“How did you kill the Chinese man?” Dawson asked him.
“I hit him on the head with my cutlass,” he said, still watching Dawson closely. “Then he stopped moving, and then I buried him inside the earth.”
The wounds to Bao’s head were postmortem, Dr. Kwapong had said.
“How long did it take you to bury the body?” Dawson asked.
“I don’t remember,” Okoh said, his eyes shifting to his left. That was also not unreasonable. In the heat of such an act, one could easily lose track of time.
“All right,” Dawson said “Thank you. Excuse us one moment, Mr. Okoh.”
He and Chikata went outside, shut the door, and moved down the corridor out of earshot.
“What do you think?” Dawson asked him.
Chikata shook his head. “His confession is not strong.”
“I agree. Also, did you notice how he fixed his eyes on me when he was speaking? Normally, when you talk to someone, you shift your gaze back and forth. When some people lie, they watch you carefully for a reaction.”
“Yes,” Chikata said, nodding slowly. “But still, there’s something I wonder. Is it possible at all that Dr. Kwapong is wrong about the injuries to Bao’s head-that they were postmortem?”
“I don’t think so,” Dawson said. “She considered it very carefully and she was very certain. So I trust her. Owura Okoh is not telling the truth.”
“Why is he doing it?”
“He’s afraid that he’ll lose another son, this time to prison. He might think-or even know-that Yaw killed Bao, or he might not, but it doesn’t matter. Either way, better Okoh be locked away than his son-that’s the way he looks at it.”
“So what do we do now?”
“You will go back to Mr. Okoh and respectfully tell him that we have no reason to believe that his account is genuine. Work on him until he confesses to not being a murderer. At the same time, I will work on Yaw.”
Yaw averted his gaze as Dawson entered the room, which was much more confining than the one Mr. Okoh occupied.
Dawson sat and leaned on the table toward Yaw. “Good afternoon. Your father is here. He has come to tell us that he is the one who killed the Chinese man, not you, so you will be free to go as soon as Constable Kobby comes to release you. But your father will spend the rest of his life in prison. That’s all I have to say.”
Dawson got up and went to the door holding his breath and hoping.
“Wait, Mr. Dawson, please.”
His heart missed a beat. He turned to find Yaw looking at him directly for the first time. “My father didn’t kill the Chinaman,” he said. “I did.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Eloquent, Yaw spoke in both English and Twi, his voice husky and unexpectedly light, like the rustle of savanna grass in a soft breeze. It was more boyish than the heavy tone that Dawson had imagined he would have.
“Why have you chosen to break your silence?” Dawson asked him.
“I have forgiven my father,” he said softly, “and now that I have forgiven him, I can’t let him take the blame for me.”
“Why were you mute for all these months?”
Yaw swallowed and stared down at the table for several moments, but the emptiness he had demonstrated before had been replaced with an expression of pain. “When I first learned of Amos’s death,” he said, “I felt like a part of my insides had been cut out-my heart, my throat. I couldn’t talk anymore. I cried for two weeks, but it was inside-without sound. And after two weeks of sadness, I started to feel angry with the world, angry with that Chinese man, and angry with my father.”
“Why were you angry with your father?” Dawson asked. “Because he made Amos work on the farm with him?”
“Yes,” Yaw said, “because if he had not, Amos would not have been at that bridge for him to be drowned by the Chinese man. But not only that. Before Amos’s death, my father had accepted money from Bao in exchange for some of the land we were farming, because the Chinese man wanted more space for his galamsey mining.”
“Your father is suffering from the bad economy just like everyone else,” Dawson pointed out. “People are just trying to survive.”
“I know that, but how can you sell our ancestral lands to these foreigners for them to plunder our gold and spoil the forests? That is a terrible betrayal.”
He might be a murderer, Dawson thought, but he has principles. “How did your father sell the piece of land when it is only the chief who is supposed to authorize a land sale?”
Yaw gave a dry, humorless laugh. “The chief gets plenty of money from those Chinese people. He lets them do whatever they want.”
Dawson feared as much. No end to this corruption. It was everywhere, like creeping rot.
“The day I decided to avenge my brother’s death by killing the Chinese man,” Yaw continued, “I felt a great relief, as though there was no more struggle inside me. And my ability to speak returned. But still, I had anger toward my father, so I decided to keep silent and not talk to him. A story was going around that I had been cursed by a fetish priest, but it wasn’t true.”
Another blow to the juju hypothesis. “Describe to us what happened on the morning of the murder of Bao Liu,” Dawson said.
Yaw cleared his throat and folded his lips between his teeth for a moment while collecting himself. “I heard that the Chinese man would come early in the morning to fix the excavator.”
“How did you hear that?” Dawson interrupted quickly.
“One of the workers at Mr. Granger’s site told me, and they heard it from one of the boys at the Chinese man’s site.”
Plausible. “Go on,” Dawson said.
“I wasn’t sure of the time he will come, so I arrived there very early and waited for him. After about one hour, he came-at about something past four. He was carrying a lantern because it was still dark and he needed to see what he was doing while working on the excavator. I waited for him to start his work. It seems he was trying to call someone.”
He knows that detail, Dawson thought, startled.
“I attacked him as soon as he turned his back to me,” Yaw continued. “First, I gave him a blow on the back of the head to knock him out. Then I pulled the legs up behind and the arms also, so that they come together, and then I tied them.”
“How many pieces of rope did you use to tie Bao?”
“Two.”
Correct. “After that, what did you do?”
“He was still suffering from that blow I gave him, so he was only moving a little bit. I dragged him to where his galamsey boys used to dig, and I put him there. Then I went to Mr. Chuck’s site and drove one of the excavators to where Bao was.”
He’s on the right track, but he’s not there yet. “How could you drive it?” Dawson asked.
“At Mr. Chuck’s site, one of the excavator operators, he sometimes used to leave the key in the ignition when he goes on his break around noontime. On that Wednesday, I hid in the bushes and waited for him to leave and then I went and stole the key.”
That might account for Chuck Granger’s missing CAT key, Dawson thought. “Continue.”
“I drove it to the place where I was going to bury him. By that time, Mr. Bao had woken up and was trying to shout for help, but because of how I tied him, he wasn’t able to breathe well, and he couldn’t shout. I operated the excavator and took some soil into the loading bucket. Then I turned it and dropped the soil on him. I did it eight times until he was buried very well.”