“Good afternoon,” Abraham greeted her. “Have you seen Forjoe?”
“He’s inside,” the woman said, pointing her chin at the door behind him. “Wait, I’ll call him.”
She wiped her hands and went to knock on the door, the top half of which was a large opening covered with torn mosquito netting.
A voice answered. “Who is it?”
“Some people are here to see you,” she said in Fante.
“I’m coming.”
It was too dark in the room to see anything from outside. Forjoe emerged from the gloom putting on a T-shirt as he came to the door. He smiled as he saw them.
“Abraham! How are you?”
They shook hands and Abraham introduced Dawson to Forjoe the same way as he had done with Clay. Forjoe was around 28, short and as solid as a brick house. He dragged over a couple plastic chairs and invited the two men to sit down while he took a seat himself on a nearby wooden stool.
“So what brings you here today?” he asked.
“My cousin wanted to meet you,” Abraham said.
“Oh, is that so?” Forjoe said, looking at Dawson with interest.
“Abraham tells me you sometimes hire his canoe to other fishermen,” Dawson said.
“Yes,” Forjoe said, nodding. His expression was friendly. “Especially the young ones who can’t afford to buy a new canoe. You know, now the wood is expensive, and the government doesn’t allow certain trees to be cut. The fishing is tough too. Not so much fish in the sea anymore.”
“Oh, I see,” Dawson said. He had heard about the troubles plaguing the fishing industry. “It makes life hard, eh?”
Forjoe turned the corners of his mouth down. “Very hard.” He looked at Dawson with curiosity. “Why? Do you want to hire a canoe?”
“Oh, no,” Dawson said with a smile. “I just have a question, Forjoe. Last July, someone killed a man and his wife and took them out to sea in a canoe, all the way to one of the oil rigs. Did you hear about it?”
Forjoe’s expression changed abruptly. “Are you a policeman?”
“Yes.”
Forjoe shook his head as if to say, I can’t help you.
Dawson was used to this kind of reticence. People became very uncomfortable and tight-lipped with police questioning, often afraid that they were under suspicion.
Abraham came to his rescue. “Forjoe, he’s not here to make any trouble for you. CID sent him from Accra to help the Sekondi police.”
“Oh, okay.” Forjoe appeared to relax, although not completely.
“We think that late on the night of Monday, seventh July, after the killers murdered the Smith-Aidoos,” Dawson said, “they put the dead bodies in a canoe and used a second one to tow it out to sea.”
“Starting from where?” Forjoe asked.
Excellent question, Dawson thought. “That I don’t know, but that Monday night, there was a full moon, so I’m hoping that maybe some fishermen might have spotted the canoes.”
Forjoe frowned. “But you won’t find any fishermen at sea late on a Monday, sir.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because we can’t fish overnight. It’s a taboo to fish on Tuesdays.”
“Oh,” Dawson said, flattened like an insect underfoot. He had forgotten that by ancient tradition, the sea is a goddess who must rest one day a week. Why it was Tuesday in most fishing communities along Ghana’s coast, Dawson did not know.
Abraham looked at him ruefully. “He’s right. I should have thought of that.”
“On Mondays,” Forjoe continued, “rather than going to sea, most fishermen concentrate on selling as much fish as possible from the weekend’s catch. Monday is a big market day. We never miss it.”
“So, no one rented a canoe from you on that day,” Dawson said, disappointed and clutching at straws.
“No, sir.”
“Do other people rent canoes?”
“A few.”
“Please, can you ask around to find out if anyone took a canoe that night? It doesn’t have to have been a fisherman who rented—anyone at all. If you hear anything, call me. I’ll give you my number.”
“Okay, sir.”
A movement caught Dawson’s eye, and he turned to see a girl of about nine years old hovering in the half-open doorway of Forjoe’s dwelling.
“Hello,” Dawson said, smiling at her.
“That’s my daughter, Marvelous,” Forjoe said.
Dawson saw how his eyes softened as he looked at her. Forjoe gestured at her to come to him. “Marvelous, bra ha.”
