So now, despite her perennial irritation over Anton’s impetuosity, she rather hoped he was right. It had been a long time coming but she savoured the thought of an I-told-you-so moment. It would be in stark contrast to her prevailing mood since leaving the British diplomatic service – a dead weight of regret at having failed to stand her ground and fight. Her failure to do so had played into a private and punishing evaluation of her own worth.

It was a self-deprecating assessment at odds with how others perceived her. Lindi Seaton stood out from the crowd. If you met her once, you were unlikely to forget her: it was the intensity with which she seemed to relate to other people. Never wholly comfortable in front of a crowd, she came into her own one on one. She had the right question at the right moment. It was a reflex, a way of coping with the awkwardness she always felt when she met someone for the first time. There was an apparent intimacy, which Lindi did not intend and from which she would all too often have to extricate herself. It was a characteristic many loved her for. Clive Missenden, however, was not among them.

Lindi gathered her work things, looked out of the window, decided she would not need her waterproofs, and manoeuvred her bike through the front door of her ground-floor flat.

4

Lindi arrived at South Trust’s King’s Cross offices, a converted Victorian warehouse now hosting architects, tech start-ups and a firm of human-rights lawyers. No sign of Anton Chetty. On this day, of all days, you’d have thought he’d manage to get into the office on time. She knew where to find him, but she also knew that to search him out would be more trouble than it was worth, a cue for one of his now familiar rants about not needing a nanny.

True to form, Anton was in his usual spot at the café down the road. He always claimed his best work was done there, in the coffee house, at the table in the front corner by the full-length window.

Now living in London, Anton still took more than a passing interest in South Africa. He’d been born there, grown up there, and had even been jailed there. For him, the personal had always overlapped with the professional. He was the charismatic, if shambolic, director of South Trust, which was generally regarded as the most effective outfit involved in conflict resolution outside the United Nations. Most of its work was in poor countries, almost all of which were in the southern hemisphere. ‘Local solutions for local problems’ – that was its tag line. Independently funded and staffed by men and women whose hands-on, real-time decision-making was the antithesis of the committee-ridden structures of conventional diplomacy, South Trust had negotiated deals in places where others feared to tread. It had no official or statutory powers but plenty of influence.