TIMOTHY SOWAH ASKED THAT his lawyer be present during his interrogation, but it turned out that counsel was in Lagos and wouldn’t be able to make it to Ho before the next day at the earliest. So Timothy would be spending the night in jail, and Dawson decided to find somewhere to stay overnight in Ho rather than go back to Ketanu. He called Chances Hotel but found their prices were far beyond his reach. Hence the name, he thought wryly. Chances are you can’t afford it. He should have known. That hotel was every tourist’s first choice when visiting the Volta Region.
He found another place called Liberty Hotel, an establishment of dubious credentials, but he wasn’t that bothered. After filling up with a meal of yam and fish stew, Dawson spent some time in his hotel room looking over Gladys’s diary and the two letters from Timothy that she had kept with it. The more Dawson read, the more it became clear that Gladys was smitten with the kind of infatuation that makes a person blind to reason and reality. The more she closed in on Timothy, the more he drew back in alarm, and that hurt Gladys, as it always does in these cases. Pain quickly turned to anger.
Something troubled Dawson, though. It was Timothy who had pressed for a detective from Accra because he doubted the abilities of the CID man stationed at Ho. If Timothy was the murderer, why would he have done that? Wouldn’t he have wanted a less competent investigator, to increase the chances that the case would go unsolved and he’d get off scot-free? The question didn’t blow Dawson’s case apart, but it did make him uneasy.
The mobile signal was strong in Ho, and Dawson called Christine to let her know how things were going. Hosiah was doing fine and spoke to Dawson briefly before his bedtime story. Six-year-old boys are short on phone conversation. After he had hung up, Dawson had a smoke and felt good, and then he played his kalimba. Marijuana made his fingers more nimble. He took a shower and then turned in to bed. He was bone tired.
Reindorf Bannerman, Timothy Sowah’s lawyer, was supposed to arrive by nine o’clock in the morning but did not show until almost noon. While he was waiting, Dawson bought the Daily Graphic from a newspaper boy. On the second page he came across a small article that made him curse with disgust.
Madina Traditional Healer Released
ACCRA-Well-known herbalist and traditional healer Augustus Ayitey has been released from Madina police custody. Charges of assault on a child being treated for illness have been dropped. Chief Superintendent Theophilus Lartey of the Criminal Investigations Department, stated that an investigation would be carried out as to whether Mr. Ayitey was improperly detained.
One of the Ho police constables came up to Dawson. “Please, sir, Mr. Bannerman has arrived and we are ready.”
They went into the interrogation room. Timothy was seated at the table next to Bannerman. He was tense and did not look like he had had much sleep. Nervousness had replaced his self-assured air, but Bannerman, despite his resemblance to a squat bulldog, had a warm voice and a calming effect on his client.
“You’ll be all right,” he said quietly to Timothy, touching his arm.
He shook hands with Dawson and said, “Are you ready to proceed?”
“Yes, thank you, Mr. Bannerman. Good afternoon, Timothy.”
Dawson wasn’t going to take any chances that the suspect might get off on a technicality, so he was careful to recite verbatim the police advisory statement, known to some as the Judge’s Rule, that cautioned Timothy that he didn’t have to say anything, but that what he did say could be used in evidence against him.
“I’ve been looking through Gladys Mensah’s diary,” Dawson went on, “and in several places she talks about how she feels about you.
“Here’s one from early this month: ‘I can’t stop thinking about Timmy. Can’t wait to see him when I go up to Ketanu.’ By ‘Timmy’ she means you, is that correct, Mr. Sowah?”
“Yes.”
“Were you having sexual relations with Gladys Mensah?”
“Is that necessary, Detective Inspector?” Bannerman cut in.
“The type of relationship is important in establishing motive.”
Bannerman conceded and nodded permission to Timothy, who hesitated before he said, “We did have sex, yes.”
“How often?”
“Please, Mr. Dawson,” Bannerman said. “There’s no need for prurience.”
“That wasn’t my intention. I’ll rephrase. Where and when, Mr. Sowah, did you rendezvous with Gladys?”
“Sometimes I went to Accra and booked a hotel in town and Gladys would come to see me there.”
“What about in Ketanu?”
“I had access to the Ministry of Health guesthouse, and she would join me.”
“The same one I’m staying at now?”
“Yes.”
“I see. Did you ever meet in the forest around Ketanu and Bedome?”
“Once or twice.”
Dawson flipped through Gladys’s diary entries. One in particular caught his eye.
I despise Togbe Adzima. I want to get the trokosi wives away from him, but there has to be a place for them to go, somewhere they can make a living.
