by Kwei Quartey
She thought about it for a moment. “Well, it’s very difficult to not talk if you really can.”
“So you think it’s genuine?”
“I think he is talking to a chosen few and pretending to others.”
“Oh, really? Interesting. Why do you say that?”
“I believe he really was in a state of shock when the brother died and lost his ability to speak. But now that’s past and he’s trying to punish his father. If his dad hadn’t forced Yaw’s brother to work on the farm, Amos would never have had the fatal encounter with the Chinese guy, and he’d still be alive today.”
“Ah, I see,” Dawson said, nodding. “I thought rather that it was guilt that was eating Yaw up and that he’s punishing himself.”
“He doesn’t seem like the type,” Christine said.
Dawson rolled on his back again and got comfortable against her. “You might have given me an idea.”
She smiled. “Let me know if it works.”
“I will.”
They were quiet for a while.
“Christine?”
“Yes, love.”
“Do you ever wish you got married to that doctor?”
She looked at him quizzically. “Nothing like that has ever entered my mind. What in the world made you ask that question, Dark?”
“Well, today it occurred to me, if you had been with that doctor, you probably would never be dealing with all this nonsense with the house and a place to stay and all that.”
“No,” she said. “This is our life. I love you and the boys, and whatever we have to go through together, so be it. No regrets, ever, ever.”
“Okay,” he said. “Good.”
“Silly boy.” She gave him a light but reproachful slap on his forehead. “Anyway, I heard he died.”
“What?” Dawson lifted his head. “Who died?”
“The doctor. He died a couple months ago.”
“Oh,” Dawson said. “Poor guy. Wow, life is strange.”
He thought about the ironies of existence for a while, and then realized that Christine had fallen asleep and was snoring with her head back and her mouth half open. My wife, he thought, shaking his head. To this day, she refuses to accept that she snores.
Dawson got up and gently repositioned her on her side of the bed. She rolled over and muttered something unintelligible.
He smiled. “Yes, my love. Whatever you say.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Sunday morning, Christine went to an eight o’clock church service with Gifty, Hosiah, and Uncle Joe’s wife, while Sly, who was Muslim, stayed home with Joe. By then, Dawson and Chikata had already arrived at the Dunkwa Police Station. Dawson asked Constable Kobby to bring Yaw out to the interview room.
Dawson had hoped he would see a glimmer of light in his eyes, but none was there. Yaw was sullen and kept his eyes down to stare morosely at the table in the interview room. Dawson feared that he was now descending into deep depression, which would not help the circumstances.
Dawson had decided to have Chikata start the interview. Who knew? Perhaps Chikata could get a response out of Yaw.
“How are you this morning, Yaw?” Chikata asked after cautioning the suspect again. “Mr. Yaw,” Chikata said a little more sharply. “I hope you have decided to talk to us today. Do you understand that if you don’t say anything, we will send you back to your cell?”
Yaw seemed unmoved. Dawson thought about what Christine had said last night.
He leaned forward. “You have punished your father enough. He is suffering as much as you, and he doesn’t need any more pain. I know you can talk. It’s only that you don’t want to talk to him. You know as well as anybody else that he didn’t cause Amos’s death. Did he send Amos onto the bridge? No. Please, take away some of his pain. Eh? Yaw, what do you say?”
Dawson saw no response whatsoever. He leaned back again. “You will go back to your cell now. Constable, escort the prisoner.”
“What should we do next?” Chikata asked Dawson after Yaw had been taken out.
“I’m trying to shift the emphasis away from the murder itself,” Dawson said, lost in thought. “If we can get past whatever is troubling him, I think the confession will come next. He has killed Bao in revenge, and now he’s killing his father too—just in another way. I know something about that.”
