Murder at Cape Three Points (12 page)

Just beyond that was the wharf where large trawlers were moored and crowds of fishermen carried on a brisk and noisy business with market women. Some of the women carted off their purchases on their own heads, while others used a professional porter.

“See that guy?” Abraham said, pointing to a compact older man who was moving off with a punishingly heavy bin full of fish on his head. “He’s about sixty years old—been doing this since he was a teenager.”

And all of it in the harsh sun
, Dawson thought, wiping his drenched forehead.

Abraham led the way to a quieter part of the harbor, weaving in between shacks where mechanics were repairing outboard motors and carpenters were building new trawlers. Compared to the area they had just left, the vessels here were canoes of different sizes pulled up on the shore or moored in shallow water with makeshift cloth canopies for shade.

One of the fishermen, a densely muscular man of thirty-ish, was darning his fishing net, a portion of it hooked over his big toe to keep the net’s tension as he deftly repaired holes and tears with a large needle. His deeply black skin glistened in the sun.

“Clay!” Abraham called out.

The man looked up and grinned as he saw them approaching. He put down the net and skipped out of the canoe.

“Abe, my brother! How are you?”

Abraham introduced Dawson as his cousin and asked Clay if Forjoe was around.

“I haven’t seen him today,” Clay said.

He called out to three fishermen on an adjacent canoe, asking them if they knew where Forjoe was.

“I think he went to the house,” one of them replied.

Abe thanked them and went on with Dawson. At the top of the incline not far from where they had parked, they crossed the street to a ramshackle group of houses around a small compound. A teenage boy was washing clothes in a wide metal pan, and a woman was hanging them out to dry on the line.

“Good afternoon,” Abraham greeted her. “Have you seen Forjoe?”

“He’s inside,” the woman said, pointing her chin at the door behind him. “Wait, I’ll call him.”

She wiped her hands and went to knock on the door, the top half of which was a large opening covered with torn mosquito netting.

A voice answered. “Who is it?”

“Some people are here to see you,” she said in Fante.

“I’m coming.”

It was too dark in the room to see anything from outside. Forjoe emerged from the gloom putting on a T-shirt as he came to the door. He smiled as he saw them.

“Abraham! How are you?”

They shook hands and Abraham introduced Dawson to Forjoe the same way as he had done with Clay. Forjoe was around 28, short and as solid as a brick house. He dragged over a couple plastic chairs and invited the two men to sit down while he took a seat himself on a nearby wooden stool.

“So what brings you here today?” he asked.

“My cousin wanted to meet you,” Abraham said.

“Oh, is that so?” Forjoe said, looking at Dawson with interest.

“Abraham tells me you sometimes hire his canoe to other fishermen,” Dawson said.

“Yes,” Forjoe said, nodding. His expression was friendly. “Especially the young ones who can’t afford to buy a new canoe. You know, now the wood is expensive, and the government doesn’t allow certain trees to be cut. The fishing is tough too. Not so much fish in the sea anymore.”

“Oh, I see,” Dawson said. He had heard about the troubles plaguing the fishing industry. “It makes life hard, eh?”

Forjoe turned the corners of his mouth down. “Very hard.” He looked at Dawson with curiosity. “Why? Do you want to hire a canoe?”

“Oh, no,” Dawson said with a smile. “I just have a question, Forjoe. Last July, someone killed a man and his wife and took them out to sea in a canoe, all the way to one of the oil rigs. Did you hear about it?”

Forjoe’s expression changed abruptly. “Are you a policeman?”

“Yes.”

Forjoe shook his head as if to say,
I can’t help you.

Dawson was used to this kind of reticence. People became very uncomfortable and tight-lipped with police questioning, often afraid that they were under suspicion.

Abraham came to his rescue. “Forjoe, he’s not here to make any trouble for you. CID sent him from Accra to help the Sekondi police.”

“Oh, okay.” Forjoe appeared to relax, although not completely.

“We think that late on the night of Monday, seventh July, after the killers murdered the Smith-Aidoos,” Dawson said, “they put the dead bodies in a canoe and used a second one to tow it out to sea.”

“Starting from where?” Forjoe asked.

Excellent question
, Dawson thought. “That I don’t know, but that Monday night, there was a full moon, so I’m hoping that maybe some fishermen might have spotted the canoes.”

