“As far as you know, where was he going next?” Dawson asked.
“Back to Takoradi, I believe.”
“Did you suggest to him that he go somewhere else before proceeding?”
Cardiman frowned. “No, why?”
“Think carefully. Did you recommend to the Smith-Aidoos that they visit the lighthouse?”
Cardiman thought for a moment and his puzzled frown cleared as soon as he remembered. “Ah, yes—you’re correct. As they were leaving I did recommend they go up there for the marvelous view. I should have mentioned that to you. My apologies.”
“When did you recommend that?” Dawson asked.
“Around the time Charles and his wife were leaving.”
Dawson took out his notebook. “Let me read you what I noted when we first met and talked. ‘Cardiman stated: could not have ambushed vehicle if Smith-Aidoos left at twelve thirty and he left almost thirty minutes after—impossible to catch up with them in order to carry out an ambush.’ You went out of your way to make that specific point, and now you tell us you just conveniently forgot to mention that you had suggested to the Smith-Aidoos that they take a detour?”
“That’s true,” he agreed, “but Inspector, this event was four months ago. My memory isn’t infallible. And in any case, they probably decided not to go the lighthouse.”
Cardiman was thinking ahead, Dawson realized. “Why do you say that?” he asked, even though he was anticipating the answer.
“Because if they spent time at the lighthouse,” Cardiman said confidently, “I would have beaten them to the location their vehicle was found abandoned—or perhaps arrived around the same time. Obviously that did not happen, and so I could not have had anything to do with the Smith-Aidoos’ death.”
But Dawson did not agree. Deliberately or not—and Dawson suspected deliberately—Cardiman was using invalid logic: if A then B, and therefore C. It was clever, but not clever enough.
“You told us that you had parted with Charles Smith-Aidoo on good terms,” Dawson said leaning forward and boring his gaze into Cardiman, “but we’ve learned that in fact you had heated words with him because he told you that if you didn’t voluntarily vacate the Ezile property, it would be easy to pay off Nana Ackah-Yensu to kick you out.”
Cardiman’s jaw slackened. “What? Whoever told you that completely misrepresented our discussion. We did not have a big argument, and we did not part on bad terms, and Charles certainly never threatened me in the way you or your source claims. I’ve already told you what Charles said to me: He offered me a stake in a development along the Cape Three Points shoreline, including the Ezile Bay and Akwidaa locations. He showed me the plan, the expected revenue, the environmental impact assessment, and so on. And I said no.”
That was true, Dawson reflected, thinking back to their first meeting with Cardiman. That was what he had said. No matter. Dawson was not thrown off course. “Mr. Cardiman,” he said, “we’re giving you a chance to respond now: did you either kill Charles Smith-Aidoo and his wife, or hire someone to do it, or conspire with one or more people to do it?”
Cardiman appeared shocked. “Oh, God, no! I would never do that.”
Dawson leaned forward and handed the warrant to Cardiman. “The district court has authorized us to search your office and living quarters.”
“Oh,” Cardiman mouthed, looking shattered as he read the warrant. “This is just awful. What do I have to do?”
“You may stand at the door,” Dawson said. “You should closely observe us as we search in order to reassure yourself that we do not plant any false evidence. Anything we remove, we will note for the record, and you will initial it to confirm that it is the item we have removed. Do you have any questions about the procedure?”
“No,” he stammered. “No, it seems quite clear.”
Appearing pale, Cardiman moved to the door and Dawson and Chikata began the search. They were looking for a firearm and/or any incriminating correspondence between Cardiman and Smith-Aidoo. It wasn’t an easy task. Cardiman was a disorganized man, and his office was a jumbled mess.
How does he run this place? Dawson wondered, as he looked in a drawer containing a fertility doll resting on an unruly pile of receipts from two years before. He glanced at Cardiman, whose expression had changed from shock to disgust.
They went on to the bedroom, which was quite unkempt with an unmade bed that smelled of stale sweat. It was not quite as packed with junk, and it took them less time to search it. There was nothing found and nothing to take away. Dawson had mixed feelings. It was not that he wanted Cardiman, specifically, to be guilty, but he had wanted so much to find something to finally get a break in the case.
