by Kwei Quartey
“Before,” Obeng explained as they went downstairs, “it was a house belonging to a certain businessman who donated it to the Ghana Police.”
Nice of him, Dawson thought, wondering if the businessman could now build them a fresh and modern facility.
“But Ghana Police is building a new place for us,” Obeng said, as if reading Dawson’s mind.
The charge office, CID room, and Dawson’s office-to-be occupied the front of the building. At one end of the dim rear corridor was the court office, which faced the CID room. Dawson put his head in and found a couple of lawyers with three officers preparing a case for court.
In the tailoring room, a tailor at his sewing machine repairing a police uniform looked up absently at them and smiled. “Morning, sir.”
Next in the hallway, Obeng opened the door to the exhibit room. Dawson let out a low whistle. Items from machetes to stolen trinkets were thrown chaotically one on top of the other, mixed in with a jumble of dusty folders and manila envelopes from old cold cases.
“We have to work on this,” Dawson said, although he admitted privately to himself that even the exhibit room at Central was a disaster.
The jail was at the other end of the gloomy passage lit by a lonesome curly fluorescent bulb in the ceiling. An eight-by-six-foot cell, it was designed to detain a maximum of ten prisoners. By Dawson’s count, it contained seventeen at the moment. The powerful odor of unwashed bodies was supplemented by the stink from the rudimentary latrine. The prisoners regarded Dawson with a mixture of curiosity and hope. Could this be someone coming to rescue them from jail?
Dawson hated to disappoint them, but no. “Okay,” he said. “Thank you, Obeng.” He tried to sound upbeat, but in fact he was feeling profoundly depressed by the entire picture. The place felt fragmented and at a low ebb.
Returning to his office with Obeng, Dawson took a look at the documents the sergeant had been trying to sort out. Cold cases, interrogation transcriptions, documents, fingerprint records, DNA data here and there. It was a mountain of material, and in Dawson’s opinion, some of it would eventually need archiving in off-site storage. But what portion? He took a deep breath and blew it out through his cheeks, feeling daunted.
“Okay,” he said. “We’ll take a closer look at everything tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir, thank you, sir,” Obeng said enthusiastically.
Dawson sensed that the sergeant was grateful for his arrival, as though he had been overburdened without the guidance of a senior officer. He smiled at Obeng, studying him for a moment and noticing a few untidy stains on the sergeant’s light green shirt, which stretched to bursting point over the rotund belly. He wasn’t slovenly, but he didn’t have far to go. Troubled in some way? A chaotic home life?
“Everything okay with you?” Dawson asked.
“Oh, yes, please, sir,” Obeng answered quickly.
His voice changed slightly, and Dawson’s left palm tingled for a second. He had synesthesia, where vocal qualities were experienced as a sensation in his hands, the left one in particular. Sometimes it meant an untruth was being told, and Dawson sensed that all was not well with Obeng. Whether it was, or would be, affecting his work, Dawson would no doubt find out.
CHAPTER FIVE
Dawson slept badly that night. The skeletal mattress was lumpy and smelled stale. He was almost glad to rise early and freshen up for the day. The bathroom was dingy, with mold growing in the grout of the shower stall. While the cool water trickled anemically over him, he kept his slippers on, not wanting to pick up some kind of infection on his feet.
He could not wait to be out of this hotel when Gifty’s Kumasi house was ready. As planned, Christine had traveled from Accra to take a look at the house her mother had offered them and to secure a school for the boys. She had been successful with the latter, but the lodgings had been in bad shape. Whoever was supposed to have been maintaining the property had been doing a terrible job and lying about it.
Embarrassed, Gifty had scrambled to find a foreman to get the place back in decent shape. It would take another two weeks, or so he had said. Dawson had been tempted to suggest to Christine that they simply look for accommodations elsewhere, but he knew what that would get him: a whole lot of trouble. He could hear his mother-in-law launching her high-pitched complaint, What, my house is not good enough for you? Besides, rents in Ghana had become exorbitant, some landlords demanding not one, but two years in advance. Dawson could not afford that.
