Vida had no idea how long he stood in that alleyway with his back pressed against the wall. A few minutes? An hour? A lifetime? All he knew was that it seemed to take forever for fear to leave him and allow him to exit the shadows and venture onto the well-lit streets. It was not that he was no longer apprehensive and suddenly courageous; it was that the body and the mind can only hold onto fear for so long. His heart was still pounding as he left what he soon learned was the alleyway next to Downing’s Bakery. What if she was lying in wait for him? Even as he thought this thought, he crossed the street and headed towards where he had heard the three gunshots coming from. He wished other people were out and about so that someone else could come across whatever crime had taken place. But there was no one else. There was just him on this lonely night. The moment had chosen him, of all people, to bear witness.

He thought he remembered seeing the silhouette of a man fall, but he could no longer be sure. He could not be sure of anything, to be honest. He had had six bottles of Castle Lager and a rather potent blunt – a perfect way to end a bloody year. That he still remembered his name – Vida de Villiers – was the real mystery here. He probably had imagined, no, hallucinated it all.

Just as he was beginning to convince himself of the implausibility of it all, there appeared before him the shape of something under one of the in-bloom trees that surrounded the City Hall. Vida made his way to it. If the woman was still somewhere close by and still waiting to shoot him, she would have done so already, he reasoned as he finished crossing Selborne Avenue. He marvelled at how very quiet, almost peaceful, a street that was always bustling during the day could actually be.

When he looked down at the shape of something, it was a man looking up at him with dead eyes. Vida had seen men with dead eyes before, so that was not what caused the terrified sound which escaped his mouth. What made him scream was the fact that looking up at him with dead eyes was Emil Coetzee, Everleigh’s father – the man who, not so long ago, had driven past Flat 2A without looking at it, and, in so doing, determined Vida’s future. If only fear had not captured Vida’s heart and rendered him immobile, perhaps he would have been able to get to Emil Coetzee in time to save him in some way. Even though Vida was not sure that the man who had refused to look up at Flat 2A was deserving of salvation, he knew that he would have tried to save him because he was Everleigh’s father.