My dearest Bobby,
Ah! You left me alone yesterday, darling, with the lovely ring to comfort me. I kiss it every passing minute, and now my lips are golden. Thank you for your kindness. I will not let HIM find it. It will stay in a secret place until I am rid of HIM and we are together.
All my night was sleepless, dreaming of playing with my beloved. Are you feeling as if I am by your side, darling? God bless your thoughts for me. I do not know what more to say but hope to write a long one next time.
Good-bye darling
A big kiss to you,
Bessie
“I like the old-fashioned language,” Dawson said with a smile. “By ‘HIM,’ I assume she was referring to Tiberius?”
“Yes, evidently.”
So, by at least 1939, and maybe even earlier, Dawson reasoned, Bessie had been having an affair with R.E. Obviously he had been a dashing, attractive man, but surely it would have taken more than that to drive Bessie into his arms? What had been going on in her marriage that had encouraged her to stray? Another thought struck Dawson. “What about children?” he asked Eileen. “Did Bessie have any with Tiberius?”
She looked up at him from the letter, which she had been studying. “Only one that I know of—Richard Sarbah. I was told he had at least one sister, but I haven’t confirmed that. Have you met Jason Sarbah?”
“Yes, I have.”
“That’s Richard’s son—Charles’s cousin. Richard lives not far away in New Amanful, a suburb of Takoradi. On one occasion several years ago, I tried to approach him for more information about Bessie, but he said he couldn’t help me. He seemed bitter and resentful—angry, even—and I know the probable reason.”
She went to the window and looked out at the street through the dusty patina and then turned to face Dawson with a look of distress. “R.E. and Grandma Bessie were killed in 1952, more than ten years before I was born. They were murdered—hacked to death late one night as they slept.”
Dawson was shocked. “Oh!”
“A brutal, bloody killing, Inspector,” she said quietly, with so much emotion that the murder scene could have been right before them. “I can show you some newspaper articles I got from the archives at the university library.”
She picked through some boxes until she found three clippings from a daily paper called Gold Coast Times. In the first, the murder of Bessie and R.E. Aidoo, “who met their ruthless and tragic death while in slumber,” was a front-page news item.
The second clipping detailed how Bessie’s ex-husband, Tiberius Sarbah, had been arrested for the crime. The third announced that he had been released and charges dropped, due to insufficient evidence. A witness had retracted his original story that he had seen Tiberius commit the crime. The newspaper speculated that the witness, who was reportedly a minor, might have been one of the two now-orphaned children, Simon or Cecil, who were eleven and nine respectively.
All that was fascinating, but something else excited Dawson. “Do you see it, Eileen?” he said, turning to her in earnest. “Do you know what I’m thinking?”
“I believe I do, Inspector,” she replied, her eyes widening as she caught his fever. “You’re wondering if the butchery of Bessie and R.E. in 1952, and the massacre of Charles and Fiona in July of this year could be connected.”
“They’re too alike not to be,” Dawson said. “A husband and wife brutally murdered in both cases. It doesn’t matter that they are far apart in time.”
She smiled widely for the first time, showing several missing teeth. “You must be a divine gift, Inspector. I tried to make that case to Superintendent Hammond. He was not impressed—dismissed it at once.”
That’s the way it often was in Dawson’s line of business. What struck one detective as important could appear trivial, or at least coincidental, to another.
“The question is,” Dawson continued, “how could those two cases, so separate in time from one another, be related? Have you ever asked your father what he remembers about the events surrounding the murder?”
“Yes. Even before he became demented, he refused to talk about it and told me to put it out of my mind forever.”
“I see,” Dawson said, watching Eileen. He hadn’t quite known what to make of her in the first minutes of their meeting each other, but now he liked her. “What about Richard Sarbah?” he asked her. “You think he’ll talk to me?”
She seemed optimistic. “Between your charm and your authority, he might.”
“Charm?” He laughed. “Well, thank you. Where can I find Richard?”