He turned to Cardiman and offered a handshake, which he accepted uncertainly. “Thank you very much, sir,” Dawson said. “We apologize for the inconvenience.”
“Not at all, Inspector,” Cardiman said dully. “I suppose I should say have a nice day.”
ON THE WAY back to Takoradi, they discussed the encounter with Reggie Cardiman.
“What do you think?” Chikata asked Dawson.
“He hasn’t proved that he wasn’t involved in the murder,” he said, “and neither have we. He could be lying that he didn’t have a bad argument with Charles, and if he did, why at the end of that would he talk about such pleasantries like going up to the lighthouse for the beautiful view? So that he and/or someone else would have time to get into position to intercept them on the way back to Takoradi.”
Chikata was quiet for a moment. “At this point, Dawson,” he said finally, “whom do you suspect most? You have DeSouza who hated Fiona’s guts; there’s Jason Sarbah who blamed Charles for the death of his daughter Angela; Cardiman who might have felt deadly afraid that Charles was going to destroy his way of life; possibly some Akwidaa fishermen who didn’t want to be uprooted by Malgam; perhaps some members of some activist group like FOAX who want to stop Malgam in its tracks … have I missed anyone?”
“Yes, you have,” Dawson said. “Brian Smith-Aidoo, Charles’s bitter younger brother who was jealous of his success and his influence over Sapphire Smith-Aidoo.”
“Does he have an alibi?”
“He says he was at home all of Monday, the seventh of July, sick with gout. He lives alone, so it’s not confirmed.”
Chikata sat forward in the backseat. “Shall we go back to him and interrogate him again?”
“Yes, I think so,” Dawson said, “but I’ve been thinking about the juju angle to this case. I don’t feel like we have probed deeply enough into it. Baah, please take us to Kweku Bonsa’s shrine.”
“Yes, sir,” Baah said. He adopted a mocking tone. “So-called best fetish priest in Takoradi.”
“You don’t believe it?” Chikata asked.
“No, he’s just chopping people’s money.”
AS THEY ENTERED Bonsa’s shrine, Dawson discreetly commented to Chikata that he had expected much less. Three surprisingly modern buildings with four labeled consulting rooms surrounded a clean cement compound. Maybe Baah was right—Bonsa was making good money.
“He even has a website,” Chikata said.
“Are you serious?”
“Yes, look over there,” Chikata said, pointing his chin to a wall emblazoned with the URL.
They found an assistant and asked to see Mr. Bonsa.
“Please, you can wait for him,” the assistant said.
“Mepaakyew,” Chikata said politely, using the word for “please” in Akan, “tell him we’re policemen from Accra, and we don’t have time to wait.”
“Yes, please,” the man said, scurrying away.
Dawson looked at Chikata and smiled. “I like that. You asserted yourself well. And beat me to it, too.”
Chikata smiled. “I’ve already missed him once while he was doing his spiritual dance special. I’m not coming back a third time.”
The assistant returned. “Please, he says he can see you in ten minutes.”
Ten minutes turne
d out to be thirty, but by general standards, that was very good. Dawson and Chikata took off their shoes at the doorstep of Consulting Room One and entered.
A small pile of cowry shells in front of him, Kweku Bonsa was sitting on the carpeted floor of a slightly elevated stage around which four attendants stood. Bonsa was a slight man with a severe defect in the left side of his face as though it had been gouged out as a child. A pink, rigid scar tugged at the lower lid of his left eye, which watered constantly because it could not close completely.
One of the attendants prompted the visitors to introduce themselves. Dawson spoke on Chikata’s behalf, since the sergeant didn’t speak Fante.
Bonsa stared at them and nodded. “What problems do you have?” His voice was hoarse and scratchy.
“We are looking for the person who killed a man and his wife last July,” Dawson said, deciding on the blunt approach.
“Why have you come to me?” Bonsa asked.
“We want to know if it was a human sacrifice. The man was Mr. Charles Smith-Aidoo. He and his wife were shot, and then he was beheaded. Can I show you the picture?”
“If you want.”
He brought up the image on his phone and gave it to one of the attendants, who showed it to Bonsa. He looked at it for a moment with not even a twitch in his expression and then handed the phone back.
