Kwei Quartey - Gold of Our Fathers

Dawson felt his blood chill a little. “Prostitute, bank executive, illegal gold miner-it’s all the same to me. Murder is murder.”

“Got it,” Prempeh said, smiling. He leaned forward and unconsciously spun his pen in circles on the desk. “Here is what I will do for you. I could perform the post on this man, but you know, I’m not really a forensic pathologist, which is what you need here. There’s a woman in Accra at Korle Bu-brand new Edinburgh graduate and first Ghanaian female forensic pathologist in the country-they say she’s sharp as a tack. She was supposed to come up here and teach us some new stuff, but all the stupid bureaucracy has got in the way. Let me try and expedite it, and maybe we can get her up here to do the Chinese man as her first demonstration case in the posh facility in the new building-not here in this dump.”

“I appreciate that very much,” Dawson said, standing up. “I think you need to talk to the Chinese man’s family to explain the situation.”

“I will do that,” Prempeh said. “Please show them in.”

Dawson called the Chinese trio in but stayed out himself. Prempeh could handle it through Mr. Huang, and besides, Dawson did not want to be there if and when money changed hands. See nothing, hear nothing, say nothing.

Lian wanted to return home, but did not want to be alone, so Wei offered to stay with her a while. But first he had to pick up his laptop. Mr. Huang said it was no problem to swing around to Wei’s house. Perfect, Dawson thought. Wei directed Huang to take a right at Pine Avenue off Bantama Road, and then a left on West End Hospital Bypass. The streets of Kwadaso were somewhat serpentine with neat houses quite close together on either side. At length, Wei pointed out his house and told Huang to blow the horn at the gate. A few seconds later, a watchman pulled it open so that Huang could drive through.

Wei alighted and the other three waited for him. The house, a pinkish color, and the unpaved yard were clearly smaller than Lian’s, but just like hers, the property was protected by an electric fence running along the top of the wall, which encircled the house and space around it.

It was stuffy in the car, so Dawson got out and casually looked around, making sure to exchange a few friendly words with the watchman sitting on a stool at his post near the gate. He said his name was David. A small, padlocked wooden shed stood behind him to the right. Dawson supposed it held tools for maintence work around the house, as well as, perhaps, a machete David might find handy if a burglar ever somehow wormed his way into the compound.

Wei came out with his laptop and a tangle of connecting wires. “We go now,” he said to Dawson.

Yes, we go, Dawson thought. It had been a long day on his first case. Was it to be simple, solved in a matter of two days or so, or was it to be more complicated? He laughed to himself at the question. Having needed a Chinese interpreter already seemed an indication that complexity awaited.

The galamsey boys who had discovered Bao Liu’s body were such an important element of the puzzle that it was vital Dawson locate at least one of them. He thought the chief of Dunkwa might be able to help, since chiefs often knew everything that was going on in their village or town.

On Saturday morning, hoping to make time and leave some of the day free to get to Gifty’s guesthouse, Dawson engaged Kofi’s taxi services and set out for Dunkwa at seven with Obeng. During the trip, Dawson found out a little bit about him. He was married with four children and was born and brought up in Aniamoa. He had managed to stay in primary school despite his father’s attempts to keep him working on the farm, and then he had moved to Kumasi to live with an aunt while in secondary school.

As they got to Dunkwa, Dawson made one stop to buy an obligatory bottle of schnapps for the chief, whose name was Nana Akrofi. Showing up empty-handed was a no-no. His palace was at the top of an incline along a paved road eaten away at its edges and hugged by worn houses with corrugated tin roofs. At the roadside, an old man in a green shirt dozed off with his back against the wall of a building as he shared space with two other people on that typically Ghanaian item of furniture-the long wooden bench.

The color of the chief’s brick house had been corrupted by accumulated layers of the ocher village dust, but the small veranda where a young man asked Dawson and Obeng to take a seat while he went into the house to get the chief was painted an uneven pink. They could smell palm nut soup cooking from somewhere in the back, and a baby was crying.

When Nana Akrofi emerged, he turned out to be younger than Dawson had imagined. He wasn’t dressed in resplendent traditional garb either, but rather in a pair of tan khaki slacks and an orange T-shirt with rutgers university written on the front in blue.

Akrofi shook hands with them, right to left, and then sat down in a white plastic chair. Times must be hard, Dawson thought, because the chief was without a linguist or spokesman. Or it could be this young guy was the “acting” chief and had dispensed with that old formality. Traditional life was changing.

Neither Dawson nor Obeng spoke out of turn. The chief had to start first, and with a fairly predictable script. After a pause in which he leaned forward slightly, he cleared his throat. “Eh-heh. Who are you?”

Dawson let Obeng speak first on their behalf. In this case, police hierarchy was subordinate to the sergeant’s roots in the Ashanti Region. Speaking in Twi, he introduced himself, beginning with the deferential “Mepa wo kyew,” and then introduced Dawson. Then it was time to present the schnapps, which the chief gracefully accepted.

“So,” he said, “what is your mission here today?”

“Please, Nana,” Obeng continued, “a certain Chinese man died yesterday morning at one of the mines around Dunkwa and my boss here, Chief Inspector Dawson, and I are investigating what happened.”

“Yes, I know about it,” Akrofi said, looking directly at Dawson now. “If I can help you in your investigation, I will.”

“Thank you, Nana,” Dawson said. “The Chinese man’s name is Bao Liu. He was the boss of some galamsey boys who found him buried in the soil yesterday morning. We need to talk to those boys, but they have all disappeared.”

“Are they in trouble?” the chief asked.

“I don’t think so,” Dawson said truthfully, “but without speaking with them, the investigation is incomplete because they are the first witnesses.”

Akrofi appeared satisfied with that and nodded. “I know the one called Kudzo Gablah. He’s from the Volta Region. I understand he left Dunkwa this morning and went to one of the mines at Aniamoa.”

Dawson glanced at Obeng. That was the sergeant’s home village. Connections like that were always good.

“Mepa wo kyew,” Dawson said to the chief, “you say Kudzo went to Aniamoa. Is it because he was trying to avoid the police?”

Akrofi smiled slightly. “I don’t know. Maybe you need to ask him.”

Dawson nodded. “We will do so. Thank you, Nana.”

“You are welcome.”

It might have been the end to a short meeting, but Dawson was curious about other things, and now that he had given the chief his schnapps, he felt licensed to ask Akrofi if he had known Bao Liu or his brother Wei.

“I was not the chief here when Bao first came to Dunkwa three years ago,” Akrofi replied, “but one time they came to pay their respects to me.”

Dawson wondered if they had brought the chief some gold along with the schnapps. “Did you hear of any problems between the Lius and the farmers working in the area of the mine?” he asked.