Chapter 16
DARKNESS HAD FALLEN BY the time Baah and Dawson reached New Amanful. Its name spoke to its recentness as a suburb. Very little street lighting existed, and the brand new single-family homes and gated communities in the middle of untended, overgrown plots appeared as looming, bulky shadows. With its proximity to the beach, the suburb was prime real estate, but not all of it was newfangled construction. In contrast, the original Amanful was an old fishing community clinging to the shore with its shacks, canoes, and non-potable water.
As they bumped along the unpaved road, Dawson fed Baah the directions Eileen had provided, but the house with a green gate that she had described as their final destination never materialized. They pulled up alongside a lone pedestrian walking toward the beach and asked if he could help. The man gave them another set of tortuous directions to the residence he asserted was Richard Sarbah’s. Praying that the man was right, they set off again, and after one or two wrong turns, they found it. Baah pumped his horn twice. A man peeped out through the crack between the two halves of the gate and came out, approaching in the beam of the headlights and coming around to Baah’s window. Dawson realized with surprise that the guard was Forjoe.
“Forjoe!” he exclaimed, switching on the car’s interior light. “It’s me, Inspector Dawson.”
Forjoe peered in at him. “Ei, Inspector! Good evening!”
“You work here?”
“Yes, please,” Forjoe said, smiling.
“Is this Richard Sarbah’s house?”
“Yes.” A worried look came to his face. “Is there any problem?”
“Not at all. I’m just paying a visit. Is he in?”
Forjoe hesitated. “He’s in, but I have to check if he’s available. Please, I’m coming.”
He walked quickly back into the house, returning about five minutes later to open the gate so that Baah could pull into the front yard. The one-story house was a decent size with a white exterior tarnished by the red dust of the unpaved road outside. Within the compound, someone had been working on a water pipe in a deep hole underneath the wall that enclosed the property. A toolshed stood in the corner of the compound.
“Like I told you before,” Forjoe said, as Dawson followed him in, “the fishing business is not paying enough these days, so I do extra work as a watchman. I’ve been knowing Mr. Sarbah since I was a small boy. He’s a good man—something like an uncle to me.”
“I see,” Dawson said. “So is he the one you mentioned to me who is helping you with your daughter Marvelous?”
“Yes, please.”
“How is she doing?”
Forjoe was visibly troubled. “Not so well, but I pray that God will continue to help us.”
Dawson hoped the prayers were answered. He understood the kind of anguish the man was going through.
Forjoe showed Dawson into a dimly lit, stuffy sitting room.
“Please, you can have a seat. He will come just now.”
Dawson chose a pair of old angular wooden armchairs with square cushions. They didn’t make furniture like this anymore. Now it was all overstuffed sofas and chairs in imitation leather. He looked around the room. It was clean, if a little shabby. The building was obviously much older than the structures that now populated New Amanful. Some old family pictures sat on a bookcase, a small TV in one corner, a worn rug on the linoleum floor. The mosquito netting on the windows needed renewing.
He heard a soft sound and turned to see Richard Sarbah entering the room. He was of average height but exceptionally solid in the chest and shoulders. His hair was jet black, and Dawson thought he must dye it. If his son, Jason, was in his mid to late forties, Richard had to be in his early seventies, at least. On the other hand, he appeared youthful in posture, and his age was difficult to place from his appearance alone.
“Mr. Sarbah?” Dawson rose from his chair.
“Yes, please. You say your name is?”
“Dawson. Inspector Darko Dawson.”
“Ah, I see.” He had a slightly hoarse voice, but it didn’t trigger Dawson’s senses. They shook hands.
“Please, have a seat.” Sarbah sat in a facing chair. “I don’t usually accept visits from strangers, especially at this time of the night, but Forjoe tells me you’re a friend.”
“Yes,” Dawson said, going along with it. “I’m investigating the murder of Charles and Fiona Smith-Aidoo.”
His face revealed a flicker of interest. “So what can I help you with?”
“Jason Sarbah at Malgam Oil is your son, is that correct, sir?”
