The Missing American

by Kwei Quartey

  “Good morning, Mr. Sowah.”

  At first, they didn’t see where the voice came from, but then they realized that Sana Sana was sitting in a corner dressed in black.

  “Morning, Sana,” Sowah said, stepping forward to shake hands. “It’s a while since we’ve spoken. This is my assistant, Emma Djan.”

  “You are welcome.”

  Sana was not wearing his iconic cap with a concealing curtain of beads attached to the visor. Instead, he had donned a lifelike human mask. He gestured toward two guest chairs in front of him. Sowah and Emma sat.

  “I’m sorry it’s been difficult to get hold of me,” Sana said. “I’ve been away for a few days.”

  “No problem,” Sowah said. “You are a very busy man.”

  “How can I help you, sir?”

  “We are trying to find out what has happened to an American gone missing in Ghana, one Gordon Tilson. He came to Ghana on the fifteenth of February and was in touch with people back home in the States up until the third of April, at which point he disappeared and has not been heard from since. His son, Derek, arrived in Ghana at the beginning of May and is now our client. As you can imagine, he is desperate to find his father.”

  Sana nodded. “Naturally.”

  “We’re consulting you because you have your ear to the ground and know a lot about what’s going on in the country at any one time. We’re curious if you have any information—no matter how small—about Mr. Tilson, and his disappearance.”

  Sana paused before his response. “It’s very interesting that you come here today because I have also been very interested in what has been the fate of Mr. Tilson. I had heard that he had disappeared and that the police were investigating, and the reason why it has been of interest to me is that Mr. Tilson came to see me.”

  Neither Sowah nor Emma could hide their surprise. “He did?” Sowah exclaimed.

  “Yes, sir. He contacted me via Facebook Messenger and told me he had read a lot about me and my reporting on Internet fraud and sakawa boys. Now, I don’t respond to everyone who messages me, but his situation interested me because I’ve been working to collect enough cases in which defrauded individuals come from abroad to confront the people who have ripped them off. There aren’t many of them. Okay, so, that’s one aspect of what I’m doing. The second is what I call the Big One. That is to name, shame, and jail high officials in the police force and elsewhere in the government who are secretly aiding and abetting sakawa boys to continue in this illegal, money-making enterprise.

  “So, clearly, we had a common interest, Tilson and I, and we agreed to meet somewhere around the fifth of March, I think it was. But before that, I spoke to Tilson on the phone and advised him to move out of the Kempinski Hotel.”

  “Ah,” Emma said. “We wondered who it was. Why did you advise him as such?”

  “Kempinski is a high-visibility place with extraordinary security in place. I call it a political hotel. Unless you’re a harmless tourist, I wouldn’t recommend a journalist, detective, or any kind of investigator stay there. I suspect in some cases the rooms are bugged. But that’s just me.”

  “Interesting,” Sowah said.

  “Yes. So, at the time we met,” Sana continued, “I had expected Gordon to be concerned mostly with catching the person or persons who had tricked him, and he had already gone to the police about it. What surprised me was he asked if he could help me in my goal to name, shame, and jail the sakawa big wigs, as I call them.”

  “What role did he want to play?” Sowah said. “I mean, what could he do?”

  “That’s exactly the point. He was overeager—like a sprinter off the starting block too soon. I have a method of working and I use my own people. I didn’t want a co-investigator, I only wanted to know what had happened to Mr. Tilson and take it from there. He said he had a possible contact who could give him access to top-ranking officials in the police service. I told him, if you start at the top, you have nowhere to go from there. Start at the bottom and work your way up. For example, I told him about Kweku Ponsu, the fetish priest, who has contact with both sakawa boys and powerful people. No one will admit it, but MPs, commanders, commissioners, and CEOs alike go to Ponsu for spiritual guidance to make money, get promotions, destroy political opponents, and so on. Ponsu has a foot in one world and the other foot in another. He is the kind of player we want to engage and court, but it’s a slow process.”

