“Yes or no. Did you follow her back to Ketanu?”

Adzima leaned back and began to laugh softly. “Oh, Mr. Detective Man all the way from Accra. You are funny. No, I didn’t follow her.”

“Where were you around that time?”

“I was inside,” Adzima said, gesturing to the house.

Dawson looked at Inspector Fiti to see if he wanted to ask anything, but Fiti shook his head.

“The girls who are brought to your shrine,” Dawson said, “do you think they’re happy to come here and be separated from their families?”

He felt a poke in his side and from the corner of his eye saw Fiti glaring at him.

“Aha!” Adzima said, smiling crookedly. “I knew you were going to ask me that, because it’s what you kind of people from Accra always do. You see, this is our tradition. In our religion, these girls come to the shrine to learn godly ways, and they are the blessed ones. That’s what you don’t understand. And these white people who come all the way from abrochi-Denmark or U.K. or somewhere-to tell us our customs are bad and the women at the shrine are slaves and all this kind of nonsense. What about white people too and their ugly ways? Men having unnatural relations with other men. What about that, eh? Kai, what nastiness!”

Adzima spat a long stream of phlegm, and it landed on a rock with deadly accuracy.

“Do you treat your wives well?” Dawson said.

“Oh, yes!” Adzima said indignantly. “I treat them like queens. I have to. If I didn’t, do you think the gods would not have punished me by now?”

“I don’t know. You’re the expert.”

Adzima laughed. “True. I am the expert. Look, if you want, you can come and watch our trokosi ceremony today. I will get a new wife today.”

He grinned his toothless, red, rubbery smile, and Dawson wanted to slap it off his face.

“Thank you, Togbe Adzima,” Fiti said.

“But we need to talk to the wife,” Dawson chimed in quickly, “the one who found Gladys.”

“Efia?” Adzima said. “No problem. I can call her right now and she can tell you everything.”

“In private,” Dawson said.

“Eh?”

“We need to talk to her in private. Alone.”

“Oh, no.” Adzima shook his head adamantly and clicked his tongue. “She is not authorized to talk to you if I’m not also with her. She belongs to this shrine, and I am the High Priest of this shrine.”

“But we are authorized to talk to her in private,” Dawson said evenly.

“Authorized by whom?”

“The attorney general of Ghana and every rank below him.”

This did not impress Adzima, who shrugged his shoulders. “I’m telling you she won’t talk to you if I am not there with her.”

Dawson felt another jab in his side, and Fiti said hurriedly, “Togbe Adzima, thank you for seeing us.”

“You are welcome.” He stood up. “Just one thing, Detective Inspector Dawson.”

“Yes?”

“Never underestimate the striking hand of an angry god. No one can escape, not even you. I hope you will heed my words better than Gladys Mensah did.”

THE TROKOSI CEREMONY WOULD not be for a couple of hours, so Dawson and Fiti killed some time by returning to Ketanu to get something to eat at a noisy, popular place called Light Up My Life Restaurant, where Dawson had spicy hot chicken and rice, and Fiti ordered banku and kontomire.

“How are we going to talk to Efia alone?” Dawson asked Fiti. “Any ideas?”

Fiti thought about it while munching on a mouthful of food. “While the ceremony is on and Togbe Adzima is occupied,” he said at length, “we will try to talk to her.”

“I don’t want to get her in trouble,” Dawson said.

“We’ll do our best to protect her.”

It was a facile answer that didn’t make Dawson any more comfortable. Somehow he seriously doubted Adzima’s claim that he treated his wives like queens.

When they returned to Bedome, the trokosi ceremony had begun. A large crowd had formed a wide circle, at the top of which three sweating, bare-chested men were pounding sogo and kidi drums. A group of women sang, clapped, and swayed in tight unison.

Dawson and Fiti made their way to the front rows. Togbe Adzima, dressed conspicuously in white cloth, sat diametrically opposite the drummers with village elders on either side of him.

The circle broke open, and a slow procession came through toward Adzima. The girl heading the procession, no older than fifteen or sixteen, carried a dappled black-and-white stool on her head and wore a black-and-white cloth bunched above her breasts.

“This will be Togbe’s fifth wife,” Fiti said.

And she’s well into puberty, Dawson thought, which meant he might have sexual relations with her as immediately as tonight. Dawson’s skin crawled at the thought of the hideous little toad touching this teenager.

Right behind the trokosi, the women of her extended family brought in cloth, gin-yet more gin, Dawson thought-kola nut, and money in large bowls balanced on their heads, but the men, solemn and silent, carried nothing.

The trokosi stopped in front of Adzima and curtsied to him as she placed the stool at his feet. He did not appear moved by the gesture, nor did he acknowledge the family members as they laid the bowls of goods in front of him.

All the women began to sing and clap joyfully as the trokosi performed a ceremonial dance around the circle. From Dawson’s point of view, she moved as if she had feet of lead. Her face seemed contorted with sadness. She wept all the way through the dance, but Adzima watched her with a hint of a smile.

Dawson studied the trokosi’s face and wondered what her name was. Last week she might have been chatting with her friends the way all teenagers do, unaware of the fate about to befall her. Completely innocent, she may not even have known about the family crime for which she was supposedly the atonement.

Abruptly, Adzima stood up and began to leave the circle, followed by other priests and half a dozen village elders. The young woman continued to dance until they were all gone. Then she stood still while family members crowded around her and unwound the first layer of cloth from her body, exposing her plump breasts. She was wearing beads around her waist and between her thighs, and there were white markings on her legs down to her bare feet.

The family ushered her forward in the direction the fetish priest had gone, and the village crowd followed.

According to Fiti, the new trokosi would go on to a series of private shrine initiation rites in the presence of Adzima and a few other priests. They disappeared into a small, smoky hut reputed to contain fetish objects before which the wife would bow. The public part of the ritual was over, and it was Dawson’s and Fiti’s chance to get to Efia.

They circled the perimeter of the village, and under cover of the bush they spotted the “old” trokosi wives preparing Adzima’s wedding feast behind a cluster of huts. Some were pounding fufu in large mortars to the rhythm of their singing, others were stirring soup in pots over woodstoves. The children played with one another, and undernourished dogs hovered for scraps.

“That’s Efia over there,” Fiti said, pointing one of the women out. She was in the center deftly slicing plantains with a large, sharp knife. “And that one, the old one, that’s Nunana. She’s been here a long time.”

“We have to get Efia away from there, but how?” Dawson said. “A diversion-that’s the only way.”

Fiti thought about it for a second. “I know what to do. I’m going to the other side. Once I cause a commotion, go and get Efia. You have to be fast.”

Dawson nodded. He was ready.

Fiti disappeared, and Dawson waited and watched for him to reappear somewhere, but he didn’t show. Dawson frowned. Where was he?

Suddenly Fiti’s voice shrieked from somewhere in the bush, “Snake! Snake!”