Spokes had no idea how long he had been standing there looking at it – the same pretty dress as the one on the body in the burlap sack, hanging on display in the store – or how long the man beside him had been saying, ‘Hello. My name is Jasper Mlangeni. I’m the shopkeeper here. How may I help you?’ Spokes only snapped out of it because he heard a voice outside that caught his attention. He walked out of the store and made his way towards the voice. Sure enough, there she was: Loveness, as lovely as ever, and standing right beside her was a girl of about five. Spokes would always remember but never be able to capture fully the true radiance of that moment.

When Spokes had returned the next day to ask Jasper Mlangeni about the dress, he found the Idlazonke General Goods and Bottle Store closed until further notice. Apparently, Jasper Mlangeni had left the night before, at the behest of his boss, Silas Mthimkhulu, to go and open another Idlazonke store in a country up north. All this seemed too coincidental and Spokes felt certain that in Jasper Mlangeni he had found his man and that, perhaps, in Silas Mthimkhulu, he had found Jasper Mlangeni’s protector … his accessory after the fact. He confidently felt this until all evidence pointed to the fact that Jasper Mlangeni had been in the City of Kings on the night in question. Spokes reluctantly let go of what had become the centre of his case and watched things fall apart.

Spokes had still not found the proper place to store Daisy’s unsolved case within himself when he came across the harbinger. Years later, during the war, while Spokes was helping his mother resettle in a Tribal Trust Land village, a boy had arrived in the dead of night. A stranger in the dead of night was something never to be welcomed, but Spokes had made sure that the villagers welcomed him because even though the stranger was weighed down by his army boots and AK-47, he was just a boy. The boy had screamed and smashed things, broken precious windows, shattered the quiet of the night – and still Spokes had made the villagers let him be, because it was evident that the boy was wrestling with something bigger than all of them.

It was only when the boy told them about severed limbs and torsos with Y-dissections cut into them floating in the Zambezi River that Spokes fully understood why the boy had come. He had been sent, by forces that they would never see and never fully know, to show Spokes that his inability to solve Daisy’s murder had led to other deaths perpetrated by Jasper Mlangeni.

The boy left before sunrise and, within a year, Spokes’s very healthy and strong mother died peacefully in her sleep. After the funeral, the villagers recalled the boy with the heavy army boots and AK-47, they remembered how welcoming Spokes had been, and it was then that they called the boy a harbinger. But Spokes knew the true purpose of the boy’s visit.