I never thought that simply being a passenger on a long distance bus could turn me into a witness to something so strange. We were travelling to Port Harcourt, somewhere between the usual conversations, sleeping passengers and the constant noise of the road, when we arrived in Ughelli. The driver suddenly turned into a filling station and announced that he needed to use the restroom. Nobody thought anything of it. After several hours on the road, it was a perfectly normal thing to do.
We were travelling from Onicha to Gongo on a smooth evening with very cool weather, as it had rained the previous day. All of a sudden, the bus came to a stop, and almost immediately people started getting down. Some passengers wanted to buy snacks and drinks from the station, while others simply wanted to stretch their legs after being squeezed into the same position for hours. I got down too, grateful for the opportunity to walk around for a few minutes, even though I hated taking short breaks during trips.
The driver disappeared towards the station building. Nobody paid much attention to him, but then ten minutes passed and then twenty. People started checking the time and looking towards the building. Someone joked that perhaps the driver had found a particularly comfortable toilet. A few people laughed, but after another ten minutes, nobody was laughing anymore.
It had now been close to forty minutes. The bus was still sitting there, the engine off, our luggage underneath, but the person responsible for getting all of us to Port Harcourt was nowhere to be found.
"Has anybody seen the driver?" someone asked.
Nobody had seen the man.
That was when the atmosphere changed. A couple of passengers went to the fuel attendant and asked whether she had seen him. She pointed towards the restroom and casually said that he had gone inside. That answer should have settled the matter, but something didn't feel right. Two of the passengers decided to check for themselves.
They walked towards the restroom and came back a few minutes later looking confused.
"He isn't there."
What was going on, no one knew. The attendant was certain she had seen him enter. The passengers had checked the restroom. The driver had apparently vanished.
Then everyone started talking at once, everyone with their own theory.
"How could he leave without telling anybody?"
"Is there anyone who can drive this bus? We should just drive off," another suggested.
People began looking around the filling station, trying to make sense of what was happening. Someone checked behind the station building, whilst another passenger walked towards the road to see whether the driver was nearby.
I remember standing there thinking about how strange the whole situation was. A few minutes earlier, we had been ordinary passengers on an ordinary journey. Now we were all standing around a filling station trying to figure out where our driver had disappeared to.
Then someone noticed something. There was another vehicle parked on the opposite side of the station, and a man nearby seemed to be watching us. One of the passengers approached him and asked whether he had seen the driver, but the man shook his head.
By then, we had become witnesses to something we didn't understand. Every person at that filling station suddenly had a possible piece of information. The fuel attendant had seen the driver enter the building. Two passengers had searched the restroom and found nothing. Others had seen him walk in that direction but couldn't say what happened afterwards.
Eventually, after what felt like an eternity, the driver returned.
He acted as though nothing particularly unusual had happened.
Naturally, everyone was angry. We questioned him about where he had been for so long, but his explanation was vague. He apologised, we complained, and eventually we got back on the bus and continued our journey.
After a while, the incident became another strange story from a long-distance journey. We laughed about it, complained about the driver and eventually moved on and I thought that was the end of the story but i was completely wrong. A few weeks later, I was watching the evening news when the newscaster mentioned a murder that had taken place at a filling station in Ughelli.
When i heard the name of the station my heart sank., thinking what circumstances led to the murder and how it could have been me because It was the exact filling station where we had stopped.
Suddenly, I remembered everything. The driver saying he needed to use the restroom, his long absence. The fuel attendant saying she had seen him go inside. The fact that he wasn't actually in the restroom when two passengers checked. The unexplained period when nobody knew where he was.
Things that had seemed completely insignificant suddenly started taking on a different meaning. Then came the part that I could hardly believe, the person suspected of being responsible for the murder was our driver. I remember just sitting there watching the news in disbelief.
Suddenly, that strange little incident on our journey wasn't funny anymore and it wasn’t just a minor inconvenience no more, the police eventually contacted some of the passengers because we had been at the filling station around the relevant period. We were asked to give statements about what we remembered.
None of us had witnessed the murder itself. We didn't know what the driver had done while he was away from the bus. We couldn't say exactly where he had been during those missing minutes but we had seen him. We had spoken to people at the filling station. We had noticed that he was gone for an unusually long time.
What we initially thought was simply an irresponsible driver wasting everyone's time had become evidence that helped establish a timeline of events. You don't always know when something you see is important, as such we must always be conscious.
That evening, we were just passengers trying to reach our destination. We had no idea that the man driving us was allegedly connected to a murder at the very place where he had asked us to stop.
And I still think about how easily we could have ignored his disappearance. If we had simply stayed on the bus and complained about the delay, perhaps we would never have remembered the details so clearly and eventually, that made us witnesses.
IMAGE IS A.I GENERATED FROM GEMINI