Webnovel Series by A Amankwaa
©2026 A Amankwaa. All rights reserved.
Dr Nhyira stood at the balcony of the temporary safe house overlooking the Weija Reservoir, her breath hitching in her throat. The mobile phone was pressed so hard against her ear that the plastic casing groaned and her right hand became numb. On the other end, there was no longer a voice. There was only the loud, metallic ticking of a cooling engine and the distant, haunting whistle of the wind through the forest canopy.
“Akyere?” she whispered. “Akyere, talk to me…. Ah… what has happened?”
The silence that followed was more terrifying than a scream. It was a heavy, terminal void. Nhyira pulled the phone away and stared at the glowing screen. The call was still active, the seconds ticking upward, recording a tragedy she could not see but could certainly feel it deeply.
She did not have time to mourn.
A sharp, electronic chirp erupted from her laptop on the desk nearby. A red pulse throbbed on the map she had been monitoring. Her heart plummeted into her stomach. The encrypted bypass she had used to contact Akyere had been a calculated risk, but the speed of the retaliation was impossible. They had not just traced the call; they had been waiting for the signal to go live.
The sound of screeching tyres tore through the quiet of the alleyway outside.
Nhyira scrambled to grab her hard drive, her fingers fumbling with the cables. Before she could yank the USB lead free, the front door did not just open; it disintegrated. The wood splintered under the force of a sledgehammer blow.
Four men flooded the room. They were massive, their muscles bulging beneath tight black shirts under a dark fugu, their faces obscured by the shadows of their black caps. These were the hired macho men of the corrupt world, the shadows that did the dirty work while men like Brako kept their uniforms clean.
Nhyira reached for a glass vase on the table, a pathetic reflex of self-defence, but the lead man swiped it aside with a contemptuous flick of his wrist. He did not speak. He did not need to.
One of them caught her by the waist, lifting her off the floor as if she weighed nothing. Another jammed a thick, chemical-smelling face towel over her mouth as she felt the sharp sting of an injection in her right arm. Nhyira jerked, her vision blurring as the sedative surged through her veins. Her last sight was her laptop being crushed under a heavy boot, the screen flashing once before turning black.
The van did not stop for a long time. Nhyira’s world was a blur of diesel fumes and the violent swaying of the chassis against her bound limbs. When the doors finally creaked open, the air that rushed in was thick with the scent of rotting pineapple and stagnant water.
She was hauled out and shoved into a wooden chair. The darkness was absolute, save for a single, searing beam of a torch aimed directly at her eyes. She could see nothing of her surroundings, only the dancing dust motes in the light.
A voice emerged from the blackness. It was distorted, perhaps by a device or a heavy cloth, sounding like gravel being ground in a mortar. It was a voice stripped of humanity.
“The remains at the forest are none of your concern, Doc,” the shadow whispered. “You play hero saa, see where e take you. The fire at your lab was a kindness. A warning you chose to ignore.”
Nhyira tried to speak, but the salt of her own tears was bitter in her mouth. Her throat felt as though it were lined with glass.
“”Erm… we know about the mortgage,” the voice said, pacing slowly around her. Heavy boots slapped the damp floorboards.
“We know about the orphanage too. All those hungry children you dey try feed with that small salary wey no ever reach. By tomorrow eh… the bank go stop calling. Your debts go vanish… just like that. One million Ghana cedis go appear inside the orphanage account. Anonymous. Nobody go fit trace am.”
The torch moved closer, the heat of the bulb stinging her skin.
“Consider it a retirement gift eh,” the voice hissed. “But if you ever mention the Big Tree again, hmm… or if you ever look for that Inspector, hmm… we will not burn your lab. We go burn your entire world. Every brick. Every life.”
Nhyira’s chest heaved with silent, racking sobs. The terror was a cold weight in her stomach, a physical sickness that made her head light. She waited for the blow, for the bullet, for the end. Instead, there was the sharp prick of a needle in her left arm. The world began to tilt and dissolve until the darkness of the room swallowed her whole.
Nhyira woke to the sound of a low, calming murmur. It was the sound of her husband’s voice, a steady baritone reciting psalm twenty-three.
She opened her eyes to find herself in her own bed. The morning sun was filtering through the curtains, casting golden bars across the room. Her two sons were kneeling by the foot of the bed, their heads bowed, their small hands clasped in fervent prayer. Her husband, Kofi, sat beside her, his face etched with a night’s worth of agony.
“Nhyira,” he gasped, his voice breaking as he saw her eyes open. “Thank God. Thank God. You were… you were just at the gate. Collapsed. We thought we had lost you.”
She could not find the words to tell him. Her body felt heavy, as if she were made of lead. Her mind was a fractured mirror, reflecting the cold, dark room and the voice of the shadow.
An hour later, as the house settled into a fragile quiet, Nhyira’s phone buzzed on the nightstand. She reached for it with a trembling hand. There were two notifications. The first was a confirmation from her bank; her mortgage had been settled in full. The balance stood at zero.
The second was an urgent, panicked message from the matron of the orphanage. A private transfer of one million Ghana Cedis had arrived. The children would be fed for years. The roof would be fixed. The debt was gone.
Nhyira sat in the silence of her bedroom, the sunlight feeling like a mockery. She looked at her hands, the same hands that had reviewed the evidential reports in the Big Tree investigation. They were clean now, but as she looked at her sleeping sons, she felt the invisible weight of the shackles. They had not killed her. They had done something far worse. They had made her a partner in their silence.
Late that evening, long after the air conditioners had been powered down and the heavy mahogany doors of the station had been locked, the silence of the Oda Divisional Headquarters was broken by the erratic sweep of a broom.
Mr Adom moved through the corridors with the invisibility of a man who had spent thirty years cleaning up after the law. He entered the DCS’s office, the smell of Brako’s expensive cologne still hanging in the chilled air. Adom emptied the waste bin and wiped the desk with a damp cloth, but as he reached for the edge of the desk mat, his eyes fell upon a small, sealed biohazard envelope.
It sat there, forgotten in the rush of the afternoon’s arrests and the staged accident on the logging track. Beside it lay a handwritten routing slip in Brako’s own bold script: Send to FSL Accra for immediate analysis.
Adom adjusted his spectacles. He knew the DCS was a man of high standing who surely had no time for such small errands. To Adom, this was not evidence; it was a task left undone.
“The big man is getting forgetful,” Adom muttered to the empty room.
He tucked the envelope into the pocket of his overalls and finished his rounds. On his way out of the main gates, he spotted DS Ntim securing his motorbike for the night.
“Ntim!” Adom called out, hobbling over. “Commander left this on his desk. The note says it is for the lab in Accra. You are heading to the capital at dawn, are you not?”
Ntim, a man who lived by the protocol of the logbook, took the envelope with a nod of professional acknowledgement. He did not question the cleaner; in a station this busy, paperwork often moved through many hands. He placed the envelope carefully into the heavy leather dispatch bag strapped to his bike, wedging it securely between a stack of routine case files.
“I have it, Agya Adom,” Ntim replied, his voice firm with the authority of his rank. “It will be on the analyst’s desk at the Forensic Science Laboratory before the sun is high.”
As the motorbike roared to life and disappeared into the humid Oda night, the one piece of evidence that could link the remains of the Big Tree to Akyere was moving steadily toward the capital. The DNA kit was no longer in Brako’s possession. It was in the system. And the system, for all its corruption, was finally beginning to turn.
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