It was a question Dawson would not have expected of a parent to his nine-year-old child, and it was eerily similar to what he had often asked Hosiah during his years of suffering heart disease. In a flash, Dawson realized that something was wrong with Marvelous. Hours of sitting with his son in inpatient wards and outpatient waiting rooms had trained him to observe signs of illness in children. Here he noticed that while kids of this girl’s age would normally have skinny ankles, Marvelous’s own were puffy and so were her hands. She was retaining fluid for some reason.
“Okay,” Forjoe said, his eyes still full of tenderness toward her. “Go and do your homework and get ready for school tomorrow, all right?”
She nodded, walked away with one glance back at her father, and disappeared round a corner.
“Your daughter is beautiful,” Dawson said. “But is she okay?”
“She’s okay,” he responded, nevertheless appearing troubled. “Please, why do you ask?”
“Because you asked her if she was tired.”
“You are right,” Forjoe said heavily, as if reluctant to admit it. “The doctors say there is something wrong with her kidneys.”
For Dawson, this struck home. Countless times, he had told people in response to their questions about Hosiah, The doctors say there’s something wrong with his heart.
“Can they help her?” Dawson asked Forjoe.
He shrugged. “Anything they can do, my wife and I can’t afford it. We are too poor. The doctors tell me that one day Marvelous will need a machine to clean her blood two or three times a week, but the cost of even one treatment is more than we make in one month. Or they can transplant one kidney from her older brother, but the cost of the operation…” He trailed off, shaking his head.
Dawson knew exactly what Forjoe was facing. It had been the same circumstance with Hosiah. Like Marvelous and her failing kidneys, the medical options available to Hosiah had been so costly, Dawson could never have afforded them without the benevolence of the Cardiothoracic Center. Even Jason Sarbah, a man of much more means, had run up against a monetary wall trying to save his daughter, Angela. Dawson’s, Forjoe’s, and Sarbah’s stories were startling in their similarity, but not coincidental by any means. They pointed to the exploding health crisis in Ghana: modern diagnostics were detecting more and more chronic diseases in both adults and children, but the tottering National Health Insurance Scheme could not possibly pay for their treatment.
Dawson wished he could help Forjoe, but he would need to ask someone in the know when he was back home in Accra-perhaps when he took Hosiah in for a follow-up visit, he could ask a doctor if anything could be done for Marvelous. However, he didn’t want to raise any false hopes by telling Forjoe that. For now, an expression of sympathy was about as far as he could go.
“I’m sorry,” Dawson said. “I pray you will find a solution for your lovely daughter.”
“Thank you, sir.” Forjoe tried to shake himself out of his dark mood. “Everything will be okay. A certain man is trying his best to help me, and God will bless us.”
Dawson stood up. “I’m grateful for your help, Forjoe.”
“You’re welcome, sir.”
They traded phone numbers, and as Dawson left with Abraham, he reserved a space in his mind and put Marvelous securely in it. He wasn’t going to forget her.
RETURNING FROM SEKONDI Harbor, they stopped off at Akroma Plaza Hotel for dinner. A visit to Takoradi was incomplete without dining at Akroma’s legendary restaurant, Abraham told Dawson. It had been moved from its old, smaller location into a completely new section of the hotel twice the original size.
It was refreshingly air-conditioned, in contrast to their visit to the harbor. The hostess seated the two men in a nice spot with a view of the street. A quick glance through the seemingly endless menu revealed to Dawson that Asian, European, and American dishes were much more costly than Ghanaian ones. He and Abraham had a hankering for banku. It was only a matter of what to eat it with.
Dawson liked both banku and fufu, but some people were vehemently aligned with one and not the other. Both were presented as soft, pillow-smooth ovals, but their respective tastes could not have been more different. Banku, made from fermented cornmeal, had a sour and distinctive flavor, whereas fufu, derived from a freshly boiled starchy food such as cassava, was a blander affair that made no effort to compete with the soup with which it was eaten.
Abraham wanted grilled tilapia smothered in a spicy onion and tomato sauce. It was served whole, the head and all the bones included. Dawson didn’t feel like dealing with the task of extracting tiny bones, so he went with okro stew instead. This was the ultimate explosion of taste, what with the prawns, beef, smoked ham, and herring in a dense mélange of eggplant, tomato, ginger, chili pepper, and okro, which gave the dish its slick mouth feel. Dawson agreed that it was one of the best he’d ever tasted-except his mother’s, of course.
When Abraham dropped him off at the house, Dawson was pleasantly full but dying for a refreshing shower after the long day. Alas, the water pressure was low, and the flow from the showerhead was but a trickle. It was back to the old standby: a bucket bath. He came out of the bathroom feeling like a new man and pulled on a pair of shorts. A cool breeze blew gently in from the windows, lifting the curtains slightly. His phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Inspector Dawson?” His voice was rather boyish. “This is Jason Sarbah. I’m returning your call.”
“Thank you very much, Mr. Sarbah. I’m investigating the murder of Charles and Fiona Smith-Aidoo,” he said. “I would like to meet you for a few minutes to discuss it.”
“Ah, I see.” He paused. “Good. Perhaps we’ll now get to the bottom of it. Did you have a time in mind to meet?”
“As soon as possible, sir.”
“Let’s see… How about two o’clock tomorrow afternoon?”
“Perfect, sir.”
“Do you know where the Malgam offices are?”
“Yes, I do. I’ll see you tomorrow at two.”
DAWSON WENT THROUGH more of the papers in the STMA box. He came across three separate meetings for which the minutes described a sharp conflict between Kwesi DeSouza and Fiona Smith-Aidoo.
When he’d had enough of that, he put everything aside on the nightstand and sat back in bed. He had brought one of his mbiras with him from Accra, as he always did when traveling. It had two rows of graduated lengths of metal strips, sixteen in all, mounted on a handheld soundboard. When plucked, the strips produced notes similar to the sound of xylophone. Dawson’s mother had given him one as a gift when he was ten, and he had played it sporadically into his teens, when he discovered he could make his own mbira with simple, scavenged materials-even old bicycle spokes. The instrument had a thousand-year history with the Shona people of Zimbabwe, who still made the most complicated of mbiras with twenty-three or more keys.
He rested his head against the wall as he practiced a piece he had composed the week before, a cyclical arrangement with intertwined melodies. After a few minutes of playing, it put Dawson in a relaxed and meditative mood, almost trancelike. It was the next best thing to smoking marijuana, and in his months of kicking the habit, he had increasingly relied on his mbira to relieve tension. In the “good old days,” he combined smoking with mbira playing, a doubly heightening experience.
After half an hour, he became pleasantly drowsy. He reached out for the light switch on the wall to turn off the bare-bulb ceiling light and stretched diagonally across the bed since it was a little too short for him. He felt tired, but he couldn’t sleep. His mind flitted over the events of the past two days like an undecided hummingbird. Instinctively, he felt that the Smith-Aidoo murder had greater breadth and depth than any of his previous cases. Two corpses in a canoe adrift around a deep-sea oil rig, a severed head with an excavated eye socket, a nineteenth-century pocket watch with a scrawled inscription invoking blood ties. What did it all mean?