Wife of the Gods (12 page)

Papa stayed in the house, and Darko played in the yard with some
friends. Cairo sat in his wheelchair watching them. After a while
they got together and pushed him careening around the yard while he
laughed at the top of his lungs.

Darko looked up as Detective Armah appeared again at the side of
the yard and beckoned to him. He walked a little way with Darko out
of sight of the house and stooped down face-to-face with him.

“You want your mama back, eh?”

Darko nodded.

“She’s a good mother to you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And your father? Is he good too?”

Darko hesitated too long. “Yes, sir. He is good too.”

“He never beat your mama or threatened to do something to
her?”

“No.”

Armah asked him a few more questions like that – actually the
same question in different ways. At first, Darko couldn’t
understand why he kept doing that, but then like a flash of light
in the dark, he realized what the detective was after. That was
Dawson’s first, chilly lesson that, in murder cases, those closest
to the victim could well be prime suspects. It took Darko’s breath
away. It had not even entered his mind before now that Papa could
remotely be involved with Mama’s disappearance. It was a terrible,
awful thought. Darko began to tremble.

“When will you find Mama?” he said, close to tears.

“I will try very hard, Darko, okay?” Armah said. “I promise
you.”

His voice was firm, but he held Darko surprisingly softly. Darko
didn’t know that kind of touch from his father, and he hadn’t
realized a man could be so gentle.

Armah kept his promise. Month after month, he stayed in close
contact, bringing them news even when there was little to be
brought. Every answered question seemed to raise a new one, and
there was more information on what had
not
happened than
what
had
. For instance, on the day Mama left Ketanu, no
tro-tro collisions between Ketanu and Accra were reported. That
practically ruled out Mama having been in a vehicle crash, but it
still didn’t help determine where along her journey she had
disappeared, nor the how and why.

Armah had shown Mama’s picture to dozens of people at the bus
stop at Atimpoku. One fish trader had remembered spotting her the
day she had been in transit with Darko and Cairo, but not on the
day she had disappeared. Armah had also been up to Ketanu twice.
Yes, people had seen Beatrice, Osewa’s sister, but no one could
shed any light on what could have happened to her.

Armah had quickly eliminated Papa as a suspect because his
alibi, much of it provided by Darko and Cairo themselves, was
airtight. Still, Armah continued to come up with more questions
about Mama, and sometimes it seemed he had a promising lead.
Nothing materialized, but Armah never showed any sense of
hopelessness.

To this day, Dawson remembered the exact moment he looked at
Armah and thought,
I want to be like you when I grow up
. The
sun was setting at the time, and Armah had been at the house for a
few minutes. For a moment the detective turned his head to one
side, and the living room window framed his profile in sharp
outline against the vermilion dusk. His nose was sharp and strong.
He was looking downward with heavily lidded eyes, and he seemed to
be wishing for something – maybe that he could find Mama, maybe
that the world would not be so cruel so much of the time.

In the end, Armah never did find her. He kept in touch, yes, but
time passed and the trail grew cold. He began to visit less and
less frequently, and Darko could see he was more despondent each
time. Almost a year to the day after he had first appeared at the
doorstep, he came for the last time and announced that he was being
transferred to Kumasi.

Darko’s heart plunged, and he felt sick and faint.

“I’ll write to you, okay?” Armah was saying, his hand on Darko’s
shoulder.

Darko nodded dumbly, scared to say anything in case he burst
into tears. He was a big boy of thirteen now, and he wasn’t
supposed to cry.

Two weeks later a letter arrived in the mail addressed to
“Master Darko Dawson.” Darko feverishly opened it and immediately
felt his chest swell with pride. It was Armah writing to him in his
methodical, looped handwriting. He wanted to know how Darko was,
how school was going, and how Papa and Cairo were doing. But he
hadn’t written to Papa or Cairo, he had written to
him
,
Darko.

Then and there, he sat down to write a very long and careful
reply, and the enduring pen-pal exchange between him and Detective
Armah was born. His last line of the letter was “When I grow up, I
want to be a detective just like you.”

