Webnovel Series by A Amankwaa
©2026 A Amankwaa. All rights reserved.
The early morning sun was already baking the concrete car park at the Oda Divisional Headquarters, but inside DCS Brako’s office, the air remained as thin and chilled as a mountain peak.
Brako sat at his desk, his fingers laced together in a cathedral of quiet satisfaction. On the local news, the tragic accident involving a visitor from the United States was already being framed as a cautionary tale of driving on unfamiliar forest roads. The truck driver had been reported as shaken but cooperative. No witnesses. No survivors.
It was a clean ledger.
He reached for his top drawer, intending to take the biohazard envelope, Akyere’s DNA kit, and burn it in the incinerator behind the station. It was the last ghost to be exorcised. The drawer slid open with a smooth, oiled hiss.
Brako’s eyes remained fixed on the spot where the envelope should have been. For a heartbeat, his face remained a mask of calm, but then a muscle in his jaw began to twitch. He reached into the void of the drawer, his hand sweeping through the empty space.
It was gone.
He did not shout. He stood up and walked to the door, his movements measured and predatory. He opened the door to find a junior officer passing by.
“Has Agya Adom arrived for his shift yet?” Brako’s voice was a low, dangerous hum.
”No, sir. He does not report for duty for another hour.”
Brako’s eyes moved to the bin beside his desk. It was empty. The surfaces were polished. He walked back to the desk and saw a small smear on the mahogany, the ghost of a wet cloth from the previous night’s cleaning. A cold, prickling sensation worked its way up Brako’s spine. He realised Adom must have taken the kit before leaving the night before.
He moved to the dispatch log on the main desk in the outer office, ignoring the salutes of his subordinates. His eyes scanned the list of outgoing files until they landed on a signature that made his blood turn to ice.
Dispatch to FSL Accra. Courier: Detective Superintendent Ntim. Status: En Route.
“Ntim,” Brako whispered, the name sounding like a curse.
He lunged for his radio, but he stopped himself. To broadcast a stop order for a specific DNA kit would leave a digital trail a mile wide. He had to reach Ntim before the laboratory doors opened, or the scent of blood would reach the high command in Accra.
About 110 km from Oda, the remand cell in Koforidua was packed like sardines, thick with the smell of damp limestone, sour breath, and the nauseating, stale odour of sweat and faeces. Outside, the Koforidua night throbbed with live‑band music, but inside the central prison the only sounds were the metronomic drip of a leaky pipe and the low, gravelly whisper of a man who had already accepted his ghost.
Ntow sat in the corner, his shadow stretched long and thin against the weeping wall. He did not look at Ansah. He looked through him, as if seeing something etched into the very stones of the cell.
“The gold demands blood sacrifice, Kwame,” Ntow said, his voice a dry rasp that seemed to catch in the stagnant air. “It is a sacred scripture, unwritten but carved into the heart of every man who touches the land. You cannot take from the forest without giving something back to the roots.”
Ansah sat on the edge of the wooden bench, his bruised knuckles throbbing. He had spent the night in silence, his mind replaying Akyere’s face in the stairwell, but Ntow’s words acted like a cold bucket of water.
“What are you saying, Ntow?” Ansah hissed, leaning forward. “Sacrifice? This is about galamsey and a cover up. This is about money.”
“It is about both,” Ntow replied, finally turning his head. His eyes were milky in the dim light. “Brako is not just a policeman. He is the overseer. The Big Tree sits on a vein of gold that would make kings weep, but the elders said the land was guarded. To appease the tree, to open the forest for mining, Brako demanded a price. He took the three children of Kwabena.”
Ansah felt a physical lurch in his chest, a sickness that had nothing to do with the prison food. “The missing children? You are telling me they were… murdered for a mine?”
“Sacrificed,” Ntow corrected him with a terrifying softness. “Before the first shovel hit the dirt, the earth had to be fed. But Kwabena… you know him. We call him Ziggy. He was a man of fire. When he found out what they had done, he did not go to the authorities. He went to his wife, then he went to Brako. He confronted the big man at the clearing.”
