JIJI NDOGO: Death of Valentine – The Clues

In the middle of an apparent suicide, where a young man hung himself from the rafters, I dared suggest that it was in fact not a suicide but murder.

My colleague Sgt Sophia is above baffled. She steps up to me and studies my face as if I have the word ‘IDIOT’ scrawled across my forehead. “Are you serious right now, Makini?”

“I mean…” I stammer. “In my opinion…”

“No, Makini. In my opinion, you’ve completely lost whatever few marbles you had floating around your noggin’. You’re saying that you don’t believe Valentine here killed himself because he did his laundry right before?”

“Does it make sense to you?”

She flaps her arms in agitation. “Of course, not, Makini. It’s a suicide. It never makes any damn sense for anyone to take their own life. Least of all because of being left by his lover.”

Sophia is referring to a suicide note left by the victim within the pages of a diary.

“That’s another thing, Sophia,” I say. “The note is printed. Do you see a printer around here? Besides, there’s no way to tell who wrote it.”

“Okay, I grant you that,” she says in a rare moment of agreement. “But he could still have prepared in advance, gone to a cybercafé and printed the note.”

“My point exactly.”

Her eyes bulge out. “Your point exactly? You just said you don’t think he wrote it.”

“I still do. I am alluding to my point that he couldn’t have done all that while also taking time to do his laundry and clean up his room. What about the appointment marked in the diary?”

As we scouted the room, I had noticed that Valentine had a pending appointment with someone marked with a star and dated a few days from today.

Sophia puts a hand on her chin. “What are you saying, Makini?”

“I don’t know.”

I walk to the window and stare outside. The sun is glorious upon a spending view of the river down the valley.

“I had an uncle — Kufo,” I continue. “He loved to gamble. For a while, it seemed to work okay for him. Then people said he pushed it to the limit. A small win here and there wasn’t enough. Soon, he put everything on the line. His car, his plots, I even heard he once promised his wife to a bookie as collateral.”

Sophia squints. “You’re kidding, right?”

I turn to face her. “When the auctioneers came calling, he took the coward’s way out and committed suicide, leaving my aunt and cousins poorer than church mice.”

“I’m sorry, love, but what has that to do with this case?”

“Towards the end, my uncle wasn’t the same man he was before. All life had drained out of him. All the fight. He was a losing shell and couldn’t take it anymore,” I say.

“Valentine seems to have had his affairs very much in order to just wake up one day and kill himself. We have at least two leads. We need to talk to the girlfriend who dumped him and find out what the appointment was all about.”

Sophia looks at me as if seeing me for the first time. “Who are you and what did you do with the Makini who believed that swallowed chewing gum stays in the stomach for seven years?”

“I’m surprised myself,” I say honestly.

“But you do know what this means, right?”

Confused, I ask: “What does it mean?”

“If we say we suspect murder, the DCI will be involved.”

This is bad news. The only DCI detective I know is in love with my wife.

Next week: Death of Valentine – The Lovers