“Yes. Is something wrong?”
“Not at all,” Dawson said pleasantly. “Just checking that I have the right Sarbah. As part of my investigation, sir, I’ve been looking into the Smith-Aidoos’ and Sarbahs’ past. I understand Tiberius and Bessie were your parents?”
“Yes.”
“Your father was once accused of killing Bessie and Robert, is that correct?”
Sarbah closed his eyes and rubbed his brow slowly, as if he had a headache. “Please, Inspector Dawson, this is not a memory I enjoy discussing.”
“I understand it must be painful,” he said gently. He was going to be empathetic, but he wouldn’t let Richard evade any questions either. “However it’s important. I was ordered here by CID Headquarters to assist the Sekondi police with the investigation, so that’s what I must do. Any details you can provide are much appreciated, Mr. Sarbah.”
“And if I choose not to?”
Dawson remained polite. “Then there are one or two options. I can return daily to question you, which will become quite tiresome—for you, not for me. Or would you prefer to join me at the police station for interrogation?”
“Very well.” He sighed. “My father Tiberius married Bessie Smith in England in 1925. They had two children—my sister, Abigail, and me. I never knew her because she died of meningitis in 1932, and I was born in 1938. Bessie and Tiberius divorced each other in 1940.”
“By that time,” Dawson said in a neutral a tone as possible, “your mother was already having an affair with Mr. R.E. Aidoo, is that correct?”
Sarbah looked resentful. “Yes, that is so,” he admitted.
“I’ve been wondering,” Dawson said measuredly, “what tore your parents apart and drove your mother to R.E.”
“I don’t know for sure. No one actually told me, and I don’t remember. I was only two years old at the time, after all—too young to understand. In retrospect, irreconcilable differences and my father’s drinking, perhaps.”
“He was an alcoholic?”
Sarbah grimaced. “Yes. I’m not sure how severe it was at the time of the divorce, but in later years the alcohol became lethal.”
“I’m sorry,” Dawson said quietly. “R.E. and your mother had Simon and Cecil, your half brothers?”
“Yes, R.E. had returned to Takoradi with my mother and me in 1942. Simon was born in 1943 and Cecil in 1945.”
“Did you get along well with your half brothers?” Dawson asked gently, fearing that he may be treading on sensitive ground too soon.
“Let’s just say things could have been better and leave it at that,” Sarbah said, tensely tapping the side of his thigh.
“What about Tiberius?” Dawson asked. “When did he come back to Takoradi from the UK?”
“In 1948.”
“I’m sure he wanted to see you,” Dawson said encouragingly.
“Of course he did. I was his son, and I wanted to see him too, but …”
Sarbah shifted his weight and Dawson waited.
“But R.E. and Bessie conspired to prevent us from being with each other.”
Dawson could feel the bitterness that Eileen had ascribed to Sarbah. He had a seething anger. “Why do you think that?”
He shrugged, but it was unresolved pain he was expressing, not nonchalance. “R.E. and Bessie hated my father. I remember hearing how R.E. once humiliated Daddy in public—called him a ‘drunken failure.’ ”
“Ho
w old were you at the time?”
“Twelve, thirteen—something like that. Two years before the murder. I presume you’ve been told about that?”
“Yes—1952?”
“Yes, sir. I was fourteen, Simon was eleven, and Cecil was nine. The three of us slept in the same room at one end of the house, R.E. and Bessie at the other. In the middle of the night, someone stole in through the screen window of their bedroom, butchered their bodies, and slashed their throats. Bessie screamed before she was slain, and Simon heard her. He woke me up and we ran to the room and saw it …” Sarbah shuddered.
“I’m sorry,” Dawson said with feeling. “A child should never see anything like that. Cecil too?”
Sarbah shook his head. “I wouldn’t let him go into the room.”
“Good man,” Dawson said approvingly.