For a long time, Dawson had cut his ties with his father, Jacob, until he realized it wasn’t worth hanging on to grudges over what he had suffered as a boy at his father’s hand. What if the man should die without Dawson’s ever speaking to him again? So, Dawson had broken his silence and returned to his side. And now, Jacob increasingly needed his sons’ care, and had moved in with Cairo, Dawson’s older brother.
“And you’re sure Yaw is guilty?” Chikata asked.
Good question. “Ninety-five percent,” Dawson said, and then reflected that the estimate might be a little high. “But we have twelve hours before we release him. I really don’t know what’s going to persuade him to start talking again.”
He and Chikata returned to Obuasi and attacked the office again, separating old material that could be archived somewhere—Dawson didn’t know where yet—and cold cases that needed reviewing. After about twenty minutes, Chikata became absorbed by one of the docket files.
“What’s so interesting?” Dawson asked, looking over his shoulder.
“It’s a police report by Sergeant Obeng,” he said. “I found it at the bottom of a pile of unsolved cases. An American guy called Beko Tanbry came to the Obuasi area about three months ago to buy some gold. After the transaction took place, he was on the way to Kumasi when he was stopped by two armed men who robbed him of the gold.”
“No doubt a setup,” Dawson said. “The robbers might have been in with the guys the American supposedly bought the gold from. Now the man has no money, and no gold either. Any other notes in the docket besides the report?”
Chikata shook his head. “Nothing. Empty. And the report is not even very detailed either. I wonder why the docket was so buried when it’s not that old a case.”
“It’s a good question,” Dawson said.
Chikata lowered his voice. “I really wonder if Commander Longdon has been keeping an eye on what’s going on here.”
Dawson grunted. “It doesn’t seem so. I’m suspicious of the commander.”
Chikata looked sharply at Dawson. “How so?”
“I think he’s corrupt. Both Mr. Okoh and Chuck Granger independently stated that the Chinese miners pay off the police. Granger made reference to the commanders specifically.” He and Chikata exchanged glances. “We don’t have to pretend that our police service is not infiltrated with corruption like a poisoned cocoa tree.”
Chikata nodded. “True. Is there any point in exposing Longdon if he is involved?”
“If it will help us solve this murder, yes,” Dawson said.
Thirty minutes later, it was his turn to read a docket in puzzlement. “Another armed robbery—same situation,” he said to Chikata. “This time, it was a man from the UK here to buy gold.”
They read the report together. Like the first one, it was short in length and sparse in detail.
“This should have gone up to the commander of the division,” Dawson said, “and then to the regional office and so on.”
“If Obeng was drunk a lot of the time, that might explain the lapses,” Chikata pointed out.
“I agree,” Dawson said. “Let’s see if we can find more cases.”
In the next hour, they found nothing significant, so they put aside the two dockets in question, and then turned to another jumble of papers. Dawson stared at it for a moment, arms akimbo.
“Let’s have something to eat before we deal with this,” he said. He was feeling mentally tired from a combination of circumstances—the mess in the office, the l
ack of progress in the case, the back-and-forth between Obuasi, Dunkwa, and Kumasi, and not having any real quality time with his boys. It was getting under his skin.
At the David & Goliath chop bar, Dawson had red-red—fried plantain and black-eyed peas cooked to dripping succulence with palm oil and spices—while Chikata ate his favorite: banku—steamed, fermented corn with a tangy bite—and goat stew laced with hot pepper.
After all that, Dawson felt like taking a nap. That is, until his phone rang. Then everything changed. It was Constable Kobby at the Dunkwa Police Station.
“Good afternoon, sir.”
“Yes, Kobby?”
“Please, can you come down to the station?”
Yaw wants to talk, Dawson thought. “What’s going on?”
“Please, Mr. Okoh, Yaw’s father, is here. He says he is here to confess to the murder of the Chinese man.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Dawson and Chikata had considered Mr. Okoh a plausible suspect, but this still came as a shock. Kobby had locked him in one of the back rooms of the station, one that would be no longer empty in another eighteen hours on a busy Monday. When Dawson and Chikata entered, Okoh was sitting at the table with his head in his hands. He looked up as the two detectives took their seats.
