Murder at Cape Three Points (7 page)

“Why, Mama?”

“Because people might think you’re a wizard, or possessed by spirits,” she told him.

His brother, Cairo, was familiar with it, and Hosiah had a game in which he would make funny voices while holding Dawson’s hand in the hope that he would feel something.

Abraham’s voice was strongly triggering his synesthesia. He felt as though his left hand was massaging a handful of wet clay. When he was a boy, a potter had once pressed a clump of fresh clay into his hand. Darko had giggled with delight as he squished it through his fingers. As an adult, he still liked the sensation, and that Abraham had induced it confirmed that he was experiencing a positive connection with his cousin.

“I’ll see you at the bus depot,” Abraham said.

As the bus continued its route toward the STC station, Dawson made comparisons with Accra. Unlike his hometown, Takoradi had labeled its streets with clearly marked blue and white signs. Above each, in white letters on a red background, was a
DO NOT LITTER
warning. Dawson had the impression that people were at least in part taking heed.

In Takoradi, Ghanaian street names like Ako Adjei coexisted with British ones—Ferguson, Hayford, Kitson, and so on—a legacy of the British colonial occupation of Ghana from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. In the Central and Western Regions, the land of the Fante ethnic group, to which Dawson’s father Jacob belonged, surnames of Dutch, Portuguese, German, and British origin were common.

Its air brakes wheezing and puffing, the bus pulled into the wide STC yard and parked. Dawson waited until his ample seatmate had heaved herself out and then alighted to pick up his bag. He looked around for Abraham, realizing he didn’t know what his cousin looked like these days. He watched the crowd milling about.

“Darko!”

Dawson turned and saw someone hurrying in his direction. He was overweight, of average height. “Abraham?”

“Yes!” He shook hands and hugged Dawson. “How are you? It’s good to see you! Welcome to Takoradi.” His round face shone with delight. “Let me take your bag. I’m parked over there.”

“Thank you. How did you recognize me so easily?”

“Have you forgotten your picture was in all the papers last year after you caught that serial killer?”

“Oh, I see,” Dawson said, laughing. “Yes, I had forgotten.”

They got into Abe’s car, a yellow Toyota Corolla. Abraham talked continuously as they made their way through the center of town. He had an easy laugh and was quite funny. He drove aggressively, which surprised Dawson because his nature seemed otherwise easygoing.

“Traffic is heavy,” Abraham commented.

“Not as bad as Accra,” Dawson replied. He looked around at the vehicles parked in marked spaces along the curb. Good luck persuading drivers to do that in the capital. White, yellow, green, and pink buildings with square facades evenly lined the pavement. The canopied first floors were businesses while the second and third floors were residences with decorative balconies.

“So the oil business has really made a difference here,” Dawson said.

“Oh, yes, both in town and out. New hotels, new houses, and new vehicles. Advertisements on the radio talk about offices being oil industry ready. We’ve become the Oil City.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that.”

“I hate that name.”

Dawson smiled at Abe’s obvious affection for his town.

“Here we are,” his cousin said, pulling into a parking space.

His shop, Abraham’s Stationery, on the corner of Ako Adjei and Kofi Annan Roads, was located opposite the Barclay’s Bank in a congested commercial area where vendor stalls packed the pavements. Before he took Dawson upstairs to the second floor where he and the family lived, Abraham showed him the shop.

One assistant stood behind the sales counter and a second one was high up on a ladder getting something for a customer. The shop wasn’t large, yet it was packed with every imaginable style, color, and size of copy paper, writing instruments, computer supplies, toner cartridges, and exercise books.

Dawson was impressed. “I like it. You have everything here.”

“Almost,” Abraham said. “I want to start carrying computers too, but I don’t know where I’m going to put them.”

“You’ve already outgrown yourself.”

“Yes, that is it.”

They exited the shop and went around to the rear of the building via a side alley.

They went up two flights of steps at the top of which Abraham’s wife, Akosua, was waiting. She was about her husband’s age, around forty. With an endearing dimpled smile, she greeted Dawson with the same elation that her husband had. Slim and straight, she was the physical opposite of Abraham, whose body was rounded off everywhere.

