Wife of the Gods (3 page)

“Maybe someone dragged her body and the shoe got pulled off,”
Fiti speculated.

“I found another thing, sir,” Gyamfi told him.

Moist dead leaves crunched softly under their feet as they moved
ten meters farther along.

“Here, sir.” Gyamfi pointed to a black leather briefcase soiled
by mud and vegetation debris.

“
Aha
.”

Fiti opened the partially unzipped top of the bag and found
papers inside clumped together in a soggy mass. They were flyers
about AIDS – simple diagrams with arrows going back and forth. Man
to woman, woman to man, woman to baby. Underneath those was the
“ABC” campaign of Abstinence, Being faithful, and Condoms. At the
very bottom of the briefcase was a mobile telephone just as soaked
as the pamphlets.

Fiti left the bag exactly where he had found it. He went back to
the rope, where Isaac stood waiting.

“You say a woman from Bedome found her?” Fiti asked him.

“Yes. One of Togbe Adzima’s wives – Efia.”

“Where is she now?”

Isaac shrugged. “Back in Bedome, I suppose. She ran away.”

“But why did you let her?” Fiti demanded. “You should have told
her to stay here.”

“I did,” Isaac said evenly, “but she was afraid to be here alone
in the forest with a dead body.”

Fiti pressed his lips together in some annoyance. “When you got
here with Togbe Adzima’s wife, those plantain leaves were covering
the body?”

“No, I put them there.”

Fiti scowled. “Why?”

“Respect for the dead, Inspector.”

“But you didn’t disturb anything?”

“No.”

Fiti grunted and returned to the corpse. Gladys’s clothes were
spattered with mud from last night’s rain, which had started after
dusk. She had been – still was – wearing a fashionable blue and
white blouse and matching skirt, both with decorative Adinkra
symbols. In the old days, you saw Adinkra cloth only at funerals.
Now anyone could wear it as fashion, and it was a tourist item as
well.

Fiti leaned down. Gladys’s color was changing – she was much
blacker than she had been in life, with a greenish hue that
repelled him.

“Help me,” he said to Gyamfi. “I need to see her back. No, go to
her other side and roll her toward you.”

Gyamfi grasped Gladys’s shoulder and pulled gently. She was
heavier and more inert than he had anticipated, and she did not
roll on the first try. The second time, he was successful. She
moved in one piece, like a log.

Apart from the mud and twigs that soiled Gladys’s back, there
was nothing out of the ordinary. No blood, no visible injuries, and
no tears in her dress. Her braided hair was still beautifully in
place, so it was easy to see that her scalp was free from
injury.

“All right,” Fiti said.

They released her body and stared at it for a moment. Fiti
didn’t know what to make of it.
What had happened to her?
A
healthy woman of only twenty-two years of age. And what had she
been doing here? How did she get here?

“There’s no mark on her,” he said, mystified. “Maybe she was
poisoned?”

Fiti heard a loud cry and whirled around. Gladys’s mother,
Dorcas, appeared from behind a flank of plantain trees screaming.
She already knows
, Fiti thought. Dorcas could barely hold
herself up, her body ravaged by emotion. Her oldest son, Charles,
was propping her up on one side, her husband, Kofi, on the other.
Behind them was a long trail of family members.

Fiti and Gyamfi leapt up to head them off.

“Stay back,” Fiti said, holding up his palms to them.
“Stay
back!
”

But one or two in the group forcefully held down the cordoning
rope, and the family surged forward across it shouting, pushing the
inspector aside as if he had not been there at all. Gyamfi had a
little bit more success holding off some of the family, but not
much.

Dorcas fell onto her daughter, and her shrieks became
animal-like. Kofi was frozen in place at the sight of Gladys’s
body. Charles turned away and vomited.

Fiti was furious. Until proven otherwise, this was a crime
scene, and any policeman worth his salt knew it had to be
preserved.

“Get them away from there!” he shouted at Gyamfi.

Together they began to try to pull and push people back with a
combination of cajoling and physical force. Fiti put his hand on
Dorcas’s shoulder as she crouched over her daughter’s body weeping
uncontrollably.

