Kwei Quartey - Murder at Cape Three Points

“Take it easy, sir,” he said quietly. “Take a rest. You don’t need to finish it all right now.”

Sarbah fell back in his chair and took three deep breaths, as if trying to calm himself.

“Would you like some water?” Dawson asked.

Sarbah waved that away. “I’m okay.” He smiled wanly. “Now you understand why I don’t like to talk about this.”

“I do understand. I had no idea you had been through such a terrible trauma.”

“The murder itself was only the beginning of the nightmare,” Sarbah said, his voice even huskier than before. “You must be aware through your work, Inspector, how two or more eyewitnesses to the same crime can report completely different versions of what happened.”

Dawson, transferring to a chair closer to Sarbah’s than the original one, said, “I know the problem only too well.”

“Well, there you are. What I saw was not the same as what Simon said he saw. Our parents’ bedroom was dark when he and I got there. I believe I was in front of him-in fact I’m sure of it. He claimed I turned on the light, but I don’t remember doing that. I thought he switched it on at the wall after I had already entered the room. In any case, the first thing I recall seeing then were the bodies of my mother and stepfather, but Simon reported to the police that he saw a man leaving through the window, the same way he must have come in.”

“And he identified the man as Tiberius,” Dawson said, taking an educated guess.

“Yes, sir. The police questioned us over and over. I swore, and still do, that I never saw anyone else in the room-let alone my father-but Simon insisted.”

“Tiberius was taken into custody?”

“Yes, and interrogated for hours on end.” Sarbah looked directly at Dawson. “He denied he had anything to do with the killing, and I believe him till this day. Lots of things about Simon’s story didn’t add up. Did he see the man holding a weapon-a knife or machete? At first he said a knife, but then he changed his story and it was a machete. What was the man wearing? Simon couldn’t remember. Was the man bloody? ‘Yes, I think so.’ Why didn’t your half brother, Richard, also see this man? ‘I don’t know.’ His story was not holding up. Daddy didn’t have a great alibi, but neither could the police place him at the murder site.”

“The charges were eventually dropped?”

“Yes, but by then, the investigation had dragged on, and Daddy had been in prison for three or four months. He lost friends; he lost his job. When he got out, he was a crushed man. He drank more heavily than he ever had and ate almost nothing. I saw him lose kilos by the day and wither away. In 1960 he committed suicide by hanging.”

In the gloomy room, Dawson could see Sarbah’s eyes moisten and swell. “I’m very sorry to hear that, sir.”

“In effect,” Sarbah said morosely, “the accusation, the imprisonment, the disgrace all slowly tortured him to death, and I blame Simon for it because he falsely accused Daddy.”

“Could it be that he did see someone in the room whom he misidentified?”

“No,” Sarbah said, his jaw set like stone. “He deliberately made it up.”

“Why would a boy make up a story like that?” Dawson asked.

“Spite,” Sarbah snapped, as though the word was poison he had to disgorge. “He was a malevolent child who hated me and hated my father, not the least because R.E. had a running tirade against Tiberius that he let his children hear and breathe day in, day out.”

In his mind, Dawson wondered instead whether Simon might have blurted Tiberius’s name under suggestive police questioning. Tiberius was probably a fairly strong suspect at the time, given the public displays of antagonism between him and R.E. Sometimes a frightened child says what he thinks adults want to hear. Apart from that, Dawson knew of many cases in which one detective, particularly the most senior on the team, pressures his junior officers to focus on a particular suspect and either get a confession or a solid accusatory statement from an eyewitness.

“The murder was never solved?” he asked Sarbah.

“Never,” he said, shaking his head slowly in sad disgust.

“Who then took care of you and your half brothers?”

“We were split up between R.E.’s siblings-I went to a sister of his, and Simon and Cecil went to a brother.”

“What was your experience like with your step-aunt?”

Sarbah curled his lip. “I hated it. She treated me as if I wasn’t there.”

“Did you see your half siblings much after that?”

“Yes, but we didn’t speak.”

Dawson reflected for a while on this man’s joyless life ridden with trauma, death, and neglect. No wonder he was angry. The question was whether he was angry enough to kill.

Sarbah stood up and went to the sideboard in his dining area and removed two framed photographs from the top of it.

“That’s my father and me,” he said, handing the first one to Dawson. “I was about six at the time.”

The picture was a rather faded one in sepia. Still, the resemblance between Richard and his father was easy to see. Tiberius was squarely built with widely set facial features. He and his son were smartly dressed for the picture and showed the usual solemn expressions of the time. People didn’t smile much for photographs back then.

Sarbah gave him the second picture, which was in full color and more modern in quality. “And that’s Barbara, my wife; Jason; and me.”

She was plump with a soft face. Jason, about nineteen in this photo, got his light skin was from her. Richard, well-built back then at around fifty, Dawson estimated, had evidently kept his strong physique and youthful features.

“That’s nice,” Dawson said, studying the photograph. “Do you have a lot of pictures?”

“Yes,” he said, opening one of the sideboard doors to reveal a stack of photo albums. “All in there. Perhaps one day when we have more time, I’ll show them to you.”

“I would like that,” Dawson said. He was thinking that much of the pictorial family history involving Tiberius, which Eileen so lacked, was probably all here with Richard Sarbah. “Is your wife around?”

“Barbara and I have been separated for years.” Surprisingly, Sarbah chuckled. “No sympathy required. It was for the best.”

“Besides Jason, do you have any other children?”

Sarbah’s face lit up. “No. He’s my only child. I’m proud of my boy and what he has done for himself. He’s a gem.”

That made Dawson think of Hosiah, then of Sly, and finally of children in general and what they did to a parent’s heart and soul. “I heard about Angela, your granddaughter,” he said quietly.

Sarbah stared at the floor, anguish in his face. “When she died, a part of me died with her. Jason was broken. I was afraid he might kill himself. I prayed to God-don’t let what happened to my father happen to my son. I persuaded Jason to stay with me here for a while so I could support him and keep an eye on him. I would do anything for my boy.”

“I admire you for that,” Dawson said. “You might even have saved his life.”

“But I couldn’t save Angela’s,” Sarbah said sadly.

“Maybe no one could have saved her.”

“There were people who could have,” Sarbah said dejectedly, “but they turned Jason away.”

“You mean Charles and Dr. Smith-Aidoo.”

“Yes.”

“Forgive me-I’m not trying to be offensive, but did Jason ever express a desire to take revenge on them?”

Sarbah dismissed that with a wave of the hand. “Not only is he not that kind of person, he didn’t even have the strength. He was in deep depression. He wouldn’t eat. He shed kilos the same way my father did. I was afraid.”