The Moment of Truth

Chapter 8

For the past month the Inspectors assigned with the Pentecostal Church Pastors’ case had been working their eyes out thereon. They followed every possible lead available, which all turned out to be dead ends.
     They had questioned the victims’ families and close acquaintances thoroughly concerning the victims’ affairs with women. However, they got the usual response that the victims had entertained many Christians at their homes either for visits, counseling or prayers both from within and outside their respective denominations, so no one noticed anything out of the ordinary. And so the women with the victims in the photos remained unknown, taunting the Inspectors like ghosts.
     To be doubly sure, the Inspectors checked the records of all the hotels, motels and inns in Buea, but they all showed that neither victim had ever checked into any of them.
     One faithful morning all five Inspectors of the police station were working at their desks in the office. Fabrice, Timothy and Gladys had converged at Fabrice’s desk trying once more to find the connection between the victims that would lead them to the killer.
     Gladys and Timothy noticed the dark circles under Fabrice’s eyes which were an indication that he had had little or no sleep for a long while. It was his habit – they knew – for him to go for many a night with little or no sleep whenever he was in pursuit of a killer or trying to crack a difficult case.
     ‘Maybe both victims went to a nightclub and got hooked up with these women,’ Timothy suggested. ‘Or the women came to them in their houses in the guise of Christians seeking counsel.’
     ‘Nice one,’ Gladys said. ‘But if someone ever spotted them in a nightclub, word would have spread. Besides, they themselves must have been aware of the implications of being made out at such a place hanging around with these women.’
     Fabrice rubbed his eyes with the balls of his hands and said, ‘The counseling scenario works better. That’s probably why no one noticed anything out of the ordinary. We have to…’
     He was cut short by the ringing of the emergency telephone set on a long table just near the door. They all regarded the phone which rarely rang, wondering what had just happened.
     ‘I got it,’ one of the other Inspectors – IssaDauda, a lanky Fulani – said as he went to answer the call. ‘This is the police,’ he said into the receiver in his raspy Fulani accent.
     What he got from the other end of the line was the raspy voice of a frightened young lady: ‘Um… Hello? I… My…’
     ‘Calm down and tell me what happened,’ he said as the other Inspectors now regarded him curiously.
     ‘Ok,’ the caller seemed to take a deep breath. ‘My sister… She… she was shot dead, and her body… her body was dumped into the Ndongo stream.’ She then lost control and cried over the phone.
Playing comforter over the phone, Inspector Dauda managed to get her name and address; he told her to stay calm – with the assurance that the police would be there soon - and then ended the call.
     He then turned to the others and told them about the call. ‘This could probably be linked to the case you are working on,’ he addressed the Inspectors working on the Pentecostal Pastors’ case, before resuming his seat.
     ‘Let me go check it out,’ Gladys said as she rose to her feet before leaving the office with apparent haste.
***
Minutes later, after receiving directions from passers-by, the police vehicle finally pulled over in front of a fenced compound in the Ndongoneighbourhood. Gladys and the Constable who was driving stepped out and looked at the compound to their right.
     Inside the compound were three rows of parallel buildings, all painted pink. The first two buildings to the right faced each other while the third faced the opposite direction toward the fence. On the side of the second building – the side facing the gate – was the inscription: ‘MINICITÉ PETIT COEUR’. It was a student hostel.
     Standing at the brown gate was a tall, twenty-two-year-old young lady with a brown complexion. She wore a blue tank top over a gray short skirt, and a pair of slippers. Her face was swollen and her eyes sore from crying. It seemed she had cried till she could do so no more. Her appearance was likened tothat of someone who had just been electrified, and yet managed to remain standing.
     She walked up to the Police Constable and Inspector when she saw them alight from the car.
     ‘Are you Itop Juliet, the girl who called the police to report the death of her sister?’ Gladys asked the girl before she could say a word as the Constable gave the hostel a once over.
     ‘Yes, I am,’ the girl said in a shaky voice.
     ‘Ok,’ Gladys said, nodding at the hostel. ‘Do you live here?’
     ‘Yes,’ Juliet said. ‘Come with me, please.’ She took them to the building facing the fence. They noticed each door therein had a room number inscribed above it in bold black - as did every door in the hostel. Several drying lines stretched from the building to the fence.
     There were five rooms in the building, and the doors of three of them were open; yet, the entire hostel was as quiet as a graveyard, for besides the sound of their movement, they could hear nothing else. Juliet was certainly the only person there with them. Gladys was unsettled by this, and made it a point to ask Juliet where all her neighbours had spirited to.
     They went through the door with the inscription ‘R002’ above it. Inside was Juliet’s room. The well-made bed was set against the wall to their left, just below the window, and next to the bed was a chair placed by the wall.
     By the wall to their right was a large table with a light green tablecloth on which sat a plasma TV beside which were three stacks of books. On one of the stacks was a laptop. There was a scarlet rug just in front of the table.