Ntow paused, his hands shaking as he mimed the motion of a struggle.
“Things escalated. You know Ziggy’s temper. He did not talk; he fought. He stabbed Brako’s man, nearly killed him. Then Abudu stepped out of the shadows and shot Kwabena’s wife where she stood. A clean kill. And then… then they finished Kwabena. Brako made us all stand over the bodies. We had to take a sacred oath, Kwame. We bound our souls to that oath. I have kept that secret like a stone in my gut for months, but I cannot do it anymore. Not after the children. My dreams are filled with the sound of the forest screaming.”
Ansah stared at the man, the horror of the revelation settling over him with instant goose bumps. The remains under the Big Tree were not just victims of a crime; they were the foundation of Brako’s empire.
“Akyere,” Ansah whispered, his voice cracking. “She has to know. She has the DNA… she has the proof.”
Ntow looked at him with a profound, hollow pity. “Proof is for the living, Kwame. And in Ntɛm, the gold has a way of making sure the only witnesses left are the trees.”
In the communal hall of the remand wing, the air was a thick soup of steam and the clatter of plastic bowls. Abudu sat two tables away, his eyes hooded like those of a vulture. He had watched the long, whispered confession in the cell; he knew the sacred oath had been broken.
As the prisoners queued for their morning ration, Abudu moved with a silent, practised grace. He passed a senior guard near the kitchen hatch. A small, dark vial changed hands in the shadow of a pillar.
Ansah and Ntow sat together at the end of a long, scarred wooden table. Ntow looked lighter, as if shedding the truth had finally allowed him to breathe.
“Eat, Kwame,” Ntow said softly, spooning the warm liquid into his mouth. “You will need your strength for what comes next.”
Ansah took a mouthful. It tasted bitter, a metallic tang. He took another.
The reaction was instantaneous. Ntow was the first to gasp. He clutched his throat, his eyes bulging as a thin, dark stream of blood began to leak from his nostrils. He tried to speak, but only a wet, gargling sound emerged. Across from him, Ansah felt a sudden, searing heat in his gut, as if he had swallowed lye. Blood, dark and thick, sprayed across the white plastic of Ansah’s bowl as he coughed.
The hall fell into a stunned silence, broken only by the thud of Ntow’s head hitting the table. Ansah looked up, his vision blurring. Through the haze, he saw Abudu standing by the exit, watching with a face as impassive as a stone idol. Beside him, the guard who had provided the vial stood with his arms folded, already signalling for the orderlies.
“Medical emergency!” the guard bellowed. “Clear the hall!”
As the darkness rushed in to claim him, Ansah felt himself being hoisted by his armpits. His boots dragged on the concrete floor as they carried him and Ntow away, not toward the infirmary, but toward the white vans waiting in the rear courtyard.
By the time the breakfast hall was scrubbed clean an hour later, it was as if the two men had never existed. The truth had been spoken, but the ears that had heard it were now being silenced forever.
In the Accra laboratory, Adusei worked with a quiet, practiced precision. He logged Akyere’s sample into the system before beginning the extraction, his movements a steady sequence of pipetting and sealing. By late afternoon, the capillary electrophoresis machine had finished its run, and the digital profiles began to populate the screen.
The software ran the comparison against the profiles from the Big Tree remains, and the likelihood ratios suggested an extremely high probability of kinship. On the primary monitor, the first match confirmed a 50% genetic share with the elder male, a direct, undeniable parent-child or sibling link. As the secondary scans completed, the numbers for the three remaining profiles climbed past 26%. The evidence was absolute; the victims at the Big Tree finally had a name, bound to Akyere by a map of shared blood.
The weight of the data seemed to hit Adusei physically. He stared at the screen as the names behind the numbers finally clicked into place. His breath hitched, and a moment later, he burst into tears. Unable to steady himself, he slumped from his stool, his voice cracking as he hit the floor. “What a tragedy. Corruption… nothing but corruption.”
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