“The drugs that I put in that bottle were very strong. They killed a lady who took them. It was because of what I did.

“They were very cross when this lady died. They found the bottle with the wrong drugs in it and they asked who had put them in there. The pharmacist said that he had passed the right drugs to me to put in and that I must have disobeyed him. He was very frightened because he thought that they would blame him. He was just a junior person, a foreigner who used to work there, and who has gone now. So he lied. I heard him lying and I shouted out that what he said was not true. So they asked him again and he said that he remembered that morning very well and he remembered giving me the right drugs, and that there were no other pills around at the time. That was not true. There were many containers of pills and he should have realised that I might misunderstand his instructions.

“That evening when I went home I sat at my place and said nothing. I could not speak. My wife tried to comfort me. She said that it was not my fault that somebody had died and that what had happened was a true accident, like a dog running across the road or a plate falling off the table. But I could not even hear her words very well because my heart was cold, cold within me, and I knew that I would lose my job. How would we get anything to eat if I had no job? My father was late now and I could not go back to his place. We would be finished.

“I had no idea then how much worse things would be. It was only a few weeks later, after the police had spoken to me three or four times, that they told me that they were going to charge me with culpable homicide. That’s what they called it. They said that it was culpable homicide to do something so careless that another person died. I could not believe that they would blame me so much, but the family of the lady who died were making a very big fuss about this and they kept asking the police when the man who had killed their mother would be punished for what he had done.