He took a few deep breaths and walked out of the bedroom. He saw footprints, large, blurred, pinkish. He called out as he opened the bathroom door. He almost stepped on her head. The torso was in the bath, arms hanging limply on the sides, the wedding ring winking shatteringly in the light.
He did not know if he cried out or just stared. He did not know if he fainted or vomited. It was just clear that things would never be the same again. He could have phoned. It just never occurred to him. The place seemed grotesquely swollen, with an oppressing smell that seemed to emerge from the bowels of hell. He somehow made it to the police station. It was a miracle that he didn’t kill anybody on the way.
At first they thought he was insane, the freshest apparition from the windy domain of psychosis blowing through the land. They got to see a few of those per week as part of the job. But this one looked way out on the extreme outer reaches. Had he killed a general, taken his XJ10, and come to brag about it? Had he also killed the general’s wife? Finally, they got through to him, or he got through to them, and the investigative machinery was nudged into motion. They wanted to detain him longer, but they realized that he would be of no help.
He left and zoomed to the city at an average speed of 160 kilometres an hour. The car was just a green blur steered by self-destruction seeking a quick suicidal release. The soldiers, who were the uncrowned kings of the road, committing every aberration in the book, from pushing cyclists off the tarmac to ignoring speed limits and red lights, sat back and watched in surprise. At the Clock Tower a group of Stingers was escorting a high-ranking officer. Bat drove through them, and before the soldiers could raise their fingers to point and threaten, he was gone. He parked in front of the house, rested his head on the wheel and wondered what to do next. It seemed such a weight to get out and put the tragedy in words. It seemed impossible.
Mrs. Kalanda remembered seeing him standing in the doorway, drenched in sweat, on the edge of despair, with the look of madness and grief in his eyes. The stoic bureaucrat had died, leaving behind a strange incarnation. He released a number of mangled sounds which spelled out a tragedy, of what calibre and sort, she could not tell. He waded through her questions, went to the cupboard and put a bottle of Scotch to his mouth. She had to fight him physically to retrieve the remaining quarter. There is no dignified way to grieve, she thought. Grief makes us totter between childishness and beastliness. The saving grace of wisdom and strength comes later when the poison is drained. He lay on the sofa and groaned, a heart-rending spectacle. He was saying at intervals, “I killed her, I killed her.”
“Why?” she said trying to hold him. “I don’t understand.”
She went to the phone and called her husband and the Professor. They arrived to find Bat sitting on the sofa. He was somewhat calmer and he told them what had happened, what he had seen.
“Head on the bathroom floor!” everyone exclaimed at once. Even in a country tormented by lunatics, even to a group that had trekked to the forest to search for him among the dead, this was gut-wrenching. It was personal in every way. They huddled together, grieving, and tried to make plans. There were people to inform, people who would be hurt by the news. Bat took on the biggest burden: he decided to be the one to inform Babit’s family. Mrs. Kalanda wanted to do it, but he refused.
“It is my responsibility.”
He went with the Professor because he came from the same area as Babit. Also because Bat needed company in case something went wrong on the road. The journey was uneventful. The two men looked grimly in front of them. The Professor had lost a brother. He thought he had a good idea about what his friend was going through. Tired of supporting his sickly wife and getting little in the way of pleasure out of her, he had wished death on her on a number of occasions, but now he believed he had never meant it. The idea of finding her with her head chopped off made him shiver.
Inside the endless Mabira Forest the speedometer shot madly forward. Everything seemed to darken, as if sealed in a green cloth thick as canvas. The Professor prayed that no suicidal cow cross the road, and no mad soldiers place impromptu roadblocks on the tarmac.
“I shouldn’t have let you drive! Jesus,” he moaned. “Do you want to kill us?”
It was the way the car entered the compound that told people that something had gone terribly wrong. And when the duo emerged looking like they had been exhumed from a landslide, the parents knew that the claws of grief had gripped the family. Bat broke the news slowly, steadily, each word having the effect of cutting, scalding. They all watched him, and for a delayed moment it was as though he were speaking about a disaster averted at the last moment by the intervention of a miracle. But the claws gripped tighter and people’s faces crumbled, their lips disfigured with the heaviness of their sorrow. Bat would have paid any amount of money to be elsewhere, even in prison. He asked them for their forgiveness for “killing your daughter who was so dear to me.” His father-in-law patted him on the back, as if to say everyone would apportion the blame according to their judgement.
“It is those soldiers; that curse walking this land like an eternal plague. As soon as they attacked the palace and forced the king into exile, I knew that this country would never have peace again,” his mother-in-law declared.
“What should the son of man do about those animals?” somebody said, intoning a general sense of helplessness.
“They are not animals as we know them. They are beasts, demented creatures,” another elaborated.
It was generally assumed that the State Research Bureau or the Public Safety Unit or the Eunuchs or thugs from the armed forces were responsible. Criticism was not often aimed directly at the Marshal’s doorstep, for obvious reasons, but now people talked freely. Grief had given them recklessness.
The cautious ones ended the tirade by asking when the body could be collected for burial. The Professor talked about the post-mortem, the ongoing investigations, the delays that might crop up. Somebody asked if the head would be sewn on the trunk again and received only dirty looks. Another wanted to know whether the freezers in the morgue worked, for, the last they wanted was to bury Babit with flies in her wake. Bat looked on with bowed head, waiting for the tempest to pass.
The police investigations were fast and furious, chiefly because the wife of an important man was on the slab, and partly because of the curious fact that none of the house staff had been around at the time of the murder. The policeman had reported sick, and had been sick for the past few days. Due to a shortage of staff his replacement had arrived after the murder. The detectives concentrated on the gardener and the cook. The former could not be quickly located, but the latter was at home. As soon as she saw the police cars, she knew that there was big trouble or tragedy in the air. The nasty stares from the detectives chilled her. Police brutality was common. The caning of prisoners or of children delivered by despairing parents into police hands was standard procedure. A policeman was like a lion; he was a friend only when sated or out of the way. The woman babbled in fear.