It was during the first summer of the pandemic when one of my mother’s friends said that I should probably speak to Steve. I had spent the previous four months interviewing lawyers, politicians, investigators, and criminals for a book that wasn’t meant to be just about the assassination of my mother, Daphne. It was meant to be about her life as Malta’s most famous journalist.
The personal part is what I found hardest to cover. The details of her death, and its alleged link to a corrupt public contract worth more than a billion dollars, were heard in open court, across three sets of criminal proceedings, two of which are still ongoing, in a public inquiry, and in countless civil cases. But her life before the car bombing that killed her six years ago had been elided. I thought I’d just sit at my desk, summon my memories of her, and write them down: how she’d take me and my two older brothers to the beach after school, how she was with my father, and how she’d play Bob Marley, loudly and on repeat.
