Death at the Voyager Hotel (4 page)

“But I didn’t
have sex,” he protested. “We talked, that’s all.”

“Okay,” Agyekum
said resignedly. “When is the last time that you saw her alive?”

“I left her around
eight thirty to go to
Korle Bu Hospital
.
My father is sick in the fever unit.”

“You stayed
with him for how long?”

“About one hour.”

“And then where
did you go?”

“Home. To sleep.”

Agyekum eyed
Danquah a moment. The man didn’t only seem grief-stricken, he seemed nervous as
well. “Where do you live?”

 “Teshie.”

“Can someone
confirm that you went home and stayed there through the night?”

“My roommate was
there, but he was sleeping by the time I came in and he left the house for work
by four in the morning.”

“Do you sleep
in the same room?”

“No, sir.”

“Was the door
of your room open?”

“No, I always
close it so I won’t be disturbed when he gets up.”

“So he could
not have seen that you were sleeping in your room and he can’t vouch for you.”

“Yes, sir. He
can’t.”

Agyekum paused
his questioning to write a few items down in his notebook.

“Okay, so what
time did you wake up in the morning?”

“Six o’clock.”

“Were you
having any problems with Heather? Any arguments or quarrels?”

Danquah’s eyes
darted to one side. “No, sir. Everything was fine.”

“You say
everything was fine? Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Agyekum’s eyes
narrowed. “Please, Mr. Danquah—you need to answer my questions fully.”

“I am,” Danquah
said, a defiant edge creeping into his voice.

“All right. Did
you used to swim together in the pool with Heather?”

“Sometimes.”

“Did she swim
well?”

“Very well.”

“What about
you? Do you swim well?”

“Not so much.”

Agyekum
finished his notes. “Thank you very much. That’s all for now.”

Agyekum watched
the handsome young teacher leaving the room and wondered if perhaps he had been
too harsh with him. He had, after all, just lost his girlfriend.

When the chief inspector had left
, Paula held
a meeting in the office with the staff to discuss how they were going to break
the news to the children. It was decided to divide them up by age group and assign
each cluster to a teacher. That would be more intimate and personal than Paula
simply standing in front of the assembly and making an announcement.

“Okay,” she
said to the teachers finally, when the plan had been worked out, “go out there
and be strong for our kids.”

They filed out
of the office, leaving Paula to reflect for a moment on what was happening. It
felt unreal.

“Madam Djan?”

Paula turned at
the soft voice at the door. It was Ajua.

“Madam Djan,”
she said again. “What has happened to Miss Heather?”

“Come,” Paula
said, beckoning.

As she
approached, Ajua’s chin quivered and her eyes welled up in advance of the first
tears that would break the dam. Somehow, she knew something was terribly wrong.
Blessed or cursed, she possessed that kind of intuition. Paula held her tight as
the girl began to weep.

At the end of an awful day of shock and grief, Paula was
drained, but she felt that she had one more duty before heading home: she had
to talk to Oliver alone. She called him into the office and shut the door. He still
looked shattered as he slumped into the chair at the side of her desk.

“How are you
doing?” she asked him softly. “Will you be okay tonight?”

He gave a tiny
shrug.

“Maybe you
should stay with a family member,” Paula suggested, “so you’ll have someone to
talk to?”

He nodded.
“I’ll be going to my brother’s house.”

“Good.” She
paused. “I’m so sorry, Oliver. I know Heather meant a lot to you.”

He was staring
vacantly at the wall. “I don’t know what to think…what to say.”

“Did you see
her yesterday?”

“Yes.”

“And she seemed
okay?”

“She was fine,”
he said dully.

Paula sensed
this wasn’t the time to ply him with questions. Maybe later. His head was in a
fog right now.

“Shall I drop
you at your brother’s place?” she offered.

“No, thank you.
I’ll be okay.”

“You can take
the rest of the week off, if you like.”

“It’s better I
work,” he said, shaking his head. “It will keep my mind occupied.”

“All right, then.
But if you want some time, just let me know. Otherwise, I’ll see you tomorrow.
Call me if you need to.”