  Sowah exchanged a glance with Emma. “Now we know how Mr. Tilson found out about Ponsu. What was his response to your recommendations about Kweku Ponsu?”

  “Something to the effect that he wanted to work as fast as possible,” Sana said. “That he didn’t want to stay in Ghana ‘forever.’ Americans are very impatient, you know. They always want to do things fast. So, when they come to Ghana, they don’t understand why things take so long.”

  “Were you aware Mr. Tilson went to see Ponsu at Atimpoku?” Sowah asked.

  “Not at the time, but I learned about it later. I don’t like to engage in ‘I told you so,’ but I had advised Mr. Tilson to stay away from Ponsu. After that, I never spoke to him or heard from him again.”

  “We now know from the driver, who took Mr. Tilson up to Atimpoku, that Tilson had an ugly verbal altercation with Ponsu,” Sowah said.

  Sana said, “I don’t doubt it.”

  “What do you think has happened to Mr. Tilson?”

  Sana shook his head slowly. “I doubt he’s still alive.”

  “Murdered?”

  “Look, if he was in a car crash or something of that nature, we would know by now. So, the question at hand now is who murdered him and where is he? Buried somewhere? Thrown over a cliff? I don’t know.”

  “How about thrown over a bridge?” Sowah said. “We have an eyewitness who saw something that looked like a body being dumped over the Adome Bridge into the Volta on the night of Gordon’s disappearance.”

  “Really.” Sana leaned back in his chair, discomposure showing even with his mask hiding his expression. “Oh. That’s not good at all. Have you informed the police?”

  “This morning I spoke to DCOP Laryea about possibly getting some divers to search the river, but things move at a snail’s pace at CID and I don’t expect anything to happen soon in that regard. Meanwhile, Emma has asked some local fishermen to keep a lookout while they’re on the river.”

  “Good,” Sana said.

  “I’m curious, Mr. Sana,” Sowah said, “have the police ever spoken to you about Tilson?”

  “No, they haven’t,” Sana said. “Like you, they probably didn’t know of any connection between the two of us. Besides, on this issue they might want to avoid me like the plague if they’re the ones responsible for Tilson’s death.”

  Sowah looked startled. “What do you mean?”

  “Consider it. If indeed there are top police personnel involved in these scams, and I’m positive there are, and Mr. Tilson went to Ponsu asking probing questions about some of these same high-level cops that Ponsu is regularly in touch with, that sets up a potentially dangerous situation for Tilson. I don’t need to tell you that one messes with high authority at one’s peril, and one should leave it to the professionals.”

  “Do you have a specific person or persons in mind?” Sowah asked.

  “No one definite yet,” Sana said. “But I’m working on it.”

  Sowah looked at Emma. “Did you have any questions? Anything I missed?”

  She leaned toward him and said in a low voice, “His whereabouts.”

  Sowah nodded, stood up, and stretched out his hand to Sana. “We will take our leave, now. Thank you very much for your time. This has been very informative. Just one more thing—”

  “On the third of April,” Sana interrupted, “I was in the States doing some TED talks. There are some recent YouTube videos of me with a verifiable date. Is that what you wanted?”r />
  “It is,” Sowah said. “Thank you, sir.”

  FIFTY-FIVE

  DCOP Cleo Laryea generally did not like Mondays and he was already grumpy when, as he had promised the director-general, he summoned DCS Quaino and DI Damptey to his office.

  They entered his frigid, air-conditioned office like a pair of guilty children due for a spanking, giving the customary civilian salute by stiffening briefly with closed palms facing backward.

  “Sit,” Laryea said curtly from behind his desk. They kept their eyes down until he began to speak. “We have this American man missing since April. That is your case, correct, DI Damptey?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Update me on your progress so far.”

  “Yes please,” Damptey said. “After the man’s son—I mean Mr. Tilson’s son, Derek—came to CID to report his father missing in middle of May—around there—we started to work diligently on it while following several leads—”

  “What leads? Be specific.”

