DARKO DAWSON RODE a Honda Shadow Spirit so he could maneuver between vehicles and get to work much faster than he would in a car.
“I wish you wouldn’t ride that thing, Dark,” his wife said as he put on his helmet. “It’s so dangerous.”
“Not this debate again,” Dawson said. “Christine, I’m not spending two hours sitting in traffic just to get across town, so until and unless they build an underground system in this city, it will have to be a motorbike.”
Accra, Dawson’s smoky, noisy hometown and Ghana’s capital, had traffic jams rivaling the worst in the world. Christine, a primary school teacher, was lucky that her job was close enough to walk it, but Dawson worked at Criminal Investigations Department Headquarters, eight tortuous kilometers away.
He kissed his son good-bye. “Be good, Hosiah, okay?”
“Okay, Daddy,” the boy said.
Hosiah, six years old, was their only child. At the end of a hellish pregnancy, he had emerged in perfect form except for one important detail: he had a hole in his heart, or more correctly, ventricular septal defect.
Dawson worried about his boy every single day The doctors at the Cardiothoracic Center at Korle-Bu, Accra’s largest hospital, had at first hoped that the defect would close on its own, as they sometimes did, but that did not happen, and the ill effects were now showing. Hosiah was beginning to suffer from fatigue and shortness of breath. It was painful to watch. He was taking two types of medicine to suppress the symptoms, but the only true cure was surgery. Ghana’s fledgling National Health Insurance Scheme provided only for basic medical care and did not cover surgery for congenital heart disease. The operation was staggeringly expensive, far beyond Dawson and Christine’s immediate financial reach, especially now, with the price of food spiraling up. They were saving money as fast as they could but they were nowhere close to the required amount, even with Christine working part-time on weekends.
Dawson had to force his mind away from Hosiah to concentrate on negotiating bumper-to-bumper traffic on Ring Road. He white-lined the double lane toward the Ako Adjei Interchange, dodging cars that suddenly cut in front of him while he simultaneously avoided the young, nomadic street hawkers who walked up and down the narrow space between traffic lanes selling pencils, TV remotes, DVDs, tennis shoes, gingersnaps, hairbrushes, apples, chocolate milk, and anything else one could think of. They stopped beside cars and tro-tros, waving their wares in the windows with astonishing persistence until it became obvious they were not going to make a sale. It was a tough life. After twelve hours in the broiling sun, these traders could expect to make a profit of less than a cedi.
Tailpipe exhaust invaded Dawson’s throat and expanded in his lungs. He had tried covering his nose and mouth with a handkerchief tied across his face, but that seemed to smother him even more, so now he simply moved through the traffic as fast as he could. Every vehicle was his enemy. Taxis, ubiquitous and distinguished by their yellow front and rear panels, were the worst of them all. There was one chief rule about driving in Accra: always be prepared to give way to another vehicle at an instant. People drove with razor-thin margins between their vehicles and the next ones.
Tro-tros, the other means of transport for the masses, packed twelve to fifteen passengers into their rattling, smoke-belching frames. Dawson called them “Chariots of Fire.” On the other end of the spectrum were the glittery Benzes, Lexuses, BMWs, SUVs, and the most ostentatiously obnoxious of them all, Hummers.
Once Dawson was past the Ako Adjei Interchange, he didn’t have far to go to Police Headquarters. At seven fifteen exactly, he turned left into the parking lot, barely slowing down at the security gate as he gave a cursory salute to the armed guards. They had complained to him before that he charged in the entrance too fast. He locked up the bike and cut across the browning lawn and past the knee-high hedges to the side of the Criminal Investigations Department building.
CID was a specific branch of the Ghana Police Service. Although the headquarters was here in Accra, officers were stationed throughout the country. For a structure with such an official title, CID was a downright disappointing seven-story building that could easily have been an undistinguished apartment block. It might have once been off-white, but now it was the color of the dark sand of a less than pristine beach. In addition to an interior staircase, a flight of steps cascaded along the outside of the building’s south end and provided free access to anyone wandering in and out. It seemed ironic that CID Headquarters was no high-security fortress.
Dawson trotted up the stairs to the second level and turned in to the narrow, dim corridor lined with office doors painted blue with yellow trim. A few other employees were coming into work just like Dawson, wishing one another “Good morning,” a crucial ingredient of Ghanaianness: no “Hi,” “Hello,” or, God forbid, “What’s up?”
He crossed the reception area, an inner courtyard with half a dozen worn wooden chairs on opposite sides and a handful of early-bird visitors waiting to take care of their affairs. Regina, the glacial receptionist, was at her desk in the corner serenely setting up for work.
“Morning, Regina.”
She looked up with her impenetrable, enigmatic smile. “Good morning, sir.”
Dawson worked in the Homicide Division and shared a small office with two other detectives, neither of whom had yet arrived, which was just fine. Dawson preferred a quiet start. The cramped room had three desks and not enough storage space. There were computers, yes, but no matter how hard you tried, you just couldn’t get rid of paper. Some of it was stowed in file cabinets or on shelves the way it was supposed to be, but the rest was on the floor or any clear space on a table-top. Dawson did his best to keep his desk tidy because he could not think clearly with clutter around him.
His desk was closest to a louvered window with a view onto the lawn and parking lot below. He turned on the ceiling fan in the hope of staving off the vicious March heat, which would be in full force in another three or four hours. No luxurious air-conditioning here. He was a detective inspector, still a “subordinate”-he disliked that word-officer. When someday he got to detective chief superintendent or higher, then maybe he would get a big office with the AC blasting.
