BEFORE CONTINUING ON TO Bedome, Dawson took a slight diversion to talk to the handful of farmers toiling on their plots at the side of the forest.
He called out, “Good morning. Ayekoo!”
They responded appreciatively, and Dawson introduced himself and asked if any of them had witnessed the argument between Isaac and Samuel. Two of them said yes.
“Where were they when you saw them?” Dawson asked.
The farmers pointed, and as he turned to look, Dawson realized something that he hadn’t before. Although Isaac and Samuel would have been within view from this spot, the Bedome-Ketanu footpath was obscured by a clump of bushes. It meant that the farmers would not have been able to see whoever accosted Gladys on her way home.
“Did Samuel come back this way?” Dawson asked.
The older of the two farmers nodded. “He came and helped us for a little while.”
“Did he leave you before it got dark?”
The farmer shook his head. “No, sir.”
“Did he seem angry after the quarrel?”
“He was annoyed, yes, but I told him not to let it trouble him, and I think he was all right after that.”
Dawson thanked the two witnesses, and took down their names in case he needed to get back in touch with them.
As he walked on to Bedome, Dawson wondered, How could Samuel have been in two places at one time-working on the farm and talking to Gladys on the path? It wasn’t physically possible.
Togbe Adzima was sitting outside bouncing one of his children on his knee, but as soon as he saw Dawson approaching, he got up and retreated into his house.
“Don’t come in here,” he shouted from inside. “Get away from me!”
But there was no door to stop Dawson from entering.
“What do you want from me?” Adzima snapped.
“I need to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“I’m not here to do anything bad to you, but Togbe Adzima, your life may be in danger.”
“What are you talking about?”
“One of your trokosi died.”
“Who told you that?”
“Mr. Kutu.”
“All right. And so what?”
“Have you had that blood test Gladys Mensah was giving?”
“I don’t need any kind of blood test.”
“Was the trokosi a virgin when she came to you?”
“Of course,” Adzima said contemptuously.
“Okay, listen to me. I have come to ask you to use condoms, especially with your new wife. I can get you some.”
Adzima threw his head back and roared with laugher. “For what? Mr. Detective Man, I’m not going to use any condom.”
“I’m begging you.”
“You are begging me?” Adzima spat. “You came here and did all kinds of bad things, and now you say you’re begging me. You are too funny, Mr. Inspector.”
After several more futile attempts to talk sense into Adzima, Dawson left abruptly, annoyed and despairing. Even if he did find a way to put the priest behind bars today and get him away from Efia and his other wives, it might already be too late. He may already have transmitted HIV to some or all of them.
Dawson walked quickly back toward Ketanu. He passed a mango tree laden with ripe, rosy fruit and badly wanted to climb up and pick a few. He used to love doing that as a boy. The only problem was that fire ants, just as fond of mango trees, made ingenious nests out of clusters of leaves. If they were disturbed, these vicious little creatures the color of fire launched an attack with bites that felt like a thousand red-hot needles.
As he passed by, Dawson heard a hiss from somewhere behind the mango tree. He stopped and turned.
“Mr. Dawson!” A loud whisper.
He moved back toward the tree. “Who’s there?”
“Can you come, please?”
He circled around to see who it was.
“Nunana? What are you doing?”
She was crouched behind the tree trunk.
“So sorry to disturb you, please, sir,” she said, still speaking in a whisper. “I saw you coming from Bedome. I have to tell you something, but I don’t want anyone to see me talking to you.”
He knelt down beside her and dropped his voice in the same way. “What is it you have to tell me?”
“You are looking for a silver bracelet belonging to Gladys Mensah.”
“Yes, I am! You know something about it?”
“Please, I have seen one, sir.”
“Where?”
“In Togbe Adzima’s room, sir. In a tin he keeps with his drink.” She swallowed hard and looked around nervously, as if convinced they were being watched. “I was cleaning his house, and I saw it.”
“When was that?”
“On Tuesday.”
Dawson’s heart surged. That was the day before he and Fiti had searched Adzima’s room. This could be the lead he had been praying for.
“Inspector Fiti and I didn’t find the bracelet,” he said. “Do you think he’s hidden it somewhere?”
Nunana shook her head. “I don’t think he has it anymore, sir. I think he has sold it.”
“To whom?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“How do you think he got Gladys’s bracelet?”
“I don’t know, but when Efia came to tell us Gladys was dead, Togbe went to see where the body was, and he went alone.” Nunana dropped her voice even further. “Maybe he stole it at that time.”
