Kwei Quartey - Wife of the Gods

“When will you find Mama?” he said, close to tears.

“I will try very hard, Darko, okay?” Armah said. “I promise you.”

His voice was firm, but he held Darko surprisingly softly. Darko didn’t know that kind of touch from his father, and he hadn’t realized a man could be so gentle.

Armah kept his promise. Month after month, he stayed in close contact, bringing them news even when there was little to be brought. Every answered question seemed to raise a new one, and there was more information on what had not happened than what had . For instance, on the day Mama left Ketanu, no tro-tro collisions between Ketanu and Accra were reported. That practically ruled out Mama having been in a vehicle crash, but it still didn’t help determine where along her journey she had disappeared, nor the how and why.

Armah had shown Mama’s picture to dozens of people at the bus stop at Atimpoku. One fish trader had remembered spotting her the day she had been in transit with Darko and Cairo, but not on the day she had disappeared. Armah had also been up to Ketanu twice. Yes, people had seen Beatrice, Osewa’s sister, but no one could shed any light on what could have happened to her.

Armah had quickly eliminated Papa as a suspect because his alibi, much of it provided by Darko and Cairo themselves, was airtight. Still, Armah continued to come up with more questions about Mama, and sometimes it seemed he had a promising lead. Nothing materialized, but Armah never showed any sense of hopelessness.

To this day, Dawson remembered the exact moment he looked at Armah and thought, I want to be like you when I grow up . The sun was setting at the time, and Armah had been at the house for a few minutes. For a moment the detective turned his head to one side, and the living room window framed his profile in sharp outline against the vermilion dusk. His nose was sharp and strong. He was looking downward with heavily lidded eyes, and he seemed to be wishing for something-maybe that he could find Mama, maybe that the world would not be so cruel so much of the time.

In the end, Armah never did find her. He kept in touch, yes, but time passed and the trail grew cold. He began to visit less and less frequently, and Darko could see he was more despondent each time. Almost a year to the day after he had first appeared at the doorstep, he came for the last time and announced that he was being transferred to Kumasi.

Darko’s heart plunged, and he felt sick and faint.

“I’ll write to you, okay?” Armah was saying, his hand on Darko’s shoulder.

Darko nodded dumbly, scared to say anything in case he burst into tears. He was a big boy of thirteen now, and he wasn’t supposed to cry.

Two weeks later a letter arrived in the mail addressed to “Master Darko Dawson.” Darko feverishly opened it and immediately felt his chest swell with pride. It was Armah writing to him in his methodical, looped handwriting. He wanted to know how Darko was, how school was going, and how Papa and Cairo were doing. But he hadn’t written to Papa or Cairo, he had written to him , Darko.

Then and there, he sat down to write a very long and careful reply, and the enduring pen-pal exchange between him and Detective Armah was born. His last line of the letter was “When I grow up, I want to be a detective just like you.”

A father to me , Dawson often thought, and more inspiring than the real one by far. His respect for Armah was undiminished by the detective’s failure to solve Mama’s disappearance.

From afar, Armah had followed Darko through secondary school, and once, on a rare visit to Accra, he came by the house and was astonished to find the teenager had surpassed his height and appeared to be getting even taller.

“Still want to be a detective?” Armah asked him.

“Yes.” The answer never wavered.

Armah would smile quietly and nod. Darko liked that. Just a small gesture, but so affirming. In contrast, Papa thought being a detective was a “stupid” career, but by then Darko was used to his father’s disapproval of practically everything.

Armah had been present for Dawson’s graduation from the National Police Academy. He didn’t have to say how proud he was. Dawson could see it shining in his eyes.

Years after Dawson’s graduation, Armah took early retirement from the police force and set up his own private detective agency in Kumasi. “When you get tired of the grind,” he told Dawson, “come and join me.”

As little as Dawson was inclined to leave Homicide for now, he would never categorically refuse an invitation from the wisest, most perceptive man in the world. Indeed, it was Armah who had told him that everyone, no matter how nice or respected, has at least one enemy. Perhaps Gladys Mensah was proof of that.

Darko drifted off and then woke with a start. He looked at his watch. He had been asleep for more than an hour. His phone was charged enough to ring Christine. A smile wide as the Volta River broke out on his face when she answered.

“Well, it’s about time, Detective Inspector,” she exclaimed. “We thought you’d forgotten about us.”

“Forget about you?” He laughed. “Impossible.”

D AWSON WOKE EARLY THEnext morning, took a shower, threw on some fresh clothes, and sat down to study a map of the region. As Timothy Sowah had mentioned, Ketanu and Bedome were about a kilometer apart. Separating the two places was the forest in which Gladys’s body had been found. The footpath Dawson and Inspector Fiti had taken the day before tracked through the southern tip of the forest. Most important, it was the same route Gladys would have taken back and forth between the two towns. Approximately halfway between the two, but closer to Bedome, Gladys’s crossing had been interrupted by either herself or someone else and she had ended up dead some distance north of the path.

Bedome was east of Ketanu, and some fifteen kilometers east again of Bedome was the Kalakpa Reserve, the only remaining undisturbed forest in the Volta Region.

When Dawson had visited Ketanu as a boy, the forest bordering the eastern edge of the town had been denser, but years of tree felling and burning, most of it illegal, had thinned it out. In fact, much of the Volta Region’s forestland had suffered in this way.

The Bedome end of the footpath was visible from Isaac Kutu’s compound, which was about three hundred meters away. Dawson visualized the compound, the footpath, and the village of Bedome as forming the three points of a right-angled triangle.

Some distance from the footpath, perhaps a hundred meters, a cluster of farmers’ small plots bordered the edge of the forest. Reportedly, some of the farmers had spotted Samuel Boateng with Gladys on Friday evening.

So what could have happened? Samuel lured Gladys to the plantain grove and killed her there? Dawson wondered what sort of compelling ruse would have got her to follow him into the forest.

He turned again to the police file and studied the photographs of the body and the surroundings in which it had been found. Strangled to death in that pretty blue and white outfit adorned with little Adinkra symbols . Dawson tilted his head, and then turned the photograph ninety degrees clockwise. There was something too neat about the way Gladys was lying. In his mind he saw the violent struggle until she was finally still. As Dr. Biney had said, strangling another person to death is not that easy. Then the murderer dragged her to lie beside this palm tree. Did he rearrange her clothing-make it neat, rest her arms by her sides? Undoing, it was called. Dawson preferred his own term: killer’s remorse. You’ve just murdered your spouse or parent or child, and now you’re trying to reverse it by making everything nice and pretty .