Kwei Quartey - Wife of the Gods

“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.

D ARKO DAWSON RODEa 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.