Eileen gave Dawson a set of directions, which he wrote down in his notebook.
“Something else I was wondering,” he said. “How did the hyphenated surname ‘Smith-Aidoo’ come about?”
“Ah, okay,” Eileen said with a smile, “that part I can help you with. Bessie wanted my father and Uncle Cecil to have the distinctive name of Smith-Aidoo, rather than plain Aidoo, and to pass it onto successive generations. For every Smith-Aidoo, there are probably about a hundred Aidoos, so it does stand out. Or perhaps she wanted to show off her English ties or to render a lasting recognition of that part of her heritage. Another indication that she cherished the Aidoo part of her, but not the Sarbah.”
“Yes, I see what you mean,” Dawson agreed, reflecting on all Eileen had been telling him. Clearly she relished talking, thinking, and wondering about her family history. Not everyone did. Dawson himself was not well versed in the details of his own past.
“Can I meet your father?” he asked her.
“Of course you can.”
As they walked to the bedroom, Dawson again caught sight of the textbook on witchcraft. He picked it up. “I noticed this when I came in. Another area of interest for you?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
Dawson flipped through the pages. “Do you believe in witchcraft?”
“Yes,” she said, cocking her head, “but it’s like magic. Most magic is tricks. Only a rare instance is true magic.”
Dawson thought about his investigation about two years ago in a village called Ketanu, where the death of a female medical student had been ascribed to witchcraft.
“What about Charles’s death?” he asked Eileen. “Witchcraft?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Why not?”
She stuck out her lower lip in thought. “Too tangible,” she said finally. “A good witchcraft death is subtle and mysterious—as if a physical hand never touched the victim. That’s because the death takes place originally in the astral realm where the witches go at night.”
Dawson nodded in understanding. He’d had his lessons on witchcraft in Ketanu. “What about human sacrifice?”
Now Eileen looked troubled. “Perhaps. They removed his tongue and his eye. Bad signs of ritual.”
“You said ‘they.’ Who are ‘they’?”
She stared at him. “Would you like to know what I honestly believe?”
“Yes, I would.”
“Cardiman wants his business to continue to prosper without any external interference from the likes of Malgam Oil and so do the fishermen. I think he paid two or more fishermen to kill my brother. In murdering him, they chose to make it a human sacrifice, or at least make it seem so. I believe you will find the answer to this crime at Cape Three Points.”
Chapter 15
EILEEN SHOWED DAWSON INTO the bedroom she shared with her father. Sitting in a rusty wheelchair behind a small table, he was a tiny man laid waste by dementia and immobility. He was completely bald, his scooped-out temples betraying how malnourished he was. The house girl was trying to persuade Simon, who was now almost toothless, to eat some akasa, a porridge made from fermented corn, but like a stubborn child, he wasn’t having any of it.
He looked at Eileen and in Fante said, “Who are you? You can’t build anything here, by order of the Sekondi-Takoradi Metropolitan Assembly.”
“He was a land and housing inspector for the city,” she explained to Dawson. �
�Papa, it’s me, Eileen.”
He stared at her, and for a moment realization appeared to dawn in his expression, but then he said, this time in English, “Who are you? You can’t build a house here.”
The caretaker held a spoonful in front of Simon’s mouth and coaxed him. The old man opened his mouth, seemed to accept the akasa, but a few seconds later spat it out in a far-reaching spray.
“Oh, Papa,” Eileen said chidingly. “What am I going to do with you?”
Unperturbed, she wiped her father’s mouth while the caretaker cleaned up the table.
“He’s been doing this spitting thing the whole week,” Eileen said to Dawson. “Don’t ask me why.”
“Can you ask him what happened to his mother and father?”
“All right. I doubt he will answer, but here goes.” She stood closer to him and spoke more slowly. “Papa, what happened to Mummy and Daddy?”
“I can have you arrested for building here,” he said. “I have complete authority. Who are you?”
Eileen sent Dawson a rueful look. “Do you want to try?”
