It did not take long. The man on whose word all those around him were hanging was not the largest in the group, but he stood out to Benjamin like a professor on a ward round, surrounded by medical students. Even when some of those students were giant rugby players, the professor was always the boss.

Yes, that is him, Benjamin thought, nestling the rifle against his shoulder and looking through the sights. He thought of all the times he’d gone hunting as a guest of the Courtneys. He had found it hard enough to kill animals. But to kill another human being was immeasurably worse. It went against his principles, his training, even the Hippocratic Oath.

‘First do no harm,’ the oath demanded.

But Kabaya was surely the one doing that.

You’re just cutting out a cancer, Benjamin told himself. He calmed his breathing, let his pulse drop as low as the adrenaline in his system would allow . . . and squeezed the trigger.

Kungu Kabaya had observed the effects of the skirmishing that had taken place in what seemed like the eternity since he had ordered the trucks to advance upon the house. Yet when he glanced at his watch, he saw that barely ten minutes had passed. In that time, the regular messages he was getting from the front lines told him his men had reduced the number of white adults from nine to five, and whittled away at the black servants, too.

More importantly, each of the attacks had obliged the house’s defenders to use up ammunition. De Lancey had warned him that Mbogo had as fine an armoury as any man in Kenya. But even he was not equipped to fight a full-scale battle. In any case, Mbogo was either dying or dead. The white herd had lost their bull. Now they would be frightened cattle.

Kabaya ordered half the men standing with him by the flame tree copse to go round the back of the house and reinforce the attacks on the kitchen.

Then the man standing next to him suddenly pitched face forward onto the earth. As he lay there, screaming, Kabaya saw the hole that had been punched in the small of his back. He heard the reverberation of a rifle shot, to his left. A single gun, one shooter. Not enough to alter the course of the fight.

Unless the next shot hits me.

‘Run!’ shouted Kabaya. ‘On me! Move, move, move!’

Benjamin swore under his breath. Another man had stepped into his line of fire at the very last second and taken the bullet intended for the leader, who was now running down the copse and onto the drive towards the house, surrounded by his men and getting further from Benjamin with every stride.

Time to find a new shooting position.

Kabaya was used to coming within a whisker of death. In the course of countless firefights, men had fallen all around him, yet he had always emerged unscathed, like a man who can walk through raging flames yet never get burned. He was not alarmed by the experience, but exhilarated.