He affectionately put his arm around his younger brother’s shoulders. “Come on, let’s go to the swings. I’ll push you.”
They ran off together as their parents looked on fondly. Dawson loved to see them together, and he was happy with the way things were going, especially for Hosiah. Because he could now fully participate in sports, he had a lot more friends both in school and out, and he was more outgoing than before. A year ago, before the cardiac surgery that saved him, his condition had worsened, and he had become short of breath with even the slightest exertion. Thank God for the surgeons at Korle Bu, the largest tertiary hospital in the country, who performed Hosiah’s expensive surgery on a largely charitable basis.
Sly too was doing well. Many of his rough edges had smoothed out. Fights at school were a problem in the beginning, but his adoptive parents had worked patiently with him to curb his feral instincts. But Sly’s fierce protection of his younger brother had been unwavering: anyone attempting to bully Hosiah paid dearly.
So, much contributed to Dawson’s feeling of contentment: the lifting of the worries over his beloved boy, his promotion and subsequent uptick-very slight, but better than nothing-in his salary, and Christine’s recent promotion to an assistant headmistress at her school.
He glanced at his phone. “Shall we go?” he asked Christine.
She nodded. “I think so.”
Dawson walked over to the swings and joined Sly and Hosiah for a few minutes before calling time. Then it was back to the car with Hosiah riding atop his dad’s shoulders. Dawson felt remarkably happy, but he should have known that nothing good lasts long. Or more accurately, he did know. He had simply forgotten.
CHAPTER TWO
Monday morning Dawson made his way to work on his Honda motorcycle. It was the fastest way to deal with Accra’s choked traffic. It was also dangerous. Survival on a motorcycle required a certain level of aggression and without question, catlike reflexes. At Kwame Nkrumah Circle, the new overpass was open, but for all its complexity, Dawson wasn’t sure whether it helped or worsened the chaos.
Oh, Ghana, he thought, shaking his head. Why can we never get it right the first time? With his surgical mask on to filter out some of the vehicle exhaust fumes, Dawson wound through cars and tro-tros like a snake evading capture. In Accra’s traffic tangle, the margins for vehicles and pedestrians alike were razor thin.
The congestion cleared somewhat once Dawson got onto Ring Road Central, and there was only one more logjam to tackle at the Ako Adjei Interchange before he got to the Criminal Investigations Department Central Headquarters on Ring Road East. Civilian vehicles were no longer allowed in what used to be parking spaces around the building, and even official police vehicles entering were checked underneath with long-handled inspection mirrors. Terrorism wasn’t an improbability for Ghana anymore. Often, it engulfed parts of Nigeria only two countries away to the east. One could not be too careful.
Other things had changed too. In the previously empty space between CID and the Ghana Police Headquarters, a separate entity, the public relations building, had been completed. The new structure would have press conference and media rooms with Wi-Fi for reporters to file their stories in a comfortable atmosphere. Evidently the Ghana Police Service (GPS) had decided it was better to win friends and influence people than to make enemies. The seven-story CID building, which had been around for decades, was itself undergoing piecemeal improvements as well. It had a new sun-yellow coat of paint.
Dawson parked the Honda outside the rear wall of the CID premises and walked around to the front entrance, where the sentry, a sergeant, saluted him and deferentially waved him through.
Dawson went up the narrow stairway to the fourth floor detectives’ room. Apart from the four large tables and a bunch of scattered chairs, the room was quite bare, with no adornments on the beige walls. This time of the year was the coolest, and a light, refreshing breeze came through the now modern tinted sliding panes that had finally replaced the old-fashioned louvers.
This room was always noisy-a microcosm of Accra itself. Officers of every rank from lance corporal up to chief inspector, Dawson’s new title, sat writing reports or stood around perched against the tables talking, arguing, and laughing. Don’t people have anything to do? Dawson wondered. He caught a snatch of a debate among four officers on the veracity of a bizarre news item about a woman accused of bestiality, and a more reasoned but just as vociferous discussion around the economic mess Ghana suddenly found itself in. In spite of offshore oil now flowing, the cost of living had shot up. That meant everything: fuel, transportation, food, and lodging. Like so many other Ghanaians, Dawson and Christine had been experiencing the economic pinch with a sinking feeling that Ghana was sliding backward.
In the midst of the racket in the room, two male officers were interviewing a handcuffed male suspect while other officers stood around watching. CID didn’t have private interrogation rooms. One used whatever space one could find.
Dawson’s junior partner in the Homicide Division of the Crime Unit, Inspector Philip Chikata, was in the middle of another heated discussion with a fellow officer over which soccer team was most likely to win the next Africa Cup.
“Morning, boss,” Chikata said, as Dawson pulled up a chair and sat opposite him.
“Morning, Philip.”
Dawson shook hands and snapped fingers with Chikata’s companion, a corporal who was back from spending two weeks on duty in the mayhem of the charge office on the ground floor.
“How are you?” Dawson greeted him in Twi. “How was charge?”
“Fine, sir,” the corporal said. “But I’m glad to be back.”
“What do you think?” Chikata asked Dawson. “Ghana will beat Egypt in the next round, anaa am I lying?”
Dawson shook his head. “You know I don’t talk sports or politics at work.”
“Please, excuse me, sir,” the corporal said, standing up. “I have court this morning.”
“Later,” Dawson said to him, turning back to Chikata to ask him about a cold homicide case they were working on. Cold as the corpse itself. No new leads had materialized over the weekend with Chikata’s investigations.
“What should we do next?” he asked Dawson.
“Let’s wait for the DNA report.”
Chikata sucked his teeth. “This DNA lab. So slow. It’s been four weeks now.”
“It’s not so much the slowness,” Dawson said. “It’s the backlog.”
Chikata conceded the point. Ridiculously handsome and powerfully built, he was sporting a neat regulation mustache these days.
Dawson turned his head toward a loud bang, unmistakably the impact of flesh on flesh. The handcuffed suspect, who could not have been more than twenty-three or so, was reeling from an open-handed slap delivered to his right cheek by a detective sergeant. “Please, I beg you, no-”
“No, what?” The sergeant hit him again. “How do you think your victim felt when you were assaulting him, eh?”
“What’s going on over there?” Dawson asked Chikata
“Armed robber,” he answered. “They caught him red-handed attacking an elderly man.”
The kid was crying and some of the officers began to laugh and derisively call him kwasea, a word for “idiot.” Yet another officer whacked him on the back of the head, making the boy shriek and attempt to get away.