That was an important paragraph, but for the moment, Dawson was more concerned with what was going on directly between Gladys and Timothy.
“On the fifteenth of March,” he continued, “Gladys wrote, ‘Timmy says he doesn’t think he can spend Easter Sunday with me. I can understand that he may not be able to take the whole day, but I don’t believe he can’t reserve a couple of hours for me. I feel he’s pulling away from me.’ What would make her say that, Mr. Sowah?”
“I don’t know why she thought that.”
“Tuesday, the eighteenth of March: ‘He won’t answer my calls.’ Was that true?”
“I never deliberately tried to avoid her calls.”
“But something was wrong, Mr. Sowah,” Dawson pressed, “because here’s what she said just the following day, the nineteenth: ‘Went to Ho to Timmy’s office since he won’t answer my phone calls. He was meeting with some VIP from Accra, and when I came in, Tim looked as if he would faint. Then he called me “Miss Mensah” as though he hardly knew me and said he couldn’t talk right now. That was a hateful and cowardly thing to do. You don’t abandon your loyalties just because you’re afraid of what people may think.’
“Thursday the twentieth: ‘Love has to grow. It can be secretive at the beginning, but it can’t stay that way. I should not need to play hide-and-seek with the man I love. He doesn’t love his wife, he’s told me that. Then why can’t he leave her?’ So now Gladys was putting a lot of pressure on you, Mr. Sowah, not so?”
Timothy took a deep breath. “I loved her, I loved being with her, but little by little it felt as if she had me by the throat.”
“What did you decide to do about it?”
“I knew I had to sit down and have a serious talk with her before it got beyond control. When I received her message on Thursday threatening me that she would go to my wife, I called her back and agreed we should meet in the forest the next day to talk.”
“Why the forest and not the guesthouse?”
“Because at the time it was occupied by an official visiting from Upper Region.”
“How did you feel, Mr. Sowah, when Gladys threatened you with confronting your wife?”
“I felt sick. I didn’t know whether she would really do it or not, but the thought that she should go to the length of making a threat like that made her seem a very different person from the one I’d known. It was very disturbing.”
“Did you have an impulse, even if slight, to kill her?”
“No.”
“She’s becoming obsessed, maybe even dangerous to you. An affair can be exciting, but it’s the routine life with your spouse that gives stability, and stability is comforting even if dull. The prospect of losing it can be frightening.”
“I know that, but I would never kill her.”
“Did you set a time to meet on Friday, the twenty-first of March?”
“We said no later than five because no one wants to be in the forest after dark, but I had a meeting that kept me, and I didn’t leave Ho till about quarter to five. I was running late.”
“What time did you get to Ketanu?”
“I didn’t.”
Dawson frowned. “What do you mean you didn’t?”
“Just as I was getting to Sokode, which is only about five kilometers from Ho, I had a flat tire, and I didn’t have a spare, so I had to limp into the town to see if someone could repair the puncture. It took me a little while to find someone.”
Dawson felt momentarily derailed. This had come out of the blue.
“Did you try to ring Gladys to let her know you were delayed?” he asked.
Timothy nodded. “Yes, but I kept getting that ‘subscriber out of range’ message. By the time my tire had been repaired, it was dark and there was no point in going to the forest. Gladys would not have waited until then because it simply isn’t safe. So I had no choice but to come back to Ho.”
“Weren’t you worried about her?”
“But of course I was. I tried all night to reach her on her mobile.”
“Why didn’t you go to her house in Ketanu to check if she was all right?”
Timothy sighed. “Look, in retrospect I know I should have, but at the time I thought… I’m not sure what I thought. I think I thought she might be so angry with me, she might have decided she didn’t want to talk to me. Would I go to her house and risk creating some scene?” He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. “I feel like I’ve been such a coward. From the very beginning, everything I did in relation to Gladys was cowardly.”
“I think we’ve established that my client could not have been responsible for the murder of Gladys Mensah,” Bannerman said. “She was found the following morning in the forest, and clearly that’s where the murder took place. We can’t be sure of the exact hour, but obviously my client was not present at either the time or the place. You therefore have no grounds on which to hold him any longer.”
“I don’t think we’ve established your client’s innocence at all,” Dawson said firmly. “And as for the murder taking place in the forest, that isn’t necessarily the case. Her body could have been brought from elsewhere and dumped.”
Bannerman became exasperated. “You’re clutching at straws, Detective Inspector Dawson. Come now, this is preposterous. I demand that you confirm my client’s alibi immediately and release him forthwith. Is that understood?”
Dawson refused to be rattled. “Timothy, are you able to show us the location of the repair shop in Sokode?”
“Yes, of course.”