“Along the two long walls were two unmade beds—lairs, more like—where the belongings of the two dead Boers were still scattered about. Beds? They were piles of brushwood tamped down and covered with sheep fleeces. Crawling with lice. Along the northern short wall was a built-in dresser stocked with pots and pans and—an odd nod to civilisation—a Delft-patterned tea set. Chipped and dirty. The second-best set, donated by some Dutch farmer’s wife? In the centre of the room was a large table of scrubbed wood with a strange collection of objects laid out on it. At first glance, I wondered at the startling sight of a Bible sitting next to a bloodstained huntsman’s knife. But my interest in the bad housekeeping faded when, through the shadows, I saw the livid gleam of a dead face. A young man tied to a chair. The eyes in his battered face were still open; he had died in agony. Naked to the waist, his chest was scarred and burned. We’d been on watch outside, overhearing not a quarrel between Boers, but an interrogation session. The two torturers had done their frightful work and left the man for dead, going to the river not to brew a reviving pot of coffee, but to wash the blood and vomit off their clothes and limbs.

“Abel tactfully closed the door behind us. ‘No need for young Syd to see this,’ he murmured.

“‘No. Let’s see if we can work out what was going on in here,’ I told him. I advanced on the corpse to see if there were any clues to his identity.

“The eyes in the battered face followed my movement.

“After a second’s paralysis, I was by his side, babbling reassurances. ‘Captain Dunne, Her Britannic Majesty’s Yorkshire Light Infantry, sir,’ was the best I could come up with in my state of startled horror. “We’re with the Relief Force. Hang on, we’ll get you out of this. Water, Lieutenant! There’s a jug on the table.’

“We poured the cool water over his head and eased some between his lips. He told me with his eyes he wanted to speak. As gently as I could, I poked the loose and broken teeth from his mouth, and he nodded his thanks.”

The captain fell silent, and Redfyre left him by himself for as long as it took, adrift a quarter of a century in the past in that grim place. Finally, he said simply, “His last word on this earth was: ‘boot.’ Then his head drooped sideways and he died. Of his injuries, mainly loss of blood assisted by sustained shock to the system. Oh, how often I’ve wished he’d not had the strength to utter that! If he’d just kept his poor wounded mouth shut, none of this . . .”