Terna Abu, author of “Deja vu” is an award winning author who received the 2020 Association of Nigerian Authors, ANA, Prose prize for his first novel Eagle Drive. His work has appeared or forthcoming on Karahari Review, Mind Field press, and Tintjournal, among others.
*****
It was a few minutes to 11:00 a.m. along the Lagos/Seme Border express road. A big cargo truck, driving from Seme Border, slowed down a few hundred meters to Badagry. The truck had hardly come to a stop when the driver jumped out and started racing into the bush.
His hands grappled with his belt buckle as he run. Behind him, the bluurpp bluurpp from his anus was so loud he thought his pants would burst. Barely six meters into the bush, he pushed his pants — already below his waist — down and hurriedly squatted.
Gluughh gluughh gluughh — the contents of his bowel started hurtling out immediately.
“Ahhh!” the relieved driver exhaled. “That’s better — whoa!”
Then the smell hit his nostril hard, like the disgusting smell when an unplugged fridge door containing rotten meat is suddenly opened. He almost threw up. He quickly covered his nose, unable to believe that human shit could smell so terrible, especially his own shit. He vowed quietly never to eat beans again; apart from unsettling his stomach, the resulting faces smelt like a giant dead rat in advance stage of decomposition.
Curiosity pushed him toward the polythene material…
He hurriedly wiped his ass and pulled his pants up in an attempt to quickly run from his shit and escape the horrible smell. Just then a gust of wind blew towards him, amplifying the smell twofold. He knew instantly that the smell wasn’t from his faces. He looked in the direction of the wind. Roughly seven meters further into the bush, there was a concentration of flies around a large black polythene material.
Curiosity pushed him toward the polythene material. He could see it more clearly as he drew closer. It seemed to be wrapped around something big. He took a few more steps forward then saw a boot sticking out of the material. With a long stick, he tore a side of the material. He gasped and jumped back as a torso and part of an arm in active stage of decomposition were exposed. He turned and run back to his truck. Five minutes later, he was at the Badagry divisional police station giving a report.
An hour later, the area where the body was found was swarming with the police. Among them was a rookie, Private Akor. It was the rookie’s first time in the field. He took in everything with great interest and excitement.
The polythene material was unwrapped and its content revealed. It was evidently the body of a full grown man. However, the head and hands had been chopped off and were not wrapped with the rest of the body. The police combed the surrounding area up to a hundred-meter radius, but neither the missing head nor hands were found.
The police had no means of identifying the body without the head and hands; the biometric methods available within the country in 2004 were simply inadequate. However, such a barbaric crime had never happened around that part of Lagos, and the police were determined to keep it that way by bringing to book the perpetrator. To do that, they needed to go beyond biometrics.
The most reasonable approach was to focus on people who had been reported missing. One case immediately stood out. Two days earlier, an elderly woman had reported her son, Paul, missing. She had neither seen nor heard from her son for two days. Paul lived with his wife, Bisi, less than two hundred meters from where the mutilated body was found.
The police had already questioned Bisi after Paul was reported missing. That was before the mutilated body was found. They had wanted to know why she didn’t report that her husband is missing.
“He is not missing,” Bisi had insisted. “He ran off with a whore he had been sleeping with.”
Without any evidence of foul play, the police couldn’t pursue the case further. The discovery of a body with a missing head and hands close to the couple’s residence changed everything, especially as Paul has almost identical body structure as the discovered corpse.
In addition, the police learnt that Paul run a daily savings and loan scheme. Hundreds of people had deposited money, totaling over nine million naira, with him. The news that he had gone missing was already causing a stir among those that had entrusted their money to his daily savings scheme. The discovery of the decomposing body, suspected to be Paul’s remains, gave rise to an instant pandemonium.
Many of Paul’s clients started clamoring to recover money they had saved in his daily saving scheme. The police checked his bank accounts, but found them all empty. All the money had been withdrawn within the last two weeks, yet the wife insisted that her husband left no money at home. The police found it rather strange; she became the prime suspect of a murder case.
A search warrant was obtained and the house of the embattled wife was combed through, but the police came out disappointed. No money was found and there was no evidence tying her to the murder of her husband.
However, the mother of the missing man wasn’t satisfied. She insisted that her son cannot run off without telling her where he was heading. The wife’s bank account was checked, but there was virtually nothing inside.
The police decided to get as much information on the couple as they could. They turned to neighbors with questions. It soon became clear that the relationship between the missing man and his wife had been anything but cordial. They were almost always fighting.
