Gold of Our Fathers

by Kwei Quartey

  Dawson’s eyes shifted around the room: food-caked tin plates and pots and pans stacked in one corner, plastic gallon containers in another, and soiled clothes in a third next to a pump-action shotgun—the weapon of choice among miners.

  Kobby was looking at the scene with revulsion.

  “Do you know the Chinese man’s name?” Dawson whispered to him.

  “Which one, sir?”

  “Both, I suppose.”

  “Please, I don’t know the name of the dead one,” Kobby said, “but the people outside say the brother’s name is Wei.”

  “Does he speak English?”

  “A little bit.”

  Dawson went closer to Wei and kneeled down. “Mr. Wei, my name is Detective Chief Inspector Dawson.”

  Wei was a chunky man. He pulled back from Dawson as if he’d been threatened and began shouting. Perhaps he did think Dawson was threatening him. In a moment of confusion, Dawson realized that the Chinese man was speaking in Twi. It was bad, but it was Twi.

  “Get away from me!” Wei said. “Look at my brother!”

  “Mr. Wei—”

  “They kill him!” he said, switching to broken English. “They kill him!”

  “Who?” Dawson asked urgently. “Who killed him?”

  “Galamsey! Galamsey!”

  “Which ones? Who?”

  Wei didn’t answer, his crying trailing off abruptly, and only his lower lip trembling as he looked down at his brother. “Oh, Bao. Oh, Bao.”

  Bao had been thin, but putrefaction was beginning to bloat him. Tropical weather never treats corpses kindly. Dawson would need to talk to Wei a lot more very soon, but he was too distraught to get any useful answers out of him at the moment. For now, he needed to get the man away from his dead brother Bao.

  Dawson stood up again and spoke quietly to Inspector Sackie. “Is a crime scene unit available?”

  He looked skeptical. “There is one in Kumasi, but they have to cover so many places in the region. We can call them, but usually they cannot arrive for twelve hours or more.”

  That didn’t surprise Dawson, as bad as it seemed. CSUs were hard to come by in smaller towns and villages. Dawson made a decision. Forget the CSU. He could not allow the corpse to stay here for several hours.

  “Let’s get the body to Komfo Anokye morgue as soon as possible,” he said.

  Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, often called KATH, was Kumasi’s largest.

  “We can get a four-by-four to transport it there,” Sackie said, taking out his phone to make a call.

  “Thank you,” Dawson said, studying Wei for a moment and trying to decide the best way to handle this. He returned to the Chinese man’s side. “We are going to take care of your brother, okay, sir?”

  “Wha’?”

  “We are going to take him to the hospital for autopsy.” Dawson realized he was speaking louder. How ridiculous.

  Wei shook his head, and Dawson wasn’t sure that he really understood. Getting to his feet, he touched Wei’s arm softly and indicated that he should follow his lead.

  “Come on, my friend. Let’s go now.”

  He stayed stubbornly where he was. Kobby came to Dawson’s aid by grasping Wei firmly under one arm and urging him to get to his feet. Abruptly, Wei exploded, lunged at the constable, and took a swing. Kobby sidestepped and deflected the blow, which put the Chinese man off-balance and sent him to the ground in a graceless heap. Dawson, Sackie, and Kobby moved in to cuff him.

  “I don’t know what your problem is, my friend,” Dawson said, “but you are under arrest for assaulting a police officer. I wish I knew how to say that in your language.”

  Then, Dawson reflected, Wei could even be the culprit. Who knows? All that babbling in Chinese might have been his confession: I killed my brother.

  “Take him outside to sit down,” Dawson instructed, breathing heavily. What a way to start the day.

  Kobby escorted Wei out as the Chinese man kept shouting something they didn’t understand. Now Dawson and Inspector Sackie were alone with the dead body. No police photographer meant Dawson had to improvise. He took his phone out, backed up, and took a long shot of the corpse and the interior of the shack before moving in. He photographed the ground around the body, including a white plastic bucket containing dirty water and a rag that Wei must have been using to wash his brother’s body, the two lengths of rope on, and a close-up of the knots. It might help determining left- or right-handedness of the killer, but not necessarily.