“At first I couldn’t understand what had happened,” Sarbah went on, anguish on his face. “I saw blood, so much of it everywhere—on the bed, on the floor, on the walls—and then I saw my mother’s eyes were still open, looking at me and begging me to save her. I’ll never forget that. I saw red spraying from her neck, and I heard a gurgling sound and realized she was breathing through a gash in her throat. I remember saying, ‘Mama’ several times as I went to her and tried to lift her up in my arms, but her head fell back …”
Sarbah stopped talking. He was gulping down air in an apparent effort to control the grief that must have been as fresh as it had been that horrific night when he was only a young teenager. Dawson got up from his chair and kneeled down beside him.
“Take it easy, sir,” he said quietly. “Take a rest. You don’t need to finish it all right now.”
Sarbah fell back in his chair and took three deep breaths, as if trying to calm himself.
“Would you like some water?” Dawson asked.
Sarbah waved that away. “I’m okay.” He smiled wanly. “Now you understand why I don’t like to talk about this.”
“I do understand. I had no idea you had been through such a terrible trauma.”
“The murder itself was only the beginning of the nightmare,” Sarbah said, his voice even huskier than before. “You must be aware through your work, Inspector, how two or more eyewitnesses to the same crime can report completely different versions of what happened.”
Dawson, transferring to a chair closer to Sarbah’s than the original one, said, “I know the problem only too well.”
“Well, there you are. What I saw was not the same as what Simon said he saw. Our parents’ bedroom was dark when he and I got there. I believe I was in front of him—in fact I’m sure of it. He claimed I turned on the light, but I don’t remember doing that. I thought he switched it on at the wall after I had already entered the room. In any case, the first thing I recall seeing then were the bodies of my mother and stepfather, but Simon reported to the police that he saw a man leaving through the window, the same way he must have come in.”
“And he identified the man as Tiberius,” Dawson said, taking an educated guess.
“Yes, sir. The police questioned us over and over. I swore, and still do, that I never saw anyone else in the room—let alone my father—but Simon insisted.”
“Tiberius was taken into custody?”
“Yes, and interrogated for hours on end.” Sarbah looked directly at Dawson. “He denied he had anything to do with the killing, and I believe him till this day. Lots of things about Simon’s story didn’t add up. Did he see the man holding a weapon—a knife or machete? At first he said a knife, but then he changed his story and it was a machete. What was the man wearing? Simon couldn’t remember. Was the man bloody? ‘Yes, I think so.’ Why didn’t your half brother, Richard, also see this man? ‘I don’t know.’ His story was not holding up. Daddy didn’t have a great alibi, but neither could the police place him at the murder site.”
“The charges were eventually dropped?”
“Yes, but by then, the investigation had dragged on, and Daddy had been in prison for three or four months. He lost friends; he lost his job. When he got out, he was a crushed man. He drank more heavily than he ever had and ate almost nothing. I saw him lose kilos by the day and wither away. In 1960 he committed suicide by hanging.”
In the gloomy room, Dawson could see Sarbah’s eyes moisten and swell. “I’m very sorry to hear that, sir.”
“In effect,” Sarbah said morosely, “the accusation, the imprisonment, the disgrace all slowly tortured him to death, and I blame Simon for it because he falsely accused Daddy.”
“Could it be that he did see someone in the room whom he misidentified?”
“No,” Sarbah said, his jaw set like stone. “He deliberately made it up.”
“Why would a boy make up a story like that?” Dawson asked.
“Spite,” Sarbah snapped, as though the word was poison he had to disgorge. “He was a malevolent child who hated me and hated my father, not the least because R.E. had a running tirade against Tiberius that he let his children hear and breathe day in, day out.”
In his mind, Dawson wondered instead whether Simon might have blurted Tiberius’s name under suggestive police questioning. Tiberius was probably a fairly strong suspect at the time, given the public displays of antagonism between him and R.E. Sometimes a frightened child says what he thinks adults want to hear. Apart from that, Dawson knew of many cases in which one detective, particularly the most senior on the team, pressures his junior officers to focus on a particular suspect and either get a confession or a solid accusatory statement from an eyewitness.
“The murder was never solved?” he asked Sarbah.