Dressed and groomed, he felt much better as he left the hotel for the walk to the station. It was a little past six and he was eager to get a head start on the paper mess in the office.
At 6:18, with HQ within sight, Dawson’s phone rang. It was Obeng.
“Good morning, sir. Please, I have received a call from Dunkwa Police Station, sir. They say someone found a dead body at one of the galamsey sites.”
The town of Dunkwa was about forty kilometers southwest of Obuasi.
“Please, I am going to Dunkwa Police Station now,” Obeng continued.
“Have they secured the area in question?” Dawson asked.
“Well, they say they have a constable there.”
“Then wait for me at the Dunkwa station. I’ll join you there.”
Dawson felt excitement as he sprinted the rest of the way to HQ. A murder—barely a day after I arrived here. He was hoping the station vehicle was available, but it was not. Commander Longdon had it—a meeting in Kumasi, the desk sergeant said.
Realizing his expectations of transportation in an official police vehicle had been a little optimistic, Dawson flagged down a taxi, bargained the fare, and hopped in. For police officers everywhere in Ghana, especially in smaller municipalities, getting to a crime scene was always by a mishmash of means. Often, the detective took a taxi, or the family of the victim gave him or her a ride. Every once in a while, an actual police vehicle was available to transport an officer to the scene, but more likely than not, it was in use by the commander of the unit. Use was a loose term that included anything from legit police business to a shopping spree for the commander’s wife. As they left Obuasi, Dawson noticed a slate-gray hill towering above the outskirts of the town. “What is that mountain?” he asked the taxi driver, pointing.
“Be from digging the deep mines.”
Oh! Dawson thought in shock. It was an entirely man-made elevation.
“It be one of the AngloGold Ashanti mine,” the taxi driver explained further.
They drove along Obuasi High Street, which turned to Goldfinger West Road before a roundabout with a gold-colored statue of a worker drilling in a mine shaft.
“The old AGA office dey there,” the taxi driver said, pointing to a dilapidated AngloGold Ashanti sign to the right, in front of an equally run-down building with a rusty corrugated metal roof.
Leaving Obuasi, the taxi driver, whose name was Kofi, passed through Anyinam, a township that housed the mine workers in green, almost lush surroundings. The distinction between the workers’ quarters and the houses belonging to management was obvious to Dawson.
Turning his attention away for a minute as the residential setting thinned out and was superseded by bush on the open road, Dawson looked forward to meeting up with the most admired and influential man in his life—not his father, but a father figure. Daniel Armah, who lived in Kumasi, was Dawson’s mentor. He was the man who, as a CID detective some twenty-five years ago, had done his utmost to find out how and why Darko’s mother had mysteriously disappeared when Darko was a mere ten years old. Armah had not succeeded in his quest, but the care and doggedness he had shown had inspired Darko.
Through his teen years and into early adulthood as Dawson began training as an officer in the Ghana Police Service, the two men had remained steadfast friends. Reaching back into the long years of his experience as a detective, Armah always had wisdom and insight to share whenever Dawson
discussed a case with him. Armah held a special place in Dawson’s heart. He had taught Darko about determination and tenacity of purpose, and provided to him the role model and father figure that Darko’s own father was not.
Dawson tried Armah’s number several times. It rang, but no one picked up.
•••
Dunkwa, another mining town, was one-fifth the size of Obuasi. It stood practically on the banks of the Ofin River, hence its full name, Dunkwa-on-Ofin. Dawson had never been there, but he knew it was one of the major destinations of thousands of illegal Chinese miners flocking into Ghana to get at its gold. Dawson wasn’t exactly sure how the whole phenomenon had even started, but a lot of them had subsequently been kicked out of the country, while many remained on the run or in hiding. Dawson thought of it in a funny way: thousands of Chinese people concealed in Ashanti forests like hidden colonies of ants waiting for the anteaters to lose interest and wander away. And then they’d come right back. He didn’t know every detail of how the Chinese came back so successfully, but he knew the general mechanism: bribery and corruption. It got you everywhere in Ghana.
