In the office she sifted through letters of support from friends and neighbours, answering several of them and paying urgent bills. An account of the raid had been in the newspapers, and she read the clippings and filed them away. Then she unpacked and made her way to the sitting room where she found Piet waiting for her. She sat down and tried to make conversation with him, talking incessantly about the chores she would take care of on the following day, clutching her glass in tight fingers, trying to ignore the gun that lay on the table beside her armchair and the rifle standing up against the wall. The doors leading out on to the verandah were locked, and the accustomed sounds and scent of evening no longer drifted into the room. It was claustrophobic. Around her there were gaping spaces where Lottie’s pictures and ornaments had stood, and they seemed to Hannah like empty eye sockets.

‘The police will be back in the morning,’ Piet said. ‘Jeremy Hardy wants to go through everything with us. The staff have all been questioned now. He’s still banking on the idea that it was someone with a grudge, or radical political ideas.’

‘This can’t be any of our regular watu,’ Hannah protested. ‘It has to be some madman, passing through. Everyone is afraid. I can feel it. Simon is terrified they’ll come back for another round, and he’s not the only one. I wouldn’t be surprised if he leaves.’

He had been hit across the head as he tried to take a vehicle and go for help. For some time he had lain unconscious, locked into the office. But he had come around, and when the first shot was fired he had used a heavy paperweight to break the glass in the French windows leading out to the verandah. His hands were cut and bleeding and he had twisted his ankle as he ran to the vehicle. Since that treacherous night he had barely spoken a word, and his normally cheerful face was grey with apprehension.

‘Han, I know this is hard,’ Piet said, hunkering down beside his sister. He knew that she was trying to disguise her fear, but he had seen the way she jumped at the slightest noise, how her eyes darted back and forth from the door to the window in the sitting room, how she hung on to the arms of her chair and made sure that she was not sitting with her back to the kitchen entrance. ‘Let’s ring Ma now. It would be good to talk to her.’

‘Look, I’m sorry. We have to get through this, and I’m making a fool of myself,’ she said, ashamed of her weakness. ‘Don’t pay any attention to me. It’s my first night home and I have to get used to the fact that a terrible thing happened, but it won’t ever happen again. I have to find a way to put it out of my mind.’ She stopped, realising that he was trying to tell her something. ‘What did you say?’