They had a cozy sitting room with a flat-screen TV, a small adjoining kitchen, and two bedrooms down a short hallway. After about an hour, Akosua announced that dinner was served. When she brought the dishes out to the table that she and their young housemaid had prepared, it was clear that they had put themselves out in the good tradition of Ghanaian hospitality. On a wide plate stood four smooth, perfectly shaped ovals of
fufu
brushed with a light coating of water to make them glisten. The
fufu
was made by strenuously pounding boiled
cassava
in a large mortar while adding water until it turned into a soft, glutinous mass.

Next to the plate of
fufu
was a deep bowl of steaming palm nut soup, its rich golden-red oil snaking languidly around succulent chunks of fish and turgid white eggplant. The sight and the aroma made Dawson’s salivary glands contract so hard that they hurt.

Akosua brought a towel, soap, and a two bowls of water to the table. She waited for the men to wash up before she followed suit. The three ate traditionally with the fingers of the right hand only. Like many, Dawson would tell you he loved
fufu
, but in fact it was really all about the soup. It provided the heavenly flavor as well as the lubricant for a generous chunk of
fufu
to pass from the lips to the back of the throat and down the gullet in one smooth motion. He was famished and had to moderate his impulse to eat at high speed, especially a meal this sumptuous. He burned energy like a racehorse and was hungry punctually every four hours. Yet he had never been prone to putting on weight. Because he was tall and lean, people often underestimated his physical strength.

“So you have a big case here in Tadi?” Abraham asked Dawson after the silence that goes with the initial tasting of a meal.

“A family member petitioned CID Headquarters to look into the murder of Fiona and Charles Smith-Aidoo.”

Abraham swallowed with a loud, glottal sound before exclaiming, “Hallelujah!”

Dawson smile. “You’re glad about that, I see.”

“Come on,” Abraham said indignantly, leaning back in his chair. “Four months of investigation and no arrests, Darko? What is that Superintendent Hammond doing over there in his crime unit at Sekondi? I saw him once on TV making all kinds of excuses about lack of manpower and all that nonsense.”

“It’s not always all that simple to make an arrest,” Dawson said gently, anxious to lower any grand expectations that he was going to wrap up the case in no time.

“That’s true,” Akosua agreed. “It’s easy to judge from the outside. Still, it’s frustrating to have a killer like that on the loose—someone who has done such a hideous thing to poor Charles and Fiona.”

“Did either of you know the couple well?” Dawson asked them.

“Fairly well,” Abraham said. “I went to the same secondary school as they did, but they were one year ahead. They were sweethearts
even back then, and they stuck together all the way through university and got married after that.”

It didn’t surprise Dawson that cousin Abraham had had contact with two murder victims. Takoradi was a relatively small city, and personal connections, whether direct or indirect, often went back as far as primary school. Ghanaians made it a point to mix with others in their socioeconomic group and to “know” people and talk about them. Phone numbers were exchanged and shared at the drop of a hat, and arriving at a party with uninvited friends and relatives was quite the norm.

“What were your impressions of Charles and Fiona?” Dawson asked.

“He was a smart guy,” Abraham said, “and he got close to the right people. That was what he did in the oil business, but he was influential and well-to-do even before oil arrived. As the CEO of Smith-Aidoo Timber, he had contacts all over the Western Region. He positioned himself to impress the circle of oil executives with his smooth talk and his charming manner. He was really perfect for corporate relations.”

Without prompting, Akosua served more soup to both the men and Dawson thanked her.

“What about Fiona Smith-Aidoo?” he asked. “Tell me about her.”

“She was an attractive woman about town,” Abraham said. “She liked being seen in public—fundraising and so on. She was also the first female chief executive of the Sekondi-Takoradi Metropolitan Assembly—STMA. She displaced longtime chief Kwesi DeSouza, which shocked many people, not least DeSouza himself. He thought he was coasting to another term as chair. A rumor started—and some people think Fiona was responsible—that he had embezzled a few thousand from the STMA trust fund to build a new house on Beach Road, one of the posh areas in Takoradi. De Souza and Fiona had a strong rivalry.”

“Do you think DeSouza could have killed her?”

Abraham grunted. “I’ve never been inside the man’s mind, so I can’t say. He went on Skyy FM, one of our local stations, to deny the embezzlement allegations and blast Fiona and others for trying to destroy his reputation. He was obviously furious, but enough to kill? I don’t know.”

