Even from his office on the seventh floor, Rutherford could hear the commotion on the streets below, and he went to stand by one of his many windows in order to witness it. Independence Day. People dancing in the street as if they did not know what tomorrow held. He wanted to pity them for their optimism and short-sightedness, but found that he did not have the power to do so. They were so like ants from way up here, but were not ants at all … far from it. They had always seemed to him to be more like cockroaches, and they had definitely proved to be just as resilient. The sun had at long last set, and Prince Charles had already arrived in the country to confirm this fact and collect the Union Jack. And they were dancing in the street. It all came down to dancing with these people.

Needing something else to do, Rutherford looked at his watch. The direct flight to Heathrow would be taking off from Johannesburg any moment now, carrying with it Mrs Tom Fortenoy and her children. Chief Inspector Spokes Moloi had been wrong about her. She had wanted more than to know what had happened to her husband, and she had wanted more than to find comfort in that knowledge. She had wanted the life the Fortenoys would have had if they had never left England, and she had made sure that the price for her silence would make such a life possible. The best thing that Tom Fortenoy had probably ever done for his family was walk down Selborne Avenue during the early hours of New Year’s Day. Rutherford took a sharpened HB pencil out of his breast pocket and twirled it between his fingers. Some people got what they wanted, and he got an office on the seventh floor. He bit into the pencil. At least he could take some pleasure in the fact that Chief Inspector Spokes Moloi had not been right about everything.

As Rutherford looked at the ongoing melee down below, something truly beautiful caught his eye – an antique car bleeding its way through the crowd on Eighth Avenue. Watching it, he felt an emotion that was akin to hope. Things could still go wrong.

The car was such an unexpected and exquisite red that Vida de Villiers could not help but stop his journey towards the Downing’s Bakery alleyway to watch it travel up Eighth Avenue. He was so absorbed in its splendour that it took him some time to realise that something was wrong. A group of people had just turned the corner on Main Street. Unlike the other people dancing and singing