“I can’t find any H. Sekyi,” the man said. “Please, Inspector, if you can wait a little bit for Agnes, my co-worker, to come back. She will know.”

Said Agnes walked in about ten minutes later, sucking on a Fan Milk strawberry ice, which, in the gathering heat of the day, looked very inviting.

“Agnes, this is Inspector Dawson. He’s looking for one H. Sekyi he says works here.”

Agnes, who obviously knew her way around, shook her head and clicked her tongue with regret. “Humphrey Sekyi? He used to work in Archives up until about six months ago, when he was sacked, and then only about one week after that, he was killed in a car crash. Poor man.”

“Killed,” Dawson echoed, drawing back in surprise. “He’s dead? Could there be another H. Sekyi?”

“Not at all,” Agnes said. “There’s Ruth and Kwame Sekyi. No H.”

“Who sacked Mr. Sekyi?”

“The Archives supervisor.”

“Is the supervisor still here?”

“No, he was transferred to Ho to be in charge of the Ghana Health Service AIDS program in the Volta Region.”

A smile of disbelief crept to Dawson’s lips. “Transferred to Ho. Do you remember his name?”

“Of course,” Agnes said. “I don’t forget such things. His name was Timothy Sowah.”

28

AFTER THE TOWN OF JUAPONG, Dawson continued past Ketanu on the Accra-Ho road. Both sides of the route became less forested, giving way to open bush. Under an hour later, the REDUCE SPEED NOW sign marked his arrival in Ho. It was of course a much larger town than Ketanu, but to Dawson it was still quiet and slow, like a kite lazily catching an updraft rather than an airplane taking off.

He had to get fuel and pulled up to a Total station.

“Do you know where the Ghana Health Service office is?” he asked the attendant as he filled the tank.

“I think it’s somewhere near the Community Center,” he said.

“And where is the Community Center?”

“Past the Municipal Assembly.”

Dawson grinned. No doubt all perfectly correct, but he still didn’t know how to get to the GHS office.

After some clarification and a little wandering around, Dawson found the Community Center, and the Ghana Health Service regional office was indeed adjacent to it. He parked and crossed the stretch of unpaved ground to the entrance.

Not one of the newfangled buildings in town, it looked rather rickety on the outside, but it was blissfully air-conditioned on the inside. The four employees busy at their computers were a lucky bunch.

“Good afternoon,” Dawson said.

They chorused back the greeting, and one of the men asked how he could be of help.

“I’m looking for Mr. Timothy Sowah,” Dawson said. “Is he here?”

“No, he hasn’t come yet.”

“Any idea when he’ll be in?”

Everyone shook heads and said no.

“Do you know where he lives?”

One of the clerks came out onto the street with Dawson and pointed south along the road with instructions like “next to the My Savior Barber Shop” and “turn where you see the petrol station.”

The directions took Dawson to a more residential area. Once he thought he was in the vicinity, he got out of the car and started asking around for Sowah. A streetwise teenage boy said he could take Dawson to his house.

They walked some distance past a group of shacks and a woman at a stand selling eggplants and tomatoes, then down a craggy lane with mosquito-friendly puddles of water. On the other side, the teenager pointed. “That is it.”

Dawson fished in his pocket and gave the boy a dash. He scuttled off jubilantly.

Timothy’s house was a cut above most. It was painted a sensible bronze color that masked the dust, and with its neatly shuttered windows, it looked like one of those perfect little square houses children draw. Outside, two teams of girls were deep into a game of ampe.

He knocked on the screen door.

“Come in,” a female voice called out.

Dawson found a young woman breast-feeding her baby in the front room.

“Good afternoon. I’m Detective Inspector Dawson. Is Mr. Sowah here?”

The woman hitched her baby up a little closer to her bosom. “No sir, he’s not here.”

“What about Mrs. Sowah?”

“She went to market with the children.”

“I see. Are you a relative?”

“I’m his niece.” Her name was Charlotte, and her baby was four months old.

“She’s a beautiful little girl,” Dawson said.

She smiled shyly. “Thank you.”

“Do you know when Mr. Sowah will be back?”

“I think he will come soon.”

Soon could mean almost anything. Dawson debated what he should do.

“Thank you,” he told the niece. “I’ll come back.”

He set back out for the Ho Magistrate Court, a salmon-colored, single-story building he had noticed while he had been looking for the GHS office. It took him about an hour to obtain the search warrants he needed. Not bad at all.

When Dawson returned, Charlotte was watching television while her baby slept on her lap. Timothy hadn’t come back yet. Dawson had no inclination to sit around waiting, so he showed the warrant to the young mother, who read it and nodded uncertainly when Dawson told her he was going to search Timothy’s bedroom.

The hallway beyond the front room was dim. There were two doors off either side and one at the end, which Dawson correctly guessed was Timothy’s room. He pushed the door open, stepped in, and looked around. Compulsively neat and well organized-exactly what Dawson would have expected from Timothy Sowah. Nonfiction books were in one bookcase, on the left side of a shiny mahogany desk, and fiction was in another bookcase on the right. Dawson noticed they were arranged alphabetically by author. Atop the desk was a nice-looking laptop. Judging from that and his fancy Audi, Timothy Sowah was not a man without means.

Dawson turned to the desk, which had a column of four drawers on either side. He wanted to search quickly and efficiently, and preferably finish before Timothy, his new suspect, returned. Primarily he was looking for Gladys’s diary, but he was also on the lookout for anything else relevant.

Timothy’s drawers were arranged as meticulously as his bookshelves-paper in one, stationery in the next, a third with AIDS information pamphlets. Nothing was out of place.

Dawson found no diary. He checked the underside of the desk, where people often hide items with the aid of tape. Nothing there.

Dawson began to go through every book on the shelves. Perhaps Timothy had slid the diary between them or within one. He found nothing.

He spun a few revolutions in the chair, which was fun but made him dizzy. As he waited for the room to stop spinning, he noticed a recessed handle at the side of the desk. He pulled on it, and it tilted out to reveal a wedge-shaped space deeper than it was wide. Dawson’s hand shot in and retrieved two items. They were both identity badges for the Ministry of Health. One belonged to Timothy Sowah, Supervisor, Department of Archives. The other belonged to Humphrey Sekyi.

“Ah,” Dawson sighed. How utterly rewarding.

Two minutes later, voices drifted in from the front of the house, and Dawson recognized one of them as Timothy’s. Hurried footsteps approached until Timothy made his appearance in the bedroom doorway.