I was certain Raji was the thief. Though I couldn’t prove it. I didn’t catch him in the act. But he was the only other person that came close to my room that day. My thoughts swung back and forth with doubt and suspicion. I thought about how to approach Raji about the issue. “What if it wasn’t him?” I thought to myself.
But I couldn’t take it, I just couldn’t take it. There had been numerous incidents of breaking and entering in our compound that month. Most had been during the early hours of the day when students had gone for morning lectures.
There were twelve self-contain apartments in the compound. Each had a large room, a kitchen, a toilet, and a wardrobe section. My apartment was the first from the mini gate. My friends used to joke about how I would be the first to be attacked in the event of any armed robbery attack. We were overly facetious. We joked about everything. The doors to the apartments were made of iron, had a dead bolt on either side of the doors, and a lever handle only on the inside. Due to the absence of a lever handle on the outside, a key was always required to open the doors from the outside, once jammed.
Raji was my next-door neighbour’s boyfriend. While most of us in the compound were in our third year, he was in his final year. He seemed a nice guy, at least not the violent type. He related well with everyone in the compound, until that fateful day.
I had left my room open for not up to two minutes to see a neighbour in another apartment. I came back to the room to find that my phone was gone. Everything else was in place, almost as if I had merely forgotten where I actually kept the phone. I didn’t know what to make of it. I was sure I had left it on the table. But my sure wasn’t really sure. So, I instinctively started to look for it all over the room. A few minutes into my search, someone knocked on my door, I wasn’t interested in whoever it was. I looked up and saw that the door wasn’t jammed, so I passively said “come in”. It was Raji.
The very first words he uttered would be the only proof I was to have that he did it. He was wearing blue board shorts and a black polo shirt. His skinny frame stood by the door as though he was in a strange place for the first time and wasn’t sure whether to go further in or not.
“Ehen you don come back, abeg you fit on your hotspot for me?”
That was when it hit me.
“You been come here?” I asked, with one eyebrow raised. My voice was breathy. The thought of him being in the room those couple of minutes I was away gave me hope and anguish at the same time.
“I been show your room just now, you no dey. I no come inside, I just open the door.”
At this point, both my eyebrows went up. I thought to myself, “who asked whether you came inside”. I figured he was definitely trying to hide something. He was already putting up defences.
“someone stole my phone”, I suddenly switched to proper English, as if that would make me sound serious and properly highlight the seriousness of the situation. “If this is a joke please just give me my phone, I’m not in the mood.”
He looked at me wide eyed and open mouthed, as if he was shocked at my demand. I knew he was pretending. I just knew it. He denied taking or even seeing my phone. He kept asking me why he would take my phone as if I was supposed to have an explanation for his actions.
I knew it was him, I thought he must have come into the room while I was away for whatever reason and when he saw that I wasn’t there, he took it. But why would he come back to ask me to put on my hotspot right after he had taken the phone? The obvious answer was that he wanted to vindicate himself early enough. If he asked for hotspot, that would mean he didn’t know anything about the whereabouts of the phone. He couldn’t fool me, I thought to myself.
The bickering between the two of us went back and forth. In no time, everyone in the compound became aware and involved. One of the neighbours suddenly suggested that we searched his girlfriend’s room. At first, I felt I couldn’t do it because I had so much respect for her. But she herself insisted that we did so. She was ashamed of the whole thing and at the same time eager to get everything over with. She kept asking him to give the phone back. “Please give them their phone”. We went ahead and searched her apartment. We didn’t find anything.
Another neighbour called the caretaker of the compound and a few minutes after, Broda Biodun the caretaker arrived at the scene. Broda Biodun was a jovial man who was probably in his early thirties. He studied Sociology at the University. He was everyone’s friend. He always wore a lace with a fila woven from Aso Oke fabric, always! I used to wonder how Yoruba men could wear laces. I thought laces should be for women. I always thought it had a feminine touch to it. I couldn’t imagine myself wearing an outfit that was fairly transparent and had holes in it. He didn’t qualify as fat but his belly was always protruding, and that, combined with the lace and the fila made him look older than he actually was.
As soon as we explained everything to him, he started clapping and screaming “police station, police station, police station!” Then he frantically said something to me in yoruba, as if he thought I could understand him.
I had no idea what he was saying in yoruba language. But I definitely didn’t want to involve the Police. The truth was that even though I was convinced Raji was the thief, I still had some doubt in me. There is always room for doubt. I kept thinking to myself, “what if it wasn’t really him? What if he was telling the truth?”
I dragged Broda Biodun aside and explained to him that I wouldn’t want to tarnish Raji’s image by involving the Police. It was too much of a risk.
“So that is how your phone will just go like that? How much did you say you buy that phone sef?