“Those two…hmm. They quarreled almost every day and sometimes it got physical,” a close neighbor told the police.
Another neighbor said she had seen, on several occasions, the wife of the missing man in company of another man. She suspected that Bisi was having an affair. Both neighbors also confirmed that another woman was involved in the complex love circle of the couple. They had both seen Paul in a compromising position with a young lady on a number of occasions. It appeared both the husband and wife were involved in extramarital affairs.
For the detectives, the involvement of lovers, especially the wife’s boyfriend meant more red flags. The police increased their focus on their main suspect. She was brought in for further questioning.
“How would you describe your relationship with your husband?” Chima, the detective in charge, asked.
“Not good,” the wife admitted. She also confirmed that she and her husband quarreled almost daily and sometimes it got physical. However, when asked whether she has a boyfriend, she vehemently denied.
“Why are you so certain that your husband run off with another woman?” Detective Chima then asked.
“He had been threatening to leave me for that whore, and I know he is capable of doing it,” Bisi said defiantly.
The police weren’t taking her words on their face value. The man suspected to be the boyfriend, Dikibo, was tracked down and brought in for questioning. After a brief hesitation, Dikibo admitted being in a relationship with the wife of the missing man.
“Did she make you kill her husband, or you killed him of your own accord?” Detective Chima asked.
Dikibo flinched and immediately became defensive. “I know nothing about the husband! I didn’t even know that he is dead.”
The police were not convinced. Bisi was brought in again for more questioning. This time the police wanted to know why she denied having a boyfriend. She maintained that she is a married woman and the society frowns at women that have extramarital affairs.
The police didn’t buy her explanation. They continue with the investigation. After a few hours dedicated to digging deeper into Dikibo’s background, they soon found out that he was one of the repentant Niger delta militants whom the government had granted amnesty the previous year. He definitely had what it takes to kill and maim a man the way his girlfriend’s husband was maimed. The police’s suspicion heightened. Bisi and Dikibo were issued police orders restraining them from travelling outside Lagos while investigations into the disappearance of Paul were still ongoing.
As details of the investigation leaked to the public, increasing number of people were convinced Paul’s wife was responsible for his death. They believed she was hiding the money people had deposited in her husband’s daily saving scheme somewhere. The wife was receiving threats of all kinds from Paul’s clients. The police suddenly found themselves under pressure to solve the case quickly before an over zealot client takes matters into his hands.
Further investigations revealed that neither Dikibo nor Bisi left Badagry within the time frame that Paul disappeared. Detective Chima concluded that the head and hands of the decomposing body being investigated must still be within the site the rest of the body was found, probably buried around the area. He decided to visit the site again in company of Private Akor and one other detective.
As the detectives were about to park their car near the crime scene, Private Akor spotted someone trying to hide behind surrounding shrubs. The rookie cop quickly jumped out of the car and the person burst from the shrubs and started running.
The detectives gave chase. The man didn’t go far. He tripped on a log of wood and fell. A backpack he had in his hand fell by his side. Before he could rise to his feet, he was surrounded by the detectives. They immediately recognized him. He was a petty criminal, drug addict and ex-convict known by the street name — Ratty.
“What’s inside this bag?” Detective Chima asked, as he picked the backpack up.
“Nothing,” Ratty said.
“Okay, let’s see,” Detective Chima said as he unzipped the bag and turned it upside down.
A few items, mostly junk, fell out along with two wraps of marijuana and a Samsung phone. Apart from a cracked screen, the phone looked quite new. However, the battery was dead so the detectives could not access any information from it.
“I no thief dey phone,” Ratty said defensively and pointed at the shrubs he was trying to hide behind. “Na for there I find am as I bin dey try set traps for bush animal.”
“Then why did you run when you saw us?”
“Because you go say I thief everything wey dey for dey bag. You dey always accuse people for wetin dem no do.”
After almost thirty minutes of coercion, threats, and even blackmail to make Ratty confess his involvement or reveal what he knew about the murder case failed, the detectives arrested him for the possession of illicit drugs and stolen items. He continued to insist he knew nothing about the body found at the scene.
At the police station, the phone was charged and the detectives quickly established that it was not likely to belong to the missing man. The number was registered under a different person — Tayo, and none of the closest person to Paul, including his wife and mother, were on the saved contact list.
