Kwei J. Quartey - Children of the Street

PRAISE FOR Wife of the Gods

[A]n absolute gem of a first novel and the sort of book that will delight not only hard-core mystery fans, but also those who visit the genre only casually in search of an occasional literary entertainment Wife of the Gods is not simply an extraordinarily well-crafted mystery; its also an extremely well-structured and deftly written novel. [Quartey] has a remarkable ability to credibly evoke the simultaneity of the modern and deeply traditional worlds in which so many of that continents people coexist. Los Angeles Times

Like The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency suspense novels? Youll love Wife of the Gods.Essence

Wife of the Gods is a lush and well-written tale of murder most foul, set in an alien landscape, but laced with many of the same motivations and alibis you might expect to find much closer to home. BookPage

Already garnering unusual critical acclaim for a debut novel, Quarteys remarkable characters give the reader a worthy whodunit. Ebony

Move over Alexander McCall Smith. Ghana has joined Botswana on the map of mystery. [This] newcomer is most welcome. Kirkus Reviews

Crisp, engrossing[Quartey] renders a compelling cast of characters inhabiting a world precariously perched between old and new. Fans of McCall Smiths No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency will relish the opportunity to discover yet another intriguing area of Africa. Booklist (starred)

[A] winning debut Dawson is a wonderful creation, a man as rich with contradictions as the Ghana Quartey so delightfully evokes. Readers will be eager for the next installment in what one hopes will be a long series. Publishers Weekly

ALSO BY KWEI QUARTEY

Wife of the Gods

Children of the Street is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

A Random House Trade Paperback Original

Copyright 2011 by Kwei J. Quartey

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

R ANDOM H OUSE T RADE P APERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Quartey, Kwei J.
Children of the street: a novel / Kwei Quartey.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-60411-2
1. PoliceGhanaFiction. 2. MurderInvestigationFiction.
3. GhanaFiction. I. Title.
PS3617.U37C47 2011
813.6dc22
2010026476

www.atrandom.com

Cover design: Joe Montgomery
Cover images: Jason R. Warren/iStockphoto (children), Alan Tobey/iStockphoto (border)

v3.1

To all those who dare to care

Prologue

A day shy of his seventeenth birthday, Musa was a boy with the survival instincts of a grown man. Blood sprang from the stab wound in his back, but he did not die instantly. As his life drained, Musa had a running vision, like a video, of his short life. Life in his small hometown of Gurungu had been a depressing, losing battle as his family tried to grow millet in the unforgivable desert conditions of northern Ghana. It was what had pushed him to his seven-day trek to Ghanas capital city of smooth motorways and impenetrable traffic jams.

Penniless and lonely, Musa hadnt known a soul in Accra. With no education, no family connections, and no skills, he could hope for only a few jobs. He could be a street vendor, a luggage porter at a lorry park, a shoeshine boy, or a truck pusherone of those guys who roams Accra with carts picking up metal scraps to take to the junkyards. He earned much less than a cedi a day.

Up before dawn, Musa never rested until after nightfall, laying his head down on city pavements, at storefronts, and around marketplaces. He had only wanted his life to get better. He had sworn that, after working in Accra for a year, he would go back to Gurungu with new clothes and some money for his mother.

As Musas eyelids fluttered closed, he must have wondered if this was what his father had meant when he had shaken a warning finger in Musas face. If you go to Accra, you will become nothing but a street child, and you will pay a terrible price for it.

1

The call had come in on a Sunday morning in June.

For this one, Detective Sergeant Chikata had said, I think they will need us.

On his Honda motorbike, Detective Inspector Darko Dawson sped by industrial buildings along Ring Road West. The dead body was near the Korle Lagoon. Dawson made it there in fifteen minutes. Even if his eyes had been shut, the pervasive, foul smell of the lagoon would have announced to him that he had arrived.

He turned onto Abossey Okai Road, which formed two bridges, the first of them over the refuse-choked Odaw River, which flowed into the lagoon. Agbogbloshie Market on Dawsons left and Kokomba Market on his right teemed with Sunday shoppers and hawkers trying to sell everything from bananas to sea crabs.

At the second bridge, over a much smaller channel of tarry, polluted water, there were umbrella-shaded market vendors, pedestrians, trucks, and cars mixed together in organized chaos. Dawson parked and locked his bike. Sprawling onto the riverbanks, a crowd of onlookers overflowed both ends of the bridge. Standing at over six feet, Dawson could see above most peoples heads. Detective Sergeant Chikata and a uniformed man Dawson didnt know were about a hundred meters up on the south bank of the channel. Framed apocalyptically against dense black smoke billowing from somewhere upstream, Deputy Superintendent Bright and three members of his crime scene team, all in masks, gloves, and galoshes, were moving about knee-deep in the foul mire.

Dawson skirted the mass of the crowd and made his way onto the bank. It was carpeted with litter, much of it plastic bottles discarded without a seconds thought after the contained water had been drunk. The rest of the junk included boxes, tin cans, abandoned clothing, trash bags, pieces of machinery, old tires, coconut husks, and unidentifiable bits of metal and plastic detritus. There was also the kind of human waste Dawson definitely did not want his shoes to touch, some of it exposed, some of it in flying toiletstossed black plastic bags with excrement inside.

The impossibly good-looking Detective Sergeant Chikata, Dawsons junior in rank in the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) Homicide Division, looked up as Dawson approached.

Morning, Dawson.

Morning, Chikata.

Body of a dead male spotted in there this morning.

How did we get notified?

Chikata introduced the bulky, flinty-eyed man next to him. This is Inspector Agyekum. He was the Korle Bu station officer this morning.