BAD NEWS SPREADS THROUGH any small town like fire through dry savanna bush. Kweku and Osewa Gedze first heard about Gladys Mensah’s death as they were working on their cocoa farm. The golden ripe cocoa pods were particularly beautiful this year. Each was perfectly almond shaped with sculptured ridges that ended in a point like an erect nipple. One pod held thirty to forty fleshy seeds that were scooped out, fermented, and then dried for days before they were ready to be shoveled into sacks for shipping. It was back-splitting work, and for all of it Osewa and Kweku would probably never savor a single mini-square of the final product-chocolate. It all went to fancy stores in the big cities at prices that they could never dream of paying.
Kweku wiped the sweat off his face and watched his wife for a moment. She was on her knees deftly slashing the pods open with a cutlass. Fifty-one years old and nine years his junior, she was strong and skilled with powerful hands that wielded a cutlass or shovel better than most men.
They looked up at the sound of running footsteps, and Alifoe, their twenty-three-year-old son, burst into view. He was tall and beautifully built, with the deepest black skin possible, glossy and silky with its natural oils.
“Have you heard?” he said breathlessly.
“Heard what?”
“You know the Mensah girl who was going to be a doctor?”
“Yes, what about her?” Kweku said.
“They found her dead early this morning.”
“Oh, no.” Osewa dropped her cutlass and stood up. “Where?”
“In the forest not far from here. Everyone is going there. I’m going too.”
He turned and started out.
“Wait for me,” Kweku called out. “Osewa, we’ll be back soon.”
Moving quickly with Isaac Kutu, Inspector Fiti made a call on his mobile to his constable.
“Gyamfi,” he snapped, “where are you-at the station? Eh-heh, good. Stop everything. Gladys Mensah has been found dead in the forest… Yes, that’s what I said, are you deaf or what? Go there now and secure the place… You’ll know where it is because everyone is going there. That’s why you need to hurry before they destroy the scene. You hear? Go!”
He pocketed his phone and took a few trotting steps to keep up with Isaac, who moved as swiftly and easily as a river over its bed. The police station was closer to the scene than the two of them were at the moment, so Gyamfi would get there first. The forest was on the eastern edge of Ketanu. To reach it, Inspector Fiti and Isaac had to cross the breadth of the town. Its dwellings and shops sprawled along either side of the busy road to Ho, the capital of the Volta Region, twenty kilometers due northeast. In his time, Inspector Fiti had seen three new roads built in Ketanu as it had mushroomed in size, and many of the mango, banana, and palm trees in which the town had once nestled had gone the way of chopped wood and compost.
Bedome village was in turn on the east side of the forest, a wellbeaten footpath connecting it to Ketanu. Fiti had been right-scores of people were breaking off into the forest from the footpath. As the inspector closely followed Isaac, he shouted at people to get out of the way, which they did. Everyone was familiar with Inspector Fiti’s rough, gravelly voice. He was not a particularly patient man.
Gyamfi had already arrived by the time Isaac Kutu and Inspector Fiti made it there, and he had managed to mark off a wide perimeter using a length of rope wrapped around the trunks of plantain trees. Now he stood guard at the edge of the cordoned-off area looking as fierce as he could to keep away a gathering cluster of spectators. People sometimes teased him and called him Boy Constable Gyamfi, because even though he was twenty-four, he looked nineteen and still had no serious facial hair.
“Who is it there?” Fiti asked Gyamfi as they came up to him. “Is it really Gladys Mensah?”
The constable nodded. “Yes, sir. It’s her.”
Fiti lifted the rope and ducked under. Isaac was about to follow, but Gyamfi put a gentle restraining hand on his shoulder. “Please, when we’re ready for you, we will call you.”
Isaac stepped back, looking a little insulted.
“Where is she?” Fiti asked Gyamfi.
Gyamfi pointed to just beyond a palm tree and led the way. He pulled aside the bush, and the inspector looked.
“Oh,” he said softly, shock in his voice. “Oh.”
It was midmorning by now. The sun was already scorching and the first of the bluebottle flies had begun to buzz around frenetically, but Fiti didn’t see a wound of any kind on Gladys’s body. She was missing a shoe, though. The left one.
“Is this how she was when you first came here?” he asked his constable.
“Yes, sir.”
“With the plantain leaves on her body?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you find something else?”
“Yes, sir.” He moved away about five meters. “Here, sir. Her shoe.”
It was a russet-colored, open-toed shoe with a back strap and low heel. Why was it here and Gladys over there?