Forjoe frowned. “But you won’t find any fishermen at sea late on a Monday, sir.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because we can’t fish overnight. It’s a taboo to fish on Tuesdays.”

“Oh,” Dawson said, flattened like an insect underfoot. He had forgotten that by ancient tradition, the sea is a goddess who must rest one day a week. Why it was Tuesday in most fishing communities along Ghana’s coast, Dawson did not know.

Abraham looked at him ruefully. “He’s right. I should have thought of that.”

“On Mondays,” Forjoe continued, “rather than going to sea, most fishermen concentrate on selling as much fish as possible from the weekend’s catch. Monday is a big market day. We never miss it.”

“So, no one rented a canoe from you on that day,” Dawson said, disappointed and clutching at straws.

“No, sir.”

“Do other people rent canoes?”

“A few.”

“Please, can you ask around to find out if anyone took a canoe that night? It doesn’t have to have been a fisherman who rented—anyone at all. If you hear anything, call me. I’ll give you my number.”

“Okay, sir.”

A movement caught Dawson’s eye, and he turned to see a girl of about nine years old hovering in the half-open doorway of Forjoe’s dwelling.

“Hello,” Dawson said, smiling at her.

“That’s my daughter, Marvelous,” Forjoe said.

Dawson saw how his eyes softened as he looked at her. Forjoe gestured at her to come to him. “Marvelous,
bra ha.
”

She approached and leaned against her father, shyly keeping her head down as he put his arm around her waist. She was pretty, with a heart-shaped face and the standard short schoolgirl haircut.

“Greet our guests, eh?” he told her.

She curtsied slightly and said, “Good afternoon,” in barely a whisper.

“Are you feeling tired?” he asked her softly, passing his hand over hair.

She shook her head.

It was a question Dawson would not have expected of a parent to his nine-year-old child, and it was eerily similar to what he had often asked Hosiah during his years of suffering heart disease. In a flash, Dawson realized that something was wrong with Marvelous. Hours of sitting with his son in inpatient wards and outpatient waiting rooms had trained him to observe signs of illness in children. Here he noticed that while kids of this girl’s age would normally have skinny ankles, Marvelous’s own were puffy and so were her hands. She was retaining fluid for some reason.

“Okay,” Forjoe said, his eyes still full of tenderness toward her. “Go and do your homework and get ready for school tomorrow, all right?”

She nodded, walked away with one glance back at her father, and disappeared round a corner.

“Your daughter is beautiful,” Dawson said. “But is she okay?”

“She’s okay,” he responded, nevertheless appearing troubled. “Please, why do you ask?”

“Because you asked her if she was tired.”

“You are right,” Forjoe said heavily, as if reluctant to admit it. “The doctors say there is something wrong with her kidneys.”

For Dawson, this struck home. Countless times, he had told people in response to their questions about Hosiah,
The doctors say there’s something wrong with his heart.

“Can they help her?” Dawson asked Forjoe.

He shrugged. “Anything they can do, my wife and I can’t afford it. We are too poor. The doctors tell me that one day Marvelous will need a machine to clean her blood two or three times a week, but the cost of even one treatment is more than we make in one month. Or they can transplant one kidney from her older brother, but the cost of the operation …” He trailed off, shaking his head.

Dawson knew exactly what Forjoe was facing. It had been the same circumstance with Hosiah. Like Marvelous and her failing kidneys, the medical options available to Hosiah had been so costly, Dawson could never have afforded them without the benevolence of the Cardiothoracic Center. Even Jason Sarbah, a man of much more means, had run up against a monetary wall trying to save his daughter, Angela. Dawson’s, Forjoe’s, and Sarbah’s stories were startling in their similarity, but not coincidental by any means. They pointed to the exploding health crisis in Ghana: modern diagnostics were detecting more and more chronic diseases in both adults and children, but the tottering National Health Insurance Scheme could not possibly pay for their treatment.

Dawson wished he could help Forjoe, but he would need to ask someone in the know when he was back home in Accra—perhaps when he took Hosiah in for a follow-up visit, he could ask a doctor if anything could be done for Marvelous. However, he didn’t want to raise any false hopes by telling Forjoe that. For now, an expression of sympathy was about as far as he could go.