A father to me
, Dawson often thought, and more inspiring
than the real one by far. His respect for Armah was undiminished by
the detective’s failure to solve Mama’s disappearance.

From afar, Armah had followed Darko through secondary school,
and once, on a rare visit to Accra, he came by the house and was
astonished to find the teenager had surpassed his height and
appeared to be getting even taller.

“Still want to be a detective?” Armah asked him.

“Yes.” The answer never wavered.

Armah would smile quietly and nod. Darko liked that. Just a
small gesture, but so affirming. In contrast, Papa thought being a
detective was a “stupid” career, but by then Darko was used to his
father’s disapproval of practically everything.

Armah had been present for Dawson’s graduation from the National
Police Academy. He didn’t have to say how proud he was. Dawson
could see it shining in his eyes.

Years after Dawson’s graduation, Armah took early retirement
from the police force and set up his own private detective agency
in Kumasi. “When you get tired of the grind,” he told Dawson, “come
and join me.”

As little as Dawson was inclined to leave Homicide for now, he
would never categorically refuse an invitation from the wisest,
most perceptive man in the world. Indeed, it was Armah who had told
him that everyone, no matter how nice or respected, has at least
one enemy. Perhaps Gladys Mensah was proof of that.

♦

Darko drifted off and then woke with a start. He looked at his
watch. He had been asleep for more than an hour. His phone was
charged enough to ring Christine. A smile wide as the Volta River
broke out on his face when she answered.

“Well, it’s about time, Detective Inspector,” she exclaimed. “We
thought you’d forgotten about us.”

“Forget about you?” He laughed. “Impossible.”

∨
Wife of the Gods
∧

D
awson woke early the
next morning, took a shower, threw on some fresh clothes, and sat
down to study a map of the region. As Timothy Sowah had mentioned,
Ketanu and Bedome were about a kilometer apart. Separating the two
places was the forest in which Gladys’s body had been found. The
footpath Dawson and Inspector Fiti had taken the day before tracked
through the southern tip of the forest. Most important, it was the
same route Gladys would have taken back and forth between the two
towns. Approximately halfway between the two, but closer to Bedome,
Gladys’s crossing had been interrupted by either herself or someone
else and she had ended up dead some distance north of the path.

Bedome was east of Ketanu, and some fifteen kilometers east
again of Bedome was the Kalakpa Reserve, the only remaining
undisturbed forest in the Volta Region.

When Dawson had visited Ketanu as a boy, the forest bordering
the eastern edge of the town had been denser, but years of tree
felling and burning, most of it illegal, had thinned it out. In
fact, much of the Volta Region’s forestland had suffered in this
way.

The Bedome end of the footpath was visible from Isaac Kutu’s
compound, which was about three hundred meters away. Dawson
visualized the compound, the footpath, and the village of Bedome as
forming the three points of a right-angled triangle.

Some distance from the footpath, perhaps a hundred meters, a
cluster of farmers’ small plots bordered the edge of the forest.
Reportedly, some of the farmers had spotted Samuel Boateng with
Gladys on Friday evening.

So what could have happened? Samuel lured Gladys to the plantain
grove and killed her there? Dawson wondered what sort of compelling
ruse would have got her to follow him into the forest.

He turned again to the police file and studied the photographs
of the body and the surroundings in which it had been found.
Strangled to death in that pretty blue and white outfit adorned
with little Adinkra symbols
. Dawson tilted his head, and then
turned the photograph ninety degrees clockwise. There was something
too neat about the way Gladys was lying. In his mind he saw the
violent struggle until she was finally still. As Dr. Biney had
said, strangling another person to death is not that easy. Then the
murderer dragged her to lie beside this palm tree. Did he rearrange
her clothing – make it neat, rest her arms by her sides? Undoing,
it was called. Dawson preferred his own term: killer’s remorse.
You’ve just murdered your spouse or parent or child, and now
you’re trying to reverse it by making everything nice and
pretty
.

