Sarbah looked resentful. “Yes, that is so,” he admitted.
“I’ve been wondering,” Dawson said measuredly, “what tore your parents apart and drove your mother to R.E.”
“I don’t know for sure. No one actually told me, and I don’t remember. I was only two years old at the time, after all-too young to understand. In retrospect, irreconcilable differences and my father’s drinking, perhaps.”
“He was an alcoholic?”
Sarbah grimaced. “Yes. I’m not sure how severe it was at the time of the divorce, but in later years the alcohol became lethal.”
“I’m sorry,” Dawson said quietly. “R.E. and your mother had Simon and Cecil, your half brothers?”
“Yes, R.E. had returned to Takoradi with my mother and me in 1942. Simon was born in 1943 and Cecil in 1945.”
“Did you get along well with your half brothers?” Dawson asked gently, fearing that he may be treading on sensitive ground too soon.
“Let’s just say things could have been better and leave it at that,” Sarbah said, tensely tapping the side of his thigh.
“What about Tiberius?” Dawson asked. “When did he come back to Takoradi from the UK?”
“In 1948.”
“I’m sure he wanted to see you,” Dawson said encouragingly.
“Of course he did. I was his son, and I wanted to see him too, but…”
Sarbah shifted his weight and Dawson waited.
“But R.E. and Bessie conspired to prevent us from being with each other.”
Dawson could feel the bitterness that Eileen had ascribed to Sarbah. He had a seething anger. “Why do you think that?”
He shrugged, but it was unresolved pain he was expressing, not nonchalance. “R.E. and Bessie hated my father. I remember hearing how R.E. once humiliated Daddy in public-called him a ‘drunken failure.’ ”
“How old were you at the time?”
“Twelve, thirteen-something like that. Two years before the murder. I presume you’ve been told about that?”
“Yes-1952?”
“Yes, sir. I was fourteen, Simon was eleven, and Cecil was nine. The three of us slept in the same room at one end of the house, R.E. and Bessie at the other. In the middle of the night, someone stole in through the screen window of their bedroom, butchered their bodies, and slashed their throats. Bessie screamed before she was slain, and Simon heard her. He woke me up and we ran to the room and saw it…” Sarbah shuddered.
“I’m sorry,” Dawson said with feeling. “A child should never see anything like that. Cecil too?”
Sarbah shook his head. “I wouldn’t let him go into the room.”
“Good man,” Dawson said approvingly.