Dawson sat down and logged on to his terminal, quickly running through his emails. They were much of the same, as always, with the usual edicts from the boss, Chief Superintendent Lartey.
Dawson turned to the bottom drawer of the file cabinet next to his desk and pulled out a stack of ragged folders stuffed with papers-court records, statements and documents from open cases, and the miscellaneous laborious reports that were inescapable elements of police work.
As Dawson started on the first report, Detective Sergeant Chikata walked in. He was about six years younger than Dawson’s thirty-five, muscular and impossibly handsome.
D.S. Chikata was good when he applied himself, but much of the time he was as languid as a lion in the midday sun. It was hardly a secret around CID that he had got into the Homicide Division mostly on the strength of his being Chief Superintendent Lartey’s nephew. This was also undoubtedly why the detective sergeant was so smugly confident that he would soon rise to Dawson’s rank of inspector, and why he was such a cheeky brat. He showed little or none of the customary deference to his superior officers, and although Dawson was not a stickler for protocol, Chikata’s impudence could be irritating.
“Morning, Dawson.”
“Morning. How’re you?”
Chikata yawned long and wide, shaking his head as if to throw off the lingering remains of the night’s slumber. “Tired,” he said. “Too much beer last night. And women.”
Dawson grunted. What did one say to that kind of information?
Chikata sat down at his desk, and Dawson mentally counted down the time it would take his colleague to lean forward and switch on the radio; he came within a second’s accuracy. He’d do better tomorrow.
Chikata leaned back and propped his gigantic feet on his desk as he listened to the call-in morning show on Happy FM. After a while, it got on Dawson’s nerves.
“Turn that racket down, Chikata.”
The D.S. reduced the radio’s volume. “Yes, sir, D.I. Dawson, sir,” he said, with mock reverence, before resuming his repose position. “We need to close some cases.”
“Maybe we would if you actually did some work.”
Chikata ignored the jab. “Can’t we get some confessions by beating up one or two suspects-like you did to that rapist when you were detective sergeant?”
Dawson swiveled in his chair. “Look, that’s not what happened, Chikata.”
“Sorry. Then tell me.”
“I caught the guy red-handed. He confessed. After I cuffed him, he said all little girls deserved to have his bulla up their totos, so I punched him in the face. That’s all.”
“Oh, I see. How many times did you punch him?”
Dawson shrugged. “I don’t remember exactly. Two, three times.”
“Three times at least, from what I heard. No disrespect, but I think your temper is too hot, Dawson. Why waste energy on a bleddyfool like that?”
“I’m not like you. Doesn’t anything ever upset you?”
“Oh, yah. Not getting enough sleep.”
“You would get some if you would go to bed by yourself every once in a while.”
Chikata began to laugh so hard he capsized his chair, at which point Dawson could not help himself and broke into laughter himself. Chikata recovered and restored the furniture.
“Anyway, you’d better solve something before my uncle transfers you to some bush village somewhere,” he said, only half jokingly.
“I’d like to see him try,” Dawson said.
Perhaps he should not have spoken with so much bluster. That afternoon Chief Superintendent Theophilus Lartey called Dawson to his office. Lartey, around fifty-two, was a surprisingly tiny man for the amount of power he wielded. His soft leather armchair and expansive desk dwarfed his proportions, as did the room, which could have held at least three offices the size of Dawson’s. It was luxuriously cool in here, with a powerful air conditioner purring from high up on the wall. The room was completely quiet, insulated from the hum and bustle of the outside world, where the weather was hot and stifling.
“Sit down, Dawson,” Lartey said.
Dawson did so, feeling as he always did-like a pupil in the headmaster’s office. One never went there unless there was trouble.
“You know Ketanu in the Volta Region?” Lartey asked.
“Yes, I’ve been there before.”
“And you speak Ewe?”
“Yes. My mother is Ewe.” He could not refer to her in the past tense. “Why, sir?”
“There’s a situation up there,” Lartey said. “A young woman was found dead in the forest day before yesterday. Suspicious circumstances for sure, so the local police called in a CID detective from Ho.”
Ho was a minuscule city compared with Accra, but as the capital of the Volta Region, it was where small-town Ketanu would look for help in police or other matters.
“All right,” Dawson said. “So CID Ho is investigating-”
“And where do we come in?” Lartey interjected. “The young lady, Gladys Mensah, was in her third year of medical school and was volunteering with the GHS under the Ministry of Health. The minister called me this morning. He insists someone here in headquarters take the case.”
“What’s wrong with the Ho detective?”
“Look, Dawson,” Lartey said irritably, “don’t ask me these questions. I have no idea why the minister doesn’t want the Ho man to take the case. I’m sure it’s something political, but what difference does it make? The bottom line is that I have to send someone there, and that someone is you.”
“Why me, sir?”
“Use your head, Dawson. You’re the only detective here who speaks Ewe and that’s what they speak in the Volta Region, so you have a big advantage. What’s that stupid look on your face?”
“This is a little unexpected, sir-”
“Life is full of surprises.”
“When am I supposed to go, sir?”
“Tomorrow morning. You can take one of the CID cars. The MoH will make the arrangements for a place to stay in Ketanu, but your first port of call will be the Volta River Authority Hospital. The postmortem is being done there tomorrow, and I want you to attend it.”