by Kwei Quartey
“Tuesday, I was off,” Susan said. “Monday I was here, but… no, sorry, I can’t think of anyone.”
“Any kind of visitor that seemed out of the ordinary,” Dawson persisted.
She pondered again but drew another blank.
“All right,” Dawson said patiently. “Let’s try something else. How about any unusual visit to any part of the residence, not necessarily to Gladys’s room? Anyone, going anywhere.”
She shrugged, taking a stab. “The only thing I can think of was the man from the Ministry of Health who came on Monday, but Mrs. Ohene knows about that already.”
Mrs. Ohene’s head snapped around. “What man from the Ministry of Health?”
Susan froze. “Didn’t you ask for someone to come and take care of a rat problem?”
“Rat problem! What rat problem? What are you talking about? We do not have rats in my hall, young lady.” Mrs. Ohene was appalled. “Someone came from the Ministry of Health and you didn’t notify me?”
Susan’s eyes went wide with something approaching terror. “Madame Ohene, I’m so sorry. He said he had already talked to you about it earlier in the morning and that I didn’t need to bother you.” Her voice was shaking.
“The Ministry of Health does not handle this sort of thing, Susan,” Mrs. Ohene said witheringly “They deal with serious national problems, like AIDS and malaria control, not campus rats. The campus has its own pest control. Isn’t that something you should know?”
“I do know that, I do, Madame Ohene,” Susan said, “but this man, he said he was from the Pest and Parasite section of the Ministry of Health.”
“Pest and Parasite!” Mrs. Ohene exclaimed. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard.”
Dawson knew they were onto something now. “You say the man was here on Monday, Susan?”
“Yes.”
Two days after Gladys’s body was found and the day before Charles and Elizabeth had been here.
Dawson went back a couple of pages to Monday and quickly scanned the sign-ins.
“Here it is. ‘H. Sekyi, oh-nine-twenty, K block, MoH Pest and Parasite.’” He looked at Mrs. Ohene. “He went to Gladys’s section.”
She stared at Dawson, mystified. “Who on earth is this man? What did he want?”
“Did he show any identification?” Dawson asked Susan.
“Yes. A badge that said ‘Ministry of Health’ and his name. He said there were complaints about rats in several rooms in the wing. He was very convincing.”
“Pest and parasite indeed,” Mrs. Ohene muttered.
“He asked you for a key to Gladys’s room specifically?” Dawson asked Susan.
“Yes,” she said, looking anguished. “He told me that’s where the complaint had originated and that he would send the rat catchers out with special equipment.”
Mrs. Ohene cringed. “Rat catchers? Oh, my goodness gracious me. Now I’ve heard it all.”
“Do you remember what this Sekyi man looked like?” Dawson asked Susan. “Tall, short, slim, fat?”
“Not tall, but slim. And quite young. Boyish.”
“Clean-shaven?”
“Yes.”
“Wedding ring? I’m sure you noticed.”
“Yes,” she said a little sheepishly. “He did have one.”
“Any distinguishing marks? Tribal scars on the face, for example?”
“No. Completely smooth skin.”
“Glasses?”
“No glasses.”
“One more thing. Try to picture him in your mind signing the logbook. Think carefully before you answer. What hand did he use to sign?”
“That’s easy—I know it was his left because that’s how I saw his wedding ring.”
“You’re brilliant,” Dawson said. “Completely brilliant. Thank you.”
“I am?” She was both relieved and incredulous, while the warden looked utterly unconvinced.
“Look at it this way,” Dawson said. “If you’d called Madame Ohene, this man probably would have bolted, but instead now we have a name, and—I’m praying—I can find him at the Ministry of Health.”
DAWSON’S DRIVE BACK TO Accra was painfully slow, with traffic particularly heavy on Independence Avenue. Lost in thought about the case as he inched along, Dawson paid little attention to the opulent buildings in this part of the city—the excessive presidential palace glittering in the sun like a diamond, the Mormon temple with its golden statue atop the tower, and the luminous College of Physicians and Surgeons.