She approached and leaned against her father, shyly keeping her head down as he put his arm around her waist. She was pretty, with a heart-shaped face and the standard short schoolgirl haircut.
“Greet our guests, eh?” he told her.
She curtsied slightly and said, “Good afternoon,” in barely a whisper.
“Are you feeling tired?” he asked her softly, passing his hand over hair.
She shook her head.
It was a question Dawson would not have expected of a parent to his nine-year-old child, and it was eerily similar to what he had often asked Hosiah during his years of suffering heart disease. In a flash, Dawson realized that something was wrong with Marvelous. Hours of sitting with his son in inpatient wards and outpatient waiting rooms had trained him to observe signs of illness in children. Here he noticed that while kids of this girl’s age would normally have skinny ankles, Marvelous’s own were puffy and so were her hands. She was retaining fluid for some reason.
“Okay,” Forjoe said, his eyes still full of tenderness toward her. “Go and do your homework and get ready for school tomorrow, all right?”
She nodded, walked away with one glance back at her father, and disappeared round a corner.
“Your daughter is beautiful,” Dawson said. “But is she okay?”
“She’s okay,” he responded, nevertheless appearing troubled. “Please, why do you ask?”
“Because you asked her if she was tired.”
“You are right,” Forjoe said heavily, as if reluctant to admit it. “The doctors say there is something wrong with her kidneys.”
For Dawson, this struck home. Countless times, he had told people in response to their questions about Hosiah, The doctors say there’s something wrong with his heart.
“Can they help her?” Dawson asked Forjoe.
He shrugged. “Anything they can do, my wife and I can’t afford it. We are too poor. The doctors tell me that one day Marvelous will need a machine to clean her blood two or three times a week, but the cost of even one treatment is more than we make in one month. Or they can transplant one kidney from her older brother, but the cost of the operation …” He trailed off, shaking his head.
Dawson knew exactly what Forjoe was facing. It had been the same circumstance with Hosiah. Like Marvelous and her failing kidneys, the medical options available to Hosiah had been so costly, Dawson could never have afforded them without the benevolence of the Cardiothoracic Center. Even Jason Sarbah, a man of much more means, had run up against a monetary wall trying to save his daughter, Angela. Dawson’s, Forjoe’s, and Sarbah’s stories were startling in their similarity, but not coincidental by any means. They pointed to the exploding health crisis in Ghana: modern diagnostics were detecting more and more chronic diseases in both adults and children, but the tottering National Health Insurance Scheme could not possibly pay for their treatment.
Dawson wished he could help Forjoe, but he would need to ask someone in the know when he was back home in Accra—perhaps when he took Hosiah in for a follow-up visit, he could ask a doctor if anything could be done for Marvelous. However, he didn’t want to raise any false hopes by telling Forjoe that. For now, an expression of sympathy was about as far as he could go.
“I’m sorry,” Dawson said. “I pray you will find a solution for your lovely daughter.”
“Thank you, sir.” Forjoe tried to shake himself out of his dark mood. “Everything will be oka
y. A certain man is trying his best to help me, and God will bless us.”
Dawson stood up. “I’m grateful for your help, Forjoe.”
“You’re welcome, sir.”
They traded phone numbers, and as Dawson left with Abraham, he reserved a space in his mind and put Marvelous securely in it. He wasn’t going to forget her.
RETURNING FROM SEKONDI Harbor, they stopped off at Akroma Plaza Hotel for dinner. A visit to Takoradi was incomplete without dining at Akroma’s legendary restaurant, Abraham told Dawson. It had been moved from its old, smaller location into a completely new section of the hotel twice the original size.
It was refreshingly air-conditioned, in contrast to their visit to the harbor. The hostess seated the two men in a nice spot with a view of the street. A quick glance through the seemingly endless menu revealed to Dawson that Asian, European, and American dishes were much more costly than Ghanaian ones. He and Abraham had a hankering for banku. It was only a matter of what to eat it with.
