Lindi could feel the suffocating weight of responsibility bear down on her – followed closely by the inevitable question: ‘Am I up to this?’ She could sense the incipient menace of self-doubt and knew that, if she did not manage to stamp it out, it would overwhelm her. It was like having the walls of a room slowly but surely close in on her, pushing out the air, starving her of oxygen. Over the years she’d learned that the only way to deny its power over her was literally to let the air in. She got up, opened a window, then went to the door and left that ajar to get a draught through the room. It usually worked and it did now. She knew she was dealing only with the symptom and not the deep-seated well of anxiety from which the fear arose but it would have to suffice for the moment.

The correspondent had come to Comfort’s desk; Lindi could hear her unmistakable voice but not see her.

‘London says the World Service has run an interview with an eyewitness to last night’s attacks. Get someone here to track it down, find out who it was and let me know. Maybe we can take the guy into the squatter camp and do a walkie-talkie with him – that’ll keep the News Channel happy for a bit and we can concentrate on Ten.’

‘It must have been Julius who did the interview. He’s been in Nelspruit since Lesedi’s murder.’

‘Okay. Tell Julius to line him up for me – we should be there just after lunchtime, about two-ish,’ the correspondent said. ‘By the way, who’s the visitor?’

‘You remember Robert told us to hire out that room to someone from South Trust? That’s her.’

‘Oh, so that’s Whitaker’s Oxford totty. He sent me her CV. Well, she’ll need more than her friggin’ master’s in African development or whatever to sort this lot out. And all those beads and bangles. Very ethnic, right up Whitaker’s street. Is Tito here?’

‘He’s in the car park. He’s in a terrible mood.’

‘Well, that’s hardly breaking news! See you when I see you.’

As she listened to the conversation, a grim determination replaced the anxiety that had enveloped Lindi just a few minutes earlier. How bloody typical, that British proclivity to put people into their little boxes. And this from a woman who might have been expected to remember that a generation earlier her own people were being caricatured as garlic-munching, over-populating foreigners. And to think she had defended the correspondent when Anton had made his own snap judgement about her.