TWO Competition: Top Entries (7) – Mate in Two.
——-
Kola – Mate in Two.
——-
Now
Aigbe smiled callously as he watched Esosa tumble backwards onto the floor. He thought to himself that she quite looked like a fish out of water – flailing about, reaching for support that would not be forthcoming. His smile very quickly evolved into a cruel laugh as he watched the back of her head crash onto the cold, tiled floor with a sickening, wet sound. Leaping astride her semi-conscious body, he rained three solid blows onto her torso, working his way from her lower ribcage to her sternum. She yelped, shook and choked with each blow, unable to fight back.
“You are the one that will die, not me, Stupid Harlot!”
He spat into her face as the last blow landed and she choked violently, jerking with the impact of the blow and recoiling from the glob of projectile spittle that had hit her face.
“You! Are! A! Mad! Dirty! Prostitute!”
Each word was punctuated by a slap that sent waves of pain coursing through Esosa’s head. She could barely speak or shout or scream in protest, much less move. She felt herself start to slip into a numb blackness but she tried to hold on. Aigbe wrapped his hands around her neck and muttered.
“Witch! Harlot! Your plan has failed!”
Esosa closed her eyes and let the numbing darkness take her as her husband choked the remaining life from her, his wedding ring pressing against her carotid artery.
2 hours earlier
Esosa smiled to herself as she poured the brown powder into the bottle of Merlot. She re-corked it and shook it violently until the powder began to dissolve. She knew Aigbe was already on his way home from Abuja and she knew he would be hungry after such a long meeting with the foreign investors. She carefully set the Merlot on the table beside the rice, dodo and catfish stew in the warmer – just the way her husband loved it. She discarded her gloves and washed her hands thoroughly with an antiseptic. She was as physically tired as she was tired of her marriage.
“And tonight, you’ll dine in hell”, she muttered bitterly.
Aigbe stopped at an eatery on his way, but when he finally arrived home, Esosa was asleep. He looked at the food and wine on the dining table. Definitely not the white rice, but a dark burgundy Merlot can hide the brown poison. Then he called Suleiman, his driver from the lounge – and offered him the wine. Suleiman was very pleased to collect it, and returned to the lounge to drink it. There was no more driving for the day so he could probably afford to be tipsy.
A little less than two hours later, Esosa would wake up. Aigbe would call her and Suleiman to the sitting room; terminate his employment after stating that he found out he had been sleeping with Esosa. And as Suleiman wept and exited after pleading to no avail, Aigbe would tell Esosa, “Suleiman really enjoyed your poisoned Merlot” and watch her stammer as her face would transform in horror, just before he would crash his fist into her face.
2 days earlier
Nonso was asking for a whole lot of money for his solution to her problem, but it was worth it. The only difficulty Esosa had was how to send the money to him without drawing Aigbe’s attention. Finally she had a brilliant idea. She got permission from Aigbe and bought a containerized cargo of clothes in her own name with the guise of setting up a new business of her own. As usual, Aigbe only grunted. He never said anything to her unless he had something to bitch about. Oh how she hated him! After all his nagging that she never made herself useful financially, the least he should now show was some excitement. She re-sold the container and went to the bank to deposit the cash into Nonso’s bank account.
Aigbe’s mobile phone rang and he picked the call. It was Nonso – his secret agent at the Nigerian State Security Service who had informed him about Suleiman and Esosa’s trysts. He was on his way to deliver the brown-poison package to Esosa. The ever-dependable Nonso had previously processed Esosa’s travel papers without her knowledge, and had also gotten her details logged into the Immigrations and Checkpoints systems. Esosa’s look-alike – as assigned by Nonso – was already boarding a plane on a vacation to the Bahamas. Esosa’s supposed alibi would give him his own alibi when he returns home and murders her in a couple of days. Aigbe clucked loudly and chuckled to himself. Sometimes he wondered if Nonso was super-human; he always got the job done.
“Mate in 2″, Nonso muttered under his breath as he mailed the poison package at the overnight-delivery parcel office.
2 weeks earlier
Esosa wanted out of her abusive and unhappy marriage. She hated how she kept having to let her husband’s driver nail her because she was so sexually frustrated yet her husband had girlfriends. Aigbe never even hugged her since they got married. She had met Charles, a loving man, via the internet, and she wanted to be with him. But she needed Aigbe’s life insurance first of all.
Amanita verna, also known as the Fool’s Mushroom. One of the most poisonous mushrooms in the world, when powdered it provides a flawless method of poisoning for a victim who takes a lot of reddish wine. It is mocha brown, very soluble, tasteless and has no negative symptoms until 6 to 24 hours after ingestion. Then unease and diarrhea would follow, and by the third day – simultaneous kidney and liver failure, after which the victim quickly dies. The medical examiner would believe that an excessive consumption of alcohol killed the victim.
Esosa was well informed by Nonso. She had gotten his business card from Labake, a friend of hers whose husband worked with the SSS. Labake had blatantly told her that she didn’t want to know details, and that it was none of her business whoever Esosa wanted to get rid of. When she contacted Nonso, he suggested the poison and claimed he had used it in the past for two clean political assassinations. After explaining the mechanism of action, he had requested a hefty payment for his efforts before delivering the product to her.