“I don’t deal in such blood practices,” he declared.
“I didn’t say you did,” Dawson said. “I’m asking your opinion.”
Bonsa leaned slightly forward and swept his hands back and forth over the cowry shells, scattering them. One of his assistants picked up the few that had strayed outside of reach and threw them back in the pile. Bonsa studied the shells as he muttered something inaudible. He repeated the cycle of scattering and studying twice, and then he looked up with the good eye narrowed to a slit.
“If someone is saying it is a sacrifice,” he said, “the person is uttering a falsehood. It is a killing of a different purpose. The one who did it is trying to make it seem like a human sacrifice.”
Dawson wasn’t sure if his next ploy would work, but he took the plunge. “I heard that in April of this year, a man came to you asking your help for his dying daughter.”
Bonsa stiffened and stared at Dawson for several moments. “Not me.”
“Then who?”
“I don’t concern myself with imposters.”
Dawson wasn’t sure what the priest meant. “You’re saying that this man consulted a fake fetish priest about his daughter?”
Bonsa blinked slowly but said nothing.
“Was the name of the man Jason Sarbah?” Dawson pressed. “What did that fetish priest instruct Mr. Sarbah? That he should have Mr. and Mrs. Smith-Aidoo killed in order to save his daughter?”
Bonsa maintained his silence. He had closed his eyes and appeared to be in a trance. Abruptly, one of the attendants held the door open for the two detectives to leave. The meeting was officially over.
DAWSON AND CHIKATA didn’t speak until they were back in the taxi.
“Agh,” the sergeant said. “That was unpleasant. I don’t like that man.”
“Strange atmosphere in there,” Dawson agreed. He glanced at Baah, who was staying silent.
“Why did you make up that story about a man consulting Bonsa about his dying daughter?” Chikata asked.
“It popped into my head,” Dawson replied. “What if, out of desperation during the final days of Angela’s fatal illness, Jason Sarbah consulted a fetish priest? From the way Bonsa responded, it seems I hit a nerve. So maybe Jason did go to a fetish, but he went to a quack and Bonsa heard the story.”
“Then why didn’t he want to confirm whether or not it was Jason?”
“Because I don’t think he wants to get involved. It’s like if a TV reporter or someone like that came to you and asked about a corrupt policeman. Even if you’d heard something about it, you might not want to talk about it with someone like that because of the mess it would drag you into.”
“True,” Chikata said. “Okay, so, let’s say Jason goes to the quack priest. And then?”
“And then this imposter fetish priest recommends to Jason that he perform a human sacrifice on the man who denied him money for the operation Angela needed. There’s no way Jason can do this himself, so he hires two or three people to do it.”
“So now we have to go looking for a quack fetish priest Jason went to see? That could take us years.”
“There’s a much easier way,” Dawson said, taking out his phone. “We’re going to ask Jason himself about it.”
BY THE TIME Jason appeared at the Takoradi central police station with his lawyer, it was well past nightfall. Dawson had reached him at a pool party at Planter’s Lodge, an upscale hotel not far from Shippers Circle. Jason had sounded annoyed that Dawson wanted to question him.
“Can you give me a couple of hours?” he asked.
“Yes, all right,” Dawson replied, but when he had hung up, he began to worry. Why did Jason need a couple of hours? He dispatched Chikata and Baah immediately to Planter’s Lodge, instructing them to park discreetly outside the entrance and watch for Jason. Dawson wanted to be sure he didn’t bolt.
He didn’t. It turned out that he needed time to contact his lawyer and have him accompany Jason to the station. The lawyer, Calvin DeGraft, was contracted with Malgam Oil.
Smart man to come with DeGraft, Dawson thought.
They met in the CID room, Jason and DeGraft sitting opposite Dawson and Chikata.
“What is this about, Inspector?” the lawyer asked. He was a large, imposing man with a razor edge to his voice. “Today is Sunday. This is a considerable disruption of my client’s leisure time.”
“I do apologize for that, sir,” Dawson said. “However, we need to ask your client some questions, if you would allow it.”
“Go ahead. Please be brief.”
