TOGBE ADZIMA HAD BEEN right-there wasn’t much to his living quarters: one room with two wooden stools, one small table, and a deteriorating foam bed mounted on planks and old crates. He kept his clothes in a cardboard box or hanging from nails in the wall. There was a pair of sandals near his bed and a selection of alcoholic drinks, mostly gin and schnapps, in another box. The place smelled musty and pungent.
Adzima leaned against the doorjamb and glowered at them as they searched. Fiti looked desultorily underneath the foam mattress while Dawson checked the sleeping cloth on top of it. If only he could find that silver bracelet, get a confession from Adzima, and wrap this case up. He would love that.
He went through the priest’s few clothes, digging in pockets. Fiti leaned against the wall and folded his arms, apparently done with his search, and Dawson reluctantly admitted to himself that he was about done too. He looked around. There had to be something.
“Are you satisfied now?” Adzima said with a slight smirk.
“No,” Dawson said. He was staring at the box of booze and thinking it reminded him of the way Daramani kept his own stash of toxic elixirs in a portmanteau. He hid things in there too-stolen watches, for instance.
And so might Adzima.
Dawson reached into the box and began pulling the bottles out-gin, schnapps, whiskey. Fetish priests and village chiefs received an impressive amount of alcohol as gifts.
Ah.
Under the Beefeater gin, Dawson found a small, locked, rusty tin. He shook it gently, and it rattled.
“What’s inside?” he asked Adzima.
“Coins.”
“Would you open it, please?”
The priest gave Dawson a slow, seething look before removing a small key from his pocket. He unlocked the box.
Dawson found some coins, safety pins, and a watch. No silver bracelet. Disappointing, very disappointing. He gave the box back. “Thank you.”
Before he and Fiti left, Dawson said to Adzima, “We’ll be back.”
He liked telling suspects that. It kept them off balance.
Dawson and Fiti walked back to the dancing circle, and Togbe Adzima returned to his spot. As Dawson watched and listened, he saw in action the Ewe people’s long-held fame for the drumming tradition, and he made a mental apology to the village of Bedome for having dismissed it as underdeveloped. In the realm of drumming and dancing, Bedomeans were unmatched by anything Dawson had seen before. He was not the only one impressed. Many in the thrilled audience had evidently come from Ketanu and other surrounding towns.
Dawson spotted John in the crowd, and as he smiled and waved, he saw something else out of the corner of his eye. A man appeared next to Adzima and whispered in his ear. Dawson’s heart stopped. It was the same man who had passed by while Dawson was talking to Efia in the bush. The man cast a furtive glance at Dawson, and the priest followed his lead. Dawson looked straight ahead, as if he had not seen them.
The man slipped away. Adzima rested his chin casually in his palm, but his narrowed eyes glinted with anger. He knew.
He got up and left abruptly.
“I’ll be right back,” Dawson told Fiti, and he quickly cut a path through the crowd. Not quite fast enough, because Adzima had disappeared from view. Dawson picked up the pace. As he passed by the wives cooking, he saw that Efia wasn’t there, and his stomach plunged. He began to run.
As he got to the priest’s house, he heard two voices.
“Didn’t I tell you not to talk to them?” Adzima was saying. “Eh? Didn’t I?”
Dawson heard the first strike and Efia’s cry. He charged into the room. Adzima had her cowering against the wall with her hands raised defensively. He hit her across the face.
“Leave her alone,” Dawson said.
Adzima jumped away from Efia and swung around. Dawson reached him quickly and hit him hard in the face with an open palm. The impact sent Adzima’s head whipping to the side as if unhinged from his neck. He reeled and toppled, but before he fell, Dawson got him by the throat and lifted him off the ground. Adzima kicked out, but found only air. He swiped and groped uselessly as Dawson dragged him across the room by the throat and drove him into the wall with the force of a wrecking ball.
Dawson pushed his thumb into Adzima’s gullet and increased the pressure until the priest’s eyeballs began to jut blood red from their sockets. A short gurgle escaped his open mouth.
“This is how it feels to die,” Dawson said. “Do you like it?”
The priest’s eyelids fluttered and his body slackened. Dawson released some of the pressure on his neck and slapped him again across the face. Adzima’s body shuddered.
“If you ever hurt her again, I will finish killing you. Do you hear me?”
“Please, I beg you,” Adzima whispered hoarsely.
“Did you hear what I said?”
