“Do you remember where you were on Monday, the seventh of July, the day Charles and Fiona were killed?”
“Again, for the fourth or fifth time,” DeSouza said, as if this questioning was torture, “I am here in my offices every Monday from morning till early evening. Every Monday night, I prepare for the IT class I teach at Takoradi Tech on Tuesdays. That Tuesday, we had an STMA meeting in the evening. When I got here, it was around five thirty or so, and everyone was there except Fiona. It was unusual for her to be late or absent. We were scheduled to debate the issue of Sekondi-Takoradi city planning in response to the influx of people into the area. We even had the director of the Ghana Tourist Board present as well.”
DeSouza’s phone rang, and he snatched it up, listened for a second, and then told the person on the line that he’d call him back. “So, yes-what was I saying?”
“The meeting,” Dawson prompted him.
“Right-Fiona was very late. We waited a little longer and tried to reach her by phone, but after about fifteen minutes or so, I offered to chair the meeting and we went ahead. About an hour later, one of the STMA members got a phone call from his wife, who works at the Effia-Nkwanta hospital, saying that Fiona and her husband were dead.”
“How did your colleagues react?”
DeSouza turned his palms up. “What do you expect? Disbelief. Shock. That doesn’t even sum up the totality of what we felt.”
“At that time, what did you know about the cause of death?”
“No one knew anything. The meeting came to a standstill and everyone was on the phone calling all over the place.”
He stared at his desk for a while, evidently picturing the chaos and shock of that evening.
“Did Fiona have any enemies among the STMA members?” Dawson asked, allowing a pause.
“Not that I know of.” DeSouza pressed his lips together. “I cannot tell you how to do your job, but the likelihood of finding anyone on the STMA with motive enough to kill not only Fiona but her husband as well is very small. Disagreements occurred, yes, but this is entirely normal on a board such as this. In fact, it would have been odd if we didn’t have any divergence of opinion.”
“Thank you, sir. You’ve been very helpful.”
“Do you know what I don’t get, Inspector Dawson?” he said, looking exasperated. “I don’t understand why you don’t target obvious suspects instead of coming here over and over to ask these tedious questions.”
“Obvious suspects like whom?”