  “Please, we were in touch with the locations where the gentleman—Mr. Gordon—was residing here in Accra and also at Akosombo.”

  “What did you learn?”

  “At first he was staying at a certain hotel, em—”

  “Kempinski,” Quaino prompted.

  “Yes, Kempinski, and then he moved to another place one European woman owns. When I talked to her at March ending, she told me Mr. Gordon Tilson had left to Akosombo to stay at someone’s home, but he never returned after that. So, then we called the homeowner and spoke to him. We found out that on the morning Mr. Gordon was supposed to leave, he was absent from his room and all his possessions were gone.”

  “Did you find any signs of struggle in the room?”

  Damptey, shifting her weight and appearing uncomfortable, seemed to have lost her tongue.

  DCS Quaino came to her rescue. “Please, due to transportation issues, we have not as yet been able to visit the Akosombo site—”

  “What?” Laryea’s eyes blinked rapidly. “A possible scene of the crime and you haven’t seen it in person?”

  “Please, we couldn’t secure a vehicle—”

  Laryea cut him off. “Don’t try that old, worn-out excuse because it doesn’t work on me. What about Derek Tilson? Did you ask him to assist you with transportation costs?”

  “Sir,” Quaino said, firming up, “we asked him, but he was annoyed because we were asking him to cover our transportation costs. He doesn’t understand how our system works.”

  “What system?” Laryea asked icily. “What system? Derek Tilson is right to be annoyed! Why should he pay our transport costs? That is not a system. That’s your laziness, pure and simple. Oh, you think because now I’m a DCOP I’ve forgotten how officers make up these inflated transportation costs and pocket the change?”

  The two flagellated officers sat as still and silent as they could. If only they could magically disappear.

  Laryea sighed wearily and ran his hand back and forth over his hair, of which there was less and less these days. “So, where are we with the case at this moment?”

  “Sir,” Quaino said, taking over, “from the beginning, Mr. Gordon’s driver has been a person of interest.”

  “What driver?” Laryea said, frowning.

  “Oh, sorry, sir. I didn’t explain it well. Let me start from the beginning.”

  “Please do.”

  “Mr. Gordon went to Akosombo on twenty-seventh March with the intention of staying five days at a private lodge by the Volta River. He rented a vehicle from a business called Executive Fleets here in Accra. They provided him with a driver called Yahya Azure. While Mr. Gordon was at the lodge, Yahya stayed nearby in Atimpoku. On the morning of third April when Mr. Gordon was to return to Accra, Yahya told us that when he arrived to pick up Mr. Gordon, the gentleman did not respond to his texts or calls. Yahya claims the front door of the lodge was open, so he went inside to discover that Mr. Gordon was nowhere to be found and his luggage was also not there.”

  Laryea nodded. This was how a narrative was supposed to be done. “Okay, go on.”

  “So, Mr. Yahya called the owner, one Mr. Labram, who came down to also have a look and confirmed that Mr. Gordon had disappeared along with his luggage and laptop and phone and everything.”

  “You spoke to Mr. Labram yourself?” Laryea asked.

  “Yes please. On the phone.”

  “What happened after that?”

  “Mr. Yahya returned to Accra and his employer sacked him, saying he was ultimately responsible for the safety of the clients.

  “DI Damptey and I then conducted a search of the vehicle that Mr. Gordon had used, but we found nothing—no traces of blood or anything like that. Mr. Yahya also gave us permission to search his house in Shukura and at first everything was normal until DI Damptey, to her credit, found a dark brown jacket of fine quality that Yahya had been keeping in his room in a plastic bag. When we asked him about it, Yahya said Mr. Gordon had accidentally left it in the rental vehicle on the eve of their departure from Akosombo, and so Yahya kept it with him in the bag with the intention of giving the jacket back to Mr. Gordon in the morning. But, of course, in the morning, the white man was gone and Yahya held on to the jacket for safekeeping, so no one at the car rental would steal it.”

  “What did Yahya plan to do with it eventually?” Laryea asked.

