Wife of the Gods (23 page)

He had to get fuel and pulled up to a Total station.

“Do you know where the Ghana Health Service office is?” he asked
the attendant as he filled the tank.

“I think it’s somewhere near the Community Center,” he said.

“And where is the Community Center?”

“Past the Municipal Assembly.”

Dawson grinned. No doubt all perfectly correct, but he still
didn’t know how to get to the GHS office.

♦

After some clarification and a little wandering around, Dawson
found the Community Center, and the Ghana Health Service regional
office was indeed adjacent to it. He parked and crossed the stretch
of unpaved ground to the entrance.

Not one of the newfangled buildings in town, it looked rather
rickety on the outside, but it was blissfully air-conditioned on
the inside. The four employees busy at their computers were a lucky
bunch.

“Good afternoon,” Dawson said.

They chorused back the greeting, and one of the men asked how he
could be of help.

“I’m looking for Mr. Timothy Sowah,” Dawson said. “Is he
here?”

“No, he hasn’t come yet.”

“Any idea when he’ll be in?”

Everyone shook heads and said no.

“Do you know where he lives?”

One of the clerks came out onto the street with Dawson and
pointed south along the road with instructions like “next to the My
Savior Barber Shop” and “turn where you see the petrol
station.”

The directions took Dawson to a more residential area. Once he
thought he was in the vicinity, he got out of the car and started
asking around for Sowah. A streetwise teenage boy said he could
take Dawson to his house.

They walked some distance past a group of shacks and a woman at
a stand selling eggplants and tomatoes, then down a craggy lane
with mosquito-friendly puddles of water. On the other side, the
teenager pointed. “That is it.”

Dawson fished in his pocket and gave the boy a dash. He scuttled
off jubilantly.

Timothy’s house was a cut above most. It was painted a sensible
bronze color that masked the dust, and with its neatly shuttered
windows, it looked like one of those perfect little square houses
children draw. Outside, two teams of girls were deep into a game of
ampe
.

He knocked on the screen door.

“Come in,” a female voice called out.

Dawson found a young woman breast-feeding her baby in the front
room.

“Good afternoon. I’m Detective Inspector Dawson. Is Mr. Sowah
here?”

The woman hitched her baby up a little closer to her bosom. “No
sir, he’s not here.”

“What about Mrs. Sowah?”

“She went to market with the children.”

“I see. Are you a relative?”

“I’m his niece.” Her name was Charlotte, and her baby was four
months old.

“She’s a beautiful little girl,” Dawson said.

She smiled shyly. “Thank you.”

“Do you know when Mr. Sowah will be back?”

“I think he will come soon.”

Soon
could mean almost anything. Dawson debated what he
should do.

“Thank you,” he told the niece. “I’ll come back.”

He set back out for the Ho Magistrate Court, a salmon-colored,
single-story building he had noticed while he had been looking for
the GHS office. It took him about an hour to obtain the search
warrants he needed. Not bad at all.

When Dawson returned, Charlotte was watching television while
her baby slept on her lap. Timothy hadn’t come back yet. Dawson had
no inclination to sit around waiting, so he showed the warrant to
the young mother, who read it and nodded uncertainly when Dawson
told her he was going to search Timothy’s bedroom.

The hallway beyond the front room was dim. There were two doors
off either side and one at the end, which Dawson correctly guessed
was Timothy’s room. He pushed the door open, stepped in, and looked
around. Compulsively neat and well organized – exactly what Dawson
would have expected from Timothy Sowah. Nonfiction books were in
one bookcase, on the left side of a shiny mahogany desk, and
fiction was in another bookcase on the right. Dawson noticed they
were arranged alphabetically by author. Atop the desk was a
nice-looking laptop. Judging from that and his fancy Audi, Timothy
Sowah was not a man without means.

Dawson turned to the desk, which had a column of four drawers on
either side. He wanted to search quickly and efficiently, and
preferably finish before Timothy, his new suspect, returned.
Primarily he was looking for Gladys’s diary, but he was also on the
lookout for anything else relevant.

Timothy’s drawers were arranged as meticulously as his
bookshelves – paper in one, stationery in the next, a third with
AIDS information pamphlets. Nothing was out of place.

