by Kwei Quartey
He finished his joint, lay down on the bed, and returned to thinking about Gladys. Who would kill her? Togbe Adzima? Maybe. She had evidently infuriated him. Samuel Boateng? Perhaps. Dawson didn’t know enough about him yet. What about family members themselves? Inspector Fiti had discounted that proposition, but even as a boy, Dawson had learned that a detective should never overlook a “loved one” as the victim’s possible slayer.
As soon as Papa had returned from Ketanu, he went to Accra Central Police Station to report Mama officially missing. It was two weeks before anyone got back in touch with them. A plainclothes policeman came to their house. Darko stared at him. He was about Papa’s age, late thirties, neat, and small. Darko had always thought policemen had to be big.
“I’m Detective Sergeant Daniel Armah,” he said to Papa. “Is Beatrice Dawson your wife?”
“Yes,” Papa said.
Armah shook hands with him and then with Darko and Cairo, who was in his wheelchair.
“So,” Armah said. “She’s still missing?”
“Yes.”
“I see.” Armah’s gaze was flat and steady, and Darko couldn’t tell what he was thinking. At first he thought the detective simply wasn’t that interested in Mama’s case, but when Armah sat down and took a long and painstakingly detailed report, Darko realized he had been wrong. Armah took his time and asked Papa a lot of questions—sometimes the same question twice—and wrote everything down. After more than an hour, the detective left. Darko stood at the door and watched him walking away, oddly wishing he could stay longer. Suddenly Armah turned around and waved to him as if he had felt Darko’s gaze.
Papa stayed in the house, and Darko played in the yard with some friends. Cairo sat in his wheelchair watching them. After a while they got together and pushed him careening around the yard while he laughed at the top of his lungs.
Darko looked up as Detective Armah appeared again at the side of the yard and beckoned to him. He walked a little way with Darko out of sight of the house and stooped down face-to-face with him.
“You want your mama back, eh?”
Darko nodded.
“She’s a good mother to you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And your father? Is he good too?”
Darko hesitated too long. “Yes, sir. He is good too.”
“He never beat your mama or threatened to do something to her?”
“No.”
Armah asked him a few more questions like that—actually the same question in different ways. At first, Darko couldn’t understand why he kept doing that, but then like a flash of light in the dark, he realized what the detective was after. That was Dawson’s first, chilly lesson that, in murder cases, those closest to the victim could well be prime suspects. It took Darko’s breath away. It had not even entered his mind before now that Papa could remotely be involved with Mama’s disappearance. It was a terrible, awful thought. Darko began to tremble.
“When will you find Mama?” he said, close to tears.
“I will try very hard, Darko, okay?” Armah said. “I promise you.”
His voice was firm, but he held Darko surprisingly softly. Darko didn’t know that kind of touch from his father, and he hadn’t realized a man could be so gentle.
Armah kept his promise. Month after month, he stayed in close contact, bringing them news even when there was little to be brought. Every answered question seemed to raise a new one, and there was more information on what had not happened than what had. For instance, on the day Mama left Ketanu, no tro-tro collisions between Ketanu and Accra were reported. That practically ruled out Mama having been in a vehicle crash, but it still didn’t help determine where along her journey she had disappeared, nor the how and why.
Armah had shown Mama’s picture to dozens of people at the bus stop at Atimpoku. One fish trader had remembered spotting her the day she had been in transit with Darko and Cairo, but not on the day she had disappeared. Armah had also been up to Ketanu twice. Yes, people had seen Beatrice, Osewa’s sister, but no one could shed any light on what could have happened to her.
Armah had quickly eliminated Papa as a suspect because his alibi, much of it provided by Darko and Cairo themselves, was airtight. Still, Armah continued to come up with more questions about Mama, and sometimes it seemed he had a promising lead. Nothing materialized, but Armah never showed any sense of hopelessness.
