“Go ahead. Please be brief.”
“Mr. Sarbah, we’ve learned that during or around April, you visited a fetish priest seeking a cure for your daughter’s illness.”
Jason’s eyebrows shot up. “What?”
“Did you go to a fetish priest about Angela’s illness, sir?”
“Is this some kind of joke?” Jason snapped. “You brought me here to ask this ridiculous question?”
“Can you please answer?”
“No, Mr. Sarbah is not going to answer this question,” DeGraft cut in. “I will not allow it.”
“What about a fetish priest called Kweku Bonsa?” Dawson tried again. “Are you familiar with him, Mr. Sarbah?”
“He won’t answer anything related to fetish priests,” DeGraft said. “Do you have any other questions?”
“Was human sacrifice ever considered in order to save Angela’s life?”
Jason flinched and his eyes swelled and moistened.
“You’re an offensive man, Inspector,” DeGraft said coldly. “You know very well that Angela’s death is a painful chapter in Mr. Sarbah’s life. These questions are not only unnecessary, they are deliberately cruel.”
“It wasn’t my intention to offend,” Dawson said quietly. “I apologize.”
“Is my client under arrest?”
“No, sir.”
“Then we are leaving.” DeGraft stood up. “Come along, Jason.”
They left in silence. Chikata sneaked a glance at Dawson and then meekly returned his gaze to the table.
“Okay,” Dawson said. “I admit it didn’t go well, but I think it was worth a try.”
“Yes,” Chikata said slowly, obvious doubt in his voice.
Feeling deflated all of a sudden, Dawson stood up with a sigh. “I’m tired. Let’s go home. We have another long day tomorrow.”
Chapter 29
THIS IS IT, DAWSON thought.
For the first time in his life, he was going to be airborne. As he took his seat in the first row behind the pilot and co-pilot of one of Malgam’s NHV Dauphin helicopters, his nervousness made his stomach churn.
A few minutes past seven in the morning, Dawson and the five other passengers had watched a ten-minute safety video in the helicopter administration waiting room of Takoradi’s small airport. Thereafter, they had donned their life jackets and boarded the van that transported them to the helicopter on the tarmac. Dawson had always pictured a helicopter as a smallish machine, but up close to the Dauphin, he realized how mistaken he had been.
Now he was duplicating all the steps that he had seen on the video-fastening the four-point seatbelts, putting on the protective headphones, checking the large exit window to his right, and mentally rehearsing how to release the window seal and push it out in an emergency. He went through the safety leaflet in the seat pocket in front of him, realizing that his hands were trembling. He surreptitiously glanced at the passenger to his right, afraid that his nerves were showing. He need not have worried. The sixty-ish expatriate with an expanding belly was reading a magazine and showing no interest in anyone around him.
The helicopter door closed. Dawson watched the pilot as he pressed buttons and flicked switches on a bewildering console of dials, levers, and screen displays in front of him and overhead. Dawson was startled as the engine started, a low rumble rising quickly to a high whine and finally a pulsating roar.
On the ground in front of the Dauphin, a man in overalls signaled to the pilot. For a moment, Dawson thought he felt the craft moving, dismissed it as his imagination playing tricks on him, and then realized they were indeed already about ten feet off the ground. The pilot kept the Dauphin there for a few seconds while he and the co-pilot performed some final checks, and then he shifted the helicopter sideways, a maneuver Dawson found disconcerting. The helicopter pivoted and went forward to the runway, where the pilot turned it again, tipped it slightly forward, and accelerated into a climb. Much more rapidly than Dawson had expected, he had a full view of the city: a patchwork of urban construction and green space.
He could already see the Atlantic ahead and then both the Sekondi and Takoradi harbors. They were climbing higher still, and he closed his eyes for a moment. When the vertigo passed, it was replaced by his awe at the magnificence of the ocean beneath them. Stretching to infinity, its surface reflected the golden arc of the early morning sun. He spotted only a rare trawler, canoe, or flat-decked supply ship, but as the Dauphin began to approach the Thor Sterke some thirty minutes later, the picture changed. He saw four drilling rigs over a wide area. Dotted around them like worker ants attending their queen were several vessels, some of which Dawson guessed were the fishery protection vessels he had read about in the docket reports.
He had found it difficult to believe that fishermen would venture out this far in their canoes, but now he saw living proof. There they were, keeping a respectful distance from the rigs. How, he wondered, could the Smith-Aidoos’ murderer possibly have delivered a canoe containing two corpses to the restricted zone around a rig and then disappear without a trace?
The pilot came on the PA system to let them know they’d be landing in five minutes, although Dawson could barely hear him above the background noise. He double-checked his seat belts as they began to descend. For an unnerving second, he visualized the helicopter crashing and the awful aftermath. Unable to grasp his father’s death, Hosiah repeatedly asked Christine, what happened to Daddy?
Dawson shook himself and stopped thinking the worst. Ahead, the Thor Sterke with its angular appendages and spindly lattice crane booms seemed incredibly small and far below them. They were going to overshoot, surely? Dawson couldn’t see how they could possibly touch down on the octagonal-shaped helipad, marked with a large H and perched at the edge of the rig. Could it really hold a helicopter? As they came closer and the helipad loomed, he felt silly. The structure was obviously solid and more than large enough. The helicopter came to a stop in mid-air, hovering over its landing spot for a moment before the pilot set it down with a delicacy Dawson hadn’t anticipated. He heaved a sign of relief. He had made it. He was on a real oil rig after having flown for the first time in his life. And, he thought, all because of murder.
The helicopter rotor blades were still turning as two helipad crew members opened up the compartment beneath the cabin to remove luggage. Then they directed the passengers to the exit staircase directly ahead. To their immediate right was a crane, and another lay ahead to the far left. The derrick was directly in front of them, emblazoned with the name THOR STERKE. In real life and close up, it was massive and towering.
After leaving the helipad, Dawson entered the helilounge in street clothes and emerged transformed in orange coveralls, a green hard hat that marked him as a visitor, regulation steel-toe boots, and safety glasses.
He felt a little strange, but the rig’s culture of safety had impressed him. Indeed, the very first man to welcome him and accompany him on the guided tour was the safety officer. Michael Glagah was as tall as Dawson but of much greater girth. He had a rumbling, resonant voice and was deadly serious about maintaining the rig’s clean safety record. Before anything else, he made sure Dawson knew the location of the lifeboats on the second level, two each at the forward and aft positions.
The sun was warm, but a cool sea breeze softened its intensity.
“Please, can you show me where the canoe with the dead bodies was spotted?” Dawson asked.
Glagah led him to a yellow railing at the edge of an upper level. From there, they could look down to the next tier, a drop of about ten meters. “That’s the pipe deck below us,” Glagah said. “Those long metal pipes you see stacked together on your right are called casing joints. We have to use cranes to lift them and other drilling equipment. So, at the end of the deck there, you see two cranes, one each on the port and starboard side-left and right. You can see how the crane operator has a bird’s eye view. That morning, Clifford was on the starboard side. He saw the canoe coming from the southwest direction, somewhere over there.”