“Maybe someone dragged her body and the shoe got pulled off,” Fiti speculated.
“I found another thing, sir,” Gyamfi told him.
Moist dead leaves crunched softly under their feet as they moved ten meters farther along.
“Here, sir.” Gyamfi pointed to a black leather briefcase soiled by mud and vegetation debris.
“’Aha.”
Fiti opened the partially unzipped top of the bag and found papers inside clumped together in a soggy mass. They were flyers about AIDS-simple diagrams with arrows going back and forth. Man to woman, woman to man, woman to baby. Underneath those was the “ABC” campaign of Abstinence, Being faithful, and Condoms. At the very bottom of the briefcase was a mobile telephone just as soaked as the pamphlets.
Fiti left the bag exactly where he had found it. He went back to the rope, where Isaac stood waiting.
“You say a woman from Bedome found her?” Fiti asked him.
“Yes. One of Togbe Adzima’s wives-Efia.”
“Where is she now?”
Isaac shrugged. “Back in Bedome, I suppose. She ran away.”
“But why did you let her?” Fiti demanded. “You should have told her to stay here.”
“I did,” Isaac said evenly, “but she was afraid to be here alone in the forest with a dead body.”
Fiti pressed his lips together in some annoyance. “When you got here with Togbe Adzima’s wife, those plantain leaves were covering the body?”
“No, I put them there.”
Fiti scowled. “Why?”
“Respect for the dead, Inspector.”
“But you didn’t disturb anything?”
“No.”
Fiti grunted and returned to the corpse. Gladys’s clothes were spattered with mud from last night’s rain, which had started after dusk. She had been-still was-wearing a fashionable blue and white blouse and matching skirt, both with decorative Adinkra symbols. In the old days, you saw Adinkra cloth only at funerals. Now anyone could wear it as fashion, and it was a tourist item as well.
Fiti leaned down. Gladys’s color was changing-she was much blacker than she had been in life, with a greenish hue that repelled him.
“Help me,” he said to Gyamfi. “I need to see her back. No, go to her other side and roll her toward you.”
Gyamfi grasped Gladys’s shoulder and pulled gently. She was heavier and more inert than he had anticipated, and she did not roll on the first try. The second time, he was successful. She moved in one piece, like a log.
Apart from the mud and twigs that soiled Gladys’s back, there was nothing out of the ordinary. No blood, no visible injuries, and no tears in her dress. Her braided hair was still beautifully in place, so it was easy to see that her scalp was free from injury.
“All right,” Fiti said.
They released her body and stared at it for a moment. Fiti didn’t know what to make of it. What had happened to her? A healthy woman of only twenty-two years of age. And what had she been doing here? How did she get here?
“There’s no mark on her,” he said, mystified. “Maybe she was poisoned?”
Fiti heard a loud cry and whirled around. Gladys’s mother, Dorcas, appeared from behind a flank of plantain trees screaming. She already knows, Fiti thought. Dorcas could barely hold herself up, her body ravaged by emotion. Her oldest son, Charles, was propping her up on one side, her husband, Kofi, on the other. Behind them was a long trail of family members.
Fiti and Gyamfi leapt up to head them off.
“Stay back,” Fiti said, holding up his palms to them. “Stay back!”
But one or two in the group forcefully held down the cordoning rope, and the family surged forward across it shouting, pushing the inspector aside as if he had not been there at all. Gyamfi had a little bit more success holding off some of the family, but not much.
Dorcas fell onto her daughter, and her shrieks became animal-like. Kofi was frozen in place at the sight of Gladys’s body. Charles turned away and vomited.
Fiti was furious. Until proven otherwise, this was a crime scene, and any policeman worth his salt knew it had to be preserved.
“Get them away from there!” he shouted at Gyamfi.
Together they began to try to pull and push people back with a combination of cajoling and physical force. Fiti put his hand on Dorcas’s shoulder as she crouched over her daughter’s body weeping uncontrollably.
“Dorcas, come away, eh?” He turned to Kofi. “Take her away from here, I beg you. It’s too much for her, too much.”
Dorcas resisted, but Kofi and Charles coaxed her to go with them to a spot under a mango tree where Gladys was out of her sight. This gave Fiti and Gyamfi some momentum, and they were able to urge the rest of the multitude-family and unrelated onlookers-back behind the cordon. While Gyamfi kept them at bay, Fiti, sweat pouring off his face and body in rivulets, got on his mobile. He liked everything in Ketanu under his control, but he knew when it was time to call in the big boys from Ho. He needed help.