Charles looked at him and nodded.

“Run and get the van,” he said to the youngest man there. “Tell the driver to be quick.”

39

DAWSON’S TWO PRISONERS COULD not have been much older than eighteen. Both of them quickly came to, and Dawson was able to question them. Someone in town by the name of Dzigbodi had paid them off to beat Elizabeth “because she’s a witch.”

“You are such stupid boys,” Dawson told them. “Get up.”

He cuffed them to each other and got them up, pushing them in front of him to the car. He opened the trunk. “Get in.” “What?”

“You heard me. Get in before I knock your heads off.” They struggled in, one uncomfortably on top of the other, and Dawson slammed the trunk shut.

When he got to the police station, Constables Gyamfi and Bubo were there but not Inspector Fiti.

“What happened?” Gyamfi asked in surprise as Dawson came in with the two disheveled youths.

“Book them,” Dawson said. “Assault, battery, conspiracy to murder, attempted murder.”

He gave a quick version of the story. Gyamfi listened attentively, but Bubo avoided making any eye contact with Dawson.

“We’ll take care of them, Inspector, sir,” Gyamfi said, shooting a disparaging look at the two boys.

“I’ll write my report in a minute,” Dawson said. “Can I see Samuel?”

“Yes, no problem.”

Dawson went down the two-stair drop to the jail.

“Samuel?”

The young man had fashioned a rope from his shirt and was hanging from the bars of the jail window, his toes about an inch from the ground. His head was slung forward, and the bucket was on its side on the floor along with the excrement it had contained.

“Gyamfi!” Dawson screamed. “Gyamfi! The keys, bring the keys!”

The constable came quickly. He saw Samuel hanging and gasped. “Oh, no.”

The key rattled against the lock, and it seemed too long before Gyamfi got the door open.

“Hold him up, hold him up,” Dawson said.

Gyamfi lifted Samuel’s legs, and Dawson flicked open the blade of his Swiss Army knife and cut above the knot.

Live, please live.

They got him down. His body was limp, his neck had been stretched, and his face was swollen with engorged blood.

Bubo came down with the two new prisoners just as Dawson tried blowing a breath into Samuel’s mouth. He pumped on Samuel’s chest and gave another breath. He had forgotten the correct number for each action, but he performed the sequence just the same and repeated the cycle for he didn’t know how long and until he was pouring with sweat.

He thought he heard someone say, “Dawson, stop,” and then a hand squeezed his shoulder.

“Dawson, you can’t do anything more.”

It was Gyamfi talking. Dawson looked up at him and then down at Samuel.

He was dead. It was all over.

Dawson jumped up with fists clenched and cried out in the purest anguish. He hurled himself against the wall and then crumpled to the floor with his head in his hands. He didn’t make another sound.

“Inspector,” Gyamfi whispered, touching his arm. “Inspector Dawson, it wasn’t your fault, hear? You couldn’t have done anything wrong.”

40

DAWSON TOOK THE NEWS to the Boatengs. This was an ordeal he had to go through. He blamed himself for Samuel’s death, and he wanted the family’s pain to be his punishment. He wanted them to whip him with their fury and lash him with words that cut like barbed wire raked across the skin.

But it didn’t happen that way. Mrs. Boateng let out a single shriek of shock and collapsed. Mr. Boateng supported her, and she pressed her face into his chest and began to utter a high-pitched keen like a lost kitten crying for its mother. And all the children in the house stood and watched with big, round eyes.

Mr. Boateng said nothing. He stared unseeing at a point on the wall. He may have seemed without emotion, but Dawson saw where all the pain was. It was deep in those sad, bloodshot eyes.

“I’ll be outside if you need me,” Dawson said quietly.

He stood in front of the crumpled house and watched people going about their daily business. He wished he could start over again. He wished he could have forced Inspector Fiti to free Samuel for lack of evidence.

Instead, what had he, Darko Dawson, done so far? Arrested the wrong man, antagonized the local police, beaten up a few people, and lost an innocent boy to suicide.

He turned as Boateng’s soft voice invited him back in. “Do you want to drink some water?”

“No, thank you, Mr. Boateng.” I don’t deserve water.

Dawson sat with them in silence for a long time until Samuel’s father asked him if he would tell them the whole story.

He left them late that night. By then he knew for certain Samuel had not murdered Gladys Mensah. He had been a troubled boy, vulnerable even while trying to make a show of toughness. The time he had stolen a packet of chewing gum at the market, it had been on a dare from his friends. That was when he had been hanging around with the wrong crowd, but that had become history. Samuel had shunned them and expressed his intention to go back to school. He had had a strong love for animals, particularly dogs, often sacrificing his meals to feed a stray.

Dawson didn’t sleep. He sat outside the house and smoked until he was higher than a soaring eagle. The smoke from the marijuana kept the mosquitoes away. He became quite numb to pain, although not completely dead to it. At some point he thought he felt tears running down his face, but he couldn’t be sure. He kept seeing Samuel hanging from the jail window, and he cringed and cried out each time the image hit him like the strike of a puff adder.

He had no idea what time it was until the cocks began to crow back and forth like echoes as light came quickly to the dark sky.

In the distance Dawson saw smoke rising from the forest. More illegal fires. But it was a little different from the time he had asked Inspector Fiti about it. This smoke was white rather than black or gray, and there appeared to be a pattern to the puffs as they went up. It took him a little while to get it. One puff, two puffs, two puffs, one. Dawson laughed a marijuana giggle. It seemed unreasonably comical that smoke should rise this way. Look, there it was again. One puff, two puffs, two puffs, one.

Now it seemed stupid and not at all amusing. Dawson went back inside the house floating on air. He wanted to ring Christine, and then he didn’t, and then he did again. He debated. Normally he would have turned to her in this kind of situation, but he couldn’t call her in his marijuana-suffused condition. She would immediately detect he was high, and that would quench any sympathy she might have for him. Christine loved her husband, but she did not like him on drugs.

Call Armah. That’s what he should do. Armah could help him through this.

Dawson looked around for his mobile, forgetting where he had put it. After a few minutes, he found it in his pocket.

His call went through.

“Hello?” It was a woman’s voice-Armah’s wife, Maude.

“Hello,” Dawson stammered. “Is this… is Armah there, please? May I speak to him?”

He was shocked at the sound of his own voice. He might as well have been talking through a mouthful of cotton balls.

“Who is calling?” Maude asked after a second’s hesitation.

Dawson was about to say his name, but he lost his nerve. It would be embarrassing and insulting to Armah, a man Dawson revered, to talk to him from out of this mind-altered miasma. Dawson was about as lucid right now as Ketanu mud.

He ended the call and flung the phone across the room, cursing fluently in Ewe. He needed a shower.