Twisted Times: Son of Man (Twisted Times Trilogy Book 1)

by Vincent de Paul

  For over two months I used to go to court to answer to fraud charges. I was out on a five-million-shilling bond and a surety of the same amount. I did not know why the case was being treated with such haste. But nothing lasts forever.

  Judgement Day.

  The court was packed to capacity. For the umpteenth time I was in the dock waiting for the court’s judgement about my case where I was accused of fraudulently attempting to defraud the Barclays Bank of Kenya of over ten billion shillings through the corporate account of UniStar Kenya Ltd, where I had been working for the past three years.

  Once everybody, including the judge, was seated, an expectant hush fell over the courtroom. Reporters from all the media houses leaned forward with their notebooks poised. They were waiting for the judgement of which they already knew what it would be.

  The judge was concentrating on his notes, morgue silence looming over the whole courtroom. This heightened the tension for both the defence and prosecution. The prosecution already knew what it would be; and we the defence had our own version of the outcome of the case.

  At last the judge launched the delivery of his summation and judgement. Occasionally, the courtroom was filled with murmurs that grew to low voices and the judge did not hesitate to rap his gavel sharply to restore order. When he was done, he said, “Before passing the sentence, I will listen to any submission in mitigation the defence may wish to submit to the court.”

  My lawyer rose to his feet immediately with speed that startled everybody. “Yes, your honour. I would like to call in a witness to give evidence in mitigation...”

  “Come on, counsel. You do not want to introduce a witness at this stage,” the judge said.

  My lawyer rambled law jargon and technicalities that can make the defence produce a witness at that stage until the judge gave him the nod.

  “Thank you your honour. I call Ms Evelyn Chepkemboi from the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission.”

  There was stunned silence in the entire courtroom you could hear a pin drop. A buzz of surprise and anticipation could not be missed sweeping through the entire courtroom. The forest of press stood up not to miss anything at this moment, cameramen scrambling to get the best shot of each and every minute that passed.

  Once Evelyn Chepkemboi was at the witness stand, a thick green folder tightly tucked under her right armpit, my lawyer stood to start his examination.

  Evelyn detailed each of her evidence with staccato clarity and ingenuity, heavily accentuated and emphasizing her points with rare prominence. Half an hour later when the examination was over, the pent-up emotion of the courtroom exploded in ghoulish relish and it was almost five minutes when order restored and the courtroom was quiet.

  “Thank you, Geoffrey. The court recesses and reconvenes at two o’clock this afternoon,” the High Court judge said. “To my chambers now, you two,” he called the two learned friends.

  The two attorneys at law almost went for each other’s throats as they made their way to the judge’s chambers.

  At exactly two o’clock in the afternoon, the court reconvened and ruling was passed.

  “The court finds the accused, Mr. Kennedy Maina, not guilty of the charges filed against him and has been acquitted.” As though he wanted that to sink in, he waited for an eternity of a minute before continuing. “In all my eighteen years of service to this country on the bench I’ve never witnessed such a noble and well-orchestrated performance.

  “May I point out that this court is of opinion that Mr. Kennedy Maina here is an epitome of the incorruptible minds that this country should have. Let’s not be so fast to judge persons from their past. Things change, people change with time. Time is the best healer. Who are we to judge others if we’ve failed the test of time? What have we done? What have we done?”

  When he was done the courtroom was vacated with the cacophony of disgruntled voices of the losers’ astonishment and disgrace and the winners’ merry and pats of congrats on the shoulder.

  The forest of press scampered to talk to each of the parties – losers and winners – at the same time.

  I had no comment for the press.

  CHAPTER 74

  Despite the requirements put on the advert and required for the applicants, they took me in. Since completion of my criminology degree from the U.S. Penn Foster school I had not been on internship or done anything that could qualify as experience.

  However, the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission (KACC) wanted a forensic investigator with a master’s degree in forensic investigation or an equivalent of that and who’d had at least five years’ experience in forensic investigation or related field in a reputable organisation. With my bachelor’s they took me in as a forensic investigator, with no prior experience.

  I think what made them consider taking me in was the fact that when I was still working with UniStar Kenya I was covertly working with them to investigate the company which was under investigation for tax evasion, racketeering, and money laundering. I was their snitch on the inside. Their five-year investigation was successful and that saw me acquitted of fraud charges I was being accused. Talk of quid pro quo.

  The very minute they got to me, their source on the inside, they were like jackals for the information that I was all too willing to give. I gave them all the company information they needed; they came to my rescue in the fraud case. KACC did not disappoint. I was acquitted, exonerated of the charges, but lost my job with UniStar.

  So, when I saw the advert on the dailies I did not hesitate to apply. Not that it mattered. I had already received the offer from the Director KACC. Applying was just procedural, for accountability purposes.

  I became the KACC’s forensic accountant working in conjunction with Evelyn. Within the first six months of my new job we worked different cases that saw us branded the best of KACC’s forensic investigators ever. As a pat on the shoulder the KACC director one day jokingly said that we had actually came up with a template that would be used even by other forensic investigators and accountants world over. All the data collection, analysis, relevant findings, supporting details, and investigative leads were all well-organized.