To this day, Dawson remembered the exact moment he looked at Armah and thought, I want to be like you when I grow up. The sun was setting at the time, and Armah had been at the house for a few minutes. For a moment the detective turned his head to one side, and the living room window framed his profile in sharp outline against the vermilion dusk. His nose was sharp and strong. He was looking downward with heavily lidded eyes, and he seemed to be wishing for something—maybe that he could find Mama, maybe that the world would not be so cruel so much of the time.
In the end, Armah never did find her. He kept in touch, yes, but time passed and the trail grew cold. He began to visit less and less frequently, and Darko could see he was more despondent each time. Almost a year to the day after he had first appeared at the doorstep, he came for the last time and announced that he was being transferred to Kumasi.
Darko’s heart plunged, and he felt sick and faint.
“I’ll write to you, okay?” Armah was saying, his hand on Darko’s shoulder.
Darko nodded dumbly, scared to say anything in case he burst into tears. He was a big boy of thirteen now, and he wasn’t supposed to cry.
Two weeks later a letter arrived in the mail addressed to “Master Darko Dawson.” Darko feverishly opened it and immediately felt his chest swell with pride. It was Armah writing to him in his methodical, looped handwriting. He wanted to know how Darko was, how school was going, and how Papa and Cairo were doing. But he hadn’t written to Papa or Cairo, he had written to him, Darko.
Then and there, he sat down to write a very long and careful reply, and the enduring pen-pal exchange between him and Detective Armah was born. His last line of the letter was “When I grow up, I want to be a detective just like you.”
A father to me, Dawson often thought, and more inspiring than the real one by far. His respect for Armah was undiminished by the detective’s failure to solve Mama’s disappearance.
From afar, Armah had followed Darko through secondary school, and once, on a rare visit to Accra, he came by the house and was astonished to find the teenager had surpassed his height and appeared to be getting even taller.
“Still want to be a detective?” Armah asked him.
“Yes.” The answer never wavered.
Armah would smile quietly and nod. Darko liked that. Just a small gesture, but so affirming. In contrast, Papa thought being a detective was a “stupid” career, but by then Darko was used to his father’s disapproval of practically everything.
Armah had been present for Dawson’s graduation from the National Police Academy. He didn’t have to say how proud he was. Dawson could see it shining in his eyes.
Years after Dawson’s graduation, Armah took early retirement from the police force and set up his own private detective agency in Kumasi. “When you get tired of the grind,” he told Dawson, “come and join me.”
As little as Dawson was inclined to leave Homicide for now, he would never categorically refuse an invitation from the wisest, most perceptive man in the world. Indeed, it was Armah who had told him that everyone, no matter how nice or respected, has at least one enemy. Perhaps Gladys Mensah was proof of that.
Darko drifted off and then woke with a start. He looked at his watch. He had been asleep for more than an hour. His phone was charged enough to ring Christine. A smile wide as the Volta River broke out on his face when she answered.
“Well, it’s about time, Detective Inspector,” she exclaimed. “We thought you’d forgotten about us.”
“Forget about you?” He laughed. “Impossible.”
DAWSON WOKE EARLY THE next morning, took a show
er, threw on some fresh clothes, and sat down to study a map of the region. As Timothy Sowah had mentioned, Ketanu and Bedome were about a kilometer apart. Separating the two places was the forest in which Gladys’s body had been found. The footpath Dawson and Inspector Fiti had taken the day before tracked through the southern tip of the forest. Most important, it was the same route Gladys would have taken back and forth between the two towns. Approximately halfway between the two, but closer to Bedome, Gladys’s crossing had been interrupted by either herself or someone else and she had ended up dead some distance north of the path.
Bedome was east of Ketanu, and some fifteen kilometers east again of Bedome was the Kalakpa Reserve, the only remaining undisturbed forest in the Volta Region.
When Dawson had visited Ketanu as a boy, the forest bordering the eastern edge of the town had been denser, but years of tree felling and burning, most of it illegal, had thinned it out. In fact, much of the Volta Region’s forestland had suffered in this way.
The Bedome end of the footpath was visible from Isaac Kutu’s compound, which was about three hundred meters away. Dawson visualized the compound, the footpath, and the village of Bedome as forming the three points of a right-angled triangle.
