by Kwei Quartey
Sowah thought about that for a moment. Walter had reported from his interview with Augustus that his relationship with Araba had been wonderful up to the time of her murder, but this story didn’t support that.
“What happened after that?” Sowah asked.
“I brought Madam home and helped her take her bags inside the house, and then I left.”
“So, was that around nine-fifteen?”
“Something like that.”
“Did anyone see you leave?”
“Sako—one of the guards.”
“Did you speak to him?”
“Not so much. I just told him I was going home and I’d see him in the morning.”
“And then you went home?”
“Yes, I took a tro-tro.”
“Can someone confirm it?”
“You can call my brother to ask him. He lives with me, and we were at home together that night.”
Sowah took the number down before continuing. “Now, Monday morning, what happened?”
“I came to take her to the Tang Hotel for the fashion show. First, I washed the car, and I saw Ismael there too. He was going to put some flowerpots up at her door behind the house. I thought Madam would come down by seven-fifteen, but she didn’t. Then Ismael started shouting to me that I should go and call Mr. Peter. I returned with Peter and we went to the roof and Ismael broke the glass and we saw the madam lying in the bed.” Kweku-Sam stared at the ground, seemingly in a daze.
“What happened after?”
“When the police arrived, they detained all of us and we went to the police station to write our statements of what we were doing and where we were Sunday night to Monday morning, and then they let us go. Maybe two days later, they came to question me again because I had written that I was inside the house with Madam to carry her things from the car. They kept asking me what I did after. Said maybe I tried to rob her and killed her, or that I hid in the house and tried to steal from her later.” Kweku sighed. “They took me to CID to question me more. They worked in shifts to interrogate me all day and night. When one officer went home, another one came. They didn’t let me sleep. They kept saying, ‘Just sign this paper, and we’ll let you go to bed.’”
“Did you read it before you signed it?”
Kweku looked uncertain. “I think so. I don’t remember.”
Sowah nodded. “Okay, I understand. Let me ask you something. Who do you think killed Lady Araba?”
With no emotion on his face, Kweku said, “Mr. Seeza. And Peter helped him.”
“Why should they do that?”
“They are good friends. Mr. Seeza gave Peter money all the time. That Mr. Seeza is a madman. A nasty drunkard who treated Madam very badly.” Kweku shook his head, bitterness written on his face. “She wanted to get away from him, and he got angry.”
But to Sowah, Kweku’s assessment did not build a solid case. Kweku-Sam was convinced that Peter and Seeza had killed Lady Araba, but that was all he had—the conviction. As passionate as he was in that, he had not produced a single solid piece of evidence to back it up.
FORTY
Eleven months after
Doctors in government hospitals all over Ghana were on strike for better working conditions and benefits. Emergency services were sharply curtailed.
One subset of physicians couldn’t care less about the strike and refused to join under any circumstances: the Cuban doctors in Ghana, participating in Cuba’s decades-old program of “medical internationalism.” Cuba sent out thousands of its doctors every year to parts of Latin America and Africa.
This ended up working in Emma’s favor. She showed up at the Police Hospital mortuary with a reasonable facsimile of a Citi-FM Radio ID badge and showed it to one of the attendants, a wizened man who looked like he must have worked there forever. His work badge said foster.
“Good morning, boss,” Emma said, flashing her most brilliant smile.
It must have been catching, because Foster returned a big-gapped grin. “Morning, madam.”
“I’m from Citi-FM news. Is any doctor on duty today?”
“Yes, madam. Do you wish to talk to her?”
“Yes, please.”
“Okay,” he said. “Please, I’m coming.” He disappeared into another room.
To Emma’s right was a refrigerated storage room in which she could see dead bodies piled onto gurneys and even on the floor. This sight, combined with the smell of decomposition and formaldehyde, made her feel ill. She held her breath for a moment, but she couldn’t sustain that for very long, eventually giving up and breathing in the fumes.
Foster returned. “Please, she says if you can wait in her office. She will come when she has finished her case.”