Dawson liked both banku and fufu, but some people were vehemently aligned with one and not the other. Both were presented as soft, pillow-smooth ovals, but their respective tastes could not have been more different. Banku, made from fermented cornmeal, had a sour and distinctive flavor, whereas fufu, derived from a freshly boiled starchy food such as cassava, was a blander affair that made no effort to compete with the soup with which it was eaten.
Abraham wanted grilled tilapia smothered in a spicy onion and tomato sauce. It was served whole, the head and all the bones included. Dawson didn’t feel like dealing with the task of extracting tiny bones, so he went with okro stew instead. This was the ultimate explosion of taste, what with the prawns, beef, smoked ham, and herring in a dense mélange of eggplant, tomato, ginger, chili pepper, and okro, which gave the dish its slick mouth feel. Dawson agreed that it was one of the best he’d ever tasted—except his mother’s, of course.
When Abraham dropped him off at the house, Dawson was pleasantly full but dying for a refreshing shower after the long day. Alas, the water pressure was low, and the flow from the showerhead was but a trickle. It was back to the old standby: a bucket bath. He came out of the bathroom feeling like a new man and pulled on a pair of shorts. A cool breeze blew gently in from the windows, lifting the curtains slightly. His phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Inspector Dawson?” His voice was rather boyish. “This is Jason Sarbah. I’m returning your call.”
“Thank you very much, Mr. Sarbah. I’m investigating the murder of Charles and Fiona Smith-Aidoo,” he said. “I would like to meet you for a few minutes to discuss it.”
“Ah, I see.” He paused. “Good. Perhaps we’ll now get to the bottom of it. Did you have a time in mind to meet?”
“As soon as possible, sir.”
“Let’s see … How about two o’clock tomorrow afternoon?”
“Perfect, sir.”
“Do you know where the Malgam offices are?”
“Yes, I do. I’ll see you tomorrow at two.”
DAWSON WENT THROUGH more of the papers in the STMA box. He came across three separate meetings for which the minutes described a sharp conflict between Kwesi DeSouza and Fiona Smith-Aidoo.
When he’d had enough of that, he put everything aside on the nightstand and sat back in bed. He had brought one of his mbiras with him from Accra, as he always did when traveling. It had two rows of graduated lengths of metal strips, sixteen in all, mounted on a handheld soundboard. When plucked, the strips produced notes similar to the sound of xylophone. Dawson’s mother had given him one as a gift when he was ten, and he had played it sporadically into his teens, when he discovered he could make his own mbira with simple, scavenged materials—even old bicycle spokes. The instrument had a thousand-year history with the Shona people of Zimbabwe, who still made the most complicated of mbiras with twenty-three or more keys.
He rested his head against the wall as he practiced a piece he had composed the week before, a cyclical arrangement with intertwined melodies. After a few minutes of playing, it put Dawson in a relaxed and meditative mood, almost trancelike. It was the next best thing to smoking marijuana, and in his months of kicking the habit, he had increasingly relied on his mbira to relieve tension. In the “good old days,” he combined smoking with mbira playing, a doubly heightening experience.
After half an hour, he became pleasantly drowsy. He reached out for the light switch on the wall to turn off the bare-bulb ceiling light and stretched diagonally across the bed since it was a little too short for him. He felt tired, but he couldn’t sleep. His mind flitted over the events of the past two days like an undecided hummingbird. Instinctively, he felt that the Smith-Aidoo murder had greater breadth and depth than any of his previous cases. Two corpses in a canoe adrift around a deep-sea oil rig, a severed head with an excavated eye socket, a nineteenth-century pocket watch with a scrawled inscription invoking blood ties. What did it all mean?
Chapter 11
IN THE MORNING, DAWSON once again hired Baah’s taxi services for the day. On the way to Sekondi-Takoradi Police Headquarters, the young driver, curious about the Ghana Police Service and the work of a detective, peppered Dawson with questions.
“So I think say you dey come to Tadi to investigate that man they dey cut off his head.”
“Yes. Charles Smith-Aidoo. Did you hear something about it?”
“They say it be juju.”
“What do you think?”
He nodded. “It could be.”
