Anton had arranged for Lindi to rent a spare room at the BBC office in downtown Johannesburg, South Africa’s commercial heartland – the kind of city that says to the capital, the seat of government, ‘You can have the politics, I’ll take the money.’ Anton’s habitual disdain for journalists, and foreign correspondents in particular, did not extend to the World Service, the BBC’s international radio station. It recruited many of its broadcasters locally, and the editors back in London were men and women steeped in the affairs of the region they were reporting on.

‘You couldn’t have them on the News at Six, could you?’ Anton would ask rhetorically. ‘I mean, they actually know what they’re talking about.’

The Africa editor at the World Service’s headquarters in London’s Portland Place – a legendary figure whose love for Africa seemed to have grown, inexplicably, with every new and brutal war he’d covered – was an old friend of Anton’s and the two had come to an informal arrangement. It was the kind of you-scratch-mine-and-I’ll-scratch-yours deal that underpinned many a story.

After Lindi had passed Immigration (she was taken to the front of the queue and the formalities took less than a minute), she turned on her phone to find several messages waiting for her. There was one from her father, and another from Ralph. She ignored them for the time being and scrolled down to one that had been sent from a Johannesburg number. It was from the office manager at the BBC. The woman had said she would be at the airport – despite Lindi’s insistence that she could get a cab – but now apologised that it was turning into a very busy morning and that she’d been asked to go straight to the BBC bureau.

Lindi was glad. She hadn’t been looking forward to having to make small talk on the journey into the city. She looked up from the palm-sized screen and took in her first view of South Africa since she had left the country as a child. She didn’t so much look at it, as breathe it in.

There was a lightness to the air, a welcome contrast to the stale, regurgitated variety she had been inhaling all night on the plane. It wasn’t like one of those old Graham Greene novels in which the protagonists always seemed to be wading through the thick, treacly, cloying heat of a tropical backwater. This was fresh and rarefied, a product of Johannesburg’s position on the highveld, and it imbued everything Lindi looked at with a clarity so at odds with the leaden state of her mind as she’d walked off the plane an hour earlier. It lifted her spirits. Perhaps her mission was going to be all right after all.