“And a quick and brilliant mind,” Elizabeth said. “Sometimes she talked so fast she would lose people, but when she wanted to pass on her message-about AIDS, about life, about anything-she came down or rose up to whatever level she needed to be. People sometimes said she had a hot temper, but that wasn’t it. It was that she was a passionate person. That’s what you have to understand about her.”

Dawson nodded.

“It seems almost too easy to take a life like that,” Elizabeth said. “It shouldn’t be that way.”

The tears welling up spilled over onto her cheeks. She dabbed her eyes and face with a handkerchief. Charles put his hand on her arm and squeezed.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“It’s still early,” Dawson said gently. “The wound is fresh.”

“Still,” Elizabeth said, “I hadn’t exactly intended to subject you to this display, Detective Inspector.” She laughed ruefully through her tears.

Dawson smiled. “When was the last time you saw Gladys?”

“Late Friday afternoon, when she left the house for Bedome,” Charles said. “People say she was there till just before sunset.”

“I see,” Dawson said. “So, between five thirty and six Friday evening, had all the family except Gladys returned home?”

“Yes. I had been in Ho and returned around five, and Auntie Elizabeth came from the shop about an hour later to help Mummy with the cooking.”

“And your father?”

“He had been at the farm, but he went home early in the afternoon because his gout was troubling him.”

“I know why you’re asking these questions, Mr. Dawson,” Elizabeth said. “There’s no one, no one among us who didn’t love and cherish Gladys, and not one of us would ever want to hurt her, let alone kill her.”

“I’m sure that’s the case. Then let’s talk about who would want to kill her.”

“Togbe Fafali Adzima, the fetish priest at Bedome, for sure,” Charles said at once. “He hated her, and I kept warning her to be careful with him.”

“Sometimes it’s not so much the nasty people like Adzima you have to worry about,” Elizabeth countered. “Their bark is worse than their bite, if they have any bite at all. No, it’s sneaky people like Mr. Isaac Kutu who pretend to be good but are rotten on the inside. Those are the troubling ones.”

“I’ve heard Gladys was interested in Mr. Kutu’s herbal remedies,” Dawson said, “and I was told they got along well. Do you think otherwise?”

“They may have been okay with each other for a while,” Elizabeth said, “but everything changed the day he thought she was stealing from him.”

“How did that come about?”

“This is what Gladys told me,” Elizabeth said. “She went to Kutu’s compound to see him, but he wasn’t there. She wanted to see some of his herbal treatments, and she persuaded his wife, Tomefa, to show her. When Kutu arrived later on, he found Gladys writing everything down that his wife was telling her about the various herbs.”

“He wasn’t happy about that,” Dawson said.

“Not happy?” Elizabeth snorted. “Inspector Dawson, he was furious. He started screaming at them both. Tomefa ran away, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Kutu punished her with a beating. He accused Gladys of stealing his ideas to profit from them.”

“So he was angry. Enough to kill her?”

“Charles doesn’t think so, but I do.”

“What about lust or love or jealousy somewhere in their relationship?”

Elizabeth clicked her tongue. “No, not at all. Gladys would have told me that. She told me a lot of things.”

“By any chance, did she mention anything about Timothy Sowah? Any romance?”

“She liked him, that’s all I know,” Elizabeth said. “I once teased her that she looked like she was in love, but she pooh-poohed it and reminded me Mr. Sowah is married. Why do you ask?”

“No special reason.”

“I heard Inspector Fiti has arrested Samuel Boateng,” Charles said. “Is that true?”

“Yesterday.”

“Fiti the bully,” Elizabeth said contemptuously. “Picking on the weakest of the bunch. The boy doesn’t even have murder in him. But Fiti? He doesn’t care, so long as he gets his scapegoat.”

“Did Gladys have any feelings for Samuel, do you think?” Dawson asked.

“I don’t think she found him anything more than amusing, if not immature,” Elizabeth said.

“I understand from Inspector Fiti that some farmers working near the forest on Friday evening said they had seen him with Gladys as she was returning to Ketanu from Bedome.”

“Yes, that’s correct,” Charles said, “but from what the farmers told me, Samuel imposed on her rather than the other way around.”

“If that did happen, might it have upset her?”

“I doubt it, really. Gladys took things in stride.”

“I’m changing the subject somewhat,” Elizabeth said, “but there’s something else you really should know, Inspector.”

“Yes?”

“Gladys always kept a diary, a journal of everything she did every day, her feelings and thoughts and philosophies. It had a black cover-or maybe dark blue-about fifteen by ten centimeters in size. It’s missing. We’ve looked for it in her room at our house, and yesterday when we went to her hall at the university to collect her belongings, we didn’t find it anywhere there either.”

“Did she ever share the journal with you?”

“No, and I never tried to read it. She made it clear that it was private.”

Diaries fascinated Dawson. Each was unique to its owner, intimate, full of deep secrets, and they never lied. Even more important, Gladys’s diary might have borne information implicating her murderer.

“And there’s one last thing, Inspector Dawson,” Elizabeth said.

“Yes?”

“She wore a silver bead bracelet on her right wrist. She never took it off. That’s missing as well.”

“And there was no mention in the crime scene report of anything like that being found,” Dawson said. “You’ve looked everywhere possible?”

“Thoroughly. It’s nowhere to be found. So there you have two things-the bracelet and the diary. Both of them are gone.”

15

OSEWA HAD RISEN EARLY, long before Kweku and Alifoe were up. The morning was cool as she went down the road to the communal water pump. People in Ketanu no longer had to walk miles to fetch water in buckets on their heads. Osewa remembered those bad old days. Things had changed. Just imagine, many of the houses in Ketanu now had running water inside. She would like that, she thought. Maybe someday.

At the pump she talked and laughed with the other women who were waiting to fill their various containers. Men never collected water. That was women’s work. Once her bucket was full, Osewa lifted it onto the roll of cloth padding on her head and walked back home with it balanced perfectly and without spilling a drop. Just one of those things you learned to do as soon as you could walk.

In their small courtyard, she began to prepare the breakfast. Kweku was going off to Ho this morning, so she wanted to be sure his was ready. He liked akasa, but Alifoe preferred rice water with lots of sugar and Ideal evaporated milk if they were lucky enough to have some.

Osewa had two cooking stoves, each a circle of three or four large stones in the middle of which went the firewood. She bent over one of the stoves and fanned the fire to full blaze.

Kweku came out of his room, grunted good morning, and went off to the latrine. When he came back, he washed his hands in a large calabash of soapy water and then rinsed them off with clean water from a second gourd. He didn’t waste a drop. He sat down on a stool opposite Osewa and waited for his akasa.

“I hope I get somewhere today,” he said, voice still thick with sleep.

Osewa nodded. “I hope so too,” she said as she handed him his bowl of gruel. She didn’t really have much hope, though. Kweku was trying to wrestle a loan from a credit union run by a cocoa-farming cooperative. They needed the money because the prior cocoa season had been so lean, but getting their hands on the loan was difficult. Kweku had been to the Ho center four times in the last six weeks, and there still was no sign of his application being approved. Osewa had given up on the idea, but Kweku kept doggedly trying.