The road into Dunkwa was appalling. Unpaved and deeply rutted, vehicles swerved around the worst of the potholes and depressions in a kind of strange dance. Deep puddles of rainwater from the previous night and mud as thick as corn dough made the going very difficult. Only SUVs could proceed at a reasonable speed. The rest, like Dawson’s taxi, had to slow to a crawl at times.
Finally, at the crest of a hill, they saw the town ahead of them, and to the left, a segment of the Ofin River along with a large tract of land scoured bare and churned into hills and valleys of grayish-yellow soil.
Kofi looked over for a second and followed Dawson’s gaze, then back to the roadway shaking his head. “These China people,” he said in disgust. “Look what they have done to the land with their excavators.”
Look what we’ve let them do, Dawson thought.
Dunkwa was nothing spectacular by way of buildings or roads, and Dawson had not expected it to be. In most of the lower half of Ghana, certain fairly similar characteristics could be anticipated in towns of a certain size. It was only as one traveled into the arid north that architecture radically changed.
Dawson saw square brick homes with the standard corrugated tin roofs, unpaved streets and houses in random arrangement. Worn away at the sides to a strip in the middle, the main road through town was flanked on the sides by wide trash-strewn gutters, and then by chop bars, small vegetable stands. But then he had to admit that Dunkwa had a little twist to its otherwise unsurprising appearance: gold-buying stores. Lots of them.
“Ofin Gold Trading Company,” Dawson read out from one of the signs.
“Many places here to buy and sell gold,” Kofi said, in Twi this time. He turned off the main road and proceeded slowly through a narrow lane between several small buildings. He pointed. “See the line on the houses? That’s when the town flooded.”
Dawson at first didn’t understand what Kofi meant, but then he saw a faint brown border at the base of each building, the watermark of a notorious flooding of Dunkwa last year when torrents swelled the Ofin River beyond its banks.
“The police station is just here,” Kofi said, making a final left turn and pulling to a stop in front of the small building painted GPS-signature yellow and blue, or sometimes white and blue.
“Wait for me here, Kofi,” Dawson told him. “We will go somewhere else after this.”
“Yes, please.”
Obeng was waiting on the front verandah with a uniformed officer, whom he introduced as Inspector Sackie, a lanky man of about forty with a scar across his top lip.
“Good morning, sir,” he said to Dawson deferentially.
“Morning, Inspector.”
“Please, shall I give you a report first?”
“Let’s not waste precious time. You can tell me on the way there.”
CHAPTER SIX
The mining site was farther out than Dawson had expected. As they traveled more and more deeply into the bush along a laterite road whose red dust tarnished the vegetation alongside it, his sense of direction told him they must have been diverging from the course of the Ofin to meet it at some farther point along its course.
“This road,” Inspector Sackie said, “the Chinese built it.”
So they have been good for something, Dawson thought. If they had not constructed it, there might have been no road at all.
But the good roadwork came to an end as Kofi reached a point where a long, deep puddle obliterated the road’s surface. Only a 4x4 could get through that. Dawson and the two other men got out, skirted the border of the puddle to avoid sinking into the muddy thigh-deep water, and continued to their destination on foot.
“What is that noise?” Dawson asked, becoming aware of a monotonous drone in the distance somewhere to their right.
“Excavators,” Sackie said.
As they walked, the noise grew louder, and over a small rise, the source became evident—a vast area below them ploughed up in a fashion similar to what Dawson had just seen close to Dunkwa. To the right, four excavators were clawing up soil from the sides of deep pits and transferring them to the side. His instincts about the Ofin River had been correct. It had reappeared in the distance, making a wide U with the convex side toward them.