“Yes, yes, please…”
Dawson released him with a shove, and the priest collapsed to the floor like a sack of yams.
Dawson turned to Efia. She had stood up but was still pressed against the wall.
“Are you all right?”
She was trembling violently. “I’m fine.”
“Let me look.” He lifted her chin to check. Her left cheek was swelling up rapidly, but her flawless skin had not been broken. For a moment their eyes met and held. Dawson found her so vulnerable, so achingly lovely. Their bodies were almost touching, and he drew back, startled by what he was feeling.
Inspector Fiti came into the room and looked in puzzlement from Dawson and Efia to Adzima and back again. “What’s happening?” he demanded.
The priest staggered to his feet, screaming, “He tried to kill me!” He pointed a shaky finger at Dawson.
“What do you mean he tried to kill you?” Fiti said.
“He did!” Adzima cried, indicating his throat. “Look, look. Do you see? He strangled me!”
Fiti, nonplussed, frowned and looked at Dawson. “What’s going on?”
“He was beating Efia up,” Dawson said tersely. “So I took him away from her.”
“But is it true you strangled him?”
“He did!” Adzima shouted again. He was now almost weeping.
“I think strangle is an exaggeration,” Dawson said.
“Come outside with me for a moment, please,” Fiti said, looking grim.
Dawson beckoned to Efia to come with him. He certainly was not going to leave her behind. She stood a discreet distance away as the two men faced each other.
“What are you doing?” Fiti asked Dawson.
“Someone saw me talking to Efia, and he reported it to Togbe,” Dawson said. “He was beating her up for that, so I came to her defense.”
“You hit Togbe?” Fiti asked in disbelief.
“Yes.”
“A man can beat his wife if he wants to, Inspector Dawson. Don’t you know that?”
“Togbe was beating her because she talked to me. I won’t allow that. She deserves our protection.”
“You could have stopped him without beating him up. He is the High Priest of Bedome!”
“There wasn’t any time to be nice about it.”
Fiti dropped his head and rubbed it as if nursing a headache.
“They insist on sending someone from Accra instead of our own man from Ho,” he said, almost to himself. “Our own man from Ho is no good. And so whom do they send? You. You. Beating up a priest of this shrine. I just can’t believe it.”
Fiti went over to Efia and had a few words with her. From where Dawson stood, the inspector at first seemed sympathetic to her, but when he waved her away, the gesture looked callous. She looked once at Dawson, and he could see she was crying.
Suddenly she came back and clasped his hands. “Please, Mr. Dawson, sir. Take my daughter away from here to live a good life. Please, I beg you.”
Then she turned and ran away.
Nunana noticed how silent and downcast Efia was as she scooped the pounded fufu into a pot.
“What’s wrong, Efia?”
Efia shook her head, but she didn’t say a word.
Nunana touched Efia’s left cheek, and she flinched. “He beat you?”
Efia nodded.
“Why?”
She shook her head.
“Come here,” Nunana said. “Come.”
She led Efia away so they could have some privacy.
“What happened?” Nunana pressed her. “You might as well tell me. I will find out in the end anyway. Why did he beat you?”
“Because I talked to the policeman from Accra.”
“About what?”
“Gladys.”
“But why did you do that?”
“I thought we were safe-but someone saw us and told Togbe.”
“Ao, Efia!” Nunana said. “Don’t you know you have to be careful? These people who come here from Accra just do their business and go home and never think of us again. You don’t know that? Don’t talk to them!”
Efia nodded, wiping tears away.
“What did he ask you?” Nunana said. “The policeman.”
“Just what I saw that day. You know-how I found Gladys. And what Togbe was doing that evening she came here and if they were quarreling, and if he went somewhere after she left.”
“And what else?”
“If I’ve seen a silver bracelet they say Gladys was wearing before she died and now it’s gone, and I told him I haven’t seen anything like that.”
Nunana’s blood ran cold, and at once she knew what had happened. After Efia had rushed back to Bedome to report Gladys’s death, Togbe had gone to the plantain grove to “see for himself.” He must have arrived there before anyone else, and when he saw that bracelet on dead Gladys’s wrist, he just could not resist taking it. Nunana’s lip curled. What kind of man steals jewelry off a dead body?
Just then she had another thought that took her breath away and left her matchstick legs unsteady. What if… what if Togbe had taken Gladys’s bracelet even before that? Say, at the time she was killed? In other words, what if Togbe had murdered Gladys?