He led Emma through a pair of swinging doors. Straight ahead was the autopsy room, but thankfully Foster made a left and took her into a small office. The smell still permeated, but was less intense.
Emma looked around. There wasn’t much to it: a plain, rickety, wooden table piled with medical files, a more-or-less tidy desk, an open cupboard with a couple of white doctor’s jackets on coat hangers, a battered gray file cabinet, and a bookshelf filled with large forensic pathology textbooks. From the postmortem room next door, she heard the thud and bang of bodies being thrown around onto and off gurneys, the whine of the skull saw, and other noises she could not and did not care to identify.
After about thirty minutes, the door burst open and the doctor appeared. She paused for a moment to yank off her mask and surgical cap, which she dropped into the trash can in the corner. Emma had not pictured her this way. Probably not more than five years older than herself, the woman wore her auburn hair down to her shoulders.
Emma stood up.
The doctor looked at her matter-of-factly. “Hi,” she said, with a heavy H. “Doctora Jauregui. And you?”
“Oh, em, Jasmine Ohene. Citi-FM news.”
“Ah, bueno.”
They shook hands. Jauregui pulled out a chair and sat down opposite Emma with her legs stretched out. “So, you wonder why I’m working when all the Ghanaian doctors are not? You’re not the first to ask. What can I say? I’m Cubana. We never stop working. In my country, we cannot strike, you know?”
She smiled briefly at Emma before sweeping up her hair into a bun in one deft movement.
“Actually, Doctor,” Emma said, “I’m doing a Citi-FM story about a murder case that the police haven’t been able to solve, and I was wondering if the postmortem report might be here.”
“I see.” She bounded from her chair, crossing the room to the file cabinet in a couple of steps. “I can check if the autopsy was done here. What is the name of this person?”
“Tagoe, Araba,” Emma said, her jaw almost dropping. Had it been a Ghanaian doctor, he would have plied Emma with a thousand questions and instructed her to write a letter to the hospital director for permission to see the report. Was Dr. Jau . . . however her name was pronounced, really willing to show it to Emma immediately?
Jauregui pulled open the second cabinet drawer, which had neatly arranged folders in hanging files. Her fingers ran through the tabs like a sprinter on a track. “You know, when I came here one year ago, Dios mio, you should have seen what a disaster this place was.”
“Really?” Emma said.
“All over the place,” Jauregui said, waving her free hand in a circle. “Big mess! I worked three days straight to get the place back in order.” She went back to the drawer, muttering letters as she riffled through the folders. “Ah, here! Lady Araba Tagoe.”
Emma’s heart jumped for joy.
Jauregui slammed the drawer shut with a well-placed back kick and returned to the table stacked with files, which she transferred to her desk. She lightly tossed Araba’s file onto the table and dropped herself into a chair. “So, what is it you want to know about her?”
Emma s
at down as well. “We are producing a radio program about the life and death of Lady Araba. We are curious about her death. No one seems to have the details about it.”
“The police have a suspect?”
“They’ve arrested someone,” Emma said, “but we don’t believe he’s the culprit.”
“Hm,” Jauregui said, shaking her head. “Ghana police. I don’t even know what to say. Anyway, I remember this case. I did it myself.”
“Oh,” Emma said, thrilled. She had instantly liked the doctor, and something about her straightforward manner inspired confidence.
Jauregui flipped open the file. “Bring your chair over. I’ll explain everything.”
Emma did so, scooting beside the doctor, eager to learn.
“So,” Jauregui began, “this is the police summary: ‘The deceased was discovered lying in bed by one Ismael Cletus, followed by one Peter Sarpong, blah, blah . . . deceased was positioned with head on a blood-soaked pillow, the bedcovers were neatly placed over the corpse . . . blah, blah . . . No murder weapon was found.’”
Emma noticed DS Isaac Boateng’s name and signature at the bottom.