He came back to earth as he turned left on Liberia Road and then left on the Kinbu extension to the ministries. He found parking next to the Ministry of Manpower and crossed the lot to the Ministry of Health, a cream-colored building with peculiar faded mauve trim. He started his search at the front lobby. If he had thought he would have an easy time looking for someone in a large government office, he would have been mistaken. Fortunately, he had readied himself mentally and physically. He went to a total of six departments looking for an employee by the name of H. Sekyi, each section directing him to the next.
He ended up in some kind of personnel office—or one of several, he wasn’t sure. The bulky man at the desk was tapping away at a computer keyboard.
“Good morning, sir,” Dawson said.
“Good morning,” the man said, giving him a quick glance and returning to his screen. Apparently he was finishing up some pressing document.
“I need some information, please.”
The man finished typing and looked up. “Yes? What kind of information, sir?”
“I’m trying to find an employee by the name of H. Sekyi.”
“And you are?”
“Detective Inspector Dawson, CID.”
“Let me check for you, Inspector.” He changed the window on his screen. “Is that Sekyi with k-y-i or c-h-i?”
“K-y-i,” Dawson said. The other spelling would be the anglicized form.
The man shook his head and got up.
“Let me try here,” he said, pulling a large ring binder from the shelf. “You don’t know what department he is?”
Dawson resisted the temptation to say “Pest and Parasites.” “No, I don’t know.”
“I can’t find any H. Sekyi,” the man said. “Please, Inspector, if you can wait a little bit for Agnes, my co-worker, to come back. She will know.”
Said Agnes walked in about ten minutes later, sucking on a Fan Milk strawberry ice, which, in the gathering heat of the day, looked very inviting.
“Agnes, this is Inspector Dawson. He’s looking for one H. Sekyi he says works here.”
Agnes, who obviously knew her way around, shook her head and clicked her tongue with regret. “Humphrey Sekyi? He used to work in Archives up until about six months ago, when he was sacked, and then only about one week after that, he was killed in a car crash. Poor man.”
“Killed,” Dawson echoed, drawing back in surprise. “He’s dead? Could there be another H. Sekyi?”
“Not at all,” Agnes said. “There’s Ruth and Kwame Sekyi. No H.”
“Who sacked Mr. Sekyi?”
“The Archives supervisor.”
“Is the supervisor still here?”
“No, he was transferred to Ho to be in charge of the Ghana Health Service AIDS program in the Volta Region.”
A smile of disbelief crept to Dawson’s lips. “Transferred to Ho. Do you remember his name?”
“Of course,” Agnes said. “I don’t forget such things. His name was Timothy Sowah.”
AFTER THE TOWN OF JUAPONG, Dawson continued past Ketanu on the Accra-Ho road. Both sides of the route became less forested, giving way to open bush. Under an hour later, the REDUCE SPEED NOW sign marked his arrival in Ho. It was of course a much larger town than Ketanu, but to Dawson it was still quiet and slow, like a kite lazily catching an updraft rather than an airplane taking off.
He had to get fuel and pulled up to a Total station.
“Do you know where the Ghana Health Service o
ffice is?” he asked the attendant as he filled the tank.
“I think it’s somewhere near the Community Center,” he said.
“And where is the Community Center?”
“Past the Municipal Assembly.”
Dawson grinned. No doubt all perfectly correct, but he still didn’t know how to get to the GHS office.
After some clarification and a little wandering around, Dawson found the Community Center, and the Ghana Health Service regional office was indeed adjacent to it. He parked and crossed the stretch of unpaved ground to the entrance.
Not one of the newfangled buildings in town, it looked rather rickety on the outside, but it was blissfully air-conditioned on the inside. The four employees busy at their computers were a lucky bunch.
“Good afternoon,” Dawson said.
They chorused back the greeting, and one of the men asked how he could be of help.
“I’m looking for Mr. Timothy Sowah,” Dawson said. “Is he here?”
“No, he hasn’t come yet.”
