As he opened the back door of the car, he heard a pedestrian passing by say, ‘Good luck running the country.’

‘Is everything all right, sir?’ the puzzle-solver asked once Spokes was settled in the back seat – even though it was obvious that everything was not all right.

‘You said she visits her mother once a week. What is her mother’s name?’

The puzzle-solver reached into his breast pocket and retrieved his notepad. Spokes felt every flip of the page.

‘Mother’s name? Mother’s name? Here it is … Mrs Prudence Findlay,’ the puzzle-solver said.

Spokes had held on to the hope that he was wrong until the very last.

‘You’ve solved it, haven’t you, sir?’ the comic-reader said in absolute awe.

‘I’m afraid I have,’ Spokes said.

Saskia

SASKIA

Ever since writing Emil Coetzee’s obituary, Saskia had felt perpetually tired. It was the secrets … the secrets and their weight … the secrets and their weight, and her having to be the one to carry them. She found her mother sitting in her room looking quizzically at the painting of yet another sunset, as though genuinely surprised that she could have created something so exquisite.

Feeling a fatigue that was beyond exhaustion, Saskia, instead of standing as far away from her mother as she could, sat down next to her. It was their first closeness in months. Her mother looked at her with a weak but hopeful smile. When Saskia did not move away, her mother tentatively took her daughter’s hands in hers. Saskia stifled a sneeze, affected, as always, by her mother’s presence.

‘Sassie dear … I am worried about you,’ her mother said. ‘I do so hope that all is forgiven?’

Her mother made it impossible to be forgiven. ‘You are worried about me now?’ Saskia asked as she disengaged her hands from her mother’s. She tried to keep her voice calm, but could not as she stood up and went to stand by the wall. ‘It is definitely too late for that. You should have worried about me when I was fifteen – when your husband started climbing into your daughter’s bed at night.’

‘I didn’t know …’ her mother said, beginning to rock her body back and forth.

‘Don’t even start. You knew because I told you after the very first time it happened, and you told me he would never do such a thing. You chose not to believe me.’

‘He was your father—’

‘He was not my father. He explained that to me the first time he climbed into my bed. He told me that he was not my father, and that that was why he could do it.’

‘Please, Sassie … let us let the past be the past.’