Lesedi Motlantshe’s murder had made the BBC’s News at Ten the previous night, breaking news. It was only a brief mention about a member of one of South Africa’s most prominent families being found dead shortly after visiting a group campaigning for land reform. The report said South African police had launched an investigation and were questioning a number of Mozambican migrant workers. Lindi had phoned Anton straight away. They’d argued about how, even whether, South Trust should respond. He said he was sure the murder was mixed up with the land thing; she argued back, said they should wait till they had some proof. They’d agreed to talk it over in the office in the morning. Anton hadn’t said anything about having had a request for an interview. It was still too early to call him, not if she wanted any sense out of him.

And Missenden, what was he up to? His call had unsettled her, not only because of what he’d said, his ‘warning’, but because of the memories it had brought back. Lindi Seaton thought she’d left all that behind.

Missenden had been her line manager in what she now regarded as a previous life. That was in the days when she was a junior diplomat at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, a position she owed to her fast-track appointment straight out of university. Because of her family’s links to South Africa, Lindi had been asked to prepare a draft paper on what South Africa might look like post-Nelson Mandela. Among other things, her report contained the memorable, if dramatic, assessment that if land ownership became an issue, the ensuing agitation would ‘make what happened in Zimbabwe look like a picnic’.

She’d argued that apartheid’s legacy of white ownership might be eclipsed by the more recent land purchases: everyone from Gulf sheikhs, Chinese government agencies and private-equity magnates, many of them based in London, had been at it. Whether justified or not, she’d said the British government would be dragged into the affair, held responsible for the actions of ‘land-grabbers’ based in its own jurisdiction.

It had taken Missenden all of a couple of minutes to give his verdict on Lindi’s report. ‘Shrill’ – that was how he’d described it. In the following weeks, what was supposed to be a draft for Missenden’s eyes became a water-cooler topic in the Africa department. The general assessment among her colleagues, doubtless egged on by Missenden, was that, despite her impeccable credentials – starting with a degree from an ancient university – she had, somehow, missed the point. In an era when the prime purpose of British missions abroad was to boost trade and investment, her report was deemed wrongheaded and unhelpful. A transfer to an unspecified role in HR followed. Some months later she walked out of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, carrying few reminders of her brief career in diplomacy and her self-confidence in tatters.