They finished the meal and Dawson thanked Akosua for the
wonderful cooking. She cleaned up in the kitchen before rejoining the men in the sitting room.

“Akosua has her theory about what happened, and I have mine,” Abraham said.

“Okay, Akosua,” Dawson said. “Let’s hear yours first.”

“At the outset, only Charles was the target,” she said. “The killer knew Charles was going to be down at Cape Three Points that day, but he didn’t realize that Fiona was going to be with her husband. When this killer ambushed the vehicle, it took him by surprise that Fiona was there, and he had to kill both of them.”

“You think one man handled two people and ultimately two dead bodies?” Dawson said. “He’d have had to get them into his vehicle, transport them, get them into the canoe, take them out to sea, and so on. That’s a lot, even for a strong man.”

“Good point,” Akosua conceded. “Maybe two killers, then.”

“I think they
did
know that both Charles and Fiona would be in the vehicle,” Abraham said. “Someone had a contract out on both of them.”

“A professional job,” Dawson said.

“Yes.”

“Why both of them?”

“Maybe a family rivalry.”

“Interesting you say that,” Dawson said. “Are you aware there was a vendetta?”

“I’ve heard that a generations-long enmity has existed between members of the Smith-Aidoo and Sarbah families.”

Dawson was intrigued—Sapphire Smith-Aidoo had not mentioned that when she had been giving him her family history. “Where did you hear that?”

“I don’t exactly recall,” Abraham replied, “but back in the 1950s, the Smith-Aidoos and Sarbahs were competing in the timber industry. Maybe there’s been bad blood to the present day.”

“In other words,” Dawson said, a smile playing at his lips, “Jason Sarbah kills Charles and Fiona in a modern version of the generations-long feud between the two families? And then on top of that, Jason gets to replace Charles at Malgam? It seems too convenient. You’ve been watching too many movies.”

They all laughed.

“I’ve been wondering about how the murderer could get two bodies out to the deep sea,” Dawson said. “Do you know anything about fishing canoes, Abe?”

“A little. I own a canoe myself.”

“Oh,” Dawson said, surprised. “What do you use it for?”

“About a year ago I began renting it out to fishermen who can’t buy their own canoes. They’re expensive, now that the price of wood keeps going up. I thought renting the canoe would bring in extra income, but it has been disappointing.”

“In that case,” Dawson said, “let me ask you something—maybe you know the answer. The Malgam oil rig is about seventy kilometers offshore, right?”

“Closer to sixty.”

“Okay. Let’s leave aside where exactly the Smith-Aidoos were shot. How would this canoe with the dead bodies get out that far? Can a fishing canoe go out sixty kilometers?”

“Oh, yes, easily.”

“With an outboard motor, then? You couldn’t possibly row that far.”

Abraham was amused. “City boy, you don’t row a canoe, you paddle it.”

“Sorry. Paddle, then.”

“Fishermen paddle out there all the time, Darko. Have you seen how strong these guys are? You are partly right, though, because in practice many fishermen split up the journey between paddle and outboard motor. Another alternative is use a sail.”

“If someone wanted to steer the canoe to the Malgam oil rig, how long would it take?”

“Six to eight hours. The sea currents are predominantly northeasterly, so if you set out for the rig from, say, Cape Three Points, whether paddling or by motor power, you have to continuously compensate for the current if you want to arrive at the intended destination. Are you thinking that the dead bodies were transported to the rig deliberately to display them?”

“It seems too coincidental that Dr. Smith-Aidoo’s aunt and uncle show up dead at the very rig on the very day she was working there.”

It wasn’t only that. Something else led Dawson to believe that a fundamental message invoking family ties was encoded in the bizarre scene of the canoe bearing two corpses: the old watch found in Charles’s mouth with the inscription
blood runs deep.
He wasn’t about to mention that to his two hosts, however. For security, some details were best left unrevealed even to relatives—perhaps
especially
to relatives.

“I think you’re right, Darko,” Akosua said. “It was like the murderer was boasting to Dr. Smith-Aidoo, ‘Look what I did. I killed your aunt and uncle.’ How terrible.”