“Thank you.”

He got up
slowly, as if he had aged decades in just one day.

When she got home, Paula tried to phone Heather’s father,
Michael Peterson, in Portland, but he didn’t pick up. She left a message. Heather
had often spoken about her father, and in glowing terms. On the single occasion
she had mentioned her mother, she had revealed that Glenda Peterson suffered
from debilitating multiple sclerosis. It had appeared to Paula that it was a
painful topic for Heather.

By the time
Paula’s husband Thelo got in from work, she had put their eight-year-old twins
Stephan and Stephanie to bed after reading to them. Paula and Thelo had been secondary
school sweethearts who had never considered marrying anyone else but each
other. A year younger than his thirty-five, she was a social worker by training
while he was an ex-detective sergeant with the
Criminal Investigations Department
, a division of the Ghana Police
Service.

In his eighth
year on the force, disaster befell Thelo as he and two other detectives pursued
a car being driven recklessly by a fugitive wanted for murder. Rounding a sharp
corner, the suspect ditched the car and the police vehicle came around too fast
to avoid a collision. It flipped onto its side and rolled twice. The constable
who had been driving and the chief inspector accompanying Thelo were both
killed. The murderer got away, although he was later captured in another city.

As for Thelo,
his lower right leg had been crushed under the weight of the overturned vehicle.
Several times in the following months, he had come perilously close to an
amputation, which was averted only by a determined doctor who refused to give
up. In the end, Thelo kept his leg, but the trauma resulted in loss of bone and
left him with a limp that had improved only somewhat over the years.

The physical
scar was ultimately not as deep as the psychological one. Thelo grieved for his
dead fellow officers. He felt guilty that they had died while he had escaped
with his life. He had repeated nightmares of the crash. When he returned to
police work, he found he had a difficult time concentrating. He was physically deconditioned,
and at times his right leg flared up with red-hot pain.

He was also
frustrated by having to stay in the office; going out to the field had always
been his means of escape from the stifling bureaucracy of the CID. Depression
hung around his spirit like a damp mist off the Atlantic. At the time, Paula
was pregnant with the twins and she found herself despairing of Thelo’s
downward spiral. Then, one day, in a flash of inspiration, he turned to her and
said. “I have to leave.”

“Leave? Leave
what?”

“The police
service. God has been sending me a message, but I’ve been ignoring it.”

What was Thelo planning
to do? He had been following the 2007 discovery of substantial oil reserves off
Ghana’s coast and the promise of potential prosperity. He founded
Tropical
Expeditions
, a full-service tourist company. In the early days of Thelo’s
business when revenue was barely trickling in, life was a struggle, particularly
with two small children.

Now, however, he
was doing very well with an office in Accra and a second one in
Takoradi
.
He and Paula owned a four-bedroom house and two cars in the upscale airport residential
area, and their daughters went to one of the best private schools in Accra.

Paula could
have lived a life of leisure, shopping and dining all day the way many of her wealthy
friends did, but she suffered from consumer’s guilt, as she called it:
acquiring much from the world but not giving anything back. She had to do
something besides merely indulging herself. Four years ago when she’d heard that
the High Street Academy was looking for a director, she interviewed for the
post and got it.

Thelo threw his
jacket aside in the sitting room and yanked off his tie. He had been slim as a
detective, but now his belly bulged as a result of too much rich food and too
little exercise. He shaved his head clean instead of displaying the hair loss
that had begun by the time he had reached thirty.

Earlier in the
afternoon, Paula had called to give him a short version of the shocking news.

“Have they
found out anything more?” he asked her, plopping down onto the sofa beside her.

“Chief Inspector
Agyekum said they think it was a tragic accident,” Paula said, “but that
doesn’t sound right to me. What was Heather doing in the pool naked? She would
not have gone swimming without her clothes on.”

“I agree,”
Thelo said. “She didn’t seem to be that type of person.”

Relieved to be
home, Paula leaned forward, closed her eyes, and pressed her throbbing temples.

Thelo gently
rubbed her back. “You’ve had a terrible day. Did you tell the students the news?”