“Do you remember what the bracelet looked like?”
“Yes, sir.”
Dawson took his notebook and pen from his top pocket. “I want you to draw it, if you can. Just do your best.”
“All right, let me try.”
She rested the notebook on her knee, and with her tongue sticking out with the effort, she painstakingly drew the bracelet, laughing with both embarrassment and pride as she finished her rendition. It was rudimentary, but it showed clearly enough that the bracelet was a double strand of loops.
“Beautiful,” Dawson said.
She laughed again, pleased.
“Now, Nunana, tell me the truth,” Dawson said. “Think about this carefully and tell me the truth. That evening before Efia discovered Gladys’s body, did Togbe go anywhere? Did he disappear somewhere?”
She looked away for a second. “I… I don’t know. I’m not sure.”
Her voice was stretched tight like a rubber band at its limit. Lying. She knew, or had seen, something.
“You’re afraid,” Dawson said. “Afraid of Togbe, not so?”
Her eyes swung back and forth like a pendulum.
“If you’re so afraid,” Dawson pressed gently, “why come and tell me anything at all? Because, Nunana, you have honor. You can’t just let it be that a man takes a bracelet from the wrist of a dead woman. Is that right?”
Nunana nodded. Dawson waited as she gathered courage.
“After Togbe quarreled with Gladys that evening and she had left Bedome, he was angry and he started to hit all of us. Then one of his friends from Ketanu came and he went with him to have beer.”
“Do you know that friend?”
“No, I don’t know him.”
“Can you describe him?”
Her description was not the best in the world, but Nunana was certain that Togbe’s friend was fat, short, and had speckled, graying hair.
“Do you have anything else?” he asked Nunana.
“No, sir. Please, I beg you, don’t tell him-”
“That you told me about the bracelet? I won’t.”
She was shaking. He touched her shoulder. “Don’t be afraid.”
Dawson went looking for Constable Gyamfi while praying he would not bump into Inspector Fiti. He sidled up to the front entrance of the station and briefly put his head around the door to see who was inside. Bubo was leaning against the counter picking his nails, but Gyamfi wasn’t there. Dawson circled around the side and ducked down below Fiti’s office window. He peeped in from one corner. Gyamfi was standing up talking to the inspector, who was seated with his back toward the window.
Gyamfi spotted him, and Dawson quickly pressed an index finger to his lips. The constable acknowledged him without giving him away, and Dawson went to the rear of the building.
Gyamfi joined him about five minutes later.
“Dawson, how are you?” he said. “What’s happening?”
“I need your help. Here is the situation. I’ve just found out it may have been Togbe Adzima who stole Gladys’s bracelet.”
Gyamfi raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Is that so?”
“After Gladys’s death, someone in Bedome found it in Adzima’s room. What we don’t know is whether he killed Gladys and then took it off her wrist or whether he just took the bracelet after she had been killed by someone else.”
“Yes, I understand. What do you want me to do?”
“I can’t interrogate Togbe anymore. We hate each other so much now, and he’s afraid of me. You’re more charming than I, so I want you to work on him. There are two things: how he got the bracelet, and where he went on the evening before Gladys’s body was found. I have a witness who says he went to Ketanu with a friend, but we need to find out if that’s accurate-who is the friend, was he with the friend all the time, could he have doubled back and accosted Gladys, and so on. You get what I mean?”
“Of course, Dawson. I’m on it.”
“Thank you. One other thing-the bracelet looks something like this.” He showed Nunana’s drawing to the constable. “It’s silver.”
Gyamfi studied it a moment. “All right. I have a half day off, and I can go and see Togbe after I leave here in the afternoon.”
He and Dawson slapped hands. As they parted, Dawson briefly watched Gyamfi walking away with a long, rolling lope. He liked Gyamfi. He was the kind of partner Dawson would like alongside himself at CID.
It was past eleven o’clock in the morning, and a dense crowd of funeral spectators and mourners had collected at the Mensahs’ home. Dawson parked away from the house, closer to Elizabeth’s dress shop.
A dancing and drumming troupe was performing in a courtyard at the side of the house. The collective driving beat of the sogo, kidi, and atsimevu drums was irresistible. A young woman came out and began dancing the Agbadza, her arms rotating rhythmically from her shoulders while her torso swung back and forth in opposing motion. Another two women soon joined, and then a man. They kicked up red dust with their steps.
