MANTALK: How women investigate better than the police

I was watching this movie where the main character commits the near-perfect murder – nobody sees or hears a thing. Soon enough, investigators descend on the case. They knock on doors and ask questions.

They take forensic samples and send them to big, white crime labs and the DNA results indicate that the perpetrator is a Caucasian male of a particular colour of hair and jaw set, who probably grew up in a certain area based on hair samples that contain some chemical that can only be found in a particular shampoo that was sold in that area in the 80s.

The investigators knock on doors and ask questions. They study CCTV camera footage. They look at police records, searching for patterns and previous incidents. Eventually they find a vital piece of information – a blood group – and like bloodhounds, they follow the trail until they find their man. A year and a half later, two police patrol cars with screaming sirens pull up at a quaint, tree-lined street, and two cops and two detectives swagger up to the door and knock.

A gentleman with dyed hair and new, thick spectacles opens the door, and the cops say, “Mr Nani Nani, you are under arrest for the murder of Nani Nani.” His wife calls out behind him, “Honey, who is at the door?” And he says, “Nobody, just some gentleman from the police department who have made a terrible mistake.”

Except they haven’t, and he is their man, and when he is cuffed and arrested, it all ends, nicely and cleanly, like all Hollywood whodunit movies do.

THEY TAKE THEIR TIME

It’s funny how real-life women are just as skilled at investigating as fictional investigators in the movies. Women take their time gathering evidence.

They lay low and ask strategic questions, and when they finally knock on your door one fine morning when you aren’t expecting trouble, you can be sure they have all the evidence they need to pin you down.

My friend, who we will call Grace for the purposes of this story, is one such girl. She told me how she is on her fiancé’s trail. She knew that he was up to no good the moment he started liking and commenting on one lady’s pictures on Facebook.

She noted how he laughs at her posts that, according to her, “aren’t even funny.” How she’s sitting pretty and stalking his online activity, completely unbeknownst to him. At this very moment, there is a guy who is under surveillance yet he goes about validating his parking ticket with a happy whistle.

Every time he likes her picture, Grace notes it in her little book of the hangman’s gallows. She pretends she isn’t on Instagram (IG) while in actual fact, she has had an account for the past two years under a different name. She sees him on IG, double tapping, sending enthused smileys and writing borderline flirtatious comments on the other girl’s pictures. She waits. She laments at how careless men can be.

She got her sister to befriend this girl on Facebook. Then she got her sister’s passwords and really put this stalking business into gear four. Now she has the other girl’s phone number and when the fiancé is lying on the couch with his phone hidden in his ugly sleeping shorts, she goes online on WhatsApp to check if they are both online together. “You are insane,” I told her.

One night she sat up until 3am, going back on this other girl’s timeline – as far back as 2001, looking at her posts, maybe trying to understand the enemy. I thought that was insane because isn’t 3am the hour of the devil? How ironic. I asked her if this girl is pretty. She scoffed and said she is “all right,” which means she thinks this girl prettier than her.

She laughs at her fiancé’s buffoonery – how he has recently taken to quoting Martin Luther King to impress her. “He doesn’t give two hoots about history and philosophy, now he’s Machiavelli himself?” He’s making a complete idiot of himself, she moans.

I don’t see how quoting Martin Luther King is making an idiot of oneself. Maybe if you quoted one of our Kenyan politicians, you might...

She says the sad thing is that the girl in question isn’t quite interested in her man. (I don’t see why that is sad.) She can tell. She can also tell nothing has happened. Yet.

It made me shudder how this friend of mine has done all this spying on her man. How he is already in her crosshairs and he has no clue at all. How one day she will ambush him with evidence and he will blink fast and mumble incoherently.

So this is a public announcement, from one man to the fiancé: If you have quoted Martin Luther King recently on a lady’s Facebook account, and you made a joke about “land grabbing”, pull out your troops, son. Abort mission now. You are walking into an ambush. You have been compromised. I repeat, you have been compromised. Abort mission.