  A month later, I was attached to the British High Commissioner’s office in Kenya.

  At the BHC I worked in the Office of Foreign Intelligence (OFI) that dealt with collection of information from all government offices to help the BHC in implementing his country’s foreign policy. That’s what the job description said, but the real work was totally different. I met a team of investigators whose job was to investigate the government.

  With the team of ten – six Kenyans and four Britons, three ladies in the entire group, two of them Anglo-Saxons – we embarked on our assignments and three months later we presented our report to the BHC.

  Flanking the British High Commissioner subserviently we, the team, listened to the report being read to the public at a press conference. He did not hesitate to mention blatantly that investigations conducted by the Transparency International in conjunction with the British OFI showed that ninety per cent of high ranking government officials were corrupt. Corruption had taken root both in the government offices and private sectors where extortion was the order of the day.

  Quite ironically, and coincidentally, the director TI had just resigned from TI claiming that the organization was corrupt; and KACC was being drawn into the case to investigate the allegations.

  There was a heated outcry by the public to have those found corrupt indicted and convicted. In response to the uproar of public ire the president issued a press release stating that those found corrupt should resign to pave way for investigations, be disarmed of their legally issued weapons and submit their passports to the police commissioner.

  This was because Britain, through the BHC office, had barred one of the cabinet ministers from going to Britain after being found one of the most corrupt government officials. People whom the public respected were named behind many scandals.

  Commissions of inquiry were formed an
d tasked by the President to investigate the allegations and present their report to the President. As everything was conjuring up, something else was happening.

  There were murders everywhere like a holocaust. Deaths that were a mystery even to the law enforcement fraternity. It was all too obvious – when you rattle a snake you should be prepared to be bitten.

  CHAPTER 75

  For the umpteenth time Urbanas checked his wrist watch. It was getting late and it didn’t seem as though whom he was waiting for was in a hurry to leave the goddamned place. I blend well with the outside world, Hilton isn’t ma’ place, he thought.

  He had been watching, waiting, and the bitch did not seem to be thinking of going home today. Maybe it was because her old bastard of a husband was in town. This could jeopardize the mission, but he wouldn’t let that happen.

  He, for an instant, lost himself in reverie. The life long gone was not worthy living but he had a nostalgic memory of those days. The only difference between then and now was that then he was a failed military officer-to-be and now he was a successful businessman.

  He glanced at the hotel’s lobby and saw the bitch he had been waiting on leaving. Good. Her geezer husband was reaching for her hand. Too bad for him, he had decided to come home for the not-happily-given romp in the sack with his unfaithful wife. The sparks would definitely reach him. He shouldn’t have come.

  Urbanas watched them leave hand in hand. They were still romantic like college girls and boys to the public. To fool whom? God knew whatever kept him anchored to his ever unfaithful wife. Maybe it was because of the kids. Oh yes, the kids. He gave them a three minutes head start then followed them.

  *

  Maria looked at herself in the mirror. She liked what she saw though her waistline was beginning to thicken and her breasts were growing embarrassingly big.

  The face staring back at her was not of the ugly duckling she was some years ago. She had lived with the humiliation and despise all her childhood days; many of her friends avoiding her company. They did not want to be seen with an ugly duckling. Even her mother used to tell her outrightly that she was ugly. Why should somebody be so callous to her daughter? The facial deformation that she was born with was not her fault. But anyway, thank God she met a good person who introduced her to the German volunteer doctors who were in the country helping those with facial deformations smile again.

  In fact she smiled again.

  After the surgery she was now one of the most beautiful girls around but deficient of education. Though she had done fairly well in her secondary school she was not able to further her education or even undertake a better course. The best she did was to present her name to an agency that searched jobs for yayas/mboch (nannies).

  It was now her third year in her career as a fulltime nanny and though she had acquired quite a number of slum certificates and diplomas from the savings of her three-thousand-shillings salary, she was not planning to leave her job soon unless she found a better one that wanted a person of her education with a bag load of slum diplomas.

  Her boss was the most caring and kind person she had ever met. Madam had even told her that she would help her find a better job for her in the office where she worked if she worked harder on her diploma on certified public secretary. How Maria loved her bosses. They had even entrusted her with everything in their home and now she was the major-domo. The only problem was that their last born, a two-year-old toddler, was one hell of a brat.

  The poor little thing, Angelica, popularly known as Angel, cried from morning when the mother left for work till evening when she came back from work, screamed her head off when hungry as though just saying she was hungry was daunting a task, howled at the slightest indication of being left unattended and yowled at the slightest provocation. If this was how to go by motherhood, Maria almost vowed never ever to be a mother.

  By evening Maria would have done little or nothing and obviously this irritated her boss. Angel would not let her do anything but carry her around the house trying to sooth her or make her sleep so she can do some of her work. When it failed to work, Maria devised a way to make the kid sleep. The local pharmacy was there to supply her with tranquilizers.

