Kwei Quartey - Wife of the Gods

Instead, what had he, Darko Dawson, done so far? Arrested the wrong man, antagonized the local police, beaten up a few people, and lost an innocent boy to suicide.

He turned as Boateng’s soft voice invited him back in. “Do you want to drink some water?”

“No, thank you, Mr. Boateng.” I don’t deserve water .

Dawson sat with them in silence for a long time until Samuel’s father asked him if he would tell them the whole story.

He left them late that night. By then he knew for certain Samuel had not murdered Gladys Mensah. He had been a troubled boy, vulnerable even while trying to make a show of toughness. The time he had stolen a packet of chewing gum at the market, it had been on a dare from his friends. That was when he had been hanging around with the wrong crowd, but that had become history. Samuel had shunned them and expressed his intention to go back to school. He had had a strong love for animals, particularly dogs, often sacrificing his meals to feed a stray.

Dawson didn’t sleep. He sat outside the house and smoked until he was higher than a soaring eagle. The smoke from the marijuana kept the mosquitoes away. He became quite numb to pain, although not completely dead to it. At some point he thought he felt tears running down his face, but he couldn’t be sure. He kept seeing Samuel hanging from the jail window, and he cringed and cried out each time the image hit him like the strike of a puff adder.

He had no idea what time it was until the cocks began to crow back and forth like echoes as light came quickly to the dark sky.

In the distance Dawson saw smoke rising from the forest. More illegal fires. But it was a little different from the time he had asked Inspector Fiti about it. This smoke was white rather than black or gray, and there appeared to be a pattern to the puffs as they went up. It took him a little while to get it. One puff, two puffs, two puffs, one. Dawson laughed a marijuana giggle. It seemed unreasonably comical that smoke should rise this way. Look, there it was again. One puff, two puffs, two puffs, one.

Now it seemed stupid and not at all amusing. Dawson went back inside the house floating on air. He wanted to ring Christine, and then he didn’t, and then he did again. He debated. Normally he would have turned to her in this kind of situation, but he couldn’t call her in his marijuana-suffused condition. She would immediately detect he was high, and that would quench any sympathy she might have for him. Christine loved her husband, but she did not like him on drugs.

Call Armah . That’s what he should do. Armah could help him through this.

Dawson looked around for his mobile, forgetting where he had put it. After a few minutes, he found it in his pocket.

His call went through.

“Hello?” It was a woman’s voice-Armah’s wife, Maude.

“Hello,” Dawson stammered. “Is this… is Armah there, please? May I speak to him?”

He was shocked at the sound of his own voice. He might as well have been talking through a mouthful of cotton balls.

“Who is calling?” Maude asked after a second’s hesitation.

Dawson was about to say his name, but he lost his nerve. It would be embarrassing and insulting to Armah, a man Dawson revered, to talk to him from out of this mind-altered miasma. Dawson was about as lucid right now as Ketanu mud.

He ended the call and flung the phone across the room, cursing fluently in Ewe. He needed a shower.

He suddenly remembered Elizabeth and wondered if she was okay. He would have to visit her later on, he thought.

He fell asleep upright in the straight-backed chair. It had always mystified Christine how he could do that. He started awake at the sound of a car pulling up. He looked out the window. Chikata was alighting from a Corolla, and directly behind him Chief Superintendent Lartey was getting out of a shiny black BMW marked CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIONS DEPARTMENT.

My God. Lartey was here? This was serious. Dawson’s heart sank like a lead nugget. There couldn’t be a worse time. He opened the door wide before they could knock. It was past eight in the morning, and the day was already buzzing with people shopping and running errands.

“Dawson,” Lartey said.

“At your service, sir. Come in. Hello, D.S. Chikata.”

Lartey looked quickly around and then back at Dawson. “Is something wrong with you? Are you drunk?”

“No, sir, I’m not.”

Lartey sniffed. “Is that marijuana I smell?”

“No, sir, just some strong cigarettes.”

“Since when do you smoke?”

“I do sometimes.”

Lartey grunted. “You look horrible.”

He took a seat. Chikata remained standing, scrutinizing Dawson but trying not to be too obvious about it.

“What are you staring at?” Dawson said to him sullenly.

“Sit down, Dawson,” Lartey said sharply.

He did.

“What’s going on with you in this place?”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“I’ve received more complaints about you in the past few days than I have had about any other detective in several years. Is it true you insulted Inspector Fiti by calling him a bush policeman?”

“He was having a prisoner beaten up, sir. That prisoner is now dead.”

“As a result of the alleged beating?”

“Indirectly, yes, I would say so. And it’s not alleged, sir. It did happen. I witnessed it.”

“Have you filed a report?”

“I was about to, sir.”

“At the same time it appears you’ve been doing your own share of beating up, doesn’t it? You assaulted Augustus Ayitey, a respected herbalist, and put him in jail for supposedly hurting your boy when he went for treatment. Which is a conflict of interest. The correct procedure would be to file a report as a citizen and let someone else in the department handle it. Seems to me you were just looking for an excuse to take revenge on Mr. Ayitey, isn’t that right?”

Dawson didn’t answer. Quite frankly, he was too tired and too high to care that much.

“You also managed to falsely accuse a Ghana Health Service official of murder and throw him into jail.”

“I made a mistake-”

“Wait, I’m not finished.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“You also beat up the fetish priest at Bedome. So my question is, What is wrong with you? Why are you so out of control?”

Dawson dropped his face into his palms. His head was throbbing.

“I don’t know, sir,” he said finally.

“Is it drugs?”

“No, sir.”

Lartey grunted. “You’re only sabotaging your own progress, Dawson. It’s folly, and it is giving my department a very, very bad name. That’s what I detest most. I hate it. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir, I believe so.”

“The reason I’ve brought D.S. Chikata here is to have him take over the case. I’m suspending you. Three weeks’ suspension without pay, and then you face the Disciplinary Board.”

“Sir, wait, please. Please, I have to solve this. I promise I’ll be on my best behavior-”

“Pack up your things and get out, Dawson. Chikata is moving in.”

I SAAC KUTU HAD BEENpreparing a potion for a woman who had come to see him for her weak blood. It was still warm as he poured it into the bottle she had brought with her.

“Wait for it to get cool,” he instructed her, “and drink half of the bottle today. Tomorrow you drink the rest.”

She thanked him profusely and went away happy. For payment, she had left him two live chickens.

Isaac joined Tomefa in the courtyard, where she was cooking goat stew on the firewood stove. He sat on the stool and watched her quietly. She was a very good wife, he often reminded himself-faithful, hardworking, and fertile. She had borne seven children, and lost two, so now there were five and that was just fine. It was funny that he didn’t love Tomefa. He liked her well enough. In fact he could go as far as to say he was fond of her, but it wasn’t love. His father, Boniface, had arranged Isaac’s marriage to her, yes, but couldn’t love sometimes grow like a planted seed? He assumed it could, but with Tomefa, it hadn’t. Take Osewa by contrast. Even after all these years, whenever he saw her, he felt something in his chest, like a surge of joy, warm and wet. Why was it so? It was such a marvelous thing. And he would never give Osewa any kind of command the way he would Tomefa. There was no need for that. He and Osewa flowed together like two streams converging to form a single river.