“Agya Okoh, maaha,” Dawson greeted him respectfully in Twi. Suspect or not, he was still an elder, so Dawson had used the traditional term “father” to address him.
He replied in the traditional fashion. His shirt was threadbare, and he was sweating heavily.
“Mr. Okoh?” Dawson sat down next to him. “I understand you have something to tell us.”
Mr. Okoh wrung his hands repeatedly and then cracked his knuckles. “Please,” he said finally, “release my son. He has done nothing wrong. I am the one rather who killed the Chinese man to avenge Amos’s death.”
Dawson nodded. “I see. When did you kill the Chinese man?”
“Friday—one week and two days ago.” Now he fixed his eyes on Dawson’s face.
“Tell me what time.”
“Around four o’clock in the morning. The mining site is on the way to my farm, so I know how to get there. I went and hid in the bushes to wait for the man.”
“How did you know he was coming to the site so early in the morning?”
“One of the mining boys told me he would be coming to fix the excavator around that time.”
His story isn’t solid yet. “Which one of the mining boys?” Dawson asked.
“I don’t want to make any trouble for him,” Okoh said, “so I don’t want to say.”
Admirable, maybe—but not satisfactory. “Go on. You hid in the bushes and what after that?”
“He came and started to fix the excavator. After some minutes, I came behind him and killed him.”
Not satisfactory at all. “Owura Okoh, exactly how did you kill him?”
“First, I tied him up. He was fighting me, but I made him stop. I brought his feet and hands together behind his back.”
That was also information that Okoh could have gotten from one of the galamsey boys. “Was the Chinese man shouting for help?” Dawson asked.
“Yes, but I put a rag inside his mouth so he couldn’t shout well.”
A rag? That wasn’t found at the crime scene, but . . . old pieces of cloth had been present in the shack where Wei had taken his brother to clean him up. Was it possible that one of those was a rag that had been stuffed in Bao’s mouth? Wei could have removed it and tossed it away. Or it could have been dislodged when Bao was being pulled out of the mud. Something else struck Dawson. If the rag was severely soiled with mud, that could also explain the gravel in Bao’s throat and windpipe. In any case, such a specific detail made Dawson begin to wonder. Was it possible that Mr. Okoh was their man?
“How did you kill the Chinese man?” Dawson asked him.
“I hit him on the head with my cutlass,” he said, still watching Dawson closely. “Then he stopped moving, and then I buried him inside the earth.”
The wounds to Bao’s head were postmortem, Dr. Kwapong had said.
“How long did it take you to bury the body?” Dawson asked.
“I don’t remember,” Okoh said, his eyes shifting to his left. That was also not unreasonable. In the heat of such an act, one could easily lose track of time.
“All right,” Dawson said “Thank you. Excuse us one moment, Mr. Okoh.”
He and Chikata went outside, shut the door, and moved down the corridor out of earshot.
“What do you think?” Dawson asked him.
Chikata shook his head. “His confession is not strong.”
“I agree. Also, did you notice how he fixed his eyes on me when he was speaking? Normally, when you talk to someone, you shift your gaze back and forth. When some people lie, they watch you carefully for a reaction.”
“Yes,” Chikata said, nodding slowly. “But still, there’s something I wonder. Is it possible at all that Dr. Kwapong is wrong about the injuries to Bao’s head—that they were postmortem?”
“I don’t think so,” Dawson said. “She considered it very carefully and she was very certain. So I trust her. Owura Okoh is not telling the truth.”
“Why is he doing it?”
“He’s afraid that he’ll lose another son, this time to prison. He might think—or even know—that Yaw killed Bao, or he might not, but it doesn’t matter. Either way, better Okoh be locked away than his son—that’s the way he looks at it.”
“So what do we do now?”
