Wife of the Gods

by Kwei Quartey

  “Yes?” Fiti saw the grave look on Isaac’s face. “What’s the matter?”

  “You should come, Inspector. Gladys Mensah is dead.”

  BAD NEWS SPREADS THROUGH any small town like fire through dry savanna bush. Kweku and Osewa Gedze first heard about Gladys Mensah’s death as they were working on their cocoa farm. The golden ripe cocoa pods were particularly beautiful this year. Each was perfectly almond shaped with sculptured ridges that ended in a point like an erect nipple. One pod held thirty to forty fleshy seeds that were scooped out, fermented, and then dried for days before they were ready to be shoveled into sacks for shipping. It was back-splitting work, and for all of it Osewa and Kweku would probably never savor a single mini-square of the final product—chocolate. It all went to fancy stores in the big cities at prices that they could never dream of paying.

  Kweku wiped the sweat off his face and watched his wife for a moment. She was on her knees deftly slashing the pods open with a cutlass. Fifty-one years old and nine years his junior, she was strong and skilled with powerful hands that wielded a cutlass or shovel better than most men.

  They looked up at the sound of running footsteps, and Alifoe, their twenty-three-year-old son, burst into view. He was tall and beautifully built, with the deepest black skin possible, glossy and silky with its natural oils.

  “Have you heard?” he said breathlessly.

  “Heard what?”

  “You know the Mensah girl who was going to be a doctor?”

  “Yes, what about her?” Kweku said.

  “They found her dead early this morning.”

  “Oh, no.” Osewa dropped her cutlass and stood up. “Where?”

  “In the forest not far from here. Everyone is going there. I’m going too.”

  He turned and started out.

  “Wait for me,” Kweku called out. “Osewa, we’ll be back soon.”

  Moving quickly with Isaac Kutu, Inspector Fiti made a call on his mobile to his constable.

  “Gyamfi,” he snapped, “where are you—at the station? Eh-heh, good. Stop everything. Gladys Mensah has been found dead in the forest…. Yes, that’s what I said, are you deaf or what? Go there now and secure the place…. You’ll know where it is because everyone is going there. That’s why you need to hurry before they destroy the scene. You hear? Go!”

  He pocketed his phone and took a few trotting steps to keep up with Isaac, who moved as swiftly and easily as a river over its bed. The police station was closer to the scene than the two of them were at the moment, so Gyamfi would get there first. The forest was on the eastern edge of Ketanu. To reach it, Inspector Fiti and Isaac had to cross the breadth of the town. Its dwellings and shops sprawled along either side of the busy road to Ho, the capital of the Volta Region, twenty kilometers due northeast. In his time, Inspector Fiti had seen three new roads built in Ketanu as it had mushroomed in size, and many of the mango, banana, and palm trees in which the town had once nestled had gone the way of chopped wood and compost.

  Bedome village was in turn on the east side of the forest, a wellbeaten footpath connecting it to Ketanu. Fiti had been right—scores of people were breaking off into the forest from the footpath. As the inspector closely followed Isaac, he shouted at people to get out of the way, which they did. Everyone was familiar with Inspector Fiti’s rough, gravelly voice. He was not a particularly patient man.

  Gyamfi had already arrived by the time Isaac Kutu and Inspector Fiti made it there, and he had managed to mark off a wide perimeter using a length of rope wrapped around the trunks of plantain trees. Now he stood guard at the edge of the cordoned-off area looking as fierce as he could to keep away a gathering cluster of spectators. People sometimes teased him and called him Boy Constable Gyamfi, because even though he was twenty-four, he looked nineteen and still had no serious facial hair.

  “Who is it there?” Fiti asked Gyamfi as they came up to him. “Is it really Gladys Mensah?”

  The constable nodded. “Yes, sir. It’s her.”

  Fiti lifted the rope and ducked under. Isaac was about to follow, but Gyamfi put a gentle restraining hand on his shoulder. “Please, when we’re ready for you, we will call you.”

  Isaac stepped back, looking a little insulted.

  “Where is she?” Fiti asked Gyamfi.

  Gyamfi pointed to just beyond a palm tree and led the way. He pulled aside the bush, and the inspector looked.

  “Oh,” he said softly, shock in his voice. “Oh.”

  It was midmorning by now. The sun was already scorching and the first of the bluebottle flies had begun to buzz around frenetically, but Fiti didn’t see a wound of any kind on Gladys’s body. She was missing a shoe, though. The left one.

  “Is this how she was when you first came here?” he asked his constable.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “With the plantain leaves on her body?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you find something else?”

  “Yes, sir.” He moved away about five meters. “Here, sir. Her shoe.”

  It was a russet-colored, open-toed shoe with a back strap and low heel. Why was it here and Gladys over there?

  “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 re
leased 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.

  DARKO 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.