Children of the Street - страница 12

This room was even more frigid than the first. At one of the two desks was a young man in a tie working at his laptop. He stood up.

“Good afternoon, sir.”

“Afternoon. Darko Dawson, CID.”

“Cuthbert Plange,” the man said, shaking hands. “I’m in charge of client relations here. Please, have a seat.”

“Thank you,” Dawson said, choosing the closest chair. “I’m investigating the death of a boy found in one of the Agbogbloshie channels yesterday.”

“Ewurade,” Cuthbert said, shaking his head and sitting back down. He had full lips and thick speech, like a cotton-stuffed pillow. “This Agbogbloshie. You never know what can happen next. How did the boy get there?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out. You have a good view of the lagoon from here. Was anyone here early Sunday morning?”

Cuthbert shook his head. “Not at all, sir. We close the station down Saturday evening around six, lock the gates, and open up again Monday morning. Sundays are sacred.”

“Church wins every time,” Dawson commented.

“Oh, yes.” Cuthbert smiled. “Have you ever visited our plant before, Mr. Dawson?”

“No, I haven’t.”

Cuthbert stood up. “Then come along. I’m happy to show you around. We’ll go to the pump station first.”

After they had been in the air-conditioned office, the heat outside hit them like a cricket bat. They walked across the parking area down east of the second building and around the corner. The whir of the pump and the powerful swish of water got louder, and the sewage smell became stronger. Cuthbert led the way to the base of the pump. Towering above them in a brick housing was a huge, spinning piece of machinery that looked like a giant corkscrew.

“It’s called an Archimedes’ screw,” Cuthbert told Dawson, raising his voice above the din. “It may not seem that its turning action could pump water up, but it does-at a good two cubic meters per second from the base to the top of the tower.”

They climbed a platform beyond the pump for a panoramic view of the surroundings.

“Where was the boy found?” Cuthbert asked.

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Dawson said, frowning. “I was on the Agbogbloshie side of the canal yesterday. Everything looks different from this angle.”

“Let me help you get your bearings, then, sir.” Cuthbert looked south. “The outlet of the lagoon to the sea underneath the Winneba Bridge is over there-where you just came from. That’s a mangrove island you see in the middle of the lagoon.”

He turned the opposite direction now.

“The Odaw River comes from several miles north. Once it crosses Abossey Okai Road, it becomes Korle Canal, which is the only portion we can see from here because of the way it curves out of sight. Agbogbloshie, where you were yesterday, is on the opposite bank from us.”

Dawson gazed across at the landscape of trash and wooden shacks seen through the haze of smoke from the burning copper wire.

“Some people don’t even realize we have a river in Accra,” Cuthbert continued. “At any rate, the poor Odaw has become part of Accra’s open sewer. Garbage, human waste, domestic waste, factory waste-you name it, they dump it, and after it’s accumulated all that nastiness, it arrives here.”

“Not pretty,” Dawson said. “There must be, what, millions of plastic water bottles and water bags in there.”

“Not to mention toxic waste and chemicals. We have two excavators to take out as much of the solid waste as possible as it arrives, but it’s tough to keep up.”

“What’s that dam that goes from this side to the other bank?” Dawson asked, indicating the broad, partitioned concrete wall spanning the canal.

“That’s the interceptor. It stops solids from getting into the lagoon. It also has twenty flap gates to regulate water levels during flood season.”

In front of the interceptor, a boom lay across the breadth of the lagoon to help trap floating material. At the boom, the garbage was so dense it looked like a solid mass. Egrets, light enough to stand on it, pecked around for morsels. What food could they possibly find in there?

“Now, look carefully, Inspector, sir,” Cuthbert said. “Slightly upstream from the interceptor, you can make out the Agbogbloshie Canal as it joins the Korle Canal. It’s difficult to spot because it’s so much smaller than the Korle Canal.”