Murder at Cape Three Points - [6]

“So, to get this clear in my mind,” Dawson said, “Bessie and Robert Smith-Aidoo are your great grandparents.”

“Yes, the Sarbah and Smith-Aidoo lines are connected through Bessie. Up until the time of his death, Uncle Charles worked for Malgam Oil as their director of corporate affairs. I didn’t know Jason Sarbah or much about him until the end of February, this year, when he approached me. I had just finished my national service and joined a private clinic in Takoradi. Jason and his wife, Sylvia, had a sixteen-year-old daughter called Angela who was very ill. In spite of multiple visits to several hospitals in Accra and Takoradi, doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong. They were watching Angela die. She was severely jaundiced, so her eyes turned yellow. She was losing weight every day and having unbearable abdominal pain. He brought her to see me. By then, he was in a state of despair.”

Dr. Smith-Aidoo’s face mirrored the anguish of the scenario she was describing.

“How terrible it must have been,” Dawson said. “The private clinic you mentioned-I assume it’s expensive?”

“Very,” she said, wincing. “It’s part of a worldwide chain called International Medical Services, or IMS, with branches all over Africa. It’s not a charity-doesn’t even pretend to be anything else but a for-profit company. You pay with credit or hard cash and the patients are expatriates and well-off Ghanaians. I did an initial evaluation of Angela, which was moderately expensive but still didn’t diagnose what she had.

“Jason was having difficulty coming up with the money even for that first medical work-up. I understand that at the time, he’d just started a real estate business that wasn’t doing very well, and I don’t believe his wife worked or made a lot of money. Angela was going to need a battery of tests and scans, but any movement forward depended on his paying for what had been done so far. Jason begged me to set up some kind of arrangement whereby his payment could be deferred. I asked the clinic administrator if that was possible, and her answer was quite firm. She said IMS doesn’t give out free lunches, and anyone who thought it did was not welcome. Someone in the administrative office called Jason and politely told him that if he couldn’t pay, he needn’t bother to return. I was appalled, but only five or six years out of medical school and brand new at the clinic, I didn’t feel at the time that I could argue on Jason’s behalf, although now I wish I had.”

She must be around thirty, thirty-one, Dawson thought, graduating from medical school at a very young twenty-five or so.

“And at around that time,” she continued, “something else happened that I wish had turned out differently. Jason went to Uncle Charles to ask for a loan, but Uncle turned him down.”

“Did he say why he refused Jason’s request?” Dawson asked.

“He didn’t see why Jason had to take Angela to the most expensive clinic in town. Jason tried to explain that he had been to several public hospitals, including Korle Bu at the very beginning of Angela’s illness back in January. Uncle’s advice was to take Angela back to Korle Bu and insist that they reinvestigate what was wrong with her.

“Soon after that, Jason accosted me one morning in the car park as I drove in to work, making an embarrassing scene. It was a combination of attacking me, saying I was letting his daughter die, and begging me for mercy. The security man had to escort him away. It was horrible-still haunts me. By the end of April, I had heard nothing from him, so I called him. He said he was back at Korle Bu Hospital with Angela. They had done an exploratory laparotomy and found that she had hepatocellular carcinoma. It’s very rare in children, and all of us had missed it. Angela was in hepatic coma at the time I spoke to Jason, and she died about ten days later.”

“Oh,” Dawson said. “I’m sorry.”

She lowered her head and closed her eyes for a moment of pain that clearly still haunted her. “I am too. I failed Jason and his wife, and I failed their daughter. I could have made a stronger appeal to my administrator, or called someone at Korle Bu.”

“Would it have made a difference in the end, Doctor?”

“Perhaps not, but the point is that I didn’t try hard enough to save a girl who was the same age I was when Uncle Charles and Auntie Fiona rescued me from ruin. I wonder what that says about me.”

With the last comment, she was almost talking to herself, and Dawson felt uncomfortable, as though he were eavesdropping. He had never witnessed such self-recrimination in a doctor. Like policemen, physicians rarely accepted blame for anything. He wanted to comfort her, or at least empathize, but he was afraid he might sound patronizing.

“Did Jason ever get back in touch with you?” he asked her.

“He didn’t call me, but I reached him by phone once. I told him how sorry I was. All he said was, ‘I hope it never happens to you,’ and he hung up.”

“Meaning, ‘I hope you never lose a loved one like I have?’ ”

She contemplated. “Yes, I suppose so.”

“Could he have killed your aunt and uncle?”