“Never,” he said, shaking his head slowly in sad disgust.
“Who then took care of you and your half brothers?”
“We were split up between R.E.’s siblings—I went to a sister of his, and Simon and Cecil went to a brother.”
“What was your experience like with your step-aunt?”
Sarbah curled his lip. “I hated it. She treated me as if I wasn’t there.”
“Did you see your half siblings much after that?”
“Yes, but we didn’t speak.”
Dawson reflected for a while on this man’s joyless life ridden with trauma, death, and neglect. No wonder he was angry. The question was whether he was angry enough to kill.
Sarbah stood up and went to the sideboard in his dining area and removed two framed photographs from the top of it.
“That’s my father and me,” he said, handing the first one to Dawson. “I was about six at the time.”
The picture was a rather faded one in sepia. Still, the resemblance between Richard and his father was easy to see. Tiberius was squarely built with widely set facial features. He and his son were smartly dressed for the picture and showed the usual solemn expressions of the time. People didn’t smile much for photographs back then.
Sarbah gave him the second picture, which was in full color and more modern in quality. “And that’s Barbara, my wife; Jason; and me.”
She was plump with a soft face. Jason, about nineteen in this photo, got his light skin was from her. Richard, well-built back then at around fifty, Dawson estimated, had evidently kept his strong physique and youthful features.
“That’s nice,” Dawson said, studying the photograph. “Do you have a lot of pictures?”
“Yes,” he said, opening one of the sideboard doors to reveal a stack of photo albums. “All in there. Perhaps one day when we have more time, I’ll show them to you.”
“I would like that,” Dawson said. He was thinking that much of the pictorial family history involving Tiberius, which Eileen so lacked, was probably all here with Richard Sarbah. “Is your wife around?”
“Barbara and I have been separated for years.” Surprisingly, Sarbah chuckled. “No sympathy required. It was for the best.”
“Besides Jason, do you have any other children?”
Sarbah’s face lit up. “No. He’s my only child. I’m proud of my boy and what he ha
s done for himself. He’s a gem.”
That made Dawson think of Hosiah, then of Sly, and finally of children in general and what they did to a parent’s heart and soul. “I heard about Angela, your granddaughter,” he said quietly.
Sarbah stared at the floor, anguish in his face. “When she died, a part of me died with her. Jason was broken. I was afraid he might kill himself. I prayed to God—don’t let what happened to my father happen to my son. I persuaded Jason to stay with me here for a while so I could support him and keep an eye on him. I would do anything for my boy.”
“I admire you for that,” Dawson said. “You might even have saved his life.”
“But I couldn’t save Angela’s,” Sarbah said sadly.
“Maybe no one could have saved her.”
“There were people who could have,” Sarbah said dejectedly, “but they turned Jason away.”
“You mean Charles and Dr. Smith-Aidoo.”
“Yes.”
“Forgive me—I’m not trying to be offensive, but did Jason ever express a desire to take revenge on them?”
Sarbah dismissed that with a wave of the hand. “Not only is he not that kind of person, he didn’t even have the strength. He was in deep depression. He wouldn’t eat. He shed kilos the same way my father did. I was afraid.”
“Both of you went through a terrible ordeal.”
“As terrible as it was, life goes on. Have you spoken to my son?”
“I have. I can tell he is still in pain.”
“He is. I feel for him.”
“And maybe you were angry enough with Charles to hire two or three men to kill him?”
Sarbah snorted derisively. “If I ever decided to kill someone, Inspector, you can be sure that I wouldn’t hire anyone to do it.”
Dawson watched him carefully. “Mr. Sarbah, can you tell me where you were on Monday, the seventh of July and the following day, the eighth, when the bodies of the Smith-Aidoos were found?”
“That Monday Forjoe and I went to Tarkwa to look into buying some gold. We stayed overnight and returned Tuesday evening. Everyone was talking about the Smith-Aidoos when we got back. You’re welcome to check with Forjoe about the trip. He’ll confirm it.”
Murder at Cape Three Points Page 13