Whenever a person in power calls to request the private services of “Nonso Amaefuna”, any one of thirteen men in the SSS respond to the call, because there is no such person as Nonso. It is only a cover name for operations in their team of thirteen. So when the fourth Nonso Amaefuna was hired by Aigbe to do some covert business investigation, and Aigbe’s wife happened to contact the seventh Nonso Amaefuna about getting a poison, the two agents decided to investigate, and they did so until they realized the situation. Each one decided to go ahead and make money off the couple, but Aigbe’s Nonso told him about his wife’s plans, and they both hatched a plan on how to get an alibi and kill her off instead.
2 months earlier
Chief Okoro, renown Eastern Nigerian political godfather, was on his deathbed from lung cancer, and was flanked by his only son Aigbe and his wife Esosa. With his last breath he made Aigbe promise not to divorce Esosa despite their very troubled marriage. “She’s a good girl” were his last words. With tears in his eyes, Aigbe nodded while Esosa looked relieved.
In his lifetime, Chief Okoro’s insistence had been the only reason Aigbe didn’t get to divorce Esosa. “Don’t make the same mistake I made with your mother. May her soul rest in peace”, he kept telling him. Yet Aigbe hated his wife with every fiber of his being. And the feeling eventually became mutual because in their two years of marriage he never touched her. All he ever did was grunt, communicate via email or SMS, or complain bitterly. And on many occasions he also beat her up and cut her in the back with a knife.
With his father’s death, Aigbe gained a lot of wealth and numerous deep-seated covert political connections.
2 years earlier
As he said his marital vows to Esosa at the altar, Aigbe cursed the day he had a one-night stand with her. He hated how she had gone crying to his own father about her pregnancy that she refused to abort, and how the Chief stressed that Aigbe needed to learn responsibility and marry the girl. Besides, with Chief Okoro’s eyes on the presidency, he claimed he couldn’t afford to have a bastard grandchild for the gossip media to pick on.
Aigbe was very pleased indeed when Esosa had a miscarriage shortly after their marriage. It would make a divorce easier after the upcoming presidential elections.
****
Kindly leave your opinion and rate this entry on a scale of 1 -10
Related Posts
TWO Competition: Top Entries (8) – TWO →
TWO Late Entry: Of Saccharine And A Married Widow →
TWO Competition: Top Entries (6) – Two Peas in a Pod. →
…and I'm enjoying this more! I look forward to the next episode!
Glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for reading! :D
Too many loose ends. The thoughts are flowing in different directions, especially at the nonso bit.
I rate 6
Thanks for your criticism, @missmaplecherry.
I wish you'd tell me the loose ends you found, so that I can write better next time.
And, as per Nonso I think I deliberately twisted that part. There were two different "Nonsos" out of 13 of them in the SSS, etc
Thanks again
Kai!
Bleh. I don't want to sound rude so I'll leave it at bleh
Thanks for reading!
This is the best I've read so far jor. All lose ends were put together nicely and I totally enjoyed it 9.5
Thanks for your generous vote! I'm glad you liked the story :)
Kinda like the ghen ghen angle to the story…but…
1. Why was Esosa the one that had to be 'doubled' instead of Aigbe? If Esosa going to the Bahamas was the ruse to cover the murder, it would mean another woman had taken her identity, therefore he had plans to hide the body eternally, in which case there would be no murder and no need for an alibi. If Aigbe had 'travelled' he could kill her and then 'come back' a day after, then that would be a proper alibi.
2. Chief Okoro's son was Aigbe? his Mother was Bini? Okay I get it. An Edo chief would have been simpler though.
3. The 2 Nonsos Meeting is a major loose end. In a set-up like that, it is believed that these assassins hardly even know each other let alone converse, so their meeting should have been detailed (I get there was a word limit. If you decide to expand the story though…)
All that being said, I like the story even if it did taper towards the end. Still score it a 7/10
Thanks for your useful comment and vote, dbrizio!
(1) Hmmm yes, the plan was that the body would never be found, and there would have been no murder. The word Alibi however is Latin for "somewhere else". It has just become really popular in the murder context. Saying Esosa was on an alibi is perfectly correct in the original sense of the word.
P.S. Aigbe couldn't have gotten a valid alibi for himself at Esosa's murder because he had a meeting with investors in Abuja that same day. Maybe the ensuing story would have been that Esosa travelled and eloped from there. The only witness that Esosa hadn't travelled was Suleiman, who would also die.
(2) Mea culpa. Using an Edo chief would have been easier. Lol
(3) Yes, and yes again I agree with you. But yes, I was limited by word length. I dove right in and wrote this out in a few hours, and it was an exciting experience.
Really useful comment. Thanks again!
Your creativity is definitely admirable, as you found ways to take the expected idea of a wife's wrath to a more exciting place. However, I felt that you put in too many ideas, which made it hard for the story to form seamlessly. You should have, in essence, moderated your creativity a bit due to the short story length. the level of detail made it somewhat uneasy. I loved the direction though, definitely the most unique angle of all :) good work! 6
Thank you for your comment! Yes, I agree that I might have crowded the small space with too many ideas. Lol.
I give this a 7, I like it because it's well organised and doesn't make room for any confusion but I would have liked more suspense and more of a twist. Nice work though, it's not easy writing a piece as good as this.
Thanks Afedziba :)