Boss Takes All (12 page)

‘Fine, fine, Sergeant. Shall I start a report when I come back from my delivery?'

‘You do that, Naluki. I'll write my own later.'

* * *

Leah Marang and her twin sister, Ruth, were from one of the string of villages and townships that dotted the very top of the Escarpment that separated Nairobi from the Central Rift.

Up here the soil was rich and the rain plentiful. The family farm was prosperous with enough money to allow the girls to finish their education in a city boarding school.

Farming held no interest for the sisters and when they left school, Leah became the youngest recruit in the city constabulary and Ruth landed herself a job in the American hospital up in the hills above the Naivasha plains.

‘Ruth, you are on duty tonight, yes?'

‘Right …'

‘I'm bringing someone in. Car accident. Unconscious.

Pretty bad, I would say, but my friend Gloria, she says that she is going to make it. Hope so. She's a beautiful kid. Give me twenty minutes.'

Gloria had one or two other opinions to express to her driver on their way across the hills.

‘They are not a family. The English say that she is the child of the two dead ones. She is not.'

‘Do you know these people? Do they live near you?'

‘No, I have not seen them, no.'

‘Then …?'

‘I spend much time in the church. I polish. I dust. I talk but mostly I listen. It is a place of peace. It is very easy to hear things.'

‘So someone told you this?'

Gloria smiled and nodded her head knowingly. ‘And you think that poor Gloria spends too long in that place. Police lady, you have a good heart and I want to tell you that those two we left back in the church, they wanted to hurt this one. When I was wrapping them in the linen sheets, I saw these things, I felt them so clearly.'

On arrival at the hospital, Lydia Smith was whisked away on a trolley while Leah and Gloria were ushered into an empty waiting room.

‘I'll drive you home.' Leah tried to cheer her friend with this piece of small talk.

‘I like this place. If I am sick, I would like to come here.'

An hour later, Ruth brought news of the preliminary diagnosis.

‘Well, Gloria, perhaps we ought to offer you a job here. The girl is going to live. She has broken bones … in her foot! There is a nasty cut on her left arm, probably from a knife. And concussion that knocked her out. And the other two died …?'

‘Probably on impact. The car's a mess.'

‘But who is she? Not a single thing to tell us this.'

Gloria had a question. ‘Is this a safe place?'

The twins exchanged puzzled looks.

‘Hide her. Until she wakes. Then you will know where to find her people. It is a small thing to ask but for her, I have this fear.

bel Rubai did not suffer the inconvenience of fear, but there were times when bouts of anxiety troubled him. He thought he had had his share for that Sunday when two overreaching lawyers cornered him briefly in his very own screen room. But now, close to midnight, he was being given another serve of this uncomfortable emotion.

He was alone in the farmhouse just outside the city. But where was Uchome? More important, where was the girl? If something had gone wrong, why was there no telephone call?

At last there was news from a trusted source working in police CID headquarters on Nairobi Hill, and it was not good. ‘Half an hour ago, two bodies were brought into the city morgue on Ngong Road. Patrick Uchome and his wife, Margaret. Car crash on the bottom of the twisting road out of plains outside Naivasha.'

‘Two bodies, not three? Are you sure?'

‘Sure, but I can recheck.'

The ten minutes between calls from Nairobi Hill passed unpleasantly for Mister Big. Uchome gone. How long since that first job, a farmer down in Machakos, if he remembered properly? Died on the job. Even in this time of misfortune for someone else, Rubai's thoughts were for himself and his own mortality. So simple, so final. Hell, a man could get depressed thinking like this! The second call brought relief and sparked new vitality.

‘There was a third person. The constable who brought the bodies down said there was a girl. He thought she was gone as well, but his sergeant, a woman, took her off to a hospital.'

‘Which one?'

‘Not much information on that. The constable is still around here somewhere. I'll track him down and put him on.'

‘Without letting him know this number.'

Rubai's inside man at Nairobi pulled the handset from his ear and looked down at it scornfully. He controlled his spasm of anger before ending his conversation.

‘You know me better than that, I think.'

‘Constable Nemuti …'

‘Naluki.'

‘Okay. Okay. You brought the body of Uchome and his wife down to the city, yes?'

‘Two bodies, no names. No ID, nothing. Nothing. I never seen this before. Oh yeah, a gun and a knife on the floor.'

‘Have you been drinking? Listen, start …'

‘No, I never drink on duty. One more thing. Sergeant Marang will not be happy to find —'

The telephone was removed briefly from the constable's hand. Words were spoken on the Nairobi side that an angry Abel Rubai could not make out. When the constable took the receiver again, his tone was more submissive.

‘Yes, there was a girl. The daughter, perhaps.'

‘Nalubi, stop assuming, start thinking carefully. This woman sergeant took this … girl to a hospital.'

‘In the police car. I accompanied the deceased to the city in an ambulance. I offered to bring the kid. Could have dropped her off.'

‘Now then, big question. Which hospital? Take your time.'

The silence was so long on the CID side that Abel thought …

‘Sir, the sergeant looked as if she would be ready to pay, so my guess would be Aga Khan or Nairobi.'

‘But she didn't mention a particular one.'

