Lukha noticed that Dikeledi’s now unfisted hands were on the Formica tabletop. Her hands looked unexpectedly and remarkably ladylike – graceful, dainty and delicate – as though they needed to be held.

‘Yes …’ the Chief Inspector encouraged Lukha to carry on with his story.

It took Lukha some time to find the thread of his story again. ‘After Livingstone Stanley Tikiti and I came to visit you, I found that I could not hide any more. I had to go back home. Upon my arrival, I found that my mother and my older brother and his family had just been murdered, and that my oldest brother’s second wife was the prime suspect. She didn’t do it. I know she didn’t do it. Things like these are not the work of man; they are the punishments of the ancestors. My mother, my brother and his entire family are dead because of me, because of what happened in 1965. I tried to explain this to my family, but they only cried and touched my face as though I were a newborn child. They think it is a miracle that I am alive because they had long suspected I was dead. I told them I was responsible for the accident, but they would not listen and instead told me what the BSAP had reported to them.

‘A car carrying six members of a wedding party, bride and groom included, came careening down the road. Another car was driving along, going in the opposite direction, with its headlights bright and undimmed. The driver of the wedding-party car was briefly blinded by the light. When his eyes re-accustomed themselves to the road ahead, the car’s headlights fell on a dark object in the middle of the road. He brightened his headlights just in time to see that it was a cow. The driver had swerved off the road to make sure he did not hit the cow when his headlights fell on two pedestrians walking along the strip on the side of the tarred main road. He tried to avoid hitting them but could not, and sent them pirouetting through the dark night, at which point he lost control of the vehicle. The car rolled its way into an embankment and burst into flames, killing all on board.

‘They told me that there was no responsibility in the case, as it had been ruled an accident. That was not the worst of it. They called me a hero, told me I had liberated the country. But I am not a hero. I am a coward who found himself fighting a war after he killed six people and maimed another two. I cannot live as a hero the way they expect me to. My sister-in-law is likely to hang because the ancestors righted a sin I committed, and there is nothing I can do or say to save her.’