But the murder of Lesedi Motlantshe changed everything. No more squeamishness about being accused of interfering in South Africa. To Anton’s febrile mind, Lesedi’s death was not an isolated and untimely killing but the latest and most chilling act of violence among the many he’d been monitoring in Mpumalanga Province.

For some months now there’d been a number of apparently inexplicable and largely unreported attacks on farms in the province. Until now, no one had been killed and nothing was ever taken. Hardly the stuff of headlines. But time and again farm property or equipment would be damaged. On one farm the tractors’ tyres had been slashed. Somewhere else an experimental crop of mielies was hacked down. In another place an intruder had disabled the computerised timer on an irrigation system. Elsewhere a dam had been blown up.

All the incidents had been chronicled in a blog, under the name of the Land Collective. Anton couldn’t remember when he’d first come across the site, but once he had, it had become compelling reading. Every instalment drew attention to the fact that the farm in question had been sold or was about to be sold. Far from being random acts of vandalism, the incidents were brought together in a single narrative. Yet, as far as Anton could make out, the authorities chose to treat each one separately: to acknowledge a link – even behind closed doors – would be to accept that the post-apartheid consensus was breaking up and the political hegemony of the ruling party was being eroded.

Much to Anton’s private satisfaction, the Land Collective had been highlighting something that had long been on his own mind. Anton had always believed that land ownership would become an issue in South Africa, just as it had been in other countries where colonial settlers had carved up the best land and parcelled it up among themselves. Each nation had dealt with it differently. In Kenya white mischief was met with black rebellion; in the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique, Soviet-backed revolutionary movements had nationalised the land at a single stroke of a Communist pen; and in Zimbabwe a desperate Robert Mugabe had let loose his thugs in a populist move to shore up his faltering hold on power. Anton wasn’t sure how it would pan out in South Africa, but he believed there would be a day of reckoning before long.

He went back to the website, picking through previous statements about various incidents on farms, hoping to find a clue as to why Lesedi had been murdered. Nothing. Not even a hint that revolutionary inflation might account for sabotage turning into assassination.