Ahead and to the left of more gouged-out pits, Dawson saw a stationary excavator, its claw bucket resting on the ground like an exhausted animal, and not far away from that, a crowd of people was staring at and discussing a deep, wide cavity in the mudbank. Yellow cordon tape had been strung up using the shafts of four shovels, but one of the shovels had toppled over and people had crossed into the would-be restricted area. Presumably that is the crime scene? Where is the body, and where is the constable who has supposedly secured the scene?
Dawson, Obeng, and Sackie half slid, half walked down the muddy incline, and all eyes turned to them.
“What are you doing here?” Sackie demanded of the crowd in Twi.
“Please, the body was here,” a young man volunteered.
“Where is it now?” Dawson asked.
“Please, they have taken it.”
“Taken it where?”
“To the Chinaman’s house.”
Dawson didn’t understand. “What Chinaman’s house? Where?”
A teenager pointed behind them and the men turned.
Now they saw a second gathering of people crowded around a wooded shack behind two mountains of excavated land.
“Is the constable there too?” Dawson asked.
The crowd chorused assent.
“Okay, let’s go and see what’s going on,” Dawson said, bemused. “But Obeng, I need you to clear everybody out of here.”
Dawson and Sackie walked toward the shack, leaving Obeng to secure the area and keep it that way. Dawson wondered why the backup from the Dunkwa station was so poor. Why had only one constable been sent when clearly there needed to be at least two of them? As if reading Dawson’s mind, Sackie said, “Sorry, sir. I wanted to send another officer to assist, but we don’t have enough men.”
Dawson nodded. He wasn’t happy, but he understood the difficulty. It was often the case that the rural police stations were understaffed.
About twenty people milled about the front of the poorly constructed wood structure, which had only a dirty curtain as the door. As Dawson and Sackie approached, a constable in dark blue uniform came out of the shack sweating and looking shaken. Obviously stressed, he yelled at everyone to get away from the door. They backed up but stubbornly stood around to watch. A crowd could be as obstinate and unmoving as an oil tanker in a swamp.
“Morning, sir,” the constable said separately to Sackie and Dawson.
His badge read kobby. He was lean and tall, and very boyish in the face.
Dawson had become
aware of a sobbing sound coming from the shack. “What is going on in there?”
“The brother of the Chinese man who died,” Kobby explained with frustration. “When the body was found this morning by the galamsey boys, he told them to help him bring the body here because he didn’t want all those people staring at his brother.”
They moved the body from the crime scene. Dawson’s heart sank. It was a forensic nightmare.
“And then they helped him bring the body here and the brother washed the mud off,” Kobby added.
The blood in Dawson head drained, leaving him cold. He washed the mud off?
“And now he won’t release the body,” Kobby said.
“What do you mean he won’t release the body?” Dawson asked.
“He says he wants to take it back with him to China.”
Eventually, sure, Dawson thought, but not right now. “All right. Let’s go inside.”
The angled wooden slats of the dwelling let some air in, but it was still warm and stifling, and it smelled awful. Dawson could detect decaying flesh, urine, fuel, and stale food. In the middle of the dirt floor, the victim’s brother was weeping and mouthing words in Chinese as he cradled the corpse, shaking it every few seconds as if trying to wake it from sleep.
A chill went down Dawson’s spine. Covered in clumps of soil, the dead man was clothed except for his shoes. His back was arched concavely. His legs pulled up backward to meet his wrists behind him. His head strained upward with his eyes open and mouth agape, as if he had been in a desperate struggle to escape this terrible, anatomically impossible pose. Moving a little closer, Dawson saw that the ankles and wrists were free of ligatures, but ligature marks were present. The man was no longer tied up. He had gone into rigor in that position. Dawson spotted two slashed, knotted lengths of rope on the ground beside the corpse. Trying to reconstruct events in his mind, he imagined that after the dead man had been discovered, his brother had hastily cut the ligatures away in an effort to “release” the corpse, only to find that the body was fixed the way it had been found.
