A gust blew in through the window, chilling Inspector Winyi out of sleep. As he searched for the blanket, his phone rang. He cursed. He had turned it off at midnight. He wanted to berate his wife for switching it back on. She always warned that he would miss a very important call if he kept it off. His sweet Atim. He came fully awake when he realized she could not have done it. She was dead.

“Hello,” he grumbled into the phone.

“There’s a corpse in Rock Hotel,” a voice said in Kiswahili. A woman. She had a familiar accent, like that of Atim, who had grown up in Mombasa. “It’s in the honeymoon suite.”

For several seconds Winyi could not respond. When he did, anger thundered in his voice.

“Call the station!” he said and hung up.

His thumb moved to the power button. Only then did he notice that the phone was off, the screen blank. Had he imagined the call?

The curtains fluttered in the breeze, reminding him of Atim in her bridal gown. The cold ripped through his flesh. He frowned. They were in the middle of the dry season, and yet black clouds prowled around the moon like dogs around a bitch in heat. Were the rains coming?

He closed the wooden shutters. He found the blanket on the floor and wrapped himself. Still the chill persisted. The cold licked his bones. His teeth clattered.

The phone rang again. It was off, yet it was ringing. He rationalized the phenomenon. Though not a smart phone, he could set an alarm, switch it off, and go to sleep. At the scheduled time it would turn itself on. Maybe it had a similar function to allow incoming calls.

He checked the number flashing on the screen. His frown deepened. There were only five digits, not the proper ten. It could not be an automated call, like the ones from telemarketers, those had three digits. Puzzled, he pressed the YES button.

“Go there right now,” the woman said, gentle, but firm. “You were chosen a hundred years ago to do this job.”
She hung up. The chill vanished instantly.

For nearly a minute he kept the phone pressed to his ears, though no sound came through. He broke out in a sweat, the sheets stuck to his skin.

He tried to call her back, but a robot said, “The number you have dialed is incorrect.”

He glanced at the clock. Three a.m. He called the station. Thirty minutes later, a patrol truck pulled up outside his door. He lived in the police barracks in a row of identical buildings, none of which had received paint in twenty years. The asbestos roof had cracked, and it leaked during the rainy season. The windows and doors had rotted with mold. Being in charge of the Criminal Investigations Department in the district, he had a cottage to himself with a spare bedroom. It sometimes made him feel guilty, since lower ranked officers crammed their families into extremely small tin huts.
Four uniformed officers sat in the back of the pickup, fondling AK-47s. They mumbled indecipherable greetings. None saluted. He had woken them up, yet he could have waited until morning. It might even have been a prank. He got into the cabin. The driver, also uniformed, grumbled in response to his greeting.

The hotel was a colonial palace. When Winyi arrived, its staff had not yet cleaned the garden of debris from a wedding feast. Garbage floated in the swimming pool. Under the three party tents, overturned chairs gathered dew. Bottles, used paper plates, crumbs of cake, and leftover food littered the lawn. It took thirty minutes to awake the night manager, who escorted them up the stairs to the honeymoon suite.

A woman in a bathrobe opened the door, scowling, her eyes red. She was in her mid-twenties with elaborately braided hair. Atim had been an advocate for African hairstyles. She would have been proud of this bride’s choice.

“Sorry to bother you, madam,” the night manager said. “But the police–” he could not continue for several seconds. “They want to search the room.”

“Why?” she barked. Her breath stank of alcohol.

Winyi wanted to apologize for disturbing her wedding night. She did not look like she had a corpse in the room. It might have been a prank call after all.

“Where’s your husband?” he said.

She sighed. “Asleep,” she said. “Can’t this wait until morning?”

“We only want to make sure there is no dead body in there.”

“Dead body?”

“Apart from your husband, is anyone else in there?”

“No! Of course not!”

“We have to search. It’ll only take a minute.”

“No!”

She started to close the door. He put his weight on it. She glowered at him for several seconds. He kept a smile on his face. Finally, she stepped aside to let him in.

“Only you,” she said. “No one else.”

“Okay,” he said.

Inside, the smell of sex stung Winyi’s nose. He had not made love since Atim died three years ago. Like most honeymoon suites, this one had a red theme. The rug on the floor, the bulb, the bed spreads, they were all red. The white bridal gown lay discarded on the carpet beside the groom’s suit. A champagne bottle and two wine glasses lay on the table. Empty. The man was on the bed, seemingly asleep, the sheet pulled up to his neck.

Winyi checked the bathroom. No corpse. He looked under the bed and inside the closet. Nothing. He turned back to the man on the bed and touched his neck, searching for a pulse in the carotid artery. Nothing.

“He is dead,” he said to the bride, who stood, arms akimbo, at the other side of the bed.

“You are mad,” she said.

She climbed onto the bed and shook her husband.

“Honey, wake up,” she said. She shook him so hard, for nearly two minutes, slapping him, as she descended into tears. “Honey, wake up,” she cried. “You are not dead. Wake up.”

The other officers walked in. They cuffed her and gently dragged her out.

Winyi searched for a visible cause of death. He pulled the sheet off the corpse. On the chest he found a wedding ring and a piece of canvas. He went down on his knees to examine the ring. He was no expert in jewelry, but he thought it was pure gold, with “Okot and Aceng Forever” etched on the inside. He checked the man’s fingers. No ring.

Why did the killer put it on his chest? Was it a case of jilted love?

Maybe the bride found out he was cheating on her and staged a perfect revenge. But then there was that phone call. Was the caller the other woman? What did she mean when she said that Winyi had been chosen a hundred years ago to do the job? What job?

The body bore no visible signs of the cause of death. No bleeding. No bruises. No stab wounds. No bullet holes. No strangulation marks. No vomit from poison. Nothing.

Winyi tried to pick up the ring. It was glued to the canvas, and the canvas glued to his skin. Only then did it occur to him that the canvas was also an important clue. About half the size of A4 paper, it was worn, shapeless, a pale brown color. He ripped it off the corpse. It left a raw red patch on the body. Bits of skin and hair stuck to it.

“The clock,” an officer said. “Look at the clock, afande.”

It said ten thirty, yet the time was a quarter past four. The second hand ticked dutifully, though the minute and hour hands were dead. The sound of its ticking now echoed like the heartbeat of a demon. Atim had died at ten thirty in the morning.

Winyi took it off the wall. It was a replica of a mosque. On the back was the drawing of a small boat with a lateen sail, a dhow, under it was a line in Arabic.

“That does not belong here,” the manager said.
# END EXCERPT #