DAWSON WOKE EARLY THE next morning, took a shower, threw on some fresh clothes, and sat down to study a map of the region. As Timothy Sowah had mentioned, Ketanu and Bedome were about a kilometer apart. Separating the two places was the forest in which Gladys’s body had been found. The footpath Dawson and Inspector Fiti had taken the day before tracked through the southern tip of the forest. Most important, it was the same route Gladys would have taken back and forth between the two towns. Approximately halfway between the two, but closer to Bedome, Gladys’s crossing had been interrupted by either herself or someone else and she had ended up dead some distance north of the path.
Bedome was east of Ketanu, and some fifteen kilometers east again of Bedome was the Kalakpa Reserve, the only remaining undisturbed forest in the Volta Region.
When Dawson had visited Ketanu as a boy, the forest bordering the eastern edge of the town had been denser, but years of tree felling and burning, most of it illegal, had thinned it out. In fact, much of the Volta Region’s forestland had suffered in this way.
The Bedome end of the footpath was visible from Isaac Kutu’s compound, which was about three hundred meters away. Dawson visualized the compound, the footpath, and the village of Bedome as forming the three points of a right-angled triangle.
Some distance from the footpath, perhaps a hundred meters, a cluster of farmers’ small plots bordered the edge of the forest. Reportedly, some of the farmers had spotted Samuel Boateng with Gladys on Friday evening.
So what could have happened? Samuel lured Gladys to the plantain grove and killed her there? Dawson wondered what sort of compelling ruse would have got her to follow him into the forest.
He turned again to the police file and studied the photographs of the body and the surroundings in which it had been found. Strangled to death in that pretty blue and white outfit adorned with little Adinkra symbols. Dawson tilted his head, and then turned the photograph ninety degrees clockwise. There was something too neat about the way Gladys was lying. In his mind he saw the violent struggle until she was finally still. As Dr. Biney had said, strangling another person to death is not that easy. Then the murderer dragged her to lie beside this palm tree. Did he rearrange her clothing-make it neat, rest her arms by her sides? Undoing, it was called. Dawson preferred his own term: killer’s remorse. You’ve just murdered your spouse or parent or child, and now you’re trying to reverse it by making everything nice and pretty.
Dawson looked up at a knock on the door. He crossed the floor in three steps and opened the door to find a magnificent woman dressed in shimmering, swirling white, with a matching headdress. A white outfit in dusty Ketanu? Next to her, dwarfed by her size and splendid appearance, was a fortyish man with a vanishingly thin body and large head.
“Morning, morning,” the woman said.
“Good morning.”
“Are you Detective Inspector Dawson?”
“I am.”
She thrust out her hand. “I’m Elizabeth, Gladys Mensah’s aunt.”
She had a firm grip, but her palm was butter smooth.
“This is my nephew Charles, Gladys’s brother.”
Dawson shook hands with him as well and invited them both in. He watched Elizabeth as they entered. She looked to be in her early fifties. She was tall and plentifully built, and held her chin at just the right angle to give her carriage a regal air.
“Please have a seat,” Dawson said. “Apologies for the lack of space.”
“Quite all right, Mr. Dawson,” Elizabeth said, casting a quick look around the room. “It’s not your fault the Ministry of Health is so stingy with their accommodations. They could have done better.”
Dawson smiled at the sharpness of the criticism. Elizabeth took the chair, and Dawson and Charles sat on a bed each.
“We heard yesterday that you had arrived in Ketanu to investigate my niece’s death,” she said, “and we wanted to talk to you as soon as possible.”
Her voice had the texture of rich, warm velvet.
“First of all, my condolences,” Dawson said. “I know this isn’t easy.”
“Thank you,” Charles said softly. He was despondent, his shoulders slumped. “I still can’t believe it happened. I keep thinking it’s a nightmare I’m walking through, and on the other side of it, Gladys will be there with her smile and her laugh and her cleverness.”
“Yes,” Dawson said. “I know that feeling well.” And he did. “When you say her smile and her laugh and her cleverness, I begin to get a picture of her personality, and I’m grateful to you for that because I’ve been wondering what her spirit was like, and who Gladys the woman was.”
Elizabeth’s eyes became soft. “It’s very hard to put into words, Inspector Dawson-even for Charles and me, or any of the family who was close to her. And if you had met her, you would have the same difficulty expressing it.”
“She made you want to be around her,” Charles said. “So magnetic, so full of energy and love, and she gave it out freely for everyone to experience.”
“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.”