Free Nairobi Heat by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

trembling, but somehow he once again managed to pick up his accomplice, get her body over his shoulder and stagger off into the night.
    We got into O’s Land Rover as the crowd filed back into the bar – with us gone it was no longer a crime scene.
    ‘Why did you let him go?’ I asked O.
    ‘If we’d taken him with us we’d have to babysit him,’ he replied curtly. ‘And anyway, you had already pissed all over him …’ He laughed and started up the Land Rover.
    Without asking, I knew we were going to pay Lord Thompson a visit. The old fuck had tried to kill us and now we needed to find out why. He was the link we had been looking for.
    ‘All of this is just a game to him,’ O explained as he turned back onto the main road. ‘He could have had us back at the farm. It would have been easy enough. But, no, he has to send us on some wild goose chase to some bar …’
    I couldn’t argue with that, it seemed to be well within the old man’s character, so instead I asked O what his deal was with Lord Thompson. It was time for a fuller explanation.
    ‘The first guy he killed was a poacher,’ O started. ‘Thompson hunted him. I mean he tracked him down like an animal and shot him. The Africans out on the farm told me. But in the end he was not even booked.’ He paused. ‘Poachers do not get much sympathy from me, but you don’t kill a man for killing an animal, I don’t care how beautiful it looks. Take him to prison, but do not kill him. The other guy he killed wasa game warden. He was out on Thompson’s property looking for poachers. Again Lord Thompson tracked him down and afterwards claimed that he mistook him for a poacher. But that’s very unlikely. The guy was in a bright green game warden’s uniform. But he got away with it again: white skin and wealth equals impunity.’
    ‘Ain’t that the truth everywhere,’ I said to him.
    ‘And there are other rumours I could never get to the bottom of: rapes and disappearances. That farm is his kingdom,’ O said.
    I was suddenly very curious. O had told me that he had become a cop because he didn’t make it into the one and only university in Kenya, but in light of what I had seen of him his answer seemed flippant. What had made him so irresolute in his definition of good and evil? And where did his screwed-up sense of crime and punishment come from? I asked him, and well, he had a story to match my Random Killer story.
    ‘Well, let’s see …? A few years back a rich guy, his wife and two young children were murdered. Shot. With the rich shits it is almost always about money and rarely about sex. So, we followed the money and it led us straight to his business partner. Amos Kamau, that is the partner’s name, wanted to make all the money. It was not like their car import business was going bankrupt. It was not even a criminal enterprise, where the rules of the jungle might apply. They were a legit car import company that was doing well, making them both rich, but Amos just wanted everything for himself. So, we arrested him, but within a week we were ordered to release him, and just like that he was out. Everyone now knew he was a killer, no doubt, but he was out, bribed his way out. Hewanted to make a point, so he asked that I drive him home. On the way I asked him whether he really did it. And he said yes. Why, I asked him. Guess what the little shit said? “Because I could get away with it.” Today he is chairing fund-raisers for politicians, giving money to poor children and generally living it up. His crime has been forgotten because of his good deeds.
    ‘A few weeks later, a poor man found a thousand shillings, just like that. He went home, fetched his wife and two kids and took them for
nyama choma
and ice cream. They had a good time. But when they got home, he killed them all. The neighbours called us. We got there to find him sitting outside his hut, his panga still wet with blood. No resistance from him. As I drove him to the station I asked