Dawson saw someone handing out beer to several men at the back of the crowd. Freeloaders. They would be thoroughly drunk by early afternoon.
For the short funeral service, a seating area under a canopy had been set up in front of the Mensahs’ house. There was a long line of people waiting to get inside to view Gladys’s body. Dawson wormed his way to the front and went in. It was packed with people in a sea of black and dark brown mourning cloth. It was oppressive, and Dawson was bothered by the tight space. Gladys lay in state in the front room. The men stood back, but several women were wailing loudly over her casket while the procession of viewers slowly wound its way past her body. In the midst of all this was a videographer filming everything, and a few people were snapping photos of Gladys’s body with their mobile phones and digital cameras, which Dawson found quite bizarre.
A woman in red and black had worked herself into quite a state, sweat pouring off her as if she had been in a rain shower. She was weeping and moving frenetically around the casket like a roaming insect.
“Why have you left us?” she shouted hoarsely, gesticulating at Gladys’s body. “What will we do now?”
Dawson wondered for a moment if she was a professional mourner. Families sometimes hired these, but he doubted the Mensahs would do that.
Gladys had been dressed in iridescent blue and her casket supplied with items she might need for her journey to the other side: makeup, perfume, jewelry, and a large roll of yellow and white fabric embellished with Adinkra symbols. In case she needed a change of outfit, Dawson supposed.
Everyone who entered the room was obligated to pay their respects to Kofi and Dorcas Mensah and the extended family. There was no way for Dawson to avoid it. He had no idea who 99 percent of these people were, but he had to shake hands with every single one of them. After a while he stopped counting.
He stood near Gladys’s casket for a moment. She had been heavily made up, and Dawson felt disturbed by that. A dead body at a crime scene or in the morgue meant something to him, but a decorated corpse in a casket left him cold. Gladys’s body was a shell. The whole person was gone, and no amount of makeup could bring her back. Feeling suffocated by the atmosphere, Dawson went outside to watch the dancing.
A new set of dancers was performing to distorted music blaring from a pair of speakers.
“Did you get some refreshments?”
He turned at the voice. “Hello, Elizabeth. No, I didn’t have anything to drink.”
She was dressed in a beautiful burgundy wax print with black velvet trim. She raised her voice above the din and beckoned to a boy a few meters away.
“Would you like some beer?” she asked Dawson.
“No thanks. How about some Malta?”
“Go and bring a bottle of Malta for him,” Elizabeth commanded the boy.
He obediently ran off.
She smiled at Dawson. “Are you all right? I saw you in the wake room, and you seemed uncomfortable.”
“I don’t do well at these kinds of things.”
“Sometimes it gets too much,” she acknowledged. “But traditions die hard.”
“Do you believe in all of it? Putting things in the casket, for instance?”
“It’s symbolic, that’s all. It means we care about her even to the point of her leaving us. Providing her with the things she liked.”
Something suddenly occurred to Dawson. “The cloth in the casket with the little Adinkra symbols-is that the yellow version of the blue one she was wearing?”
“Yes, that’s right,” Elizabeth said. “She loved that pattern, Inspector Dawson. She had a yellow, a blue, and a red. We didn’t want to put the blue one with her, so we chose the yellow because it’s so nice and bright.”
The boy came back with a bottle of half-chilled Malta, and Dawson thanked him. He took a couple of swigs.
“Elizabeth, I want you to do something for me,” Dawson said, raising his voice above the noise. “Can we go over there where it’s quieter?”
They walked a distance until the music was less intense.
“That’s better,” Dawson said. “I’m going to show you a diagram someone drew of what might be Gladys’s missing bracelet. Tell me if you think it looks like hers. Take your time. Don’t hurry to any conclusion.”
He took Nunana’s diagram from his pocket and gave it to Elizabeth. While she looked at it, he downed some more Malta, Heaven’s elixir.
“It had two rows of silver loops the way it’s drawn here,” Elizabeth said, tapping the paper with a manicured index finger. “It could be it. Who did this? Where did you get it?”
“I can’t say right now,” Dawson answered evenly. “Tell me this, if I stole a bracelet like this and I wanted to sell it quickly, where would I go?”
“The best place would be to one of the jewelry traders at the Ho market.”
“Would they buy one like this?”
Elizabeth nodded vigorously. “By all means, because the traders know how to shine it up and then sell it at a profit.”
“How many jewelry traders come to the Ho market?”
“Lots of them. I know a few. I can take you there after the funeral is over.”
“Thank you.”