     There was a closet to the far right of the room, a door leading to the lavatory to the far left, and in between a translucent curtain hung on the open doorway leading to the kitchen.
     They noticed that there was no sign of spilled blood in the room, so Gladys guessed Juliet’s sister had not been killed there.
     Juliet offered Constable the chair next to the bed while she shyly invited Gladys to sit with her on the bed. Instead, Gladys sat on the chair while the Constable stood to her right with a pen and jotter, poised to take down notes.
     As Gladys looked round the room, she saw hanging on the wall above the table a photograph of Juliet in graduation attire standing next to an older young lady somewhere on campus at the Catholic University Institute of Buea (C.I.U.B.). They were both smiling into the camera, and Juliet had a bunch of flowers in her hands.
     ‘That’s Amanda and me,’ Juliet said, ‘during my graduation last year. Amanda is… was my sister.’
     Gladys regarded Juliet with concern. ‘I’m sorry for your loss, Juliet. What did Amanda do for a living?’ As she waited for Juliet to answer, she could hear the sound of the Constable’s pen scribbling against his jotter.
     ‘She worked as a sales agent at the MTN Head office around UB Junction.’
     ‘How old was she?’
     ‘Twenty-six.’
  ‘Ok. When last did you see her alive?’
     ‘Last night. She went clubbing and never came back. I was not bothered because I knew she usually returned home late. But when I woke this morning and did not find her here, I got worried; she never slept out without informing me beforehand. When I got out, I noticed that everywhere was unusually quiet and there was no one on sight.
     ‘Then I heard some noise from around the Ndongo Bridge, and saw that a huge crowd had converged there. I rushed there to see what was going on.
     ‘When I got there, I asked a man what the matter was and he told me a young lady’s body had just been found in the stream just under the bridge. I felt my heart miss a beat as I recalled that Amanda had still not come home.
     ‘Fearing for her, I tore my way through the crowd like a lunatic and got to the front where I saw my neighbours from the hostel but took no notice of them. Then I saw the horror in the stream…. Amanda… Amanda was lying there face-up with a single gunshot wound in her chest. The stream is shallow, so her body was not carried down the channel; it just laid there as the water flowed past it, turned red with her blood.
     ‘I started crying as soon as I recognized her. That was when I told everyone that she was my sister. A man then walked up to me and gave me his phone, asking me to call the police.’
     Gladys listened without interrupting. She then asked, ‘Is her body still there?’
     ‘Yes, it is.’
     ‘Take us there.’
     They left the house and when they passed the gate, the Constable got a digital camera from the car before they turned right and walked the short distance to the bridge. On the way, they noticed that the huge crowd was still there: arms folded and discussing with each other, overwhelmed with shock.
     When they got there, the people made way for them. Gladys noted that the bridge looked very old, was made of concrete and the railing at the right side was missing.
      They saw that the body had been removed from the water and placed by the side of the road where there was no railing. The gunshot wound was unmistakable, and Amanda’s skin was white and stiff with her eyes wide open. She was clad in a short red dress that barely made it down her thighs.
     Gladys asked the Constable to call the ambulance after he had photographed the body from several angles while she stooped to examine it further.
     She then stood and asked the people around them, ‘Has anyone found her handbag, or her phone?’
     A young man stepped forward and said, ‘My roommate and I were the ones who first found her on our way to fetch water early this morning. We did not find any handbag or phone.’
     ‘About what time did you find her?’
     He thought for a while before saying, ‘Five o’clock or thereabouts.’
     ‘When did you hear the gunshot?’
     ‘That’s what bothers us,’ the young man said, scratching the back of his head. ‘We did not hear any gunshot. We just found her here.’
     Gladys nodded and realized Amanda had not been killed at the bridge, either. She turned to Juliet and said, ‘The ambulance will be here shortly to get the body for more examination. Meanwhile, you have to come with us to the station for a statement.’
***
The four other Inspectors looked up from their desks to find Gladys enter the office with Juliet.
     ‘Is that the girl who called earlier?’ InspectorIssaDauda asked as he eyed Juliet.
     ‘Yes, it is,’ Gladys said as she motioned Juliet to take the seat in front of her desk before she herself got seated and placed the digital camera on the desk.
     As Juliet sat, Fabrice and Timothy who were still reviewing the case at Fabrice’s desk looked their way.
     Gladys set a blank sheet of paper before her and scribbled something on it before asking Juliet, ‘Did your sister have a boyfriend?’
     ‘No.’
     ‘Are aware of any enemy she might have had?’
     ‘No.’
     ‘Did you notice anything unusual these last few weeks?’
     Juliet thought about this for a moment. ‘Um… she had been acting strangely of recent, like she was so scared. I asked what was wrong, but she would not say.’