“I’m sorry,” Dawson said. “I pray you will find a solution for your lovely daughter.”

“Thank you, sir.” Forjoe tried to shake himself out of his dark mood. “Everything will be okay. A certain man is trying his best to help me, and God will bless us.”

Dawson stood up. “I’m grateful for your help, Forjoe.”

“You’re welcome, sir.”

They traded phone numbers, and as Dawson left with Abraham, he reserved a space in his mind and put Marvelous securely in it. He wasn’t going to forget her.

R
ETURNING FROM
S
EKONDI
Harbor, they stopped off at Akroma Plaza Hotel for dinner. A visit to Takoradi was incomplete without dining at Akroma’s legendary restaurant, Abraham told Dawson. It had been moved from its old, smaller location into a completely new section of the hotel twice the original size.

It was refreshingly air-conditioned, in contrast to their visit to the harbor. The hostess seated the two men in a nice spot with a view of the street. A quick glance through the seemingly endless menu revealed to Dawson that Asian, European, and American dishes were much more costly than Ghanaian ones. He and Abraham had a hankering for
banku.
It was only a matter of what to eat it with.

Dawson liked both
banku
and
fufu
, but some people were vehemently aligned with one and not the other. Both were presented as soft, pillow-smooth ovals, but their respective tastes could not have been more different.
Banku
, made from fermented cornmeal, had a sour and distinctive flavor, whereas
fufu
, derived from a freshly boiled starchy food such as
cassava
, was a blander affair that made no effort to compete with the soup with which it was eaten.

Abraham wanted grilled tilapia smothered in a spicy onion and tomato sauce. It was served whole, the head and all the bones included. Dawson didn’t feel like dealing with the task of extracting tiny bones, so he went with okro stew instead. This was the ultimate explosion of taste, what with the prawns, beef, smoked ham, and herring in a dense mélange of eggplant, tomato, ginger, chili pepper, and okro, which gave the dish its slick mouth feel. Dawson agreed that it was one of the best he’d ever tasted—except his mother’s, of course.

When Abraham dropped him off at the house, Dawson was pleasantly full but dying for a refreshing shower after the long day. Alas, the water pressure was low, and the flow from the showerhead was but a trickle. It was back to the old standby: a bucket bath. He came out of the bathroom feeling like a new man and pulled on a pair of
shorts. A cool breeze blew gently in from the windows, lifting the curtains slightly. His phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Inspector Dawson?” His voice was rather boyish. “This is Jason Sarbah. I’m returning your call.”

“Thank you very much, Mr. Sarbah. I’m investigating the murder of Charles and Fiona Smith-Aidoo,” he said. “I would like to meet you for a few minutes to discuss it.”

“Ah, I see.” He paused. “Good. Perhaps we’ll now get to the bottom of it. Did you have a time in mind to meet?”

“As soon as possible, sir.”

“Let’s see … How about two o’clock tomorrow afternoon?”

“Perfect, sir.”

“Do you know where the Malgam offices are?”

“Yes, I do. I’ll see you tomorrow at two.”

D
AWSON WENT THROUGH
more of the papers in the STMA box. He came across three separate meetings for which the minutes described a sharp conflict between Kwesi DeSouza and Fiona Smith-Aidoo.

When he’d had enough of that, he put everything aside on the nightstand and sat back in bed. He had brought one of his mbiras with him from Accra, as he always did when traveling. It had two rows of graduated lengths of metal strips, sixteen in all, mounted on a handheld soundboard. When plucked, the strips produced notes similar to the sound of xylophone. Dawson’s mother had given him one as a gift when he was ten, and he had played it sporadically into his teens, when he discovered he could make his own mbira with simple, scavenged materials—even old bicycle spokes. The instrument had a thousand-year history with the Shona people of Zimbabwe, who still made the most complicated of mbiras with twenty-three or more keys.

He rested his head against the wall as he practiced a piece he had composed the week before, a cyclical arrangement with intertwined melodies. After a few minutes of playing, it put Dawson in a relaxed and meditative mood, almost trancelike. It was the next best thing to smoking marijuana, and in his months of kicking the habit, he had
increasingly relied on his mbira to relieve tension. In the “good old days,” he combined smoking with mbira playing, a doubly heightening experience.