  “He said he wasn’t sure,” Quaino said. “But anyway, we confiscated the jacket as evidence and asked the forensics lab to check for bloodstains. They didn’t find any. We were still not satisfied, so a few days later, we questioned Mr. Yahya again and on this occasion, his story changed in that now he claimed Mr. Gordon had given him the jacket as a gift.

  “It was on Friday after you called me, sir, that I went over the case carefully with DI Damptey and we realized that Yahya was not really in the clear. On Saturday morning, we went to see him to ask again how Mr. Gordon’s jacket had come into his possession and how he discovered Mr. Gordon had disappeared. He became confused when I asked him why Mr. Gordon should give Yahya a jacket that is oversized for his small stature. I then arrested him for property theft and brought him to CID to question him more closely.

  “We questioned him on Saturday afternoon. Eventually he broke down and made a signed confession that very early on the morning of third April, he went to the lodge with the intention of robbing Mr. Gordon of all his possessions. During his attempt, Mr. Gordon accosted him, and a struggle ensued. Yahya knocked him out and took all his belongings including the luggage, his laptop and mobile phone.”

  Laryea leaned back in his ergonomic chair. “And where are those items, then?”

  “We believe Yahya sold them but either forgot to get rid of the jacket or simply decided to keep it.”

  “Yes, but then where is Mr. Gordon?” Laryea asked, mystified.

  “Okay, this is another strange part,” Quaino said. “Yahya admits to overpowering Mr. Gordon, knocking him out and taking all his things, but says he left Gordon in the lodge lying on the floor. Yahya says he doesn’t know what happened to Gordon between the time he left him unconscious in the lodge around three in the morning and when he returned about four hours later to supposedly collect Mr. Gordon back to Accra. We don’t believe him. We believe in fact that Yahya murdered the American and has disposed of the body somewhere. He’s just afraid to confess to the full crime, but we believe he will do so in due course.”

  Laryea blew his breath out through his cheeks. “You have a perfectly decent job as a driver and then you rob and murder a client? It makes no sense.”

  “He’s uneducated and also a little bit stupid, sir.”

  Laryea grunted and contemplatively rested his temple against a closed fist. “Just one thing, though. If Yahya had a struggle with Mr. Gordon, there must have been signs of it, surely? Furniture scattered, table lamps overturned—thi
ngs like that. Did Mr. Labram say anything about that?”

  “No, he didn’t, sir.”

  Laryea was doubtful. “Well, we’ll see if Yahya confesses to anything further, but I’m afraid your case is not that strong, Quaino. It’s very blurry around the edges. You understand what I mean by that? It’s not solid at all.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The motive is not well defined, and if this jacket is the only physical evidence tying Yahya to the crime of murder, it won’t stand up well in court.”

  “But he will confess,” Quaino said with confidence. “I am certain of that.”

  FIFTY-SIX

  April 3, Akosombo, Ghana

  Gordon Tilson hadn’t smoked in decades and he didn’t know how or why the urge had suddenly materialized. Standing at the side of the Riverview Cottage, he puffed away at his second cigarette for the night. The bubbling sound of the river was soothing, and he needed that. One o’clock in the morning and he couldn’t sleep.

  His visit to Akosombo had been eventful but he couldn’t say successful, exactly. He had met with Kweku Ponsu four days ago, but it hadn’t gone as well as Gordon had hoped. At first, under the watchful eye of the twins Clifford or Clement, the conversation had been easygoing enough—where Gordon was from in the States, how long he had been in Ghana and where he was staying in Akosombo, and so on.

  When Ponsu asked Gordon about the purpose of the visit, Yahya quickly answered for Gordon in some local language and the response appeared to have satisfied Ponsu—something to the effect that Gordon was writing a book about traditions in Ghana.

  Gordon wanted to learn about Ponsu’s involvement with sakawa boys and how the system worked. What, specifically, did they come to Ponsu for? What did they pay him? How did Ponsu communicate with the gods, and so on?