29

“CAN I BE OF assistance, Inspector Dawson?” Polite but icy. “I certainly hope so.”

Timothy moved into the room like a wary cat. “May I ask what you are doing here?”

“I need to ask you one or two questions.”

“Charlotte tells me you have a search warrant. May I see it?”

Dawson handed it to him. He read it quickly and gave it back.

“What is it you’re searching for?”

“You were a supervisor of the Archives Department at MoH in Accra?”

“Yes. That’s correct.” Still wary. “Why do you ask?”

“Do you remember Humphrey Sekyi?”

Timothy’s eyes flickered. “I don’t recall that name.”

“You should. He worked under you in Archives until you sacked him.”

“Oh, yes, yes, of course. It slipped my mind. I fired him for theft. Why your interest in him?”

“It appears a Humphrey Sekyi from the MoH went to the women’s hall at the University of Ghana and got into Gladys’s dormitory room.”

“Good gracious,” Timothy said. “How? Or why? What would he want there?”

“He wouldn’t want anything there, because Humphrey Sekyi is dead.”

The side of Timothy’s face twitched, and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down like a rubber ball. “All right, but what does this have to do with me, or with your being here in my room, for that matter?”

“Everything. The man who went into Gladys’s room matches your description exactly. Including being left-handed. When you sacked Sekyi, he turned in his badge, which came in very handy when you needed someone to impersonate.”

“You can’t prove any of this.”

Dawson held up both the badges he had found, and Timothy’s eyes almost jumped out of his head.

“Do you want to modify your story now?” Dawson asked.

Timothy slumped into a chair behind him, sighed, and put his head in his hands.

“You forced open Gladys’s desk drawer and took her diary, didn’t you?” Dawson asked.

Timothy nodded. “Yes.”

“Why did you do that?”

“Mr. Dawson, I must be honest with you. The trouble is… the problem is I was having an affair with Gladys. I was in love with her.”

“Go on.”

“The diary-Well, I had never read anything from it before Gladys’s death, but she always told me it had her deepest and most secret thoughts. I was curious, but out of respect when she was alive, I never trespassed. When she died, I panicked because I knew the family would soon be picking up all her belongings, and they’d be able to read everything. I couldn’t afford it getting out that I was having an affair. So, yes, I hurried to her dorm room and was relieved to find the diary was still there, and I took it. I wanted to be completely certain no one could track me, so I used a dead man’s identification. I thought I was being clever.”

“Where is the diary now? What did you do with it?”

Timothy’s jaw was working rhythmically He did not look at Dawson.

“What did you do with it, Timothy?”

He took a deep breath. “I burned it.”

His voice warbled badly, and Dawson smiled inwardly. Timothy Sowah, you are lying to me.

“What was in the diary?”

“She wrote every day-sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. She talked about everything.”

“About you?”

“Yes. How she felt whenever she was with me-here in town or out in the rural areas. We snatched moments here and there.”

“Did you write love letters to each other?”

“When she was away at school, we did. She was more inclined to write than I was.”

“Did you save the letters?”

“For a while, yes.”

“But then you destroyed them too.”

“I did.”

“Did you love Gladys as much as she did you?”

He hesitated. “I don’t know. Well, probably not.”

“For instance, you would not have left your wife to marry her, would you?”

“It would have been impossible, Inspector Dawson.”

“Was Gladys pressuring you to do just that?”

“I had to explain how unrealistic it would have been.”

Timothy looked up and faced Dawson’s gaze unflinchingly for a moment, and then he looked away. “I miss her. Badly.”

“Perhaps too much to destroy her diary.”

Timothy started. “Pardon?”

“The diary is not in this house because having it here would risk its being discovered by your wife,” Dawson said, “but I don’t believe you’ve destroyed it. The diary is like a part of Gladys’s soul. It contains Gladys’s essence. She’s been murdered, you miss her terribly, and now you’ll set her soul alight and burn it? I don’t think so. You’re not that kind of person. Where is the diary, Timothy?”

“Inspector Dawson,” he said, “I’ve told you the truth.”

“We’ll see about that,” Dawson said. “Let’s pay a visit to your office in town.”

As Timothy Sowah sat sullenly in a corner, Dawson began to strip the GHS office down. First he emptied every drawer and checked that none had a false bottom. Then he started on the bookcases, flipping through every volume of mind-paralyzing GHS documents.

There was a locked gunmetal gray cabinet along the rear wall of the room. “What’s in here?” Dawson asked, rattling the door.

“Old files and things like that,” Timothy said.

“Would you open it up, please?”

“As you wish.”

The cabinet contained more daunting rows of folders, ring binders, and large envelopes. Dawson did not show it, but he was beginning to lose some of his confidence as he searched each item and found nothing. He turned away.

“I hope I’ve been able to help,” Timothy said as he locked the cabinet again.

Dawson said nothing. He scanned the room and reflected what an extraordinarily ordered person Timothy Sowah was-the type who, as a student, was always the first to get his textbooks and label them neatly with his name.

Once upon a time in primary and secondary school, the more compulsive pupils would design jackets to protect the covers of their new textbooks. Some jackets were fashioned most intricately, with precisely folded edges and self-locking corners. Plain wax paper and brown paper were common, but a colorful or unique jacket was prestigious. One made from old newspaper was laughable and considered bush, as in unsophisticated. Timothy would have been the type who made superior book covers.

Book covers.

Dawson inclined his head and stared at the cabinet.

“Something wrong, Inspector?”

“Unlock that again, please.”

On the top shelf, four ring binders. Dawson transferred them to Timothy’s desk. One of them had a white plastic jacket. Dawson pulled it off and looked at the edges of the binder’s hard covers. The back one was thicker than the front, and its edge seemed to have been tampered with. He pressed his fingertips into the edge and wiggled them in until the cover began to separate into two layers. He grasped with both hands and pulled hard. The binder’s cover came apart. A dark blue, embossed leather diary was tucked securely within.

Timothy’s head fell forward as if he had been guillotined.

In the center of the diary were two folded, handwritten letters. Both began with “Dearest Gladys” and ended with “Love from Tim.” One paragraph in one letter, written in February, stood out to Dawson. Timothy had written:

I love you, dearest, but I hope you understand I still have a family to take care of and I do have obligations. I can’t just leave my wife. My love, I’m not rejecting you, I’m just trying to explain the reality we’re facing.

Next, Dawson flipped through the pages of the diary. Gladys had made an entry almost every day, with few gaps. She gave accounts of her journeys and AIDS teaching sessions, but in other entries she poured out her feelings about AIDS, poverty, superstition, and ignorance.

Thursday, 20th March. I left him a message on his mobile. I told him he has to meet me tomorrow by the forest footpath after I’ve finished my work at Bedome, and that if he shuns me, he will regret it because I will be paying his wife a little visit. “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor Hell a fury like a woman scorned.”