  Dawson looked up at Sackie. “Do you have any specimen bags?”

  The inspector shook his head. “No, sir, but I can send someone to get some from the town. Plastic, or paper?”

  “Both plastic and paper, please.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sackie went outside, leaving Dawson by himself with the corpse. Dawson saw deep bloody gashes in the top of the scalp and wondered what had inflicted them. Perhaps a machete, probably the most common murder weapon in Ghana. Was that what killed this man?

  Dawson picked up a twig and gently lifted the pile of rags and old clothes in case a machete was concealed underneath, but he found nothing. He looked up at the ceiling. Sometimes, people slipped weapons between the beams. Nothing there either.

  He didn’t see blood spatter anywhere. If the man had not been bleeding when he was discovered, the wounds might have been inflicted postmortem, but Dawson still had to return to the original crime scene to look for signs of blood before he came to that conclusion. He took a look at the shotgun, examining it for bloodstains without success. He had been thinking that maybe someone hit the Chinese guy on the top of his head with the barrel or stock of the weapon.

  He photographed Bao’s head wounds from different angles, both with and without the flash. When he moved his attention to the man’s face, Dawson recoiled. It was a picture of fright, as if he had died screaming. Perhaps in pain as the machete blows were delivered.

  Or perhaps he was shrieking in terror as he was tied. Could be two assailants, Dawson reflected, because it was tricky to tie up someone who was struggling—especially in this bizarre position—and Dawson was pretty certain that, if his temper was anything like his brother’s, Wei was fighting at the time of death.

  No marks on his belly, which was an odd, mottled grayish-yellow color. At the sides of his trunk closest to the ground, the purplish-red coloration of pooled blood—lividity—suggested the position he had been in after death: on his belly. To confirm, Dawson turned the body, which rolled in one piece, like an artless statue. Yes, there was the blanched, oval section on Bao’s abdomen, where his weight had prevented blood from pooling.

  Dawson took photos of all of this, because the lividity would change with time, and if it took a while to get the body to the morgue, which he suspected it would, the corpse would deteriorate in all sorts of other ways.

  Sackie returned as Dawson was taking pictures of the ligature marks on Wei’s wrists and ankles.

  “Someone is bringing the bags for you, sir,” Sackie said.

  “Thank you. How is the victim’s brother doing?”

  “He’s just sitting there saying nothing.”

  “Tell Obeng to escort him back to the taxi and wait for us. I’m going to look at the other site. When the bags arrive, I want these ligatures collected, all the clothes, the pots and pans, the shotgun, and the bucket. Please don’t throw the water out. There could be traces of blood in it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Dawson walked back to take a look at the site’s lone excavator resting high on the crest of the collection of pits. It was sullen yellow in color and caked with mud. The long boom attached to the hydraulic arm and the intimidating claw bucket bore the manufacturer’s name—XCMG. Chinese make, Dawson supposed. He turned to look around, the slight elevation affording him a better view. Several hundred meters away in
the dry, unforgiving laterite where only the hardiest plants grew, two Toyota pickups were parked at an angle to each other. Dawson assumed that they belonged to the Chinese brothers.

  He took a walk down to look the trucks over. They were similar, although different models. One of them, dull charcoal in color, looked like it had taken quite a beating on bad roads. The other, clearly a newer pickup, was metallic red. Dawson tried the doors, but both were locked. The inside of the charcoal vehicle was full of trash and discarded food cans. The red one was decent. Dawson looked closely at the truck beds for any signs—especially bloodstains—that the vehicle had transported Bao’s body from another location. He couldn’t find anything, but whichever pickup belonged to the victim would have to go to the Motor Traffic Unit (MTU) at Regional Headquarters in Kumasi for further examination.

  Returning to the site where the body had been dug out, Dawson saw a man and woman alighting from a silver-gray Toyota Prado at the edge of the site, where the crowd had now thinned out to just a half dozen or so. The man had a TV camera on his shoulder. Dawson made short work of the space between him and them.