Dawson found no diary. He checked the underside of the desk,
where people often hide items with the aid of tape. Nothing
there.

Dawson began to go through every book on the shelves. Perhaps
Timothy had slid the diary between them or within one. He found
nothing.

He spun a few revolutions in the chair, which was fun but made
him dizzy. As he waited for the room to stop spinning, he noticed a
recessed handle at the
side
of the desk. He pulled on it,
and it tilted out to reveal a wedge-shaped space deeper than it was
wide. Dawson’s hand shot in and retrieved two items. They were both
identity badges for the Ministry of Health. One belonged to Timothy
Sowah, Supervisor, Department of Archives. The other belonged to
Humphrey Sekyi.

“Ah,” Dawson sighed. How utterly rewarding.

Two minutes later, voices drifted in from the front of the
house, and Dawson recognized one of them as Timothy’s. Hurried
footsteps approached until Timothy made his appearance in the
bedroom doorway.

∨
Wife of the Gods
∧

“C
an I be of
assistance, Inspector Dawson?” Polite but icy.

“I certainly hope so.”

Timothy moved into the room like a wary cat. “May I ask what you
are doing here?”

“I need to ask you one or two questions.”

“Charlotte tells me you have a search warrant. May I see
it?”

Dawson handed it to him. He read it quickly and gave it
back.

“What is it you’re searching for?”

“You were a supervisor of the Archives Department at MoH in
Accra?”

“Yes. That’s correct.” Still wary. “Why do you ask?”

“Do you remember Humphrey Sekyi?”

Timothy’s eyes flickered. “I don’t recall that name.”

“You should. He worked under you in Archives until you sacked
him.”

“Oh, yes, yes, of course. It slipped my mind. I fired him for
theft. Why your interest in him?”

“It appears a Humphrey Sekyi from the MoH went to the women’s
hall at the University of Ghana and got into Gladys’s dormitory
room.”

“Good gracious,” Timothy said. “How? Or why? What would he want
there?”

“He
wouldn’t want anything there, because Humphrey Sekyi
is dead.”

The side of Timothy’s face twitched, and his Adam’s apple bobbed
up and down like a rubber ball. “All right, but what does this have
to do with me, or with your being here in my room, for that
matter?”

“Everything. The man who went into Gladys’s room matches your
description exactly. Including being left-handed. When you sacked
Sekyi, he turned in his badge, which came in very handy when you
needed someone to impersonate.”

“You can’t prove any of this.”

Dawson held up both the badges he had found, and Timothy’s eyes
almost jumped out of his head.

“Do you want to modify your story now?” Dawson asked.

Timothy slumped into a chair behind him, sighed, and put his
head in his hands.

“You forced open Gladys’s desk drawer and took her diary, didn’t
you?” Dawson asked.

Timothy nodded. “Yes.”

“Why did you do that?”

“Mr. Dawson, I must be honest with you. The trouble is…the
problem is I was having an affair with Gladys. I was in love with
her.”

“Go on.”

“The diary – Well, I had never read anything from it before
Gladys’s death, but she always told me it had her deepest and most
secret thoughts. I was curious, but out of respect when she was
alive, I never trespassed. When she died, I panicked because I knew
the family would soon be picking up all her belongings, and they’d
be able to read everything. I couldn’t afford it getting out that I
was having an affair. So, yes, I hurried to her dorm room and was
relieved to find the diary was still there, and I took it. I wanted
to be completely certain no one could track me, so I used a dead
man’s identification. I thought I was being clever.”

“Where is the diary now? What did you do with it?”

Timothy’s jaw was working rhythmically. He did not look at
Dawson.

“What did you do with it, Timothy?”

He took a deep breath. “I burned it.”

His voice warbled badly, and Dawson smiled inwardly.
Timothy
Sowah, you are lying to me
.

“What was in the diary?”

“She wrote every day – sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. She
talked about everything.”

“About you?”

“Yes. How she felt whenever she was with me – here in town or
out in the rural areas. We snatched moments here and there.”

“Did you write love letters to each other?”

