They crossed. The foliage was thin for a while where tree clearing, probably illegal, had taken place, but it grew denser quickly. Queenie, who was wearing only slippers, picked her way more and more carefully. Dawson congratulated her on her sense of direction as they turned left and right, but he had some remembering of his own to do in case he needed to return by himself, and he had no doubt that he would. He was silently counting the number of rights and lefts, grouping them in his mind as sharp or gradual, while noting any landmarks along the way, like a clearing, or a felled tree.
“It’s here,” Queenie said finally.
They had arrived at a rudimentary shelter: a simple sheet of corrugated metal on four poles.
“He normally stays there at night,” Queenie said, pointing.
“Hmm,” Adwoa said teasingly. “And did you stay here with him too?”
“Oh, shut up,” Queenie said crisply.
While the two women giggled and traded good-natured insults, Dawson went over to have a better look at the humble abode. There was almost nothing there except a rolled-up mat, a soiled T-shirt, a pair of cargo shorts, and the type of small, old-fashioned charcoal stove that people rarely used nowadays.
“During the day,” Dawson asked the two women, “where does he go?”
They shrugged. “People say they have seen him around. They say he drives excavators sometimes, or helps the galamsey dig for gold.”
“Why won’t he talk to anyone?” Dawson asked. When he saw Queenie wrinkle her nose, he added hastily, “I mean after Amos was killed.”
“The Okohs are my friends, so I know something about what happened,” Adwoa said, mixing her Twi with English. “It isn’t that he doesn’t talk to anyone; it is his family he won’t speak to. Mr. Okoh wanted Yaw and Amos to work with him on his farm. Yaw said no, he wanted to learn how to operate an excavator with Amos, because they could make more money mining gold than they can make at the farm. Mr. Okoh didn’t agree, and he tried to command the two boys to be with him. Yaw, his head is hard, and he walked away, but Amos, he was softer, and he agreed to go with his father to the farm.
“So then, while Amos was working with Mr. Okoh and Yaw was trying to get work as an excavator operator, a division came in the family. After Amos died, Yaw said to his father that if he hadn’t forced Amos to work with him, this would have never happened. Then Mr. Okoh went to a fetish priest who put a curse on Yaw that he will never be able to speak again.”
Oh, Dawson thought. This was a new wrinkle. “Did Yaw know Mr. Okoh was going to the fetish priest to place the curse?”
“Oh yes,” Adwoa said, nodding vigorously. “The whole town knew about it.”
Could it have been that Yaw’s knowledge of the alleged curse had had such a profound psychological effect that it actually happened?
“Thank you, Adwoa,” Dawson said with a smile. He always appreciated a well-informed account. He walked around the perimeter of the clearing, poking around in the bushes with a stick and wondering half seriously whether he was conducting an illegal search without a warrant.
As they left, Dawson cast one last look at Yaw’s shelter. He was rapidly planning what to do next.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
While he waited eagerly for Chikata’s arrival, Dawson spent most of Wednesday morning cleaning up and rearranging the office. Then he met with some of the junior officers to review their cases and any difficulties they were having. Lack of resources to get things done-evaluation of crime scenes, for example-was a common refrain, but sometimes Dawson saw these obstacles as an excuse rather than a justified reason.
“This is Ghana,” he told one officer. “Resources are scarce, so you work with what you have, or you devise a stopgap, but you don’t just shrug your shoulders and forget about it. If you don’t care about your work, you might as well do something else.”
And to each and everyone, Dawson’s stern warning concerned the daily diary. “There should be an entry practically every hour. I don’t want to see an empty space from midnight to six in the morning. For all I know, it means you were sleeping. The government does not pay you to sleep.”
By early afternoon, Dawson had not heard from Chikata and he became anxious. Finally, at two thirty, Chikata called. “I told them to reserve a jeep for me to go up to Kumasi,” he said, sounding frustrated, “but one of the chief inspectors grabbed it. He’ll see how much trouble he’s in when he returns and gets called to Uncle’s office.”
Dawson smiled slightly, but actually, Chikata wasn’t joking. The culpable chief inspector was about to face something worse than a firing squad.
“Sorry, boss,” Chikata continued. “I can’t make it there today, but I’ll be in tomorrow morning. The driver and I will start out by five, so God willing we’ll arrive around ten.”
“Sure, no problem,” Dawson said casually, to hide the heavy feeling of disappointment. “So we’ll meet tomorrow, inshallah.”
After a couple of hours more of work, he locked up the office and left for the day. To entertain himself, he went to one of Kumasi’s best and most crowded sports bars and devoured fufuo and piping hot groundnut soup while he watched Arsenal battle Manchester United in a fierce soccer match.
Close to his prediction, Chikata walked in the door at division headquarters around ten thirty Thursday morning. Dawson hugged him hard, surprising himself by just how glad he was to see his right-hand man. “How was the journey up?”
“It was okay, boss,” Chikata said. “Traffic wasn’t too bad.”
He was wearing dark slacks and a blue pinstripe shirt that fit perfectly across his broad chest.
“Have a seat if you can find somewhere,” Dawson said. “I’ve been trying to clear the place up. You should have seen it when I first arrived.”
“Looks like a lot of work.” Chikata sat. “I can take over if you tell me what to do.”
“We’ll go over it in detail tomorrow. Let me bring you up to speed on the case first.”
“Okay. I’m listening.”
Dawson started from the beginning: the discovery of the body in the gravel at the mine site.
“Do you think the killer was trying to hide the body or put it somewhere to be found?” Chikata asked. “It seems that if he was trying to hide it, then put it in the forest somewhere, or throw it in one of those pits. If he was trying to show it, then just leave it in the open.”
Dawson nodded. “Or else burying him was the actual means of death.”
“By suffocation?”
“Yes. But all this speculation may change when we finally get the autopsy done. I’m waiting to hear from a Dr. Phyllis Kwapong, a new forensic pathologist in Accra who should be coming up to Kumasi as soon as possible.”
“Let’s hope so. The results might even change the way we think about the case.”
Dawson agreed. “So far,” he continued, “a guy called Yaw Okoh is the prime suspect.”
“Who is he?”
Dawson told Chikata about him.
“This so-called inability of Yaw’s to talk,” Chikata said, “did it happen directly after Amos’s death?”
“Not directly,” Dawson answered. “Yaw blamed his father partly for his brother’s death. They quarreled about it and then Mr. Okoh went to a fetish priest, who people now believe struck Yaw with a curse.”
“Which would be very convenient for Yaw if he was the killer,” Chikata pointed out. “He could use that superstition to his advantage.”
“Exactly,” Dawson agreed, “or maybe he really did go into some kind of shock after Amos’s death. Either way, he could be guilty.”
“When I was a small boy,” Chikata said, “we knew one woman who went blind after her husband’s sudden death. People were saying she was possessed by evil spirits.”
Dawson grunted. “So many tales like that in our society. I think it’s a kind of psychological derangement or something like that. Bottom line, we need to bring this man in and somehow get him to talk.” Something occurred to him. “Hey, you remember Allen Botswe, the criminal psychologist at the University of Ghana we consulted a couple of years back?”