Gold of Our Fathers - страница 17

“Morning, sir,” the constable said separately to Sackie and Dawson.

His badge read kobby. He was lean and tall, and very boyish in the face.

Dawson had become aware of a sobbing sound coming from the shack. “What is going on in there?”

“The brother of the Chinese man who died,” Kobby explained with frustration. “When the body was found this morning by the galamsey boys, he told them to help him bring the body here because he didn’t want all those people staring at his brother.”

They moved the body from the crime scene. Dawson’s heart sank. It was a forensic nightmare.

“And then they helped him bring the body here and the brother washed the mud off,” Kobby added.

The blood in Dawson head drained, leaving him cold. He washed the mud off?

“And now he won’t release the body,” Kobby said.

“What do you mean he won’t release the body?” Dawson asked.

“He says he wants to take it back with him to China.”

Eventually, sure, Dawson thought, but not right now. “All right. Let’s go inside.”

The angled wooden slats of the dwelling let some air in, but it was still warm and stifling, and it smelled awful. Dawson could detect decaying flesh, urine, fuel, and stale food. In the middle of the dirt floor, the victim’s brother was weeping and mouthing words in Chinese as he cradled the corpse, shaking it every few seconds as if trying to wake it from sleep.

A chill went down Dawson’s spine. Covered in clumps of soil, the dead man was clothed except for his shoes. His back was arched concavely. His legs pulled up backward to meet his wrists behind him. His head strained upward with his eyes open and mouth agape, as if he had been in a desperate struggle to escape this terrible, anatomically impossible pose. Moving a little closer, Dawson saw that the ankles and wrists were free of ligatures, but ligature marks were present. The man was no longer tied up. He had gone into rigor in that position. Dawson spotted two slashed, knotted lengths of rope on the ground beside the corpse. Trying to reconstruct events in his mind, he imagined that after the dead man had been discovered, his brother had hastily cut the ligatures away in an effort to “release” the corpse, only to find that the body was fixed the way it had been found.

Dawson’s eyes shifted around the room: food-caked tin plates and pots and pans stacked in one corner, plastic gallon containers in another, and soiled clothes in a third next to a pump-action shotgun-the weapon of choice among miners.

Kobby was looking at the scene with revulsion.

“Do you know the Chinese man’s name?” Dawson whispered to him.

“Which one, sir?”

“Both, I suppose.”

“Please, I don’t know the name of the dead one,” Kobby said, “but the people outside say the brother’s name is Wei.”

“Does he speak English?”

“A little bit.”

Dawson went closer to Wei and kneeled down. “Mr. Wei, my name is Detective Chief Inspector Dawson.”

Wei was a chunky man. He pulled back from Dawson as if he’d been threatened and began shouting. Perhaps he did think Dawson was threatening him. In a moment of confusion, Dawson realized that the Chinese man was speaking in Twi. It was bad, but it was Twi.

“Get away from me!” Wei said. “Look at my brother!”

“Mr. Wei-”

“They kill him!” he said, switching to broken English. “They kill him!”

“Who?” Dawson asked urgently. “Who killed him?”

“Galamsey! Galamsey!”

“Which ones? Who?”

Wei didn’t answer, his crying trailing off abruptly, and only his lower lip trembling as he looked down at his brother. “Oh, Bao. Oh, Bao.”

Bao had been thin, but putrefaction was beginning to bloat him. Tropical weather never treats corpses kindly. Dawson would need to talk to Wei a lot more very soon, but he was too distraught to get any useful answers out of him at the moment. For now, he needed to get the man away from his dead brother Bao.

Dawson stood up again and spoke quietly to Inspector Sackie. “Is a crime scene unit available?”

He looked skeptical. “There is one in Kumasi, but they have to cover so many places in the region. We can call them, but usually they cannot arrive for twelve hours or more.”