“When she was away at school, we did. She was more inclined to
write than I was.”

“Did you save the letters?”

“For a while, yes.”

“But then you destroyed them too.”

“I did.”

“Did you love Gladys as much as she did you?”

He hesitated. “I don’t know. Well, probably not.”

“For instance, you would not have left your wife to marry her,
would you?”

“It would have been impossible, Inspector Dawson.”

“Was Gladys pressuring you to do just that?”

“I had to explain how unrealistic it would have been.”

Timothy looked up and faced Dawson’s gaze unflinchingly for a
moment, and then he looked away. “I miss her. Badly.”

“Perhaps too much to destroy her diary.”

Timothy started. “Pardon?”

“The diary is not in this house because having it here would
risk its being discovered by your wife,” Dawson said, “but I don’t
believe you’ve destroyed it. The diary is like a part of Gladys’s
soul. It contains Gladys’s essence. She’s been murdered, you miss
her terribly, and now you’ll set her soul alight and burn it? I
don’t think so. You’re not that kind of person. Where is the diary,
Timothy?”

“Inspector Dawson,” he said, “I’ve told you the truth.”

“We’ll see about that,” Dawson said. “Let’s pay a visit to your
office in town.”

♦

As Timothy Sowah sat sullenly in a corner, Dawson began to strip
the GHS office down. First he emptied every drawer and checked that
none had a false bottom. Then he started on the bookcases, flipping
through every volume of mind-paralyzing GHS documents.

There was a locked gunmetal gray cabinet along the rear wall of
the room. “What’s in here?” Dawson asked, rattling the door.

“Old files and things like that,” Timothy said.

“Would you open it up, please?”

“As you wish.”

The cabinet contained more daunting rows of folders, ring
binders, and large envelopes. Dawson did not show it, but he was
beginning to lose some of his confidence as he searched each item
and found nothing. He turned away.

“I hope I’ve been able to help,” Timothy said as he locked the
cabinet again.

Dawson said nothing. He scanned the room and reflected what an
extraordinarily ordered person Timothy Sowah was – the type who, as
a student, was always the first to get his textbooks and label them
neatly with his name.

Once upon a time in primary and secondary school, the more
compulsive pupils would design jackets to protect the covers of
their new textbooks. Some jackets were fashioned most intricately,
with precisely folded edges and self-locking corners. Plain wax
paper and brown paper were common, but a colorful or unique jacket
was prestigious. One made from old newspaper was laughable and
considered bush, as in unsophisticated. Timothy would have been the
type who made superior book covers.

Book covers
.

Dawson inclined his head and stared at the cabinet.

“Something wrong, Inspector?”

“Unlock that again, please.”

On the top shelf, four ring binders. Dawson transferred them to
Timothy’s desk. One of them had a white plastic jacket. Dawson
pulled it off and looked at the edges of the binder’s hard covers.
The back one was thicker than the front, and its edge seemed to
have been tampered with. He pressed his fingertips into the edge
and wiggled them in until the cover began to separate into two
layers. He grasped with both hands and pulled hard. The binder’s
cover came apart. A dark blue, embossed leather diary was tucked
securely within.

Timothy’s head fell forward as if he had been guillotined.

♦

In the center of the diary were two folded, handwritten letters.
Both began with “Dearest Gladys” and ended with “Love from Tim.”
One paragraph in one letter, written in February, stood out to
Dawson. Timothy had written:

I love you, dearest, but I hope you understand I
still have a family to take care of and I do have obligations. I
can’t just leave my wife. My love, I’m not rejecting you, I’m just
trying to explain the reality we’re facing.

Next, Dawson flipped through the pages of the diary. Gladys had
made an entry almost every day, with few gaps. She gave accounts of
her journeys and AIDS teaching sessions, but in other entries she
poured out her feelings about AIDS, poverty, superstition, and
ignorance.

Thursday, 20
^th
March. I left him a message
on his mobile. I told him he has to meet me tomorrow by the forest
footpath after I’ve finished my work at Bedome, and that if he
shuns me, he
will
regret it because I will be paying his
wife a little visit. “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred
turned, nor Hell a fury like a woman scorned.”