“Dorcas, come away, eh?” He turned to Kofi. “Take her away from
here, I beg you. It’s too much for her, too much.”

Dorcas resisted, but Kofi and Charles coaxed her to go with them
to a spot under a mango tree where Gladys was out of her sight.
This gave Fiti and Gyamfi some momentum, and they were able to urge
the rest of the multitude – family and unrelated onlookers – back
behind the cordon. While Gyamfi kept them at bay, Fiti, sweat
pouring off his face and body in rivulets, got on his mobile. He
liked everything in Ketanu under his control, but he knew when it
was time to call in the big boys from Ho. He needed help.

∨
Wife of the Gods
∧

D
arko Dawson rode a
Honda Shadow Spirit so he could maneuver between vehicles and get
to work much faster than he would in a car.

“I wish you wouldn’t ride that thing, Dark,” his wife said as he
put on his helmet. “It’s so dangerous.”

“Not this debate again,” Dawson said. “Christine, I’m not
spending two hours sitting in traffic just to get across town, so
until and unless they build an underground system in this city, it
will have to be a motorbike.”

Accra, Dawson’s smoky, noisy hometown and Ghana’s capital, had
traffic jams rivaling the worst in the world. Christine, a primary
school teacher, was lucky that her job was close enough to walk it,
but Dawson worked at Criminal Investigations Department
Headquarters, eight tortuous kilometers away.

He kissed his son good-bye. “Be good, Hosiah, okay?”

“Okay, Daddy,” the boy said.

Hosiah, six years old, was their only child. At the end of a
hellish pregnancy, he had emerged in perfect form except for one
important detail: he had a hole in his heart, or more correctly,
ventricular septal defect.

Dawson worried about his boy every single day. The doctors at
the Cardiothoracic Center at Korle-Bu, Accra’s largest hospital,
had at first hoped that the defect would close on its own, as they
sometimes did, but that did not happen, and the ill effects were
now showing. Hosiah was beginning to suffer from fatigue and
shortness of breath. It was painful to watch. He was taking two
types of medicine to suppress the symptoms, but the only true cure
was surgery. Ghana’s fledgling National Health Insurance Scheme
provided only for basic medical care and did not cover surgery for
congenital heart disease. The operation was staggeringly expensive,
far beyond Dawson and Christine’s immediate financial reach,
especially now, with the price of food spiraling up. They were
saving money as fast as they could but they were nowhere close to
the required amount, even with Christine working part-time on
weekends.

Dawson had to force his mind away from Hosiah to concentrate on
negotiating bumper-to-bumper traffic on Ring Road. He white-lined
the double lane toward the Ako Adjei Interchange, dodging cars that
suddenly cut in front of him while he simultaneously avoided the
young, nomadic street hawkers who walked up and down the narrow
space between traffic lanes selling pencils, TV remotes, DVDs,
tennis shoes, gingersnaps, hairbrushes, apples, chocolate milk, and
anything else one could think of. They stopped beside cars and
tro-tros
, waving their wares in the windows with astonishing
persistence until it became obvious they were not going to make a
sale. It was a tough life. After twelve hours in the broiling sun,
these traders could expect to make a profit of less than a
cedi
.

Tailpipe exhaust invaded Dawson’s throat and expanded in his
lungs. He had tried covering his nose and mouth with a handkerchief
tied across his face, but that seemed to smother him even more, so
now he simply moved through the traffic as fast as he could. Every
vehicle was his enemy. Taxis, ubiquitous and distinguished by their
yellow front and rear panels, were the worst of them all. There was
one chief rule about driving in Accra: always be prepared to give
way to another vehicle at an instant. People drove with razor-thin
margins between their vehicles and the next ones.

Tro-tros, the other means of transport for the masses, packed
twelve to fifteen passengers into their rattling, smoke-belching
frames. Dawson called them “Chariots of Fire.” On the other end of
the spectrum were the glittery Benzes, Lexuses, BMWs, SUVs, and the
most ostentatiously obnoxious of them all, Hummers.

Once Dawson was past the Ako Adjei Interchange, he didn’t have
far to go to Police Headquarters. At seven fifteen exactly, he
turned left into the parking lot, barely slowing down at the
security gate as he gave a cursory salute to the armed guards. They
had complained to him before that he charged in the entrance too
fast. He locked up the bike and cut across the browning lawn and
past the knee-high hedges to the side of the Criminal
Investigations Department building.