However, a particular number in the call log stood out like a peacock in a chicken yard. More than a third of the last forty calls received and made from the phone before the battery died were from that one number. In addition, the last call was within an hour of the time the coroner had estimated that the man found in the field was killed.
The reoccurring number instantly became of interest. A check with the network providers revealed that it was registered under a Florence Omagbemi. After a brief deliberation, the detectives decided that they would first talk to Florence and get as much information on the owner of the phone before talking to him directly.
It didn’t take the detectives long to track down Florence. It turned out that she had a hairdressing salon not far from the missing man’s residence and she was the woman Bisi had referred to as the whore her husband had run off with.
The detectives decided to pay Florence a visit at her saloon immediately. Unfortunately, the saloon wasn’t open. Enquiries from neighbors revealed that the saloon had not been opened for the past five days and no one was certain of the whereabouts of the tarty owner. No one had been able to get her on phone either; her line was perpetually unavailable.
Things weren’t any different at Florence’s residence. There wasn’t any answer when the detectives knocked on her door, and no one had seen or heard from her in five days. The detectives decided to go back and obtain a permit to break into her house. In the meantime, another detective was given the responsibility to track down Tayo, the suspected owner of the Samsung phone found at the scene of the murder case.
A neighbor approached the detectives hesitantly as they were about to enter their car.
“Excuse me officers. Em, well, I think I heard some noise — like screaming — a couple of times from her house the night before she disappeared. But I wasn’t sure whether there was any trouble or they were just having fun…you know what I mean.”
“What do you mean by they? Was she with someone?”
“Yes, there is this man that comes around. I think he was with her that night.”
“Show him Paul’s photo,” Detective Chima said, beckoning to Private Akor. The rookie pulled out Paul’s photo from his breast pocket and held it before the neighbor’s face. Akor was having a truly thrilling experience on the first detective case he was involved in.
“Yes, that’s the man,” the neighbor said. “And there is something else. That same night, around 2:00 a.m., I heard some noise outside, so I looked through the window. I saw Florence and her boyfriend. They were loading something into her car.”
“What were they loading?” Detective Chima asked.
“That was the strange thing. They turned the lights off. I wondered what they would be loading in the car at such an odd hour and chose to turn the lights off.”
The detectives noted all other details they could get from the neighbor and left. They returned five hours later with a permit to break into Florence’s apartment. It didn’t take long after breaking into her apartment that red flags started springing up.
First, the detectives noticed what could only be a splatter on the wall. They suspected it was blood. The portion of the wall where blood splatter was suspected was brighter, indicating a hasty attempt to mob the blood off. When the settee was raised, traces of dried blood appeared. In the bathroom, more signs of blood were detected.
The detectives deduced easily that the murder took place in the living room of the apartment while the decapitation and chopping off of the hands took place in the bathroom. The dismembered body was then moved to where it was discovered.
“If the missing man helped load the dismembered body into the car, whose body was really found in the field?” Private Akor asked, puzzled.
“Well, it means we need to still talk to the neighbor that gave us information earlier,” Detective Chima said.
The neighbor was called upon again.
“That Florence’s boyfriend, are you sure you can easily recognize him anywhere?” Detective Chima asked.
“Sure! He used to come here every day. Sometimes we exchange greetings.”
“So, you are sure he was the one that helped Florence load things in her car the night you last saw her.”
The neighbor hesitated. “It was dark, so I couldn’t see his face, but it must have been him. I mean, it’s him that spends some nights with her.”
The neighbor’s reply confirmed what the detectives already suspected — a yet to be identified man helped in the murder of Paul. They were convinced that Tayo, the owner of the phone found at the crime scene, held the key to unraveling the identity of the mysterious man.
Fortunately, the detective saddled with the responsibility of tracking down Tayo had come up with useful information. Tayo was still living at the Festac Town address he had given to his network providers. The detectives visited his apartment just to be told that he had not been seen or heard from for six days. A missing person report had already been lodged with the Festac Town police division, Lagos.
Tayo shared his apartment with his younger sister. The sister recognized Florence immediately the detectives showed her a picture of the wanted woman.
“She and my brother dated some time ago,” Tayo’s sister said. “After more than a year of separation, they recently started communicating on phone again. It appears they want to renew the relationship because she was here twice last week.”
When the police examined pictures of Tayo, they realized that like Paul, he was tall and heavily built. The two could easily be mistaken for each other, especially in the dark.