“Mr. Sarbah, we’ve learned that during or around April, you visited a fetish priest seeking a cure for your daughter’s illness.”
Jason’s eyebrows shot up. “What?”
“Did you go to a fetish priest about Angela’s illness, sir?”
“Is this some kind of joke?” Jason snapped. “You brought me here to ask this ridiculous question?”
“Can you please answer?”
“No, Mr. Sarbah is not going to answer this question,” DeGraft cut in. “I will not allow it.”
“What about a fetish priest called Kweku Bonsa?” Dawson tried again. “Are you familiar with him, Mr. Sarbah?”
“He won’t answer anything related to fetish priests,” DeGraft said. “Do you have any other questions?”
“Was human sacrifice ever considered in order to save Angela’s life?”
Jason flinched and his eyes swelled and moistened.
“You’re an offensive man, Inspector,” DeGraft said coldly. “You know very well that Angela’s death is a painful chapter in Mr. Sarbah’s life. These questions are not only unnecessary, they are deliberately cruel.”
“It wasn’t my intention to offend,” Dawson said quietly. “I apologize.”
“Is my client under arrest?”
“No, sir.”
“Then we are leaving.” DeGraft stood up. “Come along, Jason.”
They left in silence. Chikata sneaked a glance at Dawson and then meekly returned his gaze to the table.
“Okay,” Dawson said. “I admit it didn’t go well, but I think it was worth a try.”
“Yes,” Chikata said slowly, obvious doubt in his voice.
Feeling deflated all of a sudden, Dawson stood up with a sigh. “I’m tired. Let’s go home. We have another long day tomorrow.”
Chapter 29
THIS IS IT, DAWSON thought.
For the first time in his life, he was going to be airborne. As he took his seat in the first row behind the pilot and co-pilot of one of Malgam’s NHV Dauphin helicopters, his nervousness made his stomach churn.
A few minu
tes past seven in the morning, Dawson and the five other passengers had watched a ten-minute safety video in the helicopter administration waiting room of Takoradi’s small airport. Thereafter, they had donned their life jackets and boarded the van that transported them to the helicopter on the tarmac. Dawson had always pictured a helicopter as a smallish machine, but up close to the Dauphin, he realized how mistaken he had been.
Now he was duplicating all the steps that he had seen on the video—fastening the four-point seatbelts, putting on the protective headphones, checking the large exit window to his right, and mentally rehearsing how to release the window seal and push it out in an emergency. He went through the safety leaflet in the seat pocket in front of him, realizing that his hands were trembling. He surreptitiously glanced at the passenger to his right, afraid that his nerves were showing. He need not have worried. The sixty-ish expatriate with an expanding belly was reading a magazine and showing no interest in anyone around him.
The helicopter door closed. Dawson watched the pilot as he pressed buttons and flicked switches on a bewildering console of dials, levers, and screen displays in front of him and overhead. Dawson was startled as the engine started, a low rumble rising quickly to a high whine and finally a pulsating roar.
On the ground in front of the Dauphin, a man in overalls signaled to the pilot. For a moment, Dawson thought he felt the craft moving, dismissed it as his imagination playing tricks on him, and then realized they were indeed already about ten feet off the ground. The pilot kept the Dauphin there for a few seconds while he and the co-pilot performed some final checks, and then he shifted the helicopter sideways, a maneuver Dawson found disconcerting. The helicopter pivoted and went forward to the runway, where the pilot turned it again, tipped it slightly forward, and accelerated into a climb. Much more rapidly than Dawson had expected, he had a full view of the city: a patchwork of urban construction and green space.
He could already see the Atlantic ahead and then both the Sekondi and Takoradi harbors. They were climbing higher still, and he closed his eyes for a moment. When the vertigo passed, it was replaced by his awe at the magnificence of the ocean beneath them. Stretching to infinity, its surface reflected the golden arc of the early morning sun. He spotted only a rare trawler, canoe, or flat-decked supply ship, but as the Dauphin began to approach the Thor Sterke some thirty minutes later, the picture changed. He saw four drilling rigs over a wide area. Dotted around them like worker ants attending their queen were several vessels, some of which Dawson guessed were the fishery protection vessels he had read about in the docket reports.
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