• Wife goes from being a suspect to a witness, but real identity remains a secret
If most people were honest, my teachers would tell you they did a despicable job educating me. Especially the physics wiz who introduced me to Murphy’s law that, “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”
But my tutors only failed because as my maths teacher once said, “Teaching you is like trying to travel to the moon on a boda boda.” My own mother lives on her knees, praying that her dear oaf of a son survives another day without getting shot or sneezing his brains out.
It may, therefore, come as no surprise that there’s another area of my life I’m terrible at. But unlike most people, I’m not afraid to admit it.
I recently found out I’m a poor excuse for a law enforcement officer. Why? Because for the life of me, only until my wife was accused and arrested for quadruple homicide did I realise there was such a thing as a secret “Witness Protection Programme” in our country. This where people who testify against really bad criminals (or politicians) are granted new identities and relocated anonymously.
See? I’ve gone and done it again. Right there is more proof of how bad a cop I am. The operative term is “secret” and I’ve gone ahead and blabbered about the whole thing. Too late to take it back now, so I might as well plough on like a fool on fire who keeps on running instead of dropping and rolling.
As it turns out, my wife and colleague Sgt Sophia witnessed a fellow officer execute an entire family of four while on a routine search. Sophia, a stickler for honesty and proper procedure, testified against the rogue officer and had to be re-established elsewhere. After several other locations proved not so ideal, she finally opted for Jiji Ndogo. Still, the criminal and his cohorts managed to dupe the DCI into searching for her, claiming she was a suspect on the run.
“Wait!” I tell Sophia after she comes clean about the ordeal that nearly tore our young marriage apart. “This begs so many questions. Like, does that mean Sophia isn’t your real name?”
“Nope,” she says nonchalantly.
“But your mother… She, too, calls you Sophia.”
She gets pensive. “You see, I was supposed to disappear completely and not communicate with anyone from my past, but my mother is all I had. I couldn’t just cut her off, too. So, I told her what’s what and gave her my new name.”
“What’s your real name?”
“Can’t tell you.”
“C’mon. I’m your husband. Your secret is safe with me.”
“Is it?” She gives me one of her accusatory looks that could melt a glacier. “Do you know how the DCI got to me?”
I don’t like where this is going. “It wasn’t me, if that’s what you’re trying to say.”
“Not directly, but do you remember why Detective Gundua came to Jiji Ndogo in the first place?”
Oh, boy. This isn’t good. Mr Gundua, he of the DCI, had visited us because I was in trouble after some thug stole my gun and used it to kill someone. “You mean…”
“Yes, Makini. That’s when he saw me and remembered he had seen my picture some place. He went back to HQ, did some digging, came up with the false case and put two and two together.”
“Oh my God! I almost got you jailed for life.”
“Being jailed wasn’t the biggest problem. Someone is actively searching for me and where is the best place to find me but a police cell subject to public records?”
Like I said, I’m a lousy cop and it’s beginning to show.