DESHEN SC: I hate to play the devil’s advocate here, but could you not have waited it out? The property market has recovered well in the last year, after all.

DAVID LURIE: Look, I suppose I could have, but Your Ladyship must understand that I was getting impatient. I had lived in that farmhouse for nearly twenty-five years. I didn’t know if the property market would ever recover enough for me to get a decent amount of money for the house. And I’d been faithfully paying my insurance premiums for all that time. Was it really so unreasonable of me to want something back?

MKHWANE J: Insurance companies! Don’t get me started. They are the worst. You pay and pay and pay for years, but as soon as you want them to pay you, they have a thousand reasons not to.

DAVID LURIE: Exactly, M’Lady. It occurred to me that the house was worth more on paper than it was on the market, and that the quickest way for me to access that money was via my insurance policy.

DESHEN SC: Mr. Lurie, it is my duty as an officer of this court to remind you at this time that you have accepted a deal from the prosecution whereby you will testify fully and frankly to the events of the night in question in return for leniency with regard to insurance fraud. Do you understand the terms of this arrangement?

DAVID LURIE: I do.

DESHEN SC: You have testified by affidavit to the fact that you hired these men to set fire to your farmhouse so that you could claim the insurance money on it. But now the court needs to know why you also asked them to rape your daughter. It seems extraneous. Did you have a grudge against her?

DAVID LURIE: Goodness, no, M’Lady. Not at all. I have no objection in the world to the girl. It was just for authenticity. It had to look like a real break-in, you see, but I didn’t want them to steal anything of real value. I was going to take the valuables—the electronics, a few bits of jewellery—out with me in a backpack, and everything else was supposed to burn in the fire. So what could the motivation for the break-in be if not robbery? I immediately thought of rape. My daughter is an attractive girl, or at least she was. You might not think so to look at her now, but she used to be pretty. No one would question that as a motive. They broke in to rape her. It made sense.

DESHEN SC: Forgive me, Mr. Lurie, but I have to ask. Did you have no qualms about making this decision? Did it not trouble you to think about the ordeal your daughter would undergo?