Maybe I am one who needs all the dots joining together.

Until last Sunday, I thought that the grief and outrage at Daphne Caruana Galizia’s gruesome murder was, should have been, the paramount emotion in those who went to Valletta to protest.

However, it seems that there were others who moved on from this prevalent feeling to attack and decry Mr Bumble, aka the Commissioner of Police, who made a significant mess (apart from doing it rather late in the day) of his crime conference. OK, there was some correlation between the Commissioner and Daphne’s murder, but then to attack the entire Police Corps, again, with some relevance to the murder…

And then to conclude that Malta is a Mafia country? Where and how can Daphne’s murder justify this claim? Some may link her murder to what she had just written on her blog but the bomb plot was so elaborate it must have needed months and huge sums to prepare.

There are huge forces involved in this murder, that is now clear. It is easy to draw up your own hypothesis and plot from some of the things Daphne wrote. Sometimes, to read them now knowing what we know about the murder, the posts become a sort of premonition.

The investigators have been extra cautious: they are not even confirming that the explosive used was Semtex. One would have thought the conjunction between outrage at the murder and the loss of a figure of national standing would have been the utmost in people’s minds on Sunday.

But there were those who wanted to go further than ‘just’ protest at the outrage. Maybe the choice of speakers and what they said at the protest had something to do with it. The fact remains that, at the end of the national protest, a section of the crowd organised a second protest outside Police HQ, a protest that was more targeted than the first one, a protest directed at the Police Commissioner and at the police in general.

I would not say the death of Daphne was forgotten, but the focus had changed.

Then Occupy Castile took place. The women who camped outside the Auberge were (are) a new movement on the Maltese scene. Some of them had also been at the Sunday protest, but not all. The fact that they courageously came together to hold their symbolic action makes them, in a way, a reincarnation of Daphne’s courage.

They did not flinch when they were photographed at a close distance at close proximity by people from the Office of the Prime Minister. Nor when Tony Zarb poured ignominy on himself by calling them tarts – a remark so crass that it led to his abject apology but not before he was criticised by the Prime Minister himself.

So the focus, in a way, moved again from Daphne to the Occupy team to Tony Zarb. And Daphne isn’t buried yet.

I feel that, after death, especially such a cruel death, the personality keeps moving and changing. This, I believe, is a natural process, which we can discern in other personalities after their deaths. The Daphne that was honoured at the European Parliament, for instance, was a very different Daphne from the one we knew. The EP Daphne, and the one at Castille, was a very courageous woman who battled against corruption up to the very end. People in Malta, especially those who found themselves a target of her barbs, remember her differently. The Daphne that will get traction in the future, not just abroad but here too, will be the courageous Daphne, not the Daphne with the catty remarks.

Obviously, Labour will object and remember the latter Daphne, not the former. There is a big difference: the icon of courage Daphne is the one who was killed. The Daphne ‘with barbs’ is not the one who was killed – unless it transpires that she was killed by one of her targets.

Maybe it will be found that this is what happened: she was killed not because of something she had not revealed so far but rather because of something she had already said: a terrible vengeance for words that she wrote. If that is the case, the reason for her murder lies buried in the millions of words she wrote, the thousands of posts she put up.

It is important for her words, all of them, to be preserved and later studied, analysed and dissected. Together, they constitute a unique document, a description of our times like no other. She had her pet subjects, her pet targets, no doubt her blind spots too. But she was unwavering in her search for what was right and what was crooked. We await the resolution of the many outstanding libel cases against her, although she will not be there to defend herself.

Meanwhile, with all due respect to Daphne, life goes on. The Prime Minister has been around the world and at the EU Council but he still has to face tomorrow’s debate in the House and Daphne’s funeral after that. The Leader of the Opposition has troubles of his own and now has to face the new political force that is the ‘Occupy women’.

Daphne did not plan her death but we can now see that her whole life was leading to her death. Those who thought that, by silencing her, everything would fall silent can now see that, on the contrary, protest against corruption – Daphne’s lifelong quest – has not been silenced at all. Daphne is alive and perhaps even more dangerous than she was when she walked this Earth.

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