‘Drive fast,’ Sango begged, but it was unnecessary. The mad noise was enough command.
Magamu Bush was not difficult to locate. As they neared it, Sango saw the number of cars parked close by. The van parked on the side of the road and Sango stepped into the bush. People who met him had grave and frightened faces. They picked their way with awe. He barged his way through the crowd and arrived at the front of the huge crescent.
She was lying on the floor, dead. They had killed her, and her child too. Must have torn the poor thing from her back in a fury. Evidence of foul play was there on the floor beside her: two rough-looking clubs. The police in cork helmets and white cuffs took measurements, glanced at their watches. They entered figures methodically into their black notebooks while a photographer flashed lights at the bodies.
‘Some people are heartless,’ someone said. ‘I can’t understand it. Kill the woman, yes. But the innocent child – no! That’s too much!’
‘Too bad,’ said an old man. ‘And she don’t do them nothing.’ He folded his arms across his brown jumper.
‘You mean they killed her for fun?’ Sango asked.
‘What else!’ The old man shot back. ‘What is a gramophone that they will kill someone for? Of course they were drunk. But does that mean they should kill her? For her own thing?’
‘No,’ Sango said. ‘But in this world many people die defending “their own thing”, whether it is a material thing, or just a belief.’ He hurried back to the office and wrote:
I have just witnessed the most gruelling murder since I became crime reporter for the West African Sensation. In Magamu Bush, I saw her, a woman of twenty-five, lying with face twisted. And beside her lay her child, condemned in all its innocence by a gang of drunks. I saw also the two brutal clubs with which she had been done to death. The question I must ask the people of the city is this: Why? Why was the young woman killed in this heartless manner? And why the child too? The answer is simple: greed. The men who killed her borrowed a gramophone of hers. When she went to collect it, they would not part with it, but lured her into the Magamu Bush. The young woman, unsuspecting, followed the drunkards. And having defiled her in bacchanalian triumph, they clubbed her to death and strangled the child.
Let me assure these criminals that the whole of the Metropolitan Police, crime branch, is out in full force, looking for them. Let me assure the people of this city that the West African Sensation will give the police every support to bring the criminals to justice and to safeguard the life and property of the law-abiding citizens.
The weeks of investigation that followed only confirmed much of what Sango had written. The woman had been killed by drunken men for a quite trivial reason. The two men arrested were bachelors who lived on the outskirts of the city. They had come to the city from a fishing district in the delta of the Great River. They had known Muri as a girl, and now that she was married and lived in the city they looked at her with the same eyes of their childhood.
Her husband worked for a coastal vessel and was often away from the city. They persuaded her to lend them the gramophone while he was away. But Muri heard he was on his way back, and quickly went to them to return the gramophone lest her husband make trouble.
She found them drinking. One of them, Thomas, persuaded her to come with him to a neighbouring bush – the Magamu Bush. ‘That is where the repairer lives,’ he told her.
‘Repairer?’
‘Something went wrong with your gramophone. I gave it to him to repair.’
Muri would not go. ‘I left no one in the house. Is only me and the child here, and —’
‘Come on! We won’t take long.’
A little maid who saw Muri leave her home went to the police after a restless night, waiting for her to return. What had actually happened between Muri and the drunken Thomas in that lonely strip of bush no one would ever know.
Sango did not often sit at his typewriter with satisfaction. As Crime Reporter, he had seen the beginning of many crimes that made the headlines, but never the end. In this case, it was different, and hence his
smile: MAGAMU BUSH MURDER SOLVED BY CITY POLICE, ran his headline.
Readers of the West African Sensation will recall my scathing remarks in these columns some weeks ago about the way the police handled the murder case of Mr. Trobski. Well, I must now hand it to the police for their brilliant performance in the Magamu Bush murder. The man who perpetrated the atrocity, who defiled the mother, strangled and killed the child, this devil has now been apprehended by the police. If only the police in this city were as hardworking as the corporal who handled the case, life and property would be much safer in this city, and in the country as a whole.
He paused and looked up. One of the reporters had just come in, and turning to Amusa Sango, he smiled.
‘Mystery calls are not always safe – or true.’
‘Mine was,’ Sango said.
‘I just received one of those mystery calls. A complete hoax. Spent the last six hours roaming the wilds.’ He looked it, too. He blew at his open shirt while fanning himself with his reporter’s notebook.
Sango smiled and continued with his story.
•
Sango made a routine call at the pathology laboratory near the hospital. From the pathologist’s window he had a clear view into the prison yard. As he came down the steps a note was thrust into his hand by a stranger in warder’s uniform. Aina wanted to see him, the note said.
‘I take you there,’ said the male warder, and Sango followed him. He tried hard to imagine what she would look like, but failed.
In a little separate group from the out-patients stood a number of women in numbered white frocks. They all looked alike. Sango saw the female warder in her austere khaki holding a book and checking her stock of mixtures. Beside her stood a pharmacist.