The police had succeeded in identifying two prime suspects. They doubled their efforts to track them down. Flyers with mugshots of Florence and Tayo as wanted persons were circulated around busy areas of Lagos. The suspects also appeared in some newspapers. Yet after three months, nothing was heard about the wanted persons. It appeared they had disappeared into thin air.
With every subsequent month, less was done about the case. Many of those who had deposited money in Paul’s savings and loans scheme continued to pressurize the police to do more, but with no leads, they could do nothing. At the end of six months, the case went cold.
Private Akor, however, continued to reflect on the case on a daily basis. The case was reported on his first day as a policeman, and Detective Chima had graciously involved him in the entire investigation process. Long after memories of the unsolved murder had receded to the background in the minds of every other person, they remained fresh on Akor’s mind. He couldn’t forget such an intriguing experience on his first day on the job.
The years passed slowly. Akor successfully fought to become a fulltime homicide detective. After years of service in Lagos, he was transferred to Jos where he served another four years. He was then moved to Owerri and then to Abuja. In the process, fifteen years passed since the unsolved murder case at Badagry, Lagos. Over a thousand times within the fifteen years, he imagined himself apprehending and interrogating Florence as the officer in charge of the murder case.
During his first month in Abuja, Detective Akor was called to lead the investigation in a murder case at Kubwa area of the city. It was a drive-and-shot murder case and it happened in front of a cosmetic shop. He decided to talk to the owner of the shop first, a lady in her early forties known as Yomi. Immediately he started questioning her, there was an intense feeling of déjà vu. He was almost certain he had interrogated her in the past on a different case. Unfortunately, he couldn’t recall any detail.
“Have we met before?” Detective Akor asked in the middle of the interrogation.
“No, I don’t think so,” Yomi answered.
However, throughout the interrogation, the detective’s mind kept processing Yomi’s looks and name; still he couldn’t come up with anything meaningful. That didn’t stop his trained cop mind to continue digging deeper. Finally, after the detectives had returned to the police station, Akor assigned one of the junior detectives to gather all the information he could on the cosmetic shop owner.
Two days later, the junior detective turned in his report:
Yomi had moved to Abuja with her husband, Dele Bankole, from Ibadan fifteen years ago. She started with a hair dressing saloon…
Detective Akor stopped reading the report and jumped to his feet.
“Florence!” he shouted.
Even though he had seen only pictures of the woman he had investigated in Lagos fifteen years ago, he could clearly match those photos to the woman he interviewed as Yomi two days earlier. He quickly assembled a team and they hit the road.
They got to the cosmetic shop at a few minutes past 5:00 p.m. Yomi wasn’t in the shop, but the salesman told the detectives that she had gone to her house which happened to be upstairs of the same building housing the cosmetic shop. The detectives climbed upstairs and knocked on the door. After a few seconds it opened and behold, standing on the other side of the door was Paul.
“Yes?” Paul said.
Stunned, Detective Akor remained transfixed. A few seconds passed before he regained his composure.
“Mr. Paul, you are under arrest,” Detective Akor said.
Paul’s expression immediately changed from plain to that of someone who had seen a ghost. He took two steps back, looking frantically around as if searching for an escape route. However, the detectives were already on him and a handcuff swiftly locked his hands. In the commotion, the bedroom door opened and Yomi stepped into the living room.
“What’s happening here? What’s all this?” Yomi asked. The expression on her face as she saw the handcuff on her boyfriend was a shade of surprise, anger and fear.
Detective Akor turned to her.
“Florence, you are under arrest.”
It was the moment the detective had been dreaming of for fifteen years. A delightful feeling coursed through him as he watched the horror-stricken expression on Florence’s face at the mention of her real name. She and her presumed dead boyfriend were taken to the police station and placed in different interrogation rooms.
It took only an hour for the two of them to break. Then the allegations and counter allegations began. Paul claimed that everything that happened was Florence’s doing. According to him, he got to her apartment after she had already killed Tayo to settle an old score. She then pleaded with him to help clean the mess. He obliged because he loves her.
Florence, on the other hand, insisted that the whole crime was Paul’s idea to swindle his clients of the money they had deposited in his daily savings and loans scheme. She had lured her ex-boyfriend to her apartment where Paul was lying in wait. As soon as Tayo entered the apartment, he killed him and planted the body near his house.
The whole plot was to make it look as if Paul had been murdered and his wife and her boyfriend were the culprits. He had threatened to kill her if she didn’t go along with the plan.
The devious couple did agree on one thing — they buried the head and hands of Tayo at the Badagry cemetery.
*****
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