‘No, sir. I think, sir, that perhaps by now this third person is also down in the morgue. Thank you, sir.'

To Abel's mounting fury, it took a half an hour for him to clear the two big city hospitals from his list of possibilities. He began to wonder if this extraordinarily caring policewoman had taken the nuisance whore to some private doctor. He took time out just to think. He stood out on the front veranda of the farmhouse and found his concentration being disturbed by the racket that the crickets and cicadas made out there in the darkness. Abel's interest in the outdoors was limited to the profits he could make from tea plantations, from chopping down old forests and, soon, from a flower farm on the big lake just up the road.

In the enforced idleness that he was enduring in the middle of that unsuccessful night, he recalled a book he had bought at some airport book stall one time. It was a sort of primer on thinking. He had found the exercises amusing and saw they could be useful in certain circumstances. Lateral thinking, thinking outside the box, expecting the unexpected.

‘So, this bright policewoman might know a private place where she could take badly injured person, not too many questions asked.' He closed his eyes for a few moments to allow his brain machinery to grind its numbers and words. And come up with a brilliant inspiration. Clearly the theory did not always work out in practice.

All the while that Rubai was trying to work out where he might find his elusive quarry, he had two cars out on the road, ready, like a kind of criminal flying squad to do his instant bidding. He was shocked when the report from the first dash came in.

‘No, Boss. That weird clinic just across the road from your place. Dead quiet and no patients, dead or alive.'

Next came a shock of a different kind, a burst of initiative from an unlikely source. From his car parked and waiting at the very end of the dual carriageway running north out of the city came a very tentative suggestion. Zac Gusil, good friend and colleague of Patrick Uchome and brother of Drongo who had been killed on a previous attempt to get this woman, had a question for the paymaster.

‘Boss, you ever heard of a hospital up in these places? Folks around the villages up here call it “The American hospital”. It's in Kijabe.'

‘Goddammit!'

‘Sorry, Boss, did I say something wrong? It's just that me, Buba and Caleb were sitting here waiting …'

‘Nothing wrong. You boys been thinking outside the square and for the first time in your lives you've hit a target.'

‘I don't get it.'

‘Well, get this! You got the picture of the whore with you?'

‘Yep. Buba's looking at it right now. I think he fancies her.'

‘Then stop fancying and start moving.'

At last all the ideas fitted together. The sergeant, a private hospital, close to the where the car crashed. She must be there.

‘How far away?'

‘Mmn, half an hour. We know where it is, so …'

‘Got some casual clothes?'

‘Always bring them. Patrick insisted.'

‘Put them on. You're Patrick's brothers. Give them the story. Be polite but get into where she is. Use a silencer. I'll be waiting for news, good news. Get going!'

'll take you home now, Gloria. You should be a happy woman. You helped save her life.' ‘Sergeant, not yet.'

‘But I have to go back to the station.'

‘Ask Ruth. I can get home later. I have money for the bus fare.'

‘But why? She'll be safe here. You say those two were not her parents. Okay, tomorrow I'll find out where she belongs.

I'll come down to the church to tell you.'

‘Ask Ruth if I can sit with her, close by.'

‘You are one stubborn woman, Gloria. This is an American hospital. They have strict rules.'

‘She is in danger. I know this.'

‘But we are not in the church now. How can …'

‘Sergeant Leah, you are a good lady. Ruth, too. I ask a small thing, but for this girl it could be very big.'

Ten minutes later, a new nurse, dressed in an ill-fitting uniform, sat on a hard chair at the side of the bed of the new patient. She wore a big smile as she looked across at her companion. She touched the girl's arm and nodded contentedly to feel the warmth there. Indeed, this was a very pretty girl. Her face, her hair were well cared for. This was no village girl who spent her time out in the fields under a warm sun.

Nurse Ruth had granted her wish and checked it out with the tall American lady. So why was her heart still troubled? How could she know that down in the city much effort was being put into the task of finding this girl lying at rest in this very bed? The people down there knew exactly who she was. The search was being narrowed down.

Gloria began to rock back and forth on her chair. She closed her eyes. Her lips began to move soundlessly. Then, as the minutes ticked by, she began a whispered humming. She directed her closed eyes upward as though searching for some invisible guidance. The intensity of her will became stronger, more insistent. She was beginning to make demands. She became aware that she must not yield whatever the cost. The pressure mounted relentlessly in this internal struggle. Perhaps she was asking too much. Perhaps she would fall and be lost.

And there was a collapse but not of will nor of effort. Gloria felt a clear sensation that she was being watched. She prepared, fearfully, to open her eyes.

‘Who are you? Where am I?'

‘My name is Gloria. My home is not far away. You were in a car. There was an accident. I have been with you for many hours now.'

‘Is this a hospital? Are there people waiting outside?' Fear compelled her to lower her voice to a whisper. ‘Please, do not call them!'

‘There is no one there. No one but the nurses and the doctors.'

‘Are you a nurse? You are not young and your uniform …' Lydia smiled.

Gloria clapped her hands for joy. She was ready to probe further. ‘Your parents …'

‘My parents?' Lydia's eyes opened wide and made an attempt to move that she at once regretted for the pain it set off in her head.