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go with her?” she asked Ali.
    He was silent for a moment, clearly willing his father to answer for him. Finally, grudgingly, he nodded. “I have a motorbike,” he mumbled.
    â€œDid you go during the performance?”
    He was very still for a moment. “Of course,” he said shortly. “She liked watching it.”
    â€œDid she see Ghani? I mean, did both of you see him?”
    Ali glared at her, not knowing what to answer. “Well, she must have,” his father came to his aid. “She went to see him.”
    â€œCould she see him while they were performing?” Rubiah asked innocently.
    Ali gave her a look of pure hatred. “Sure. She looked in the back of the panggung.”
    â€œDid you go with her?”
    â€œNo, I went to drink some coffee. I didn’t need to see him.”
    â€œWouldn’t it be easier to see him after the performance was over?” Rubiah asked.
    All three stared daggers at her, but no one said a word. “I mean, if she wanted to talk to him, surely it would be easier …” She seemed to run out of steam.
    Ramli stood up. “Thank you so much for coming here to see us,” he said. “You probably want to go home to make dinner and see your families, and we wouldn’t want to keep you. You are very kind to look into this and bring the killer to justice, and we thank you for all that you are doing.”
    This formal speech announced their departure: in the nicest possible way, they were being thrown out. Maryam and Rubiah smiled as best they could and thanked Azizah for her hospitality. They backed off the porch and walked quickly over the pot-holed path to the only slightly less pitted main road to find a taxi to take them home.

Chapter VI
    Have you ever thought about taking a second wife?” Maryam asked Mamat as they readied for bed.
    He laughed. “Don’t I have enough to deal with now? How could I possibly deal with another wife?”
    â€œNo, really,” she said seriously. Although Maryam had no mean opinion about her own looks, especially when she was younger, Mamat had always been remarkably good-looking. Girls would turn to look at him as he walked down the kampong lanes coming home from school, and more than one of her friends had confessed a serious crush before her engagement was announced.
    Mamat, unlike Ghani, didn’t take much advantage of it as a boy; he was a sober youth with a great deal of responsibility. His father, a law clerk, had fallen into drink and gambled away the family’s rice lands. His mother was a songket weaver, but found it difficult to support all nine of her children when her husband not only brought in very little money, but lost all they had at the mah jong table. As the eldest, Mamat went to work early to support the family and helped raise all his younger siblings. He’d won awards in grammar school, but couldn’t afford to go on to high school and settled quickly into an early adulthood.
    Maryam occasionally worried he would want to relive his youthnow that he had some time to relax. He was still, she believed, a very handsome man, even with his hair turning gray. Sometimes she’d see him walking into the pasar besar and she’d lose her breath and blush like a girl to see her husband of over thirty years. What if some younger woman took a shine to him, and chased him? Would he be able to resist, or would he take whatever he found on offer? She’d certainly thought about it before, but her full day hearing about the tragedy Ghani had brought upon himself made the possibility seem all the more real.
    â€œ Sayang , what’s bothering you?” he asked her, putting his arm around her shoulder. She shook off her thoughts.
    â€œI’m just worried. I’ve seen what happened here with him taking a second wife, and I sometimes wonder whether you’ll want to do that: I mean, you know, you had to work so hard as a kid, will you want to