Ahead of him a Mau Mau had leaped onto the top of the cabinet. Leon fired a quick burst and saw the man fall backwards.

Before another attacker could take his place, Leon was already heading in a low, crablike movement towards the door, but keeping his head and gun facing towards the oncoming enemy. He shouted at Dorian, wanting him to retreat as well.

There was no response. Leon darted his head to one side and saw his brother helpless in the grip of a Mau Mau at least a foot taller than him. The man was about to cut Dorian’s throat.

Leon aimed at the Mau Mau’s head.

The Sten was a notoriously crude weapon, infamous for its inaccuracy and unreliability. Leon was attempting a surgically precise shot in low visibility. He took aim as quickly as he could, then fired.

The Mau Mau’s face disintegrated, like a watermelon hit by a sledgehammer. He fell backwards, letting go of Dorian’s hair. The panga clattered to the floor.

Dorian picked it up and ran like hell.

Leon had barely taken two seconds to kill Dorian’s attacker, but that was a lifetime in a gunfight.

He had been distracted from the danger in front of him and, as he turned towards the oncoming Mau Mau, he was hit by a sudden pulverising blow to his upper left arm.

Before the pain of the wound had hit him, Leon had registered that he had been hit, seen his arm fall away from its grip on the Sten’s magazine and fired one-handed towards the enemy.

He staggered backwards for a couple of steps and then, as the screaming agony of his shattered bones and minced flesh hit him, forced himself to concentrate on the task in hand.

Somehow, anyhow, he had to get out of the garden room.

Gerhard had been crouched by the bedroom window, waiting for the sound of gunfire that would tell him that the battle at the front of the house had shifted from stalemate to action once again. Then he heard Sophie’s desperate cry for help.

He did not want to desert his post. But this was not where the immediate danger lay. The threat was coming from the flanks. That was where he was needed. He slung his rifle over his shoulder, picked up the shotgun and ran for the stairs.

All the way down Gerhard could hear shooting coming from the garden room. Sophie watched him as he came down. He could see her mouth ‘Thank God,’ then she turned away as the door to the garden room opened again and Dorian stumbled into the hall.

Gerhard was in the hall.

Dorian shouted, ‘Leon’s still in there!’

Gerhard didn’t stop moving. He kicked the door to the garden room open and stepped through it.

Leon was trying to fend off at least six advancing Mau Mau. Almost all of them were brandishing pangas; only one had a rifle in his hands.