“All right, Inspector.”
Good. He was thinking ahead and planning the next steps. DS Chikata would be arriving the following day, and Dawson was looking forward to it. Together, they could get a lot done much faster, clear this mystery up, and get back home.
Chapter 14
A GIRL OF ABOUT ten years old showed Dawson into a dark, stuffy sitting room with dusty stacks of papers, books, and folders. His nose tickled and he sneezed twice. The room had one window dirtied by the red dust kicked up from the unpaved road outside.
“Please, I will go and call Auntie Eileen,” she said, her voice barely a whisper.
“Thank you.”
He chose not to sit on either of the two white plastic chairs, and instead peered at some of the dusty documents on the floor-psychology and biology papers taken from journals, and books on herbal medicines. With interest, he picked up a book called A History of African Witchcraft and skimmed through a few pages.
“Inspector Dawson?”
He turned to see a thin woman standing in the middle of the room.
“Mrs. Copper?”
“That is correct. How do you do?”
They shook hands. Hers was as rough as a dead leaf. He estimated her age around fifty. Her unprocessed hair was speckled with grey, and she wore a simple throw-on dress with a brown and white Ghanaian print. Obviously, she chose not to support her sagging breasts with a bra.
She pointed to the chair behind him. When he sat down, dust puffed up from the cushion and irritated his nose again. He suppressed an urge to sneeze.
“First of all,” he said, “I want to express my condolences for your brother’s death.”
“Thank you.” She half smiled, but it was bitter. “If only expressions of sympathy could resurrect a person. Next to my husband, Charles was the most important person in my life. So, yes, I am stricken, but I feared this was going to happen.”
“Why?”
She blew breath through her relaxed lips so that they made a soft, fluttering sound of weary disapproval. “You know how our fellow Ghanaians behave. People, even your own family members, would rather tear you down than cheer you on for your achievements.”
“Were there family members who were jealous of Charles’s success?”
“My ne’er-do-well brother, Brian.”
“Could he have killed Charles?”
“Could he?” She smiled. “Of course he could. Brian is a failure who was jealous of Charles and hated the fact that Sapphire’s uncle had more to do with her success than her father.”
“Doctor Smith-Aidoo told me about that,” Dawson said, nodding. “Her aunt and uncle essentially rescued her from self-destruction.”
“Yes,” Eileen agreed. “And put her on the path to academic success.”
“But I’m curious about something,” Dawson said. “Presumably Brian was jealous of his brother for a long time. What would trigger him to murder Charles? Why then and not some other time?”
“Ah, good question, Inspector,” Eileen said, lifting her index finger. “Did Sapphire also tell you all about the death of Jason Sarbah’s daughter, Angela, and how that made Sapphire want to leave the private clinic at which she had been working?”
“Yes, she did.”
“So once more, Charles came to her rescue and got her that job working on the rig.” Eileen crossed one leg over the other and smoothed her dress. “One day, Brian calls Sapphire to ask how she’s doing. Remember that they don’t talk to each other much-they’re practically estranged from each other. Sapphire lets him know that she has a new job, and Charles got it for her. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Brian wants to know. ‘What difference would it make?’ Sapphire asks.”
“Ouch,” Dawson said. “That must have been hurtful.”
“Oh, yes-so painful that Brian calls his brother and begins to berate him for influencing Sapphire’s career while deliberately excluding Brian, which of course angers Charles, who ends up calling his younger brother worthless and a number of adjectives in Fante that don’t even have an equivalent in English.”
Putting himself in Brian’s position, Dawson could feel the kind of distress, even fury, that the man must have experienced. It wasn’t that Brian could have added anything to his daughter’s career move, it was simply the principle of being included in her affairs. And Dawson immediately thought of what he had done to his father: excluded him from his life. He didn’t call him or visit him. Cairo had asked Dawson to consider warming back up to their father, and Dawson was going to have to make a decision quite soon.
He forced his thoughts away from his personal affairs. “Your niece, Dr. Smith-Aidoo tells me that you’re a dedicated genealogist.”
Eileen looked pleased. “One of my many interests, yes.”
“To a large extent, Mrs. Copper, that’s why I’m here. Aspects of the murder signature suggested family and ancestry might have played at least part of the motive.”
“Call me Auntie Eileen. Everyone else does, even when I don’t ask them to.” She laughed, more like a dry cackle. “What do you know so far about the Smith-Aidoos?”
“Not much more than a little background on Charles and his wife, you, Brian, and Sapphire. She told me that after your mother was killed in a car crash in 1994, and she overheard Charles telling Auntie Fiona that there must be a curse on the Smith-Aidoo family. He said something like, ‘First my grandparents and now my mother.’ Sapphire wasn’t sure what to make of that.”
“We have shielded Sapphire from some of the more brutal elements of our family’s history.” Eileen paused, her eyes to the floor as she apparently deliberated on how best to frame what she was about to say. “Inspector, we don’t like to talk about family murder, madness, or marital infidelities, and we have plenty of that. The first half of our name, Smith, is from Bartholomew Smith, an English seaman born around 1872. His ship docked at Takoradi for a few weeks when he met and fell in love with a Ghanaian woman and married her. After her death in about 1921, he returned to England with his daughter, Bessie, who got married there in 1925 to a Tiberius Sarbah.”
Dawson’s interest was piqued at that. Sapphire had told him that Jason Sarbah and Charles Smith-Aidoo were first cousins with a common grandmother, Bessie Smith. Now Eileen was going one generation earlier to Bessie’s father, Bartholomew. This was the kind of family history Dawson was looking for.
Eileen rose and picked her way through some folders and documents behind her chair. “I have a photograph of her I can show you.”
She brought out two manila envelopes, took out a picture from one of them, and handed it to him.
“As you can see, she was very beautiful,” she said, dragging her chair closer to his.
He examined the photo. Despite the faded sepia tone of the period, it was clear that the fair-skinned Bessie with her dark swept-up hair and large expressive eyes had been a woman of extraordinary beauty. She was dressed in a white lace blouse and a long, layered, dark skirt with lace trim.
“I see what you mean,” he said, turning the photograph over. “Lovely. What about pictures of Tiberius, her husband?”
Eileen shook her head. “I have never located any. It could be Bessie destroyed them or didn’t keep them or pass them along, because in 1940 she and Tiberius were divorced.”
“Ah, I see,” Dawson said. It stood to reason that Bessie would then abandon mementos of her marriage to Tiberius. “Why the divorce?”
Eileen looked regretful. “Again, I don’t know.”
“Did Bessie remarry?”
“Yes-to Robert E. Aidoo, or ‘R.E.,’ as people called him. Not long after that, she and R.E. left England to settle in Ghana-the then Gold Coast. So, Bessie came full circle back home. I have several pictures of R.E.”
From the second envelope, Eileen pulled out about a dozen photos that she handed to Dawson. She stood over his shoulder as he sifted through the pictures of Bessie and R.E. singly and together, and two children close in age.