“I have to go now,” Elizabeth said. “They’re going to close the casket, and then the service will start. Would you like to come?”
“I’ll be all right here, thank you.”
After some time the casket was brought out. Dawson watched the service from a distance. It was performed in both English and Ewe, using a microphone so people could listen if they weren’t in the seating area. It was hot even under the canopy, and people were fanning themselves somewhat uselessly with the funeral program. Older men wore the traditional style mourning cloth, while the young could not be bothered and dressed in shirts and slacks, some quite casually.
The service lasted forty-five minutes and went like clockwork. Finally, the pallbearers raised the coffin and a chorus of women began to sing and clap. An elderly woman with bare shoulders led the procession, pouring libation along the way. They would walk a short distance through Ketanu to the hearse that would take the coffin to the cemetery.
Dawson realized they were heading in the direction of his car, so he hurried to the Corolla and backed it well out of the way beside Elizabeth’s shop. He leaned against the trunk and watched as the long line of black-clad marchers moved forward like a giant millipede.
Just before the pallbearers passed the shop, the coffin seemed to veer off course. It was as though a magnet was attracting it, but then Dawson realized that two or more of the pallbearers were deliberately pulling the coffin to one side. He couldn’t understand what was going on. Some of the men lost their balance, and the coffin tilted and pitched. Cries of alarm went up: Don’t drop the coffin!
An older man stumbled and screamed, “What are you doing? Heh! What are you doing?”
Several funeral attendees ran in to help steady the coffin as a pushing and pulling match began. Members of the crowd began to shout and jeer, but then another cry gradually became prominent as a collective chant.
“Witch, witch, witch!”
As the coffin got closer to the shop, a fistfight broke out between two men. Elizabeth appeared, yelling at the pallbearers to get back on course, and several people jumped in front of her and began to scream the word in her face. She looked shocked and backed away. Witch! spread through the crowd like a firestorm.
Charles and three other men came to Elizabeth’s side to protect her. The coffin had swung and swayed back to its route. Dawson realized what had just happened. When a casket was drawn “mysteriously” toward a particular house, it was said that the person most associated with the dwelling had caused the death of the deceased through witchcraft. In other words, someone was trying to frame Elizabeth. It was an ugly, nasty turn to a funeral that had otherwise been proceeding smoothly. Who could have arranged this stunt?
The disruption died down, and the procession got back to normal. Elizabeth, not one to be intimidated, returned, head high, to her position near the front. About a minute later, a boy of about thirteen ran up to her and whispered in her ear. She was obviously puzzled as the boy pointed backward at something, and Dawson could see he was asking her to come with him in that direction.
She followed him and disappeared between her shop and the building next to it. Dawson circled around and looked down the length of the space between the rear of the buildings and the bush.
Elizabeth appeared with the boy, and waiting to meet her were a half dozen young men with sticks. Elizabeth turned to run. They pounced on her like a pack of hyenas and clawed her down. She held out her hand defensively as they began to club her.
Dawson opened the trunk of the car and got the cricket bat out. As he ran toward the melee, Elizabeth was trying to get up, but the youths struck her down again.
“Witch! Witch!”
“Beat her, beat her!”
She screamed as blows rained down. For a moment she got to her knees, but a strike to her head flipped her over sideways.
As Dawson got there, two of the youths shot away, but the others turned to fight. The first to come at Dawson got the cricket bat forehand and went down. The second got it backhand to the side of his head and a second strike square in the face.
Dawson moved forward to take care of another two, but they dropped their sticks and escaped.
“Elizabeth.” He knelt down next to her. “Are you all right?”
He lifted her head, and she groaned. A gash in her forehead was spurting blood. Her right forearm was bent, obviously broken as she had tried to defend herself.
Dawson ripped the bottom of his shirt and folded the length of cloth to press it firmly against Elizabeth’s forehead.
“Can you hear me?” he asked.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Hold on, all right?”
One of the youths was out cold; the other was groaning and attempting to get up. Dawson wasn’t worried.
Charles and four other men came running. They knelt down beside Elizabeth.
“I’m okay,” she said, but her face was creased with pain. Her forearm had rapidly swollen to the size of Dawson’s leg.
“She has to get to the hospital,” he said.
“Take her to Isaac Kutu,” someone suggested.
“No!” Dawson shouted angrily. He was sick of this. “You take her to the VRA Hospital now.”
Charles looked at him and nodded.
“Run and get the van,” he said to the youngest man there. “Tell the driver to be quick.”