The bullet went through the book first; she hadn’t lowered it. Maybe that was the reason there was so little blood, just a small, dark hole in her chest over her heart. When the totos found her, her eyes were open and clear. They said it almost looked as if she was smiling.

Part One

1925–1927

Chapter One

The station was big and crowded with no benches or stalls, just two signs, one reading ‘Mombasa’, and the other ‘Upper-class passengers and luggage’. Most of it was open to the hot November sun and the flies.

After a few minutes I found a porter, and led him back to my family: my father, mopping his forehead, my mother, tapping her foot, and my twelve-year-old sister Maud, melting against the pile of trunks holding books and clothes and everything else that hadn’t been sent on ahead to the new house at Lake Naivasha.

‘There you are, Theo,’ my father said. He waved our tickets and two pennies in front of the porter, ‘Load our luggage into the carriages, there’s a good man.’

‘Yes, Bwana Miller,’ the porter said. He was wearing a thick navy jacket and trousers. As he picked up the first of our trunks I saw he had dark circles under his armpits. He smelled different to the Africans in Tanganyika, less spicy and more sour.

Our carriages were two square compartments with an interconnecting door and mosquito screens attached to the window frames. I sat next to the window on a green-cushioned bench and my mother and Maud sat with me. Smartly dressed train guards checked our tickets and bowed to my father as he strode around the two rooms, explaining little features here and there. My father was an engineer, now Director of the same railway that in 1896 he’d come out to Africa to build.