“Next page, my report. At top, deceased name, address, age, case number, and so on. So, let’s continue. ‘Body is that of a normally developed black female, appearance consistent with stated age of thirty-three years. Length is 1.7 meters. The body is cold and not embalmed. Lividity is present at the dependent portions of the body, and rigor mortis is also present.’ Do you know what lividity is? It’s when the blood settles in the parts of the body that are closest to the surface the body is lying on.” Jauregui flipped a few pages forward. “Here is the photo. You see? The blood settles around the back area because she was on her back. ‘Rigor mortis is also present.’ That is, the body muscles start to turn stiff after two to four hours and can stay like that for longer. You understand?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Bien. We continue. ‘Laceration at the left parietal scalp’—the side of the head— ‘due to blunt force trauma is ragged and measures 8.3 centimeters, penetrating to the skull table, with associated secondary contusion noted 90 degrees to the laceration. No skull fracture is noted.’” Dr. Jauregui went to the next page. “Next injury is in the neck region. ‘Externally, a double ligature mark encircles the neck in the horizontal plane at the level of the larynx and upper trachea. Minimal hematoma is identified in the subcutaneous tissues and neck muscles. Internally, fractures of the hyoid bone or trachea are absent.’”
Jauregui glanced at Emma, who shook her head and laughed.
“Doctor, I’m completely lost.”
“Let me show you. There is a bone high in the neck—put your fingers here on my neck. You feel it? That is the hyoid. During manual strangulation, this bone can crack or break, because the killer usually faces the victim and puts direct pressure on the front of the neck. But in a ligature strangulation like this case, the killer is behind the victim pulling the ligature tight around the throat.”
“So, that squeezes the windpipe and she can’t breathe?”
“Ya, but that’s not the main factor causing the death,” Jauregui said with a little smile. “It’s that the ligature blocks off the arteries in the neck and therefore no blood or oxygen gets to the brain.”
“Oh, I see,” Emma said, startled that she had been under the wrong impression for so long.
“Now let’s look at the photos,” Jauregui said, turning several pages to the first image. “To start, this is a general picture of the bedroom where the body was found.”
Taken from the doorway, the photograph showed a portion of the room and the bottom one-third of the blood-splattered duvet that covered the lower portion of Lady Araba’s body. Unlike the sparse environment the bedroom had been when Emma had seen it, in Lady Araba’s time, it had been filled with paintings on the wall, a dresser with a porcelain vase of fresh flowers at either end, two matching armchairs, and a decorative shelf with a silver vase on one side.
The next image showed Lady Araba in full, lying on her back with her head on a blood-smeared pillow. Emma was shocked and saddened by how profoundly death had changed Araba’s appearance. Her face was swollen and congested. Her eyes and mouth were open with her tongue protruded slightly. Who could have slain Araba in this brutal way?
Jauregui went to the next set of pictures. “Here, we see at the far side of the bed the blood spatter on the white carpet, and more on the bedcovers. There is a large pool of blood here, about halfway across the bed, and a smaller amount on the pillow. So, how I see it, the assailant hit Araba with a blunt instrument this side of the bed and she fell, but she was still conscious at that point. She got on the bed to try to crawl to the other side, but before she could make it there, the killer also climbed on the bed, maybe even on top of the victim’s back, looped the ligature around the victim’s neck, and tightened it until Araba was dead.”
Emma nodded soberly. “How long would that take? Before death, I mean.”
Jauregui tilted her head. “You will lose conscious by fifteen seconds, dead by three or four minutes. But the pressure on the neck must be constant, so it is not as easy as in the movies. It’s hard work to strangle someone.”
Emma shuddered inwardly as she visualized such a murder in progress. “Doctor, can you tell if it’s more likely to be a man or a woman who did this?”
Jauregui shook her head. “Impossible to say.”
“Please, what about the ligature? You said it was double?”
“Well,” Jauregui said, “it appears to be something like two strips of wire close together, or two tubes or a double tube made of plástico or rubber?”
“Why use two ligatures?” Emma wondered aloud. “Double the force?”
