He felt almost certain that he would disappoint her again. He had long wanted to meet Silas Mthimkhulu, the Idlazonke shop owner who had sent his shopkeeper, Jasper Mlangeni, to a country up north, and had therefore taken away Spokes’s chance to question his prime suspect in Daisy’s case. Silas Mthimkhulu – the man he had believed was Jasper Mlangeni’s accessory after the fact.

‘Did you notice how she did that, sir?’ one of the detectives asked, breaking into Spokes’s thoughts.

‘You mean the way she skilfully ushered us out of the house,’ Spokes said.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Yes, I noticed,’ Spokes said.

Spokes

SPOKES

As Spokes alighted from the police bakkie, he looked at the cat lying sleepily in the shade of a flame tree and at the pigeons eating the birdseed that a white man, sitting on a bench under the tree, was feeding them. The man had a shock of white hair and was wearing white overalls, black gumboots and two-toned glasses – one lens tinted black and the other one clear. The man threw the birdseed closer to the cat and the pigeons fluttered towards the seed. The cat remained blissfully uninterested.

‘You don’t see that every day, do you?’ the white man said to Spokes.

‘No, I suppose you don’t,’ Spokes said pleasantly before making his way towards the whitewashed building with a maroon paint strip running along its base.

‘I wouldn’t bother going in there as yet. I don’t think you will find the man you are looking for,’ the man said before being seized by a coughing fit.

Spokes had no choice but to turn around. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

‘It’s all this smoke in the air,’ the man informed him. ‘The city is up in flames. Every furnace and incinerator in every government building is working overtime.’

Spokes looked at the billowing smoke rising from different points on the city’s skyline.

‘You know what we are witnessing?’ the man asked. ‘The erasure of history,’ he responded to his own question, and then offered his hand for Spokes to shake.

‘Chief Inspector Spokes Moloi, I presume,’ the man said. ‘I believe I am the man you are looking for. I am Dr Gustav Mabuse. Silas called to let me know to expect you.’

Spokes sat down next to the man, ‘I thought—’

‘Let me guess: that I would be wearing a lab coat and a stethoscope hanging like a noose around my neck? Well, maybe not a stethoscope given what it is I actually do,’ Dr Gustav Mabuse said.

‘Yes … something like that.’

‘Well, despite appearances, I am the Chief Pathologist here,’ Dr Mabuse said, throwing the last of the birdseed to the pigeons.

‘And a good friend of Silas Mthimkhulu.’