Pride ✔️

05

Kathleen and her partner sat under the mango tree. There was more to be done. She knew she couldn't go home, not yet. There was something about this case that didn't sit quite right with her. She needed to talk to Prince Kojo, she needed to ask them questions that would make them slip. They were hiding something, he and his beautiful fiancée.

"What now? What more do you want?" Nick asked, clearly frustrated.

"If you're going to whine all day, you better head back. I'm not leaving till I get answers."

"We just need to talk to the prince. You'll get all the answers you need."

"I know that. But I still need to talk to village folk. I feel like there's something we're missing."

And she was right about that. They wasted a lot of time asking questions from people who were more willing to give away their kidneys for free, that is, until that one girl.

She was pretty, nothing like Araba but a looker in her own right. She'd seemed hesitant at first, looking everywhere but at the journalists. Kathleen made her sit on the bench, under the mango tree with them.

She relaxed a bit but was still clearly uneasy.

"I want to tell you something, but you have to promise me that you'll tell no one. Can I trust that you won't tell anyone?" she asked Kathleen, her big brown eyes looking up at her hopefully.

"Of course," she promised. She didn't mean it though. She was a journalist; she wouldn't go anywhere in her career if she kept secrets for people.

"The prince wasn't a good man," she began. Kathleen wanted to urge her on, this wasn't something she didn't know. By now it was obvious. "You don't understand," the girl said frantically, sensing her impatience. "He was evil. Pure evil." She wrapped her arms around herself and began to shake. "He never took no for an answer."

Kathleen froze. She darted a glance at Nick. His expression mirrored hers.

"I'm not the only girl he did that to. There are many of us. Some will never admit it, but I know. I just know," she whispered. Without another word, she picked herself up and walked off, her head held high.

You'd have never guessed.

"Wow," Nick said.

"Yeah, wow."

* * *

A week had passed without any further leads. Nick and Kathleen pieced together the information they had now. They'd created a storyline, and it went like this:

Prince Agyei was a rapist. And he'd set his sights on the village beauty, except she had a man already. He may have tried or even succeeded in harming Araba, and as revenge, her fiancé killed him. In order to show her gratitude, she agreed to be engaged to him, even though she'd previously wanted to wait until she was a little older.

Their storyline wasn't too far-fetched. It wasn't something that hadn't happened before. But Kathleen knew that to prove their theory, they had to find the body. And to do that, she had to be careful. They couldn't let the village prince or the beauty know that they were on to them.

"What now?"

"We interrogate our suspect." She pushed forward a paper onto which she'd scrawled "Prince Kojo".

"And how do you plan on doing that?"

"'You'? When I crack this case, I'm taking all the credit because Lord knows how useless you've been this whole time."

Nick rolled his eyes and plopped onto his bed. "Wake me up in the morning. Living with you is so tedious that I might be tempted to sleep the whole day, just so I won't have to see your face."