Unlike the family he had been born into, the family he had created – his two wives and seven children – were happy with him because, while he spent his five working days in a township in the City of Kings, he spent his two days of rest with his family in the village. He not only made sure that his immediate family was well provided for; when he was home, he was a very industrious man, helping to cultivate the fields and performing whatever repairs were needed around the homestead. His immediate family loved him, but even they could not use that love to smooth over the rough patch that had come with his being placed on the blacklist.

As the immediate family’s situation deteriorated, the Good Samaritan’s second wife accused the younger brother – the future victim – of foul play, saying that his jealousy over his brother’s success had made him go to inyanga, who had somehow devised the two hitchhikers that had ended her husband’s successful career. Animosity grew between the two families, which were also neighbours, especially after the younger brother – the future victim – who had been a messenger boy at a nearby mine for fifteen years, unexpectedly received a promotion and found himself apprenticing to become a junior clerk.

It was as though the narrative of the family could not contain within it two moderately successful sons, and so the rags of one son were said to have necessitated the riches of the other. The entire village weighed in on the matter, but not with the intention of resolving it.

When another tragedy struck, this time taking the younger brother’s entire family, the village elders indeed suspected witchcraft and – as was often the case in a case of witchcraft – suspected that a woman, one of the wives of the Good Samaritan, was behind it all. Because she had not shed a single tear at the mass funeral, the second wife was an easily-arrived-at chief suspect. She was all but pronounced guilty by a jury of her peers long before an official investigation had been properly conducted and a magistrate engaged to weigh in on the matter.

Although Spokes did not believe in evil, he did believe in the fallibility of humans; so, when Dhlamini handed him the case with its presumed-guilty prime suspect, he knew that, beyond simply proving innocence, he would also have to prove that witchcraft had not played a part in this tragedy – and that that would be the most difficult part of the case.