The assembled squatters were marched to the spot where their two friends’ remains were buried. Kabaya set them to work exhuming the bodies. In the light of flickering torches made from bundled twigs, every man, woman and child was made to remove at least some of the earth, so that none could later deny that they had taken part.

The weather had been hot, with periods of blazing sunshine interspersed with torrential downpours. The bodies had been decomposing fast. The sight and smell of the two corpses was enough to turn the strongest stomach. People were retching, holding their hands to their mouths and noses, or vomiting on the ground beneath their feet. A handful fainted and collapsed unconscious, looking like dead bodies themselves.

Kabaya wanted the bodies destroyed. He lined the squatters up. One after another, they had to step up to the place where the exhumed, putrefying bodies lay.

One of Kabaya’s men handed each a machete. They were ordered to hack off a piece of the body in front of them: a toe, a fingertip, an ear, a slice of fat and skin, or a chunk of jellified meat. Next, they were told to pick up the stinking, festering morsel that they had carved and press it to their mouths, like some Devil’s communion wafer.

‘Break your vow of silence and your flesh will be corrupted like that,’ Kabaya told the squatters.

The fragments of Joseph’s and Mary’s desecrated bodies were gathered up and taken to a nearby patch of woodland, where they were scattered as carrion for animals, birds and insects. Within a few days, there was no trace of Kabaya’s victims to be found. Without bodies to prove death there could be no case against him. He could rest easy.

The squatters had no doubt that Kabaya would not hesitate to kill and torture again. No one told the full story of what had happened to anyone who might report it to the police. But human beings cannot help but talk among themselves. Stories spread, even if no more than vague, nightmarish rumours.

For many months there had been talk in the native and colonist populations about bizarre ceremonials at which terrible oaths were sworn. These were embroidered with further tales, often magnified and distorted in the telling, of ritual killings and cannibalism.

The men responsible for these terrible things called themselves muhimu, ‘the important ones’.

But the white settlers had a different name for the rebels. They called them the Mau Mau.