Dawson looked up at a knock on the door. He crossed the floor in
three steps and opened the door to find a magnificent woman dressed
in shimmering, swirling
white
, with a matching headdress. A
white outfit in dusty Ketanu? Next to her, dwarfed by her size and
splendid appearance, was a fortyish man with a vanishingly thin
body and large head.

“Morning, morning,” the woman said.

“Good morning.”

“Are you Detective Inspector Dawson?”

“I am.”

She thrust out her hand. “I’m Elizabeth, Gladys Mensah’s
aunt.”

She had a firm grip, but her palm was butter smooth.

“This is my nephew Charles, Gladys’s brother.”

Dawson shook hands with him as well and invited them both in. He
watched Elizabeth as they entered. She looked to be in her early
fifties. She was tall and plentifully built, and held her chin at
just the right angle to give her carriage a regal air.

“Please have a seat,” Dawson said. “Apologies for the lack of
space.”

“Quite all right, Mr. Dawson,” Elizabeth said, casting a quick
look around the room. “It’s not your fault the Ministry of Health
is so stingy with their accommodations. They could have done
better.”

Dawson smiled at the sharpness of the criticism. Elizabeth took
the chair, and Dawson and Charles sat on a bed each.

“We heard yesterday that you had arrived in Ketanu to
investigate my niece’s death,” she said, “and we wanted to talk to
you as soon as possible.”

Her voice had the texture of rich, warm velvet.

“First of all, my condolences,” Dawson said. “I know this isn’t
easy.”

“Thank you,” Charles said softly. He was despondent, his
shoulders slumped. “I still can’t believe it happened. I keep
thinking it’s a nightmare I’m walking through, and on the other
side of it, Gladys will be there with her smile and her laugh and
her cleverness.”

“Yes,” Dawson said. “I know that feeling well.” And he did.
“When you say her smile and her laugh and her cleverness, I begin
to get a picture of her personality, and I’m grateful to you for
that because I’ve been wondering what her spirit was like, and who
Gladys the woman was.”

Elizabeth’s eyes became soft. “It’s very hard to put into words,
Inspector Dawson – even for Charles and me, or any of the family
who was close to her. And if you had met her, you would have the
same difficulty expressing it.”

“She made you want to be around her,” Charles said. “So
magnetic, so full of energy and love, and she gave it out freely
for everyone to experience.”

“And a quick and brilliant mind,” Elizabeth said. “Sometimes she
talked so fast she would lose people, but when she wanted to pass
on her message – about AIDS, about life, about anything – she came
down or rose up to whatever level she needed to be. People
sometimes said she had a hot temper, but that wasn’t it. It was
that she was a
passionate
person. That’s what you have to
understand about her.”

Dawson nodded.

“It seems almost too easy to take a life like that,” Elizabeth
said. “It shouldn’t be that way.”

The tears welling up spilled over onto her cheeks. She dabbed
her eyes and face with a handkerchief. Charles put his hand on her
arm and squeezed.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“It’s still early,” Dawson said gently. “The wound is
fresh.”

“Still,” Elizabeth said, “I hadn’t exactly intended to subject
you to this display, Detective Inspector.” She laughed ruefully
through her tears.

Dawson smiled. “When was the last time you saw Gladys?”

“Late Friday afternoon, when she left the house for Bedome,”
Charles said. “People say she was there till just before
sunset.”

“I see,” Dawson said. “So, between five thirty and six Friday
evening, had all the family except Gladys returned home?”

“Yes. I had been in Ho and returned around five, and Auntie
Elizabeth came from the shop about an hour later to help Mummy with
the cooking.”

“And your father?”

“He had been at the farm, but he went home early in the
afternoon because his gout was troubling him.”

“I know why you’re asking these questions, Mr. Dawson,”
Elizabeth said. “There’s no one,
no
one among us who didn’t
love and cherish Gladys, and not one of us would ever want to hurt
her, let alone kill her.”

“I’m sure that’s the case. Then let’s talk about who
would
want to kill her.”

“Togbe Fafali Adzima, the fetish priest at Bedome, for sure,”
Charles said at once. “He hated her, and I kept warning her to be
careful with him.”