Livid, Rutherford made for her throat, but she pulled away just in time and scrambled off the bed. He leapt up and knocked Saskia to the ground. There were stars in her eyes and blood in her mouth – she could both taste and smell it. He placed his entire weight on her and pinned both her hands above her head. Saskia did not put up much of a struggle. Not yet. She had been in this position many times before. She knew how to bide her time.

Rutherford looked at her long and hard before spitting on her face. ‘You wanted Emil Coetzee, didn’t you? You wanted to have him, not just to write about him.’ It was Rutherford’s turn to laugh. ‘I can see you now in his office, pirouetting in front of him the way you did in front of me – and Joseth. It takes a certain kind of white woman to do that in front of a black man. Coquettish to the core, like a whore. A born tease. You thought all he had to do was look at you, and he would want you. He would not be able to resist you. What man has ever been able to resist you?’

The mockery in his voice and in his eyes made Saskia turn her face away.

The truth was not too far off.

Rutherford was still laughing when he said, ‘What happened? He didn’t want you, did he? He took one look at your puny, sagging breasts and your sad, spreading thighs – and he did not want you. This man who lived to have his hand up a woman’s skirt did not want you, Saskia Hargrave: the one woman no man can resist.’

Saskia had been wrong about Clement Rutherford. He was not just pathetic. He was both pathetic and cruel. The worst kind of man.

It was only when Saskia tasted the saltiness in her mouth that she realised she was crying. Ugh! Crying like a little girl. Crying like Sassie.

‘I, on the other hand, want you,’ Rutherford continued. ‘You’re not much to look at now that you’re well past your sell-by date, but you do have such a pretty swan-like neck. I have always been partial to a swan-like neck.’

It was her moment to strike. ‘Unlike you, Joseth was able to finish what he started. Every … single … time,’ Saskia said before pushing him off her with great ease.

Her mother and Clement Rutherford were, unfortunately, not altogether wrong. Saskia had been dreaming of and scheming about her revenge ever since Mr Findlay had told her who her biological father was. After years of her pleading with him to tell her, he had waited until he was certain he was about to die – just before he put a bullet through his brain – to whisper the name of her father, Emil Coetzee, in her ear.