“Yes,” she said, cocking her head, “but it’s like magic. Most magic is tricks. Only a rare instance is true magic.”
Dawson thought about his investigation about two years ago in a village called Ketanu, where the death of a female medical student had been ascribed to witchcraft.
“What about Charles’s death?” he asked Eileen. “Witchcraft?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Why not?”
She stuck out her lower lip in thought. “Too tangible,” she said finally. “A good witchcraft death is subtle and mysterious-as if a physical hand never touched the victim. That’s because the death takes place originally in the astral realm where the witches go at night.”
Dawson nodded in understanding. He’d had his lessons on witchcraft in Ketanu. “What about human sacrifice?”
Now Eileen looked troubled. “Perhaps. They removed his tongue and his eye. Bad signs of ritual.”
“You said ‘they.’ Who are ‘they’?”
She stared at him. “Would you like to know what I honestly believe?”
“Yes, I would.”
“Cardiman wants his business to continue to prosper without any external interference from the likes of Malgam Oil and so do the fishermen. I think he paid two or more fishermen to kill my brother. In murdering him, they chose to make it a human sacrifice, or at least make it seem so. I believe you will find the answer to this crime at Cape Three Points.”
Chapter 15
EILEEN SHOWED DAWSON INTO the bedroom she shared with her father. Sitting in a rusty wheelchair behind a small table, he was a tiny man laid waste by dementia and immobility. He was completely bald, his scooped-out temples betraying how malnourished he was. The house girl was trying to persuade Simon, who was now almost toothless, to eat some akasa, a porridge made from fermented corn, but like a stubborn child, he wasn’t having any of it.
He looked at Eileen and in Fante said, “Who are you? You can’t build anything here, by order of the Sekondi-Takoradi Metropolitan Assembly.”
“He was a land and housing inspector for the city,” she explained to Dawson. “Papa, it’s me, Eileen.”
He stared at her, and for a moment realization appeared to dawn in his expression, but then he said, this time in English, “Who are you? You can’t build a house here.”
The caretaker held a spoonful in front of Simon’s mouth and coaxed him. The old man opened his mouth, seemed to accept the akasa, but a few seconds later spat it out in a far-reaching spray.
“Oh, Papa,” Eileen said chidingly. “What am I going to do with you?”
Unperturbed, she wiped her father’s mouth while the caretaker cleaned up the table.
“He’s been doing this spitting thing the whole week,” Eileen said to Dawson. “Don’t ask me why.”
“Can you ask him what happened to his mother and father?”
“All right. I doubt he will answer, but here goes.” She stood closer to him and spoke more slowly. “Papa, what happened to Mummy and Daddy?”
“I can have you arrested for building here,” he said. “I have complete authority. Who are you?”
Eileen sent Dawson a rueful look. “Do you want to try?”
His efforts also proved fruitless as Simon gave him the same repetitive reply and then fell into silence.
She looked regretful. “Sorry. You won’t get much, if anything, out of him.”
“It’s okay,” Dawson said. “I understand.” He was wondering if his father would get to this stage, and with another stab of guilt he realized that Jacob could well be approaching it without Dawson’s knowledge.
Eileen accompanied him to the door. He thanked her for her time.
“Let me know if I can help any further,” she said.
As he returned to the car, he noticed someone getting out of a battered Toyota on the other side of the street, and his blood went cold for a moment as he thought he was seeing the ghost of Charles Smith-Aidoo. He recognized him from the photograph in Charles’s study. Then he realized that the man must be Brian, his brother. They were quite alike. He was walking at a hurried, agitated pace into Eileen’s house. Dawson followed, and by the time he got to the door, she and Brian were locked in an argument. Dawson stood listening to one side of the doorframe.
“I don’t say anything that isn’t true, do I?” she said heatedly. “Just answer my question. Do I?”
“You don’t have to spoil my name in front of my own daughter,” he said sharply. His voice had a nasal, stuffy quality. “You told Sapphire that everything she has become is because of Charles and not me.”
“Look me in the eye and tell me it’s not true,” she challenged.
“Of course it’s not!” he shouted. “Why are you trying to destroy any little chance I have with her? I did what I thought was best back then.”
“Best for you, not best for her.”
Dawson heard the sound of a hard slap and Eileen crying out. And another slap in quick succession. He stepped into the doorway, expecting to see Eileen hurt by her brother’s hand. Instead, the two were grappling with each other, arms intertwined and hands at each other’s throats. She was taller than he was and quite possibly just as strong.
“Stop,” Dawson said. He came closer. “Stop, or you’ll both go to jail.”
That distracted them enough for him to sever the grip they had on each other and separate them.
“She’s a crazy woman!” Brian yelled, pointing at his sister as Dawson firmly pulled him back. “She’s a witch!”
“And you are a fool,” she jeered.
“You sit down here and don’t move,” Dawson told Brian. To Eileen he said, “Take a seat over there.”
“You must be Inspector Dawson,” Brian said dispassionately.
“Yes. What’s going on here?”
“He slapped me, and so I slapped him back,” Eileen said, almost casually.
“She insulted me,” Brian said.
“And so you think you can just slap me like that?” She looked at Dawson. “I didn’t even insult him. He’s angry because when his daughter was here a couple of days ago, and we were reminiscing about Charles. We agreed that she owed everything to her uncle.”
Brian aimed a finger at her. “No, that’s not all you said. You told her that I had just wanted to get rid of her, and that is not true. Why do you insist on saying that to her?”
Eileen turned to Dawson, almost as if her brother wasn’t there. “Brian conceived Sapphire out of wedlock when he was barely nineteen-a mere boy. He fell in love with this raving beauty of an Englishwoman, Constance, some ten years older than he, and she turned out to be crazy. Brian was immature and couldn’t handle parenthood, let alone a psychotic wife.” Eileen opened her arms with her palms up, as if appealing to a judge. “So Brian asked Charles for help, and he took over Sapphire’s care. That’s the truth, and it’s also the truth that he and Fiona shaped Sapphire more than Brian did. What have I said so far that is insulting?”
“But the way she’s expressing it to you is not how she says it to Sapphire,” Brian said plaintively to Dawson. “When it comes to her niece, Eileen does her very best to paint me as some kind of criminal. And why does she do this? Because instead of asking her to take care of Sapphire all those years ago when I was having so much trouble with Constance, I turned to Charles for help. That’s why she resents me so much.”
“Oh, that is not true,” Eileen said, rolling her eyes.
“It’s very true,” Brian said quietly, leveling his gaze at her. “You know it is. And you became more and more resentful as the years went by because you were barren-childless to this day.”
That was new information for Dawson. He wondered, had the infertility been her’s or her husband’s, or both? In Ghana, being childless was very troubling for a woman, her spouse, and the extended family. Rumors of a curse on the woman could rise quickly, and an older woman who had never had children often fit the profile of a witch because as the theory goes, she kills the fetus in her womb and shares it with the members of her coven. As Dawson had discovered in Ketanu, it could lead to isolation of the barren woman, threats to her life, and ultimately murder. Witch sanctuaries existed in northern Ghana, but the word “sanctuaries” belied their hellishness.