His efforts also proved fruitless as Simon gave him the same repetitive reply and then fell into silence.
She looked regretful. “Sorry. You won’t get much, if anything, out of him.”
“It’s okay,” Dawson said. “I understand.” He was wondering if his father would get to this stage, and with another stab of guilt he realized that Jacob could well be approaching it without Dawson’s knowledge.
Eileen accompanied him to the door. He thanked her for her time.
“Let me know if I can help any further,” she said.
As he returned to the car, he noticed someone getting out of a battered Toyota on the other side of the street, and his blood went cold for a moment as he thought he was seeing the ghost of Charles Smith-Aidoo. He recognized him from the photograph in Charles’s study. Then he realized that the man must be Brian, his brother. They were quite alike. He was walking at a hurried, agitated pace into Eileen’s house. Dawson followed, and by the time he got to the door, she and Brian were locked in an argument. Dawson stood listening to one side of the doorframe.
“I don’t say anything that isn’t true, do I?” she said heatedly. “Just answer my question. Do I?”
“You don’t have to spoil my name in front of my own daughter,” he said sharply. His voice had a nasal, stuffy quality. “You told Sapphire that everything she has become is because of Charles and not me.”
“Look me in the eye and tell me it’s not true,” she challenged.
“Of course it’s not!” he shouted. “Why are you trying to destroy any little chance I have with her? I did what I thought was best back then.”
“Best for you, not best for her.”
Dawson heard the sound of a hard slap and Eileen crying out. And another slap in quick succession. He stepped into the doorway, expecting to see Eileen hurt by her brother’s hand. Instead, the two were grappling with each other, arms intertwined and hands at each other’s throats. She was taller than he was and quite possibly just as strong.
“Stop,” Dawson said. He came closer. “Stop, or you’ll both go to jail.”
That distracted them enough for him to sever the grip they had on each other and separate them.
“She’s a crazy woman!” Brian yelled, pointing at his sister as Dawson firmly pulled him back. “She’s a witch!”
“And you are a fool,” she jeered.
“You sit down here and don’t move,” Dawson told Brian. To Eileen he said, “Take a seat over there.”
“You must be Inspector Dawson,” Brian said dispassionately.
“Yes. What’s going on here?”
“He slapped me, and so I slapped him back,” Eileen said, almost casually.
“She insulted me,” Brian said.
“And so you think you can just slap me like that?” She looked at Dawson. “I didn’t even insult him. He’s angry because when his daughter was here a couple of days ago, and we were reminiscing about Charles. We agreed that she owed everything to her uncle.”
Brian aimed a finger at her. “No, that’s not all you said. You told her that I had just wanted to get rid of her, and that is not true. Why do you insist on saying that to her?”
Eileen turned to Dawson, almost as if her brother wasn’t there. “Brian conceived Sapphire out of wedlock when he was barely nineteen—a mere boy. He fell in love with this raving beauty of an Englishwoman, Constance, some ten years older than he, and she turned out to be crazy. Brian was immature and couldn’t handle parenthood, let alone a psychotic wife.” Eileen opened her arms with her palms up, as if appealing to a judge. “So Brian asked Charles for help, and he took over Sapphire’s care. That’s the truth, and it’s also the truth that he and Fiona shaped Sapphire more than Brian did. What have I said so far that is insulting?”
“But the way she’s expressing it to you is not how she says it to Sapphire,” Brian said plaintively to Dawson. “When it comes to her niece, Eileen does her very best to paint me as some kind of criminal. And why does she do this? Because instead of asking her to take care of Sapphire all those years ago when I was having so much trouble with Constance, I turned to Charles for help. That’s why she resents me so much.”
“Oh, that is not true,” Eileen said, rolling her eyes.
“It’s very true,” Brian said quietly, leveling his gaze at her. “You know it is. And you became more and more resentful as the years went by because you were barren—childless to this day.”
