‘Daisy lived in the village next to your first Idlazonke store. Chief Cele Mkhize’s village. She was murdered. Her limbs hacked at and her torso carved open with a Y-dissection.’

‘A Y-dissection?’ Bodecia said. She took an obvious step away from her husband and did not look at him.

Silas Mthimkhulu composed himself enough to say, ‘Oh yes, Daisy. I remember now. Sad business, that. Very sad business. My shopkeeper, Jasper Mlangeni, was briefly a suspect, if I remember correctly. As were several other men.’

‘Yes. And your shopkeeper, Jasper Mlangeni; he followed you to Zambia, from what I gather,’ Spokes said, knowing full well that Jasper Mlangeni had left the country before Silas Mthimkhulu.

‘Yes. He opened several stores for me there in the 1950s and 1960s,’ Silas Mthimkhulu said before he registered the full import of what Spokes had said to him: the door he had just opened, and not recognising it for the trap that it was, he had gladly walked through. ‘Yes, he followed us to Zambia,’ Silas Mthimkhulu said, hammering the final nail into the coffin.

Bodecia frowned. Spokes noticed. Silas Mthimkhulu did not.

‘Would it be possible to speak to him?’ Spokes asked.

‘He’s still in Zambia, I’m afraid,’ Silas Mthimkhulu said, at long last allowing himself to take a swig of what remained of the beer that had been sweating in his hand. ‘Taking care of business. But, as luck would have it, he will be joining us next week. I’m sure he will be happy to talk to you when he arrives.’

It was evident from Bodecia’s furrowed brow and the lost look in her eyes that she was trying to put all the information she had heard together, and it was equally evident from the self-satisfied smirk on Silas Mthimkhulu’s face that he believed Spokes’s focus had shifted away from him and that he probably had never been a suspect.

‘Unfortunately we never got to question him fully at the time, but we’ve long felt that the heart of the matter lies with him,’ Spokes said.

‘Yes, I’ll have him come and talk to you as soon as he arrives,’ Silas Mthimkhulu said. ‘We want nothing more than to cooperate fully with you, Chief Inspector,’ he graciously added.

Silas

SILAS

Silas looked at himself in the mirror and tried to accept the man he saw reflected there. He could not. Gone were his John Travolta shirts and bell-bottomed trousers. Bodecia had promptly donated those to the Salvation Army after she came home with an armload of Pierre Cardin three-piece suits and business shirts that she had bought at Sanders Department Store.

‘You are no longer a businessman. You are a politician now,’ she had declared. ‘You need people to take you seriously. A few tailor-made pieces won’t go amiss either.’