Jauregui considered that a moment. “Same total force on the throat, but a double ligature puts half the pressure of a single ligature on the killer’s hands, making it a little easier for him or her.” Spotting Emma’s momentary puzzlement, the doctor added, “Pressure equals the force over the area to which the force is applied.”
“Ah,” Emma said. “I got it.” Her memory of high school physics was only a faint glimmer.
“Now,” Jauregui continued. “Let’s look at the blood pattern. It shows she was lying across the bed as he was strangling her. You see all this blood on this side of the bed? This is where she died, but then, he moves her—look at the bloody drag marks—to lay her on the back and put her head on the pillow. Finally, he covers her with the duvet.”
Emma nodded. “Why do you think he changed her position on the bed?”
“This I’m not sure about,” Jauregui said, “but here is what I believe: from everything we see here, there is much anger—a crime of passion. Maybe the murderer didn’t plan it. It was spontaneous. And then, the killer realizes the terrible thing he has done and he feels remorse, so he repositions her body and covers her; and so now, in his mind, she looks acceptable. We call this ‘undoing.’ A lover or close family member. They feel shame and try to symbolically reverse the homicide.”
“Please, Doctor, could it also be that another person—not the murderer—found Lady Araba and wanted to ‘undo’ the murder, as you call it?”
“Yes,” Jauregui said, nodding vigorously, “that also happens, and sometimes the family doesn’t want the police and the media to see their loved one in such a degraded condition.”
Emma thought of the people in Araba’s life who might have had such love-hate feelings toward her. The person who most fit that profile was Augustus Seeza. Even Auntie Dele came to Emma’s mind. But what motive would Dele have? Jealousy? Or was it possible Dele demanded money from Araba because of the part she had played in her niece’s success as a seamstress, then designer? That didn’t seem likely to Emma. Returning to the present, she said, “One other thing, Doctor: the family says Lady Araba always wore a necklace, which was missing along with some other
jewelry.”
Jauregui shook her head. “There wasn’t any necklace on the body. Let me check the detective’s report to see if he found one at the scene.” She quickly scanned DS Boateng’s detailed report. “Nothing here. What kind of necklace?”
“To be honest,” Emma admitted, “I don’t have a good description. All I heard was it was a necklace with rubies and sapphires or something like that, along with some other jewelry snatched from Araba’s dresser.”
“Oh, I see,” Jauregui said with interest. “It’s possible someone noted that down in the police docket. I’ll be at the CID Headquarters tomorrow morning to give a class to the CSU techs, so I’ll ask one of the officers to get the docket for me. But meanwhile, I have an idea.”
She rose to her desk, returning with a loupe magnifying glass through which she peered at three autopsy photos of Araba’s neck. She spent several minutes and then finally looked up at Emma with a shake of the head. “I was hoping to see something like the impression of a chain into the skin of her neck, but no, nothing.”
Jauregui passed the loupe to Emma, who was pleasantly surprised by the collegial gesture. She spent a few seconds looking for an elusive necklace-print, and then shook her head. “No, Doc. But how do you expect me to see something you haven’t?”
The women laughed. “You never know,” Jauregui said lightly and stood up. “I have to get some work done, but if you want to spend more time here looking at the photos, you can.”
“Sure, Doctor. Thank you. Oh, em . . . may I take pics?”
Jauregui shrugged. “Take them or don’t take them. All the same to me.” She winked at Emma and left the room.
Emma smiled and began snapping pictures of everything in the record, which she presumed was a violation of some kind, but as long as she had Doctor Jauregui’s tacit permission, Emma wasn’t bothered in the least.
She stared at the image of the white duvet tarnished with scarlet blood spatter, a symbol of Araba’s life rapidly waning and then suddenly over.
Emma caught what appeared to be a tiny glint of metal amidst the blood near the foot of the bed. She examined it through the magnifying glass. It certainly did seem to be a small metallic object partially obscured by a bloodstain. What was it—a piece of jewelry? Emma doubted it.