Some distance from the footpath, perhaps a hundred meters, a cluster of farmers’ small plots bordered the edge of the forest. Reportedly, some of the farmers had spotted Samuel Boateng with Gladys on Friday evening.
So what could have happened? Samuel lured Gladys to the plantain grove and killed her there? Dawson wondered what sort of compelling ruse would have got her to follow him into the forest.
He turned again to the police file and studied the photographs of the body and the surroundings in which it had been found. Strangled to death in that pretty blue and white outfit adorned with little Adinkra symbols. Dawson tilted his head, and then turned the photograph ninety degrees clockwise. There was something too neat about the way Gladys was lying. In his mind he saw the violent struggle until she was finally still. As Dr. Biney had said, strangling another person to death is not that easy. Then the murderer dragged her to lie beside this palm tree. Did he rearrange her clothing—make it neat, rest her arms by her sides? Undoing, it was called. Dawson preferred his own term: killer’s remorse. You’ve just murdered your spouse or parent or child, and now you’re trying to reverse it by making everything nice and pretty.
Dawson looked up at a knock on the door. He crossed the floor in three steps and opened the door to find a magnificent woman dressed in shimmering, swirling white, with a matching headdress. A white outfit in dusty Ketanu? Next to her, dwarfed by her size and splendid appearance, was a fortyish man with a vanishingly thin body and large head.
“Morning, morning,” the woman said.
“Good morning.”
“Are you Detective Inspector Dawson?”
“I am.”
She thrust out her hand. “I’m Elizabeth, Gladys Mensah’s aunt.”
She had a firm grip, but her palm was butter smooth.
“This is my nephew Charles, Gladys’s brother.”
Dawson shook hands with him as well and invited them both in. He watched Elizabeth as they entered. She looked to be in her early fifties. She was tall and plentifully built, and held her chin at just the right angle to give her carriage a regal air.
“Please have a seat,” Dawson said. “Apologies for the lack of space.”
“Quite all right, Mr. Dawson,” Elizabeth said, casting a quick look around the room. “It’s not your fault the Ministry of Health is so stingy with their accommodations. They could have done better.”
Dawson smiled at the sharpness of the criticism. Elizabeth took the chair, and Dawson and Charles sat on a bed each.
“We heard yesterday that you had arrived in Ketanu to investigate my niece’s death,” she said, “and we wanted to talk to you as soon as possible.”
Her voice had the texture of rich, warm velvet.
“First of all, my condolences,” Dawson said. “I know this isn’t easy.”
“Thank you,” Charles said softly. He was despondent, his shoulders slumped. “I still can’t believe it happened. I keep thinking it’s a nightmare I’m walking through, and on the other side of it, Gladys will be there with her smile and her laugh and her cleverness.”
“Yes,” Dawson said. “I know that feeling well.” And he did. “When you say her smile and her laugh and her cleverness, I begin to get a picture of her personality, and I’m grateful to you for that because I’ve been wondering what her spirit was like, and who Gladys the woman was.”
Elizabeth’s eyes became soft. “It’s very hard to put into words, Inspector Dawson—even for Charles and me, or any of the family who was close to her. And if you had met her, you would have the same difficulty expressing it.”
“She made you want to be around her,” Charles said. “So magnetic, so full of energy and love, and she gave it out freely for everyone to experience.”
“And a quick and brilliant mind,” Elizabeth said. “Sometimes she talked so fast she would lose people, but when she wanted to pass on her message—about AIDS, about life, about anything—she came down or rose up to whatever level she needed to be. People sometimes said she had a hot temper, but that wasn’t it. It was that she was a passionate person. That’s what you have to understand about her.”
Dawson nodded.
“It seems almost too easy to take a life like that,” Elizabeth said. “It shouldn’t be that way.”
The tears welling up spilled over onto her cheeks. She dabbed her eyes and face with a handkerchief. Charles put his hand on her arm and squeezed.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“It’s still early,” Dawson said gently. “The wound is fresh.”