That was new information for Dawson. He wondered, had the infertility been her’s or her husband’s, or both? In Ghana, being childless was very troubling for a woman, her spouse, and the extended family. Rumors of a curse on the woman could rise quickly, and an older woman who had never had children often fit the profile of a witch because as the theory goes, she kills the fetus in her womb and shares it with the members of her coven. As Dawson had discovered in Ketanu, it could lead to isolation of the barren woman, threats to her life, and ultimately murder. Witch sanctuaries existed in northern Ghana, but the word “sanctuaries” belied their hellishness.
“I have made my peace with it,” Eileen said curtly. “At least I don’t have a daughter who despises me the way yours does.”
With a kind of low whimper, Brian stood up again and began to menacingly approach her, but Dawson deflected him toward the door. “Let’s go outside. Come on.”
He took Brian out of his sister’s earshot. He was shaking and hyperventilating, his face swollen with anger.
“Relax, man, relax,” Dawson said, placing his hand on Brian’s back. “Take it easy.”
Just like his older brother, Charles, Brian had a bald patch beating a path through the center of his scalp with tufted hair on either side like the parted Red Sea.
“Why do you allow yourself to get so flustered?” Dawson asked.
“I don’t know,” he said with disgust. “It has always been this way. When we were kids, she teased and bullied me until I was sometimes in tears. And now she pounds it into me every chance she gets.” He smashed his right fist into his left palm repeatedly. “ ‘You’re a failure, you’re a failure,’ over and over again.”
Dawson noticed his slumped, resigned posture. “And do you think you’re a failure?”
His eyes clouded and became moist, and he withered some more. “I may not be one, but I feel I have let my daughter down. I feel I’ve lost her and will never get her back.”
“Not get her back from your older brother?”
Brian looked up sharply. “What do you mean?”
“Charles has rescued your daughter a lot. He saved her in secondary school and put her on the road to success. You were left out of big pieces of Sapphire’s life while Charles took charge of her, and even in her adulthood, it has been happening. Earlier this year, it happened again. Charles got Sapphire a job on the Malgam oil rig, but neither of them told you about it.”
Brian looked away, a slash
of pain striking his expression. “He deliberately excluded me as much as he could. He put the knife in me, and he twisted it side to side.”
Dawson paused, watching the spectacle of wretchedness before him. “You called him after you found out about Sapphire’s new job,” he said, “and when you tried to take Charles to task, he insulted you. Was that the last straw? Was that as much as you could take?”
“You’re asking me whether I killed my brother,” Brian said wearily. “Honestly, I felt like doing it. But no, I didn’t.”
“Where were you on Monday, the seventh of July, the day Charles and Fiona were killed?”
“At home.”
“Where is home?”
“The Cocoa Marketing Board flats. I work for the CMB. I stayed home that day. I suffer from gout and was having a bad attack.”
“Can anyone else confirm that you stayed home on both days?”
“I don’t think so. I live alone.”
“Do you own a pistol, or have you ever used one?”
“No,” he said, looking startled. “Never.”
“Did you hire someone to kill your brother?”
Brian pulled his head back. “Of course not.”
“Do you know anyone who wanted him dead?”
“Any of the people who hated him, Inspector Dawson.” He shrugged. “Environmentalists, fishermen and their advocates, all kinds of meddling NGOs in Ghana and from abroad—the whole bunch of them. Basically, anyone who hates the entire oil industry. Charles was one of its most public faces.”
“What about a more personal vendetta against the Smith-Aidoo family as a whole?” Dawson asked.
“I don’t know anything about that,” Brian said, his voice weak.
“Do you know Richard Sarbah? The son of Tiberius Sarbah?”
“Sarbahs are all over the place in Takoradi, and whichever one that is, I don’t particularly care. Are you done with me, Mr. Dawson? I’m sorry, but my gout is beginning to flare up. I have to get home now.”
“Thank you, sir. Oh, one other thing—your phone number.”
Brian supplied it and then limped away as his gout got the better of him. Dawson watched the troubled, confused man leaving.
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