The Waiting Game

chapter eighteen

Better late than never. I've been done with my exams for two weeks now but I've been on mandatory teaching practice for Education students, so I'm still as busy as ever.

Updates may come sporadically now but I'll try to stick to this arrangement we've got going on. x

*****

"We received the CCTV tapes from your club this morning, thank you for cooperating." The lead detective said in a friendly voice that did nothing to make Joshua feel at ease. The woman's partner was a tall skinny man that stood beside her, mostly silent. A classic example of a good cop, bad cop situation.

"Of course," Joshua mimicked her saccharine friendliness. "A night of celebration became something of a horror movie. I'm happy to help however way that I can."

Detective Muinat Owolabi gave a low hum of agreement. "The tape has been reviewed but we'd still like you to answer a few questions."

"Naturally." Joshua said, not missing a beat.

The detective glanced down at her blank notepad and when she looked back at him, her expression was careful. "The CCTV tapes indeed prove that you left the club in the early stages of your party." He didn't miss the deliberate emphasis and he immediately knew that this woman was hell bent on pinning something on him. It might not be the murder — Joshua wasn't afraid of that — but she'd dub him a suspect if she could find the slightest bit of evidence that pointed to it.

"I left with my girlfriend." He affirmed. "She hates crowds." It felt a little like throwing Ninah under the bus but he'd deliberately mentioned that, he had no doubt that the police would pore over every pixel of the CCTV footage, they'd catch Ninah leaving and him following her out.

"And a part of the footage shows the moment where the camera at the back door was disabled. This morning, we were able to deduce that it was a bullet fired at it that disabled the footage. Unfortunately, it was dark enough that we weren't able to make out the grainy figure that shot at the camera. Every step of this murder was carried out carefully, do you have any idea who might have done this?" Detective Owolabi asked.

Joshua barely hid his smile at how she grudgingly gave up information about the investigation. If only she knew that he knew every single detail of the ongoing investigation, The Orion Project had plenty of inside men in the Nigerian Police Force.

"I have no idea." He said simply. He met the other detective's eye, the man was as stoic as ever but there was something intuitive in his gaze. He knew Joshua was telling a lie.

"No enemies?" Owolabi hinted at in a way that was less than subtle. She knew who he was, who his father had been. The details concerning Remilekun Phillips' murder was still very much a mystery.

"None at all." Joshua answered smoothly, he leaned forward in the plastic chair, casting a brief look of disdain around the interrogation room. Outwardly, he looked like the perfect picture of calm but his eyes didn't stay in one place, his gaze flickering from a dirty spot on the ceiling to his hands and the door. The room was too small, a dim, square space that stank.

When Owolabi was silent for a beat too long, he spoke, "Is that all? I'm late for a meeting."

"Do you even know the identity of the man that was murdered?" She finally asked.

Joshua tensed, now this was one bit of information that he didn't know. Early this morning, he'd received confidential photos of the dead body but the photo quality was too bad for Joshua to easily identify. Seeing that so far, all the victims were people he knew, he thought he might know who it was this time. The dead man was older too, seemingly middle aged — that was a lot of people Joshua knew. Too many possibilities to narrow it down to one.