Priscilla Motlantshe had not gone to sleep on the night after the funeral. She’d left her husband, drunk and dead to the world, and gone upstairs to Lesedi’s room. She’d stayed there, lying on his bed, clutching his pillow. She had gone through her last conversation with him over and over again. It was as if she were trying to fashion a different ending, like a storyteller wanting to leave her audience feeling happy and wholesome.

If only she’d done something different at the time. She could have confronted Jake Willemse. Or told Josiah everything when she’d called him and asked him to come back to South Africa. Could she really have prevented his … She could barely bring herself to acknowledge what had happened. Immediately after Lesedi’s death, and before the funeral, her friends had told her not to read the papers or go to the websites that were reporting the details. But the visions kept crashing in. They had invaded her mind, filling it with horror and doubt. In the end she had persuaded one of her relatives to tell her what had happened. Even that sanitised version had left her gasping, drowning in a tide of pain that she felt as keenly as if the wounds had been inflicted on her own body. She’d barely eaten anything since then, nibbling at food when the girls had had their meals.

At the funeral she’d had a sensation that she wasn’t really there. She’d gone through the motions and emotions without being conscious of what she was doing. She’d felt as if she was on a different plain, in a state of emotional limbo, somewhere between life and death. And then, when Josiah had announced his business plans, it had been like a shot of adrenaline: she had been catapulted back into the real world.

That had been two days earlier. Now Priscilla Motlantshe was alone in the house, except for the staff. She sat on the edge of the vast bed that she and her husband used but no longer shared. Not for the first time, she reminisced about how much simpler, more intimate, their lives had been when all they could afford was a mattress on the floor.

The girls had gone back to school, their first day since their brother had been killed. The head teacher at the American International School, where the children of South Africa’s burgeoning middle class and the offspring of the country’s growing expatriate population came together, had assured her that the school counsellor would be on hand to help them through what would be a difficult few weeks. Before he’d left, Josiah had said, rather grandly, that they could take as much time off school as they wanted. Priscilla had let it pass. She knew different. She knew that routine would bring its own comfort.