Baah’s reference to the involvement of supernatural powers was the second one after Sly’s. An idea struck Dawson. “Do you know any juju men in Tadi?”
Baah hesitated. “Many of them dey.”
“Can we go to them?”
“I can take you,” he said with a nervous smile, “but me, I won’t talk to them. I fear them.”
“No problem.”
“So I should take you now?” Baah said, taking his eyes off the road briefly to look at Dawson.
“No—this evening, if we have time. If not, then tomorrow.”
“Okay, sir.”
THEY ARRIVED AT Sekondi Headquarters around 8:30. Superintendent Hammond was in a meeting with three of his detectives and Dawson had to wait until they were done. Two detectives left while ASP Seidu remained behind.
“Good morning, sir,” Dawson said as he came in, switching on what he hoped was a disarming smile.
“Good morning,” Hammond said dully, barely looking at him.
“Morning, Dawson,” Seidu said, more amiably.
“May I?” Dawson said, gesturing to an empty chair.
“Of course,” Hammond said indifferently.
Dawson sat.
“Yes, Inspector?” the superintendent said. “Can I help you?”
The smile didn’t work, Dawson thought. “Just wanted to report how things have been going so far.”
“Go ahead, then.”
Dawson related the events of the day before—his morning meeting with Dr. Smith-Aidoo and then the visit to her house.
“Seems she didn’t know about the pocket watch inserted into her uncle’s mouth,” Dawson said.
“Of course she knew,” Hammond said indignantly. “She has just forgotten because of the shock she was in. I told her about it myself.”
Perhaps the superintendent was telling the truth, Dawson reflected, but he doubted it. How would Dr. Smith-Aidoo have forgotten that kind of lurid detail?
“Do you have anything else?” Hammond asked, resuming his aloof tone. “I have to get to a regional meeting.”
He looked at his watch conspicuously, which Dawson ignored as he removed a document from his folder.
“As you already know,” he said, “Fiona Smith-Aidoo had a rivalry with Kwesi DeSouza.” He leaned forward and handed Superintendent Hammond the minutes of the acrimonious meetings. “I don’t know if you saw this.”
Hammond glanced at it and gave it back. “We questioned Mr. Kwesi DeSouza closel
y. He denied being on bad terms with Mrs. Smith-Aidoo or having anything to do with her death. Then we checked his whereabouts on the seventh and eighth of July. He has an alibi. We also looked into any possibilities that Mr. DeSouza could have hired someone. We have not found anything.”
Dawson nodded respectfully. That sounded like some solid detective work had been done. “Another name that came up in these meetings at the STMA,” he continued, “was Reggie Cardiman, the gentleman who owns the Ezile Bay Resort at Cape Three Points.”
“We already know about him,” Hammond said, leaning back in his chair and irritably tapping the end of his pen on his desk. “He has lived in Ghana for almost twenty years—he even speaks Fante. He is crazy about wildlife and the environment and all that stuff, and he loves his Ezile Bay Resort. The village next to Ezile Bay is called Akwidaa. Various companies have approached the chief, Nana Ackah-Yensu the third, about buying land in the area—oil companies, real estate developers, and so on. Some have accused Ackah-Yensu of selling off tracts of land, although he denies it and says he wants to collaborate only with the government to develop that area.”
Dawson leaned forward, happy to get this kind of information and wondering if the superintendent might be finally thawing out.
“Nana Ackah-Yensu told us that Malgam Oil wanted to build luxury villas in Akwidaa,” Hammond continued, rocking back and forth slightly in his squeaky chair—a nervous habit, perhaps. “That’s where the Ezile River joins the sea and a beautiful bay is formed, as well as some ruins of a German fort built in the seventeenth century. So, this is attractive real estate and the kind of scenery these tourists love.”
“So, did Charles Smith-Aidoo go to the chief to talk to him about the villas?” Dawson asked.
“I was just coming to that,” Hammond said, holding up his palm. “He approached the chief about the possibility of relocating Akwidaa either farther inland or farther east in return for building a new village from scratch with running water and electricity.
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