     Gladys curiously looked up from her notes, and Fabrice and Timothy looked their way once more.
     ‘Since when did you notice this?’ she asked Juliet.
     Juliet thought again, frowning. ‘Um… I think it was around early December last year.
Just around the time the first victim was murdered, Gladys thought as she stared blankly at Juliet. Is it mere coincidence? She turned to Fabrice and said, ‘Can I have the photos of our first victim in the Pentecostal Church Pastors’ case, please?’
     Everyone in the room was surprised. Fabrice fetched the brown envelop tagged First victim - Pentecostal Pastors’ case from a red folder containing everything related to the case and handed it to her. Timothy joined them there, looking excited.
     Gladys took the envelope and brought out the photos which she sprawled over her desk. She then looked hard at them and gasped, ‘I knew it!’
     ‘What is it?’ Fabrice and Timothy asked in unison as they bent over to get a closer look at the photos.
     ‘The lady taking the photos in bed with our first victim is none other than Juliet’s sister, Amanda! Take a look at the photos in the camera and compare them with these ones.’
     ‘What!’ Juliet exclaimed as Fabrice got the camera and he and Timothy looked through the photos before stooping to examine the ones on Gladys’ desk once more.
     Juliet leaned forward in her chair and seized one of the photos to see for herself. She felt her hands shake violently and the room suddenly became too hot for her. For the very first time, the Inspectors saw her cry as she recognized her sister in the photograph. ‘No, no, no. This cannot be happening…’
     In her confusion, she looked from one Inspector to the other with blurred eyes, expecting to be told there was a mistake somewhere, that her own sister had not made love with a man of God just before he was killed. She could not imagine Amanda doing such a shameful thing, and yet she could see Amanda starring back up at her brazenly from the photo, clearly having no qualms taking the snapshots of her making love in bed with the late Rev. Maliba John Bosco, a man old enough to be her father.
     ‘I’m sorry Juliet,’ Fabrice said.
     ‘It makes sense now,’ Timothy said. ‘Someone must have hired Amanda to sleep with the pastor and take these photos. So when she heard he had been murdered, she got scared.’
     Fabrice added, ‘So the killer feared she might confess to us. That’s why he killed her. I bet the lab results will show that the gun that killed the pastors is the same one that killed her.’
     Juliet was crying and shivering now, mucus running down from her nostrils in addition to the tears running down her eyes.
     Gladys scribbled more notes on the sheet of paper before her while waiting for Juliet to calm down before asking her, ‘Have you ever seen that pastor with your sister, or heard her talk about him before?’
     Juliet nodded, no. ‘I myself am so surprised. Amanda would never do this.’
     ‘Where’s Amanda’s phone?’ Timothy asked. ‘She should have these photos there, if she took them with it. And she must have the killer’s contact, too.’
     ‘That’s the problem,’ Gladys said as leaned tiredly on her seat. ‘The handbag was probably carried down the channel by the water, or taken by the killer. She was not even killed at the bridge, because no one around the neighbourhood heard any gunshot last night. Her body was found around five o’clock this morning in the shallow stream under the Ndongo Bridge.’ She leaned forward again and asked Juliet, ‘Did she ever come home and spend the night with any boy?’
     ‘Several boys came to visit us, but none of them spent the night there - certainly not this pastor!’
     ‘You said she usually stayed out late at night. Do you know where she went?’
     ‘She went to the club, as she did every Sunday night and sometimes during the week.’
     ‘Which club?’ Fabrice asked as Gladys scribbled more notes.
     ‘I don’t know; I never asked. I hated the fact that she went clubbing in the first place, and I have often begged her to stop it. But she kept telling me it was what put food on our table, and how she gets the money to send me to school. Our parents died when we were still very young.’
     Fabrice said to his colleagues, ‘We have to find out which clubs Amanda went to, and whom she interacted with. I’m guessing whoever hired her for the job did so at the club.’
     ‘That’s a long list of people and places,’ Timothy said as he sat on the edge of Gladys’ desk, ignoring the scowl she gave him.
     Turning to Juliet, Fabrice asked calmly, ‘Can you tell us about any of Amanda’s close friends?’
***
News of the recent murder spread like wild fire all round and was the headline on every newspaper, television and radio channel across the country. The public once more broke into frenzy as the recent stream of murders in the South West regional capital was the talk of the day.
     Was this another working of the Catholic Church? The media and the public kept wondering. But no one could confirm that statement since there was nothing that linked it to the Catholic Church.
     In an emergency press release, the Divisional Officer for Buea – Mr. Fai PrincewillBerinyuy - had declared a curfew at nine o’clock every night; the streets of Buea were filled with military officers parading up and down and army trucks were frequently seen going up and down the streets. However, that did little to assuage the raw fear gnawing at the public right to their bones – the horrible realization that any of them could be the next victim of this ruthless killer who had come to disturb the relative peace of the town.