  “There’s no filming allowed,” he called out as he approached them. “This is a fresh crime scene we are still investigating. Please put the camera away.”

  The man hesitated and didn’t quite obey.

  “And who might you be?” the woman asked.

  “Detective Chief Inspector Darko Dawson. And you are?”

  “Good morning, Chief Inspector. Akua Helmsley. Environmental reporter for The Guardian newspaper. I’m doing a documentary on illegal gold mining in Ghana.”

  She had a British accent. Her skin was fair and flawless. She was tall for a woman—just a couple of inches shorter than Dawson. She gestured to the man behind her. “That’s my cameraman, Joshua Samuels.”

  “Please, Mr. Samuels,” Dawson said, “put the camera back in the vehicle.”

  Sullenly, Samuels put the camera down in the front passenger seat.

  “What are you doing here?” Dawson asked Helmsley.

  She seemed to smile somewhat as she considered him, as if a little amused. He didn’t let it bother him.

  A light breeze lifted her flowing black hair slightly off her shoulders. “You’ve got a dead Chinese man, I understand, Chief Inspector,” she said. “Do you know who he is?”

  “The investigation is only in its preliminary stages,” Dawson said. “I know almost nothing about him.”

  “He was buried in that mound of mud over there?” she asked, pointing.

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “Your Sergeant Obeng told me,” she said, flashing a smile. She was almost too pretty to be surrounded by this wrecked landscape. “I met him back at the taxi where he’s holding the suspect.”

  Evidently, Obeng had let her charm information out of him. How annoying.

  “Definitely homicide, I suppose?” she said.

  “Nothing is definite yet,” he countered. Her knowing tone was getting on his nerves. “We have to get the body to the mortuary for a full autopsy.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Are you aware just how backed up they are with bodies at the KATH mortuary?”

  “Yes, of course,” he said, matching her self-assuredness. “All hospital mortuaries in Ghana are backed up.”

  She smiled again, her eyes shrewd and dazzling. “I like ‘detective chief inspector’ on you. It suits you well. You say we can’t film the crime scene. What about still photos?”

  “You can take photos of the surrounding area”—he pointed in all directions—“but not the crime scene itself.”

  “But it’s so common in Ghana even to see photos of murdered victims right on the front page of a newspaper,” she pointed out.

  That was true. “Yes, and I hate that,” Dawson said. “Bad police work.”

  “I’m impressed,” she said. “Nice to meet someone who knows best practice. I’ve been back and forth to the Ashanti Region from England regularly over the past year, but I’ve never met you. Are you new around here?”

  “I was transferred here from CID Central in Accra—arrived only yesterday. What is your documentary about?”

  “It’s an in-depth look at all aspects of the gold mining industry in Ghana, but particularly the phenomenon of the mass influx of Chinese illegals.”

  Dawson saw his opportunity. “Maybe you can explain how this Chinese invasion happened, Miss Helmsley, because I don’t understand it well.”

  “Okay,” she said, propping a foot on a fallen, decaying tree trunk. Her jeans were a snug fit, and Dawson noticed the fine curve of her hamstring muscles. “Quick tutorial. Ready? The people of Shanglin County in China’s Guangxi Province have had a gold-mining tradition for centuries. Basically, they mined their own land dry as a bone, so they began looking elsewhere in China to get their gold. But the Chinese government said, ‘Oh no you don’t. We’re not giving out licenses to small fries like you. Go somewhere else.’”

  “And so they heard that Ghana was the second highest gold producer in Africa and came running here?” Dawson asked sardonically.

  “More or less,” she said. “Stories circulated in China about miners coming to Ghana for gold and returning home as millionaires. Much of it could have been urban legend, but they called the thousands of Shanglin miners flocking to Ghana the ‘Shanglin Gang.’”

  “And all of them are illegal?”

  “Yes, because it’s illegal for foreigners to engage in galamsey, or small-scale surface mining—whatever your term of preference. But who cares, right? Visa brokers in Ghana can get on-arrival visas for incoming Chinese workers by bribing officials in the Ghana Immigration Service. There’s also a trafficking system involving Togo and other countries.”

