Darko’s heart plunged, and he felt sick and faint.

“I’ll write to you, okay?” Armah was saying, his hand on Darko’s shoulder.

Darko nodded dumbly, scared to say anything in case he burst into tears. He was a big boy of thirteen now, and he wasn’t supposed to cry.

Two weeks later a letter arrived in the mail addressed to “Master Darko Dawson.” Darko feverishly opened it and immediately felt his chest swell with pride. It was Armah writing to him in his methodical, looped handwriting. He wanted to know how Darko was, how school was going, and how Papa and Cairo were doing. But he hadn’t written to Papa or Cairo, he had written to him, Darko.

Then and there, he sat down to write a very long and careful reply, and the enduring pen-pal exchange between him and Detective Armah was born. His last line of the letter was “When I grow up, I want to be a detective just like you.”

A father to me, Dawson often thought, and more inspiring than the real one by far. His respect for Armah was undiminished by the detective’s failure to solve Mama’s disappearance.

From afar, Armah had followed Darko through secondary school, and once, on a rare visit to Accra, he came by the house and was astonished to find the teenager had surpassed his height and appeared to be getting even taller.

“Still want to be a detective?” Armah asked him.

“Yes.” The answer never wavered.

Armah would smile quietly and nod. Darko liked that. Just a small gesture, but so affirming. In contrast, Papa thought being a detective was a “stupid” career, but by then Darko was used to his father’s disapproval of practically everything.

Armah had been present for Dawson’s graduation from the National Police Academy. He didn’t have to say how proud he was. Dawson could see it shining in his eyes.

Years after Dawson’s graduation, Armah took early retirement from the police force and set up his own private detective agency in Kumasi. “When you get tired of the grind,” he told Dawson, “come and join me.”

As little as Dawson was inclined to leave Homicide for now, he would never categorically refuse an invitation from the wisest, most perceptive man in the world. Indeed, it was Armah who had told him that everyone, no matter how nice or respected, has at least one enemy. Perhaps Gladys Mensah was proof of that.

Darko drifted off and then woke with a start. He looked at his watch. He had been asleep for more than an hour. His phone was charged enough to ring Christine. A smile wide as the Volta River broke out on his face when she answered.

“Well, it’s about time, Detective Inspector,” she exclaimed. “We thought you’d forgotten about us.”

“Forget about you?” He laughed. “Impossible.”

14

DAWSON WOKE EARLY THE next morning, took a shower, threw on some fresh clothes, and sat down to study a map of the region. As Timothy Sowah had mentioned, Ketanu and Bedome were about a kilometer apart. Separating the two places was the forest in which Gladys’s body had been found. The footpath Dawson and Inspector Fiti had taken the day before tracked through the southern tip of the forest. Most important, it was the same route Gladys would have taken back and forth between the two towns. Approximately halfway between the two, but closer to Bedome, Gladys’s crossing had been interrupted by either herself or someone else and she had ended up dead some distance north of the path.

Bedome was east of Ketanu, and some fifteen kilometers east again of Bedome was the Kalakpa Reserve, the only remaining undisturbed forest in the Volta Region.

When Dawson had visited Ketanu as a boy, the forest bordering the eastern edge of the town had been denser, but years of tree felling and burning, most of it illegal, had thinned it out. In fact, much of the Volta Region’s forestland had suffered in this way.

The Bedome end of the footpath was visible from Isaac Kutu’s compound, which was about three hundred meters away. Dawson visualized the compound, the footpath, and the village of Bedome as forming the three points of a right-angled triangle.

Some distance from the footpath, perhaps a hundred meters, a cluster of farmers’ small plots bordered the edge of the forest. Reportedly, some of the farmers had spotted Samuel Boateng with Gladys on Friday evening.

So what could have happened? Samuel lured Gladys to the plantain grove and killed her there? Dawson wondered what sort of compelling ruse would have got her to follow him into the forest.

He turned again to the police file and studied the photographs of the body and the surroundings in which it had been found. Strangled to death in that pretty blue and white outfit adorned with little Adinkra symbols. Dawson tilted his head, and then turned the photograph ninety degrees clockwise. There was something too neat about the way Gladys was lying. In his mind he saw the violent struggle until she was finally still. As Dr. Biney had said, strangling another person to death is not that easy. Then the murderer dragged her to lie beside this palm tree. Did he rearrange her clothing-make it neat, rest her arms by her sides? Undoing, it was called. Dawson preferred his own term: killer’s remorse. You’ve just murdered your spouse or parent or child, and now you’re trying to reverse it by making everything nice and pretty.

Dawson looked up at a knock on the door. He crossed the floor in three steps and opened the door to find a magnificent woman dressed in shimmering, swirling white, with a matching headdress. A white outfit in dusty Ketanu? Next to her, dwarfed by her size and splendid appearance, was a fortyish man with a vanishingly thin body and large head.

“Morning, morning,” the woman said.

“Good morning.”

“Are you Detective Inspector Dawson?”

“I am.”

She thrust out her hand. “I’m Elizabeth, Gladys Mensah’s aunt.”

She had a firm grip, but her palm was butter smooth.

“This is my nephew Charles, Gladys’s brother.”

Dawson shook hands with him as well and invited them both in. He watched Elizabeth as they entered. She looked to be in her early fifties. She was tall and plentifully built, and held her chin at just the right angle to give her carriage a regal air.

“Please have a seat,” Dawson said. “Apologies for the lack of space.”

“Quite all right, Mr. Dawson,” Elizabeth said, casting a quick look around the room. “It’s not your fault the Ministry of Health is so stingy with their accommodations. They could have done better.”

Dawson smiled at the sharpness of the criticism. Elizabeth took the chair, and Dawson and Charles sat on a bed each.

“We heard yesterday that you had arrived in Ketanu to investigate my niece’s death,” she said, “and we wanted to talk to you as soon as possible.”

Her voice had the texture of rich, warm velvet.

“First of all, my condolences,” Dawson said. “I know this isn’t easy.”

“Thank you,” Charles said softly. He was despondent, his shoulders slumped. “I still can’t believe it happened. I keep thinking it’s a nightmare I’m walking through, and on the other side of it, Gladys will be there with her smile and her laugh and her cleverness.”

“Yes,” Dawson said. “I know that feeling well.” And he did. “When you say her smile and her laugh and her cleverness, I begin to get a picture of her personality, and I’m grateful to you for that because I’ve been wondering what her spirit was like, and who Gladys the woman was.”

Elizabeth’s eyes became soft. “It’s very hard to put into words, Inspector Dawson-even for Charles and me, or any of the family who was close to her. And if you had met her, you would have the same difficulty expressing it.”

“She made you want to be around her,” Charles said. “So magnetic, so full of energy and love, and she gave it out freely for everyone to experience.”