But perhaps there was someone Lesedi had trusted. The charity worker, the man Lesedi had seen on his last day. Lesedi had been full of admiration for him. She remembered now that she had met him briefly at the funeral. Kagiso, that was his name. Kagiso Rapabane. Now she wished she’d quizzed him more carefully. At the time it had seemed enough to know that she had met someone Lesedi had found for himself, and someone who seemed to respect her son for what, rather than who, he was.

She had to find him. She needed a phone number. Priscilla covered the laptop with a pillow and walked across the upstairs hallway to Lesedi’s room. She looked at the cardboard carton on the desk: it was no bigger than a shoebox. On the lid someone had written ‘Personal Effects’ followed by a number. No name, just a number. The sum total of her son’s life reduced to a standard-issue police box. She hesitated. She hadn’t wanted to open it until now.

Priscilla took the lid off carefully, as if she were dismantling a ticking time bomb. The silver chain and cross, a gift to mark his confirmation, was cold to the touch. What was it doing in here? Why wasn’t he allowed to take it with him? Priscilla imagined rough hands in some dingy police room ripping the chain off her son’s neck. She shivered. There were some coins, his handkerchief, still neatly pressed, his sunglasses, his watch and his car keys. Priscilla looked at the silver fob. She remembered Lesedi getting it made to his design. On one side there was a miniature engraving of the family, on the other an extract from Nelson Mandela’s famous speech from the dock. It was a facsimile of the handwritten document he’d seen in a museum, barely legible to the naked eye but perfect in every detail.

‘It is an ideal for which I have lived. It is an ideal for which I still hope to live and see realised. But if need be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.’

Even Mandela’s corrections were there. Lesedi had had it etched in Germany, a laser-something, he’d said.

But there was no phone.