“You will go back to Mr. Okoh and respectfully tell him that we have no reason to believe that his account is genuine. Work on him until he confesses to not being a murderer. At the same time, I will work on Yaw.”
Yaw averted his gaze as Dawson entered the room, which was much more confining than the one Mr. Okoh occupied.
Dawson sat and leaned on the table toward Yaw. “Good afternoon. Your father is here. He has come to tell us that he is the one who killed the Chinese man, not you, so you will be free to go as soon as Constable Kobby comes to release you. But your father will spend the rest of his life in prison. That’s all I have to say.”
Dawson got up and went to the door holding his breath and hoping.
“Wait, Mr. Dawson, please.”
His heart missed a beat. He turned to find Yaw looking at him directly for the first time. “My father didn’t kill the Chinaman,” he said. “I did.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Eloquent, Yaw spoke in both English and Twi, his voice husky and unexpectedly light, like the rustle of savanna grass in a soft breeze. It was more boyish than the heavy tone that Dawson had imagined he would have.
“Why have you chosen to break your silence?” Dawson asked him.
“I have forgiven my father,” he said softly, “and now that I have forgiven him, I can’t let him take the blame for me.”
“Why were you mute for all these months?”
Yaw swallowed and stared down at the table for several moments, but the emptiness he had demonstrated before had been replaced with an expression of pain. “When I first learned of Amos’s death,” he said, “I felt like a part of my insides had been cut out—my heart, my throat. I couldn’t talk anymore. I cried for two weeks, but it was inside—without sound. And after two weeks of sadness, I started to feel angry with the world, angry with that Chinese man, and angry with my father.”
“Why were you angry with your father?” Dawson asked. “Because he made Amos work on the farm with him?”
“Yes,” Yaw said, “because if he had not, Amos would not have been at that bridge for him to be drowned by the Chinese man. But not only that. Before Amos’s death, my father had accepted money from Bao in exchange for some of the land we were farming, because the Chinese man wanted more space for his galamsey mining.”
“Your father is suffering from the bad economy just like everyone else,” Dawson pointed out. “People are just trying to survive.”
“I know that, but how can you sell our ancestral lands to these foreigners for them to plunder our gold and spoil the forests? That is a terrible betrayal.”
He might be a murderer, Dawson thought, but he has principles. “How did your father sell the piece of land when it is only the chief who is supposed to authorize a land sale?”
Yaw gave a dry, humorless laugh. “The chief gets plenty of money from those Chinese people. He lets them do whatever they want.”
Dawson feared as much. No end to this corruption. It was everywhere, like creeping rot.
“The day I decided to avenge my brother’s death by killing the Chinese man,” Yaw continued, “I felt a great relief, as though there was no more struggle inside me. And my ability to speak returned. But still, I had anger toward my father, so I decided to keep silent and not talk to him. A story was going around that I had been cursed by a fetish priest, but it wasn’t true.”
Another blow to the juju hypothesis. “Describe to us what happened on the morning of the murder of Bao Liu,” Dawson said.
Yaw cleared his throat and folded his lips between his teeth for a moment while collecting himself. “I heard that the Chinese man would come early in the morning to fix the excavator.”
“How did you hear that?” Dawson interrupted quickly.
“One of the workers at Mr. Granger’s site told me, and they heard it from one of the boys at the Chinese man’s site.”
Plausible. “Go on,” Dawson said.
“I wasn’t sure of the time he will come, so I arrived there very early and waited for him. After about one hour, he came—at about something past four. He was carrying a lantern because it was still dark and he needed to see what he was doing while working on the excavator. I waited for him to start his work. It seems he was trying to call someone.”
He knows that detail, Dawson thought, startled.
“I attacked him as soon as he turned his back to me,” Yaw continued. “First, I gave him a blow on the back of the head to knock him out. Then I pulled the legs up behind and the arms also, so that they come together, and then I tied them.”