Listening to Broda Biodun asking those questions made me feel as though someone was poking at my heart with a toothpick in a torturous manner. Painful yet not hard enough to make me bleed. All that thought about not tarnishing Raji’s image evaporated into nothingness.
By the time we arrived at Sabo Police Station in Mainland, we had formed a mini mob, with Raji being the prime suspect. Though in reality, everyone that was present at that point in time was a suspect. Broda Biodun was leading the congregation. I was next in line. As soon as I crossed the entrance into the police station, I was hit by a horrible stench. It was almost as if we had teleported into another universe by walking through the door. It was the obvious stench of human bodies that had gone through weeks without taking a bath. It was the stench of sickness, all coming from the detention cells of the police station. Though the cells were not visible from the lobby, the stench made it seem like we had stepped into one of the cells. None of us made any attempt to look for a place to sit. Perhaps we were all already eager to leave.
Broda Biodun and I walked up to a policeman sitting behind the counter, while the others, including Raji, waited from a distance. The policeman had a tag stitched to his faded black uniform, with “M. Wasiu” written on it. He had an angry look and the more we told him about the incident the angrier he looked. Before we could finish explaining the situation to him, he interrupted, “Where is he? Where is the boy?”
No one pointed at Raji, but those that were standing between Raji and the policeman made way so that Raji could be visible. Raji walked up to the counter. Officer Wasiu called for another policeman who was wearing plain clothes and asked him to take us all in for questioning. He referred to the policeman in plain clothes as “Kobla”. It was at that point that I took note of our actual number. We were seventeen, including Broda Biodun. Kobla led the way further into the police station and as the crowd was about to move in behind him, Wasiu intervened. “Wait, where una dey go? How many of una wan write stetement? Una think say we get paper to waste? Make una dress back abeg”. From that moment, it became clear that Raji had become the only suspect.
Only Raji and I went in and were asked to write statements. We were given a fool’s cap sheet each and warned not to waste the paper. “No be for tree we dey pluck paper”, said Kobla. It didn’t take us long to finish writing our statements. We finished at almost the same time almost as if we wrote the same exact story. If there wasn’t a considerable distance between the table I used and the one he used, I would have thought that he copied me. Kobla was leaning on a wall right next to the door, hands in his pocket, and staring at the ceiling. I raised my hand to indicate that we were done. He approached me first. He read my statement then he picked up Raji’s statement and read it. He began asking Raji questions.
After about fifteen minutes of listening to Kobla asking Raji basically the same questions I had asked even before we left our compound, and Raji giving Kobla the same answers he had given to me, I became disinterested. I gave up. I accepted that my phone was gone and since I couldn’t really prove that he did it, I just had to let go. At that point, I thought it was all over.
When it seemed obvious that Kobla was done talking, he stood up and asked us to wait for him. While Kobla was away, I made a desperate plea to Raji. I begged him to tell me where he hid the phone. I promised not to tell anyone if he confessed to me. Nothing. As he had done all day, once again, he denied taking my phone.
While I was pleading with Raji, Kobla came back in with one other policeman. Without saying anything to either of us, the new policeman walked straight to Raji and delivered a resounding slap with his left palm on the right side of Raji’s face. “Where the phone? Where the phone? You no go talk?”
I was shocked. And before I could regain control of my wide-open mouth, another slap was delivered. This time by Kobla. I instinctively rushed closer to them and started pleading with them not to slap him again. I still believed he took it. But I also knew that torturing him wasn’t the way to go. “What if he dies in the process or sustains a serious injury?” I asked myself. What would I tell people? That Raji died in Police custody in my presence because he stole my phone? It soon occurred to me that the phone was nothing compared to what they were about to do to him.
The two policemen tried to convince me that he would surely confess after receiving the right amount of beating. “You for just leave make we handle am”. I didn’t have to think twice before assuring them that it wasn’t necessary, and that the phone didn’t matter to me anymore.
I wanted to apologise to Raji, but he had just stolen my phone. Broda Biodun was the first to greet us with “howfa howfa”, as soon as we got back to the lobby. I responded with “noting, make we just dey go”.
I was sad. Sad about my phone and sad that they were going to torture him just to get it back. I was sure, but they weren’t. How could they have acted as though they were sure? Even I wasn’t one hundred percent sure. I just knew it was him.
In no time, we left the polluted atmosphere of the police station. Stepping out of the police station felt like stepping back into life again. We had walked all the way to the police station and we walked all the way back to the compound. Not a word from Raji and no one said anything to him. I hated him and at the same time felt sorry for him.
I went back to my apartment at about 5PM. I lied down on my bed, bruised and battered. Thinking about my phone. As I closed my eyes deep in thought and ready to fall asleep, I heard my phone ring.