There was a long silence which Dikeledi surprisingly did not interrupt. Then the Chief Inspector said, ‘Do you know who is handling the investigation?’

‘Sergeant Dhlamini.’

‘Dhlamini? I know him. He is a good man, good at his job. I trained him. Let me talk to him and see what can be done.’

This was not why Lukha had come here. He had come so that someone would finally hold him accountable for what he had done. Even though he was disappointed that that did not seem to be happening, he found himself saying, ‘Thank you, Chief Inspector.’

‘You can stay with us for as long as you like. I promise we will not expect you to be anything other than what you are,’ the Chief Inspector said.

Spokes

SPOKES

There were two light-blue manila folders in Spokes’s in tray – one was the thin, familiar folder faded with age and dog-eared from too much handling, and the other was new and thick, with photographs and case notes. Although he had already solved the latter case, it was to be the last of his career, and so he treated it with the sense of ceremony it deserved. He read over the case notes, made sure the ‘i’s were dotted and the ‘t’s crossed, and that his initials, S.M.M., appeared at the bottom of each page before looking over the photographs attached to the case file.

It had been a sad case, and the accompanying photographs were deceptively peaceful: an entire family whose members – father, mother, three children and one grandmother, ranging in age from four to sixty – lay strewn on the ground of their homestead as though they were fallen angels recently deposited by the heavens. All the members of the family were dead, and in their dying moments they had reached out to one another, creating a strange kind of beauty that Spokes found difficult to reconcile with the heartbreak before him.

The tragedy that took place on the eve of independence actually had its roots in an earlier tragedy that had taken place in 1977.

On one of his weekend visits to the village, Lukha’s eldest brother, then a foreman on the factory floor of the best shoe factory in the City of Kings, had decided to be a Good Samaritan and give a lift to two school-leavers he found hitchhiking on the outskirts of town. The school-leavers had informed the Good Samaritan that they were trying to make their way to a farm so that they could find work as labourers. The Good Samaritan, an avid small-scale subsistence farmer himself, had plenty to say on the subject, and was even kind enough to suggest the names of the most reasonable commercial farmers in his district.