“I had to. I
didn’t want them to hear it from elsewhere.”

“How did they
take it?”

“Very badly. They
all loved her. You remember Ajua, the one who was especially attached to Heather?
She was hysterical—almost collapsed.”

“Poor thing.”

Paula’s eyes
misted over. “This has been the worst day of my life—except when my father
died.”

Her phone rang,
showing an overseas number. “Oh, this might be Mr. Peterson,” she said, sitting
up quickly. “Hello?”

The male voice
was gravely. “Is this Paula Djan?”

“Speaking.”

“This is Mr. Peterson,
Heather’s father.” He paused. “I’ve already heard the news. The detective in
charge of the case got in touch with me by phone—Inspector Adgie-something. I’m
not too clear on his name.”

“Agyekum,”
Paula prompted. “Mr. Peterson, I don’t know how to express how very sorry I am.
All of us at High Street Academy are in a state of complete shock.”

“Yes,” he said.
His tone was flat. “Thank you.”

“Heather was
wonderful with the children and they adored her,” Paula went on, her voice
trembling. “They all said they never wanted her to go back to the States.”

“She talked a
lot about the kids,” he said, now sounding very sad. “She said she wished she
could adopt one of them. She seemed happy, but now this. I just don’t
understand. The inspector was saying she drowned. How could she have drowned?
She taught swimming lessons in Portland every summer. She swam in the ocean.
Are you kidding me? I mean, you saw the superb shape she was in. I’m sorry, but
none of this makes any sense.”

“It doesn’t to
me either.”

“It wasn’t an
accident,” he said, his voice growing sharper. “Someone either drowned her and left
her in the pool, or killed her elsewhere and then threw her in.”

Paula swallowed
hard. The thought was horrifying.

“I never wanted
her to go to Ghana,” he continued. “I had a bad feeling about it.”

“I’m so sorry,”
Paula said helplessly. She didn’t know what else to say.

“I mean, I’m
not saying anything against you specifically,” he hastened to add.

“Yes, I know,
but I feel terrible.”

“I expect to be
in Ghana Friday morning to make arrangements for Heather to be flown back home,”
he said, sounding weak and battered. “I spoke to the people at the American
Embassy in Accra, and they’ll be able to help with that, and I want to get the
FBI involved in the investigation, too.”

“Oh.” Paula hadn’t
thought of anything like that. “Did you mention the idea to Chief Inspector
Agyekum?”

“I did,”
Peterson said. “He didn’t really respond. But I know the FBI sometimes goes to
other countries when there’s a suspicious death of an American citizen—like
they did in the Natalee Holloway case in Aruba.”

“I see,” Paula
said. She knew nothing about it. “Well, I can ask my husband if he can help in
any way. He used to be a homicide detective here in Accra.”

“Really? Yes,
if there’s anything he can do, please let me know. Thank you, Paula.”

“You’re very
welcome.”

“What am I
helping with?” Thelo asked her after she had hung up.

“Mr. Peterson
is convinced his daughter’s death was due to foul play,” Paula said
thoughtfully. “He says she was a very good swimmer and can’t believe she
accidentally drowned. He wants to get someone from the FBI to come to—I guess to
help with the investigation, or supervise it—or something.”

Thelo gave a
small snort of derision. “Spoken just like an American. He thinks the FBI can
just march in and take over the case? The Ghanaian authorities have to request
assistance first, and knowing the Director-General of CID, I can practically guarantee
he won’t. He has a brand new, state-of-the-art forensic lab and crime scene unit,
the lab director himself trained at Quantico at Ghanaian taxpayer expense, and
now he’s going to turn around and ask the FBI for help? The media would have a
field day.”

“You’re right,”
Paula agreed. “What do you suggest Mr. Peterson should do?”

Thelo held up
his index finger. “The first thing is to wait for the autopsy result, then go
from there. It’s premature to be talking about the FBI and all that.”

“But I do understand
his bewilderment,” Paula said. “Heather’s death makes no sense.”

 “Wait for the
autopsy,” Thelo said firmly.