He said it. She feared it. Never mind that Anton was at his patronising best: what if he was right? In her mind, Lindi reran meeting Kagiso just a few hours earlier. Perhaps she’d been naive. She cringed with embarrassment at her words – He’s like family. Now the words sounded hollow. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t had those doubts herself.

‘What are you suggesting?’ she responded tersely.

‘Something is not right,’ Anton said. ‘Look, if Kagiso’s the champion of the landless, which is what it says on their website, then he’s got to know more about the Land Collective than he’s letting on. Either that or he’s just another naive charity worker who’s out of his depth. I know which one I think is more likely. If he’s serious about land reform, he’s got to know about the Collective. He’s just not sharing it with you.’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘Who knows? But I don’t like it.’

Sharmi Meer had time to kill. She was now what the social workers might call a woman of no fixed abode. Her car wasn’t the only thing she’d abandoned. She’d left her apartment too. She wandered back to Yeoville and to the mechanic’s shop. As she’d hoped – and expected – the car was gone. It was probably replated and repainted by now.

She wasn’t normally sentimental about possessions and she was surprised by the pang of loss she felt as she stared at the kerbside where she had last seen the Beetle. The last thing she’d done before stepping out of the car was check the odometer: more than 150,000 kilometres. Sharmi remembered the journeys, all those kilometres, especially the one back to Johannesburg with Kagiso a couple of days after they’d first met. It was like looking in the rear-view mirror of her life. It had been a journey with such promise, at least that’s what she’d hoped, a journey that might have changed her life. It had done that, all right, but only for the worse.

She’d thought she could walk away from the events of that journey and she very nearly had – that was until she’d met Kagiso again. The sense of betrayal had come flooding back. It had been almost palpable. First the memory of it, then the compulsion to get even.

Now, as Sharmi stood in an outdoor market in Yeoville, absently running her fingers through a rack of embroidered shirts from Ghana, she knew how hooked she was on competing with Kagiso. Their relationship had become increasingly destructive, eating up their time and energy in a clash of wills that served no greater purpose than its own vicious cycle.

But she was free of it now. She’d found a way to have the last word. That would be her next move.