“Still,” Elizabeth said, “I hadn’t exactly intended to subject you to this display, Detective Inspector.” She laughed ruefully through her tears.
Dawson smiled. “When was the last time you saw Gladys?”
“Late Friday afternoon, when she left the house for Bedome,” Charles said. “People say she was there till just before sunset.”
“I see,” Dawson said. “So, between five thirty and six Friday evening, had all the family except Gladys returned home?”
“Yes. I had been in Ho and returned around five, and Auntie Elizabeth came from the shop about an hour later to help Mummy with the cooking.”
“And your father?”
“He had been at the farm, but he went home early in the afternoon because his gout was troubling him.”
“I know why you’re asking these questions, Mr. Dawson,” Elizabeth said. “There’s no one, no one among us who didn’t love and cherish Gladys, and not one of us would ever want to hurt her, let alone kill her.”
“I’m sure that’s the case. Then let’s talk about who would want to kill her.”
“Togbe Fafali Adzima, the fetish priest at Bedome, for sure,” Charles said at once. “He hated her, and I kept warning her to be careful with him.”
“Sometimes it’s not so much the nasty people like Adzima you have to worry about,” Elizabeth countered. “Their bark is worse than their bite, if they have any bite at all. No, it’s sneaky people like Mr. Isaac Kutu who pretend to be good but are rotten on the inside. Those are the troubling ones.”
“I’ve heard Gladys was interested in Mr. Kutu’s herbal remedies,” Dawson said, “and I was told they got along well. Do you think otherwise?”
“They may have been okay with each other for a while,” Elizabeth said, “but everything changed the day he thought she was stealing from him.”
“How did that come about?”
“This is what Gladys told me,” Elizabeth said. “She went to Kutu’s compound to see him, but he wasn’t there. She wanted to see some of his herbal treatments, and she persuaded his wife, Tomefa, to show her. When Kutu arrived later on, he found Gladys writing everything down that his wife was telling her about the various herbs.”
“He wasn’t happy about that,” Dawson said.
“Not happy?” Elizabeth snorted. “Inspector Dawson, he was furious. He started screaming at them both. Tomefa ran away, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Kutu punished her with a beating. He accused Gladys of stealing his ideas to profit from them.”
“So he was angry. Enough to kill her?”
“Charles doesn’t think so, but I do.”
“What about lust or love or jealousy somewhere in their relationship?”
Elizabeth clicked her tongue. “No, not at all. Gladys would have told me that. She told me a lot of things.”
“By any chance, did she mention anything about Timothy Sowah? Any romance?”
“She liked him, that’s all I know,” Elizabeth said. “I once teased her that she looked like she was in love, but she pooh-poohed it and reminded me Mr. Sowah is married. Why do you ask?”
“No special reason.”
“I heard Inspector Fiti has arrested Samuel Boateng,” Charles said. “Is that true?”
“Yesterday.”
“Fiti the bully,” Elizabeth said contemptuously. “Picking on the weakest of the bunch. The boy doesn’t even have murder in him. But Fiti? He doesn’t care, so long as he gets his scapegoat.”
“Did Gladys have any feelings for Samuel, do you think?” Dawson asked.
“I don’t think she found him anything more than amusing, if not immature,” Elizabeth said.
“I understand from Inspector Fiti that some farmers working near the forest on Friday evening said they had seen him with Gladys as she was returning to Ketanu from Bedome.”
“Yes, that’s correct,” Charles said, “but from what the farmers told me, Samuel imposed on her rather than the other way around.”
“If that did happen, might it have upset her?”
“I doubt it, really. Gladys took things in stride.”
“I’m changing the subject somewhat,” Elizabeth said, “but there’s something else you really should know, Inspector.”
“Yes?”
“Gladys always kept a diary, a journal of everything she did every day, her feelings and thoughts and philosophies. It had a black cover—or maybe dark blue—about fifteen by ten centimeters in size. It’s missing. We’ve looked for it in her room at our house, and yesterday when we went to her hall at the university to collect her belongings, we didn’t find it anywhere there either.”
