relieve stiffness. It’s been a long night.

  ‘Perhaps they believed there was no point since the boys were dead anyway?’ Chika posits unconvincingly.

  ‘Maybe, but it’s still not an excuse.’ I open my list of interviewees in another folder. ‘We must follow the evidence of divergence in the reports to identify the right people to interview. They will be the clue to the missing parts.’

  Chika frowns. ‘Like finding answers in the things not in police files?’

  ‘Bingo.’

  THE POWER OF ONE

  My room is a mess. Papers are strewn everywhere. Sticky notes are tacked on every inch of wall not covered by curtains or cheap print artwork in even cheaper frames. It is late, I’m exhausted, and Chika has retired for the night.

  I pour myself a tall glass of beer from the bottle I ordered from the bar downstairs. It is now quite warm, but I am fine with that. The warmer the beer, the faster it’ll knock me out and grant me momentary reprieve from my turbulent thoughts.

  I take a deep breath, annoyed at how my fingers hover over the call prompt beneath Folake’s number on my phone screen. Just as I’m about to hit the call button, I get a text message:

  ‘I hear you caused a stir in town today, Americana.’

  How did Salome know? News may travel fast in Okriki, but all the way to Port Harcourt? I remember she said her mother hails from here, but it does seem like she has a more active connection to this town than she’s let on. Is the text message a friendly enquiry about my welfare or a continuation of her warning on the plane? Chill, Philip.

  ‘Your sources exaggerate. Perhaps we meet, and I can tell you the facts?’

  As soon as I press send, I regret what may be misconstrued as a request for a date. My panic propels me to call my wife.

  ‘Well, you took your time.’ Trust Folake not to beat around the bush.

  ‘It’s been hectic,’ I say guardedly.

  ‘I’m sure.’ She doesn’t bother to mask her irritation.

  There’s an uncomfortable silence.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say and, even to my ears, it sounds feeble.

  She exhales down the line. ‘It’s okay. The kids miss you.’

  Do you miss me?

  ‘I spoke to the boys and Lara. I called them before school –’

  And so goes the classic tension-breaker in any troubled marriage: deflection. We talk about our children, sharing known information as if it’s news: the twins in the middle of their mock tests to prepare them for their final year of high school, Lara playing Juliet in the school play.

  ‘Aren’t they too young for such a play?’ I wonder.

  ‘She’s thirteen, Sweets.’

  I can hear the chuckle in her voice and the way she says ‘Sweets’ sets me at ease enough to share some details of my time in Okriki.

  I tell her about Chika, the townspeople and my impressions of Inspector Omereji and the local police force. We hang up around midnight, and there’s a warmth in my belly that has nothing to do with beer. Once again, for the umpteenth time in twelve days, I wish there was another way to explain what I saw through her office window, but I can’t let myself think about that now.

  I down the last of my beer and look at the colour-coded Post-its Chika and I have put up on the wall encircling the floor plan of Madam Landlady’s house.

  Blue for facts: the number of victims, their gender, their ages, et cetera.

  Red for information that raises red flags with more questions than answers: the police reluctance to cooperate falls in this category, as does our guest house’s sudden need to be rid of us.

  Yellow for names of people initially arrested for the crime. We’ve highlighted the ones later released.

  Green for witnesses and their location on that tragic day.

  Orange for things we don’t know yet.

  The wall of my room looks like a
Montessori classroom.

  Prof always said that the more you understand the living, the easier it is to understand death. I wonder now about the limits of that assertion with at least a hundred suspects who might have just as many motivations for attacking the Okriki Three.

  The Wi-Fi in the hotel is passable, but maybe because of the late hour, the Internet responds relatively fast when I search ‘robberies in Okriki town’.

  Several of the news items are from the local paper, Okriki Express. After scrolling past innumerable mentions and articles on the Okriki Three, a trend of regular clashes between the students and the indigenes of town emerges. Fights have broken out in marketplaces, bars and local concerts. Landlords assert there have been damages arising from violent clashes between students supposedly in rival cults. Market women accuse young people they claim must be from TSU of taking their wares and refusing to pay. The list of incidents is long and confirms that the town has a very uneasy relationship with the university students.

  I summarise these in my notebook, on the page I had written: Get data on the rate of robberies in the neighbourhood before or during the month of the killing. I look at the wall again. I have drawn lines across the Post-it notes to link one possibility to the next, and it now resembles an admittedly confusing web.

  I flip the notebook to the page where I’d written: A singular motive masked by a collective purpose or bias?

  I need to simplify, to think of all these as one.

  My study of the lynchings in the south of the US, had showed that most, if not all, were caused by some innocuous event – Emmett Till, for instance, had reportedly whistled at a white woman. The mobs were always determined to make the lynching as public as possible, ostensibly to serve as a deterrent to other black people who might have thought about overstepping their boundaries. However, the public nature of lynching served a purpose beyond perpetuating the notion of white superiority and the subjugation of black people. It made so many people complicit in the crime that prosecution was almost impossible. Each ‘strange fruit’ that hung off a tree was both a symbol of racial terrorism and connivance. A unified force rallying behind a crime initiated by one, covered by all.