  As she stood in front of the mirror she touched her once deformed face with awe. She owed that to her lovely cousin who was an obstetrician at the Nairobi Hospital. She was so happy for him. He couldn’t have given her a better gift.

  She was going out to see her boyfriend, a sales and marketing student at a street college, and having given the little Angel her dose of the ataractics, Maria had no doubt that the time was sufficient enough to do all the crazies they did when she went to his house.

  It was dusk when she returned to the house ready to prepare dinner after two hours of uninterrupted pleasure. She had liked it when Fred had kissed her down there. The memory of it made her breathing heavy and her body twirl.

  It was almost nine o’clock when Angel woke up with a start, her sharp shriek piercing the stillness of the night and shattering the calm in the ocean of a house that was hers most of the time.

  Maria rushed to where Angel was sleeping. The sight of Angel even terrified her. It was as though Angel had seen the devil in her sleep and was scared shitless. Maria tried to calm her down to no avail. Her efforts were futile, her sweet songs, even promises and lastly threats. Angel this time was not the good girl who took the sweetened tranquilizer and slumped obediently to sleep.

  It was late at night and Maria began to get worried. Angel’s parents had not yet come home and this was her. They were not used to staying out late, not ever had they stayed past nine o’clock and now the hour hand was slowly like eternity approaching midnight. Trepidation got the better of her now. Angel had not quieted even for a minute. If Angel was sick, what was she going to do?

  It was long after midnight when Angel seemed to have exhausted all tears and air from her little lungs and started to drift off to sleep. The sharp ring of the house phone awoke Angel and Maria cursed the damned telephone. She felt as though she could trample down the infernal machine.

  “Hello, Mr. Onyango’s residence. How may I help you?” she answered the phone severing the anger and still patting Angel slowly to quieten her.

  “They are dead,” a man’s voice said after a long silence.

  *

  His torso was found four days later at the Kandara Estate plantation in Thika. Other missing members of his body were, and have been, never found.

  Her body was found a week later at Chiromo Mortuary where the officials said that they had no iota how the cadaver had found its way there.

  CHAPTER 76

  The Swedish-born Kenyan, Maren Lorna Onyango, was the third of the BHC’s OFI team members to meet her untimely demise in three months since the publication of the British High Commissioner’s Office of Foreign Intelligence report.

  The first one was the director of the OFI who was shot by hooded gunmen outside his Karen home in Nairobi. He was a man inculcated with meticulousness and precision of his job by time, experience and his zeal to right the world. During my short time with him he had inspired me with charisma and rare enthusiasm. I had admired him and had always wanted to be with him as my boss. He had taught me something my bachelors had not taught me, and they never teach you in those online universities – practicability of the much sensationalized theory of criminology and forensic accounting.

  He had even called me in on a case he was investigating independently about a young European girl who had died mysteriously during a mountaineering adventure on Mt. Kenya with her friends in 1999. I had gone through the file and I could see how meticulous he had been.

  He had covered details the police had overlooked as though he had an eagle eye or the rare gift of ubiquity and was there during the attack of the teenager. It reminded me of the CSI movies I had watched. The Binary Analysis of his forensic report had the omniscient eye of God. I had asked him why hadn’t he gone to the police with that and whoever the killer was w
ould be arrested. He had told me that we read the world wrong and say that it deceives us. “It is not a world you can clean up the dirt with the established systems. None of them are working.”

  Now, he was dead, his brains, wit and intelligence reduced to nothingness. His dying was a great loss not only to the BHC’s OFI but also to the entire intelligence community.

  Then followed his secretary who had died in a tragic road accident along Thika road near Ruiru where Chinese constructors had created a diversion near a cliff. The breaks had failed. How convenient. There’s no one who could convince me otherwise about his death.

  And now Maren had been killed – carjacked with her husband, gang-raped and dumped at Chiromo Mortuary by unknown people. Her husband’s dismembered body was found dumped at the Kandara Estate coffee plantation, Thika.

  There was a pattern in the deaths. My team members were being eliminated one by one. It didn’t need a rocket scientist to figure out what was happening. I was next. No matter how long it took.

  CHAPTER 77

  Monday, 5th October;

  I felt overwrought and a little uncertain myself. I was not sure I was about to do it, but I had to.

  He was talking too much. I did not like it. I already knew what was happening but he kept on saying it over and over. After all I had secrets of myself he never knew, and no one was to know. I had to cut the Briton off, but with tact.

  “There’s no better way to say this, Sir… James,” by the way, we were on first name basis with the British High Commissioner. That’s what he insisted. “I can’t even try to look for a better way to say it, or better time, so I’ll just say it direct and now is the time.” I paused as though to let that sink in. “I am here to tell you that I am leaving. This is very easier said than done, and unexpected. I appreciate everything, I mean everything, you’ve done for us, for me, but I have made a decision for myself.” It felt like the same words I had used on Urbanas.