Sarah could see them in the distance, sitting stiffly on opposite sides of the table. She began to pray silently. ‘Don’t let her mess this up. Don’t let him refuse her. Please God, let one good thing come out of all this. Please! Don’t let him walk away.’

Twenty minutes passed before Hannah came out to the car, her face pale, her eyes red.

‘Han? Are you all right?’ Sarah’s heart plummeted.

‘I told him all of it, as you said. I asked him, even so, to take over the farm. I told him I needed him, said I was sorry for everything that had happened. And he said he would come on a trial basis. For a few months. To see if it can possibly work. He wants to live in the cottage where Mike is now. Not in the house like before. But he will come back. He says we should join him for tea.’

On the night that Lars returned to Langani, Sarah slept for the first time. In the morning she knew that she could now return to Buffalo Springs. She could watch her elephants move across the arid beauty of the northern landscape, following the tracks through the thorny scrub, in a deliberate procession towards the blue of distant mountains. Here at the farm there would be no peace until Simon was found and brought to justice, and she could not hasten the process. She looked up at the glass-blue sky, digging into her dwindling reserves of courage before she could undertake what she had decided to do.

‘I’ll be out for most of the day,’ she said to Mwangi. ‘Tell Memsahib Hannah that I’ll see her this evening.’

Her hands were shaky as she started the car and made her way down the driveway from the house. The track had not been used in a while and occasional rain had created a jigsaw of cracks on its surface and crumbled the edges, so that the wheels spat sand and pebbles as the car whined its way up the hill. Branches scraped at the doors, and the screech of thorns on the paintwork set her teeth on edge. At the top of the trail she parked the car and set off on foot, panting a little from the steep climb and the heedless omnipotence of the sun. At the top of the ridge she came to a halt, wiping the sweat from her forehead, looking out across cloud-dappled plains.