  Dawson shook his head slowly, feeling a stab of anger over the depth of the corruption involved. “All the trouble they go through must be worth its weight in gold,” he commented.

  “Nice one, Chief Inspector,” Helmsley said. “It’s true. Even though western mining companies like AngloGold with its massive deep mining sites produce more than seventy percent of Ghana’s gold and the galamsey contribute less than thirty, the Chinese illegals do well. And so do a lot of other people. The landowner and the local chiefs get paid by the Chinese, and unemployed Ghanaian kids hanging around the villages get to do some work and earn some money.”

  “No wonder the illegal Chinese guys get to stay,” Dawson murmured, understanding the picture more completely now. He gestured to the ravaged landscape. “They are useful to us at the expense of mother Ghana.”

  “Yes,” Helmsley agreed. “Just the way it’s been since at least the fifteenth century.” She and Dawson held glances for a moment. “I think we’ll take our leave now, Chief Inspector . . . Oh, just one thing. I’d like to exchange numbers if possible. I may need to get in touch with you on another occasion.”

  She could be useful to the case, he thought as they traded their contact information. Very useful. There was also something exciting about her, like a bright strand of gold in a length of fabric one can’t resist touching.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It had taken three hours for Bao Liu’s corpse to be picked up and transported to the mortuary at KATH. Wei was in custody at the Dunkwa Police Station, at first loudly protesting and then falling silent and brooding.

  Dawson’s search of the site where Bao had been discovered had turned up no traces of blood, and besides, the area had been trampled with a thousand footprints of meddling onlookers. None of the galamsey boys who had reportedly found the body were around to be questioned, and no one knew where they were—or no one admitted to it.

  Dawson and Obeng went into town to look for a Chinese interpreter to help question Wei. They split up and began popping into gold-selling and -buying stores on either side of the street. Dawson first tried the shop he’d seen earlier—Ofin Gold Tradi
ng Company. In a small room, he found an impeccably turned out Ghanaian in a white linen shirt sitting at his desk weighing a lump of gold on a digital scale. The Chinese man who had brought it in waited anxiously for the verdict: the weight, the trading price, and how much cash he was going to get.

  “Fourteen point one six grams,” the Ghanaian man said. “Which is almost half an ounce, or twenty blades.”

  Dawson had never heard of a “blade,” but obviously forty blades equaled an ounce.

  “Four hundred dollars,” the Ghanaian man said.

  “Eh?” the Chinese man said, looking put out.

  “Four hundred.”

  “You pay me six hundred dollar.”

  The Ghanaian smiled. “Six! I don’t think so, my friend. The gold is not pure. Sorry.”

  The Chinese man looked at the buyer and back to the gold, undecided. “No,” he said finally, shaking his head. “Today you no good.”

  He took his gold nugget back and left. The Ghanaian man shrugged and laughed. “He won’t get a better price anywhere else,” he said to Dawson, as if he had been in on the conversation from the start.

  “How much is gold going for at the moment?” Dawson asked.

  “Almost thirteen hundred dollars per ounce,” the man replied. “Are you buying or selling?”

  “Neither.” He showed his badge. “Detective Chief Inspector Dawson, CID.”

  “George Danquah,” the man said, rising to shake hands. He was clean-shaven, neat, and was wearing a subtle fragrance. “Please, have a seat.”

  Dawson took the stool on the other side of the table. “I’m investigating the death of a Chinese man at a mining site.”

  “Is Bao Liu the dead man you are speaking of?”

  “Yes. You knew him?”

  “Like I know the other Chinese miners,” Danquah said with something of a smirk. “They come and they go. I do business with them, but I have no interest in them personally.”

  “What was Mr. Liu like?”

  George pulled a face, as if he had smelled something bad. “Unpleasant, always losing his temper, shouting, calling people stupid.” Raising his voice, he launched into a singsong, mocking imitation of Chinese, which Dawson admitted sounded quite authentic. It probably wouldn’t to a Chinese speaker, of course.