“Any idea when he’ll be in?”
Everyone shook heads and said no.
“Do you know where he lives?”
One of the clerks came out onto the street with Dawson and pointed south along the road with instructions like “next to the My Savior Barber Shop” and “turn where you see the petrol station.”
The directions took Dawson to a more residential area. Once he thought he was in the vicinity, he got out of the car and started asking around for Sowah. A streetwise teenage boy said he could take Dawson to his house.
They walked some distance past a group of shacks and a woman at a stand selling eggplants and tomatoes, then down a craggy lane with mosquito-friendly puddles of water. On the other side, the teenager pointed. “That is it.”
Dawson fished in his pocket and gave the boy a dash. He scuttled off jubilantly.
Timothy’s house was a cut above most. It was painted a sensible bronze color that masked the dust, and with its neatly shuttered windows, it looked like one of those perfect little square houses children draw. Outside, two teams of girls were deep into a game of ampe.
He knocked on the screen door.
“Come in,” a female voice called out.
Dawson found a young woman breast-feeding her baby in the front room.
“Good afternoon. I’m Detective Inspector Dawson. Is Mr. Sowah here?”
The woman hitched her baby up a little closer to her bosom. “No sir, he’s not here.”
“What about Mrs. Sowah?”
“She went to market with the children.”
“I see. Are you a relative?”
“I’m his niece.” Her name was Charlotte, and her baby was four months old.
“She’s a beautiful little girl,” Dawson said.
She smiled shyly. “Thank you.”
“Do you know when Mr. Sowah will be back?”
“I think he will come soon.”
Soon could mean almost anything. Dawson debated what he should do.
“Thank you,” he told the niece. “I’ll come back.”
He set back out for the Ho Magistrate Court, a salmon-colored, single-story building he had noticed while he had been looking for the GHS office. It took him about an hour to obtain the search warrants he needed. Not bad at all.
When Dawson returned, Charlotte was watching television while her baby slept on her lap. Timothy hadn’t come back yet. Dawson had no inclination to sit around waiting, so he showed the warrant to the young mother, who read it and nodded uncertainly when Dawson told her he was going to search Timothy’s bedroom.
The hallway beyond the front room was dim. There were two doors off either side and one at the end, which Dawson correctly guessed was Timothy’s room. He pushed the door open, stepped in, and looked around. Compulsively neat and well organized—exactly what Dawson would have expected from Timothy Sowah. Nonfiction books were in one bookcase, on the left side of a shiny mahogany desk, and fiction was in another bookcase on the right. Dawson noticed they were arranged alphabetically by author. Atop the desk was a nice-looking laptop. Judging from that and his fancy Audi, Timothy Sowah was not a man without means.
Dawson turned to the desk, which had a column of four drawers on either side. He wanted to search quickly and efficiently, and preferably finish before Timothy, his new suspect, returned. Primarily he was looking for Gladys’s diary, but he was also on the lookout for anything else relevant.
Timothy’s drawers were arranged as meticulously as his bookshelves—paper in one, stationery in the next, a third with AIDS information pamphlets. Nothing was out of place.
Dawson found no diary. He checked the underside of the desk, where people often hide items with the aid of tape. Nothing there.
Dawson began to go through every book on the shelves. Perhaps Timothy had slid the diary between them or within one. He found nothing.
He spun a few revolutions in the chair, which was fun but made him dizzy. As he waited for the room to stop spinning, he noticed a recessed handle at the side of the desk. He pulled on it, and it tilted out to reveal a wedge-shaped space deeper than it was wide. Dawson’s hand shot in and retrieved two items. They were both identity badges for the Ministry of Health. One belonged to Timothy Sowah, Supervisor, Department of Archives. The other belonged to Humphrey Sekyi.
“Ah,” Dawson sighed. How utterly rewarding.
Two minutes later, voices drifted in from the front of the house, and Dawson recognized one of them as Timothy’s. Hurried footsteps approached until Timothy made his appearance in the bedroom doorway.