CID was a specific branch of the Ghana Police Service. Although
the headquarters was here in Accra, officers were stationed
throughout the country. For a structure with such an official
title, CID was a downright disappointing seven-story building that
could easily have been an undistinguished apartment block. It might
have once been off-white, but now it was the color of the dark sand
of a less than pristine beach. In addition to an interior
staircase, a flight of steps cascaded along the outside of the
building’s south end and provided free access to anyone wandering
in and out. It seemed ironic that CID Headquarters was no
high-security fortress.

Dawson trotted up the stairs to the second level and turned in
to the narrow, dim corridor lined with office doors painted blue
with yellow trim. A few other employees were coming into work just
like Dawson, wishing one another “Good morning,” a crucial
ingredient of Ghanaianness: no “Hi,”

“Hello,” or, God forbid, “What’s up?”

He crossed the reception area, an inner courtyard with half a
dozen worn wooden chairs on opposite sides and a handful of
early-bird visitors waiting to take care of their affairs. Regina,
the glacial receptionist, was at her desk in the corner serenely
setting up for work.

“Morning, Regina.”

She looked up with her impenetrable, enigmatic smile. “Good
morning, sir.”

Dawson worked in the Homicide Division and shared a small office
with two other detectives, neither of whom had yet arrived, which
was just fine. Dawson preferred a quiet start. The cramped room had
three desks and not enough storage space. There were computers,
yes, but no matter how hard you tried, you just couldn’t get rid of
paper. Some of it was stowed in file cabinets or on shelves the way
it was supposed to be, but the rest was on the floor or any clear
space on a table-top. Dawson did his best to keep his desk tidy
because he could not think clearly with clutter around him.

His desk was closest to a louvered window with a view onto the
lawn and parking lot below. He turned on the ceiling fan in the
hope of staving off the vicious March heat, which would be in full
force in another three or four hours. No luxurious air-conditioning
here. He was a detective inspector, still a “subordinate” – he
disliked that word – officer. When someday he got to detective
chief superintendent or higher,
then
maybe he would get a
big office with the AC blasting.

Dawson sat down and logged on to his terminal, quickly running
through his emails. They were much of the same, as always, with the
usual edicts from the boss, Chief Superintendent Lartey.

Dawson turned to the bottom drawer of the file cabinet next to
his desk and pulled out a stack of ragged folders stuffed with
papers – court records, statements and documents from open cases,
and the miscellaneous laborious reports that were inescapable
elements of police work.

As Dawson started on the first report, Detective Sergeant
Chikata walked in. He was about six years younger than Dawson’s
thirty-five, muscular and impossibly handsome.

D.S. Chikata was good when he applied himself, but much of the
time he was as languid as a lion in the midday sun. It was hardly a
secret around CID that he had got into the Homicide Division mostly
on the strength of his being Chief Superintendent Lartey’s nephew.
This was also undoubtedly why the detective sergeant was so smugly
confident that he would soon rise to Dawson’s rank of inspector,
and why he was such a cheeky brat. He showed little or none of the
customary deference to his superior officers, and although Dawson
was not a stickler for protocol, Chikata’s impudence could be
irritating.

“Morning, Dawson.”

“Morning. How’re you?”

Chikata yawned long and wide, shaking his head as if to throw
off the lingering remains of the night’s slumber. “Tired,” he said.
“Too much beer last night. And women.”

Dawson grunted. What did one say to that kind of
information?

Chikata sat down at his desk, and Dawson mentally counted down
the time it would take his colleague to lean forward and switch on
the radio; he came within a second’s accuracy. He’d do better
tomorrow.

Chikata leaned back and propped his gigantic feet on his desk as
he listened to the call-in morning show on Happy FM. After a while,
it got on Dawson’s nerves.

“Turn that racket down, Chikata.”

The D.S. reduced the radio’s volume. “Yes, sir, D.I. Dawson,
sir,” he said, with mock reverence, before resuming his repose
position. “We need to close some cases.”