The man was given to loudly confessing his crime to every class of passers-by. At half past midnight, whether on foot or comfortably seated in their vehicles, everybody on that section of University Way got an unwelcome earful of woes from a guilt-ridden thief.

His mind had lost its cunning. It momentarily suspending thoughts of self-preservation and had the thief haemorrhaging the truth from his pink-tongued orifice. He kept saying that he did it. Perhaps it was because he knew that he frequently relieved people of their property but was never violent to the point of death.

And yet that night, well, that night, his arms had done a terrible thing. While struggling to unburden a man of his possessions on the elevated footbridge above University Way, those two limbs had fought too hard and pushed said man over the side and onto the street below.

That’s why, even as officers from the nearby Central Police station detained him, his mouth continued to run amok. Yet it seemed he was the lucky one that night. His victim, now a crumpled figure around whom officers stood, was, miraculously, alive but wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. “Gari haina mafuta” lamented the officers and neither was there any in the vehicles that carefully drove around the bleeding form.