“CAN I BE OF assistance, Inspector Dawson?” Polite but icy. “I certainly hope so.”
Timothy moved into the room like a wary cat. “May I ask what you are doing here?”
“I need to ask you one or two questions.”
“Charlotte tells me you have a search warrant. May I see it?”
Dawson handed it to him. He read it quickly and gave it back.
“What is it you’re searching for?”
“You were a supervisor of the Archives Department at MoH in Accra?”
“Yes. That’s correct.” Still wary. “Why do you ask?”
“Do you remember Humphrey Sekyi?”
Timothy’s eyes flickered. “I don’t recall that name.”
“You should. He worked under you in Archives until you sacked him.”
“Oh, yes, yes, of course. It slipped my mind. I fired him for theft. Why your interest in him?”
“It appears a Humphrey Sekyi from the MoH went to the women’s hall at the University of Ghana and got into Gladys’s dormitory room.”
“Good gracious,” Timothy said. “How? Or why? What would he want there?”
“He wouldn’t want anything there, because Humphrey Sekyi is dead.”
The side of Timothy’s face twitched, and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down like a rubber ball. “All right, but what does this have to do with me, or with your being here in my room, for that matter?”
“Everything. The man who went into Gladys’s room matches your description exactly. Including being left-handed. When you sacked Sekyi, he turned in his badge, which came in very handy when you needed someone to impersonate.”
“You can’t prove any of this.”
Dawson held up both the badges he had found, and Timothy’s eyes almost jumped out of his head.
“Do you want to modify your story now?” Dawson asked.
Timothy slumped into a chair behind him, sighed, and put his head in his hands.
“You forced open Gladys’s desk drawer and took her diary, didn’t you?” Dawson asked.
Timothy nodded. “Yes.”
“Why did you do that?”
“Mr. Dawson, I must be honest with you. The trouble is … the problem is I was having an affair with Gladys. I was in love with her.”
“Go on.”
“The diary—Well, I had never read anything from it before Gladys’s death, b
ut she always told me it had her deepest and most secret thoughts. I was curious, but out of respect when she was alive, I never trespassed. When she died, I panicked because I knew the family would soon be picking up all her belongings, and they’d be able to read everything. I couldn’t afford it getting out that I was having an affair. So, yes, I hurried to her dorm room and was relieved to find the diary was still there, and I took it. I wanted to be completely certain no one could track me, so I used a dead man’s identification. I thought I was being clever.”
“Where is the diary now? What did you do with it?”
Timothy’s jaw was working rhythmically He did not look at Dawson.
“What did you do with it, Timothy?”
He took a deep breath. “I burned it.”
His voice warbled badly, and Dawson smiled inwardly. Timothy Sowah, you are lying to me.
“What was in the diary?”
“She wrote every day—sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. She talked about everything.”
“About you?”
“Yes. How she felt whenever she was with me—here in town or out in the rural areas. We snatched moments here and there.”
“Did you write love letters to each other?”
“When she was away at school, we did. She was more inclined to write than I was.”
“Did you save the letters?”
“For a while, yes.”
“But then you destroyed them too.”
“I did.”
“Did you love Gladys as much as she did you?”
He hesitated. “I don’t know. Well, probably not.”
“For instance, you would not have left your wife to marry her, would you?”
“It would have been impossible, Inspector Dawson.”
“Was Gladys pressuring you to do just that?”
“I had to explain how unrealistic it would have been.”
Timothy looked up and faced Dawson’s gaze unflinchingly for a moment, and then he looked away. “I miss her. Badly.”
“Perhaps too much to destroy her diary.”
Timothy started. “Pardon?”
“The diary is not in this house because having it here would risk its being discovered by your wife,” Dawson said, “but I don’t believe you’ve destroyed it. The diary is like a part of Gladys’s soul. It contains Gladys’s essence. She’s been murdered, you miss her terribly, and now you’ll set her soul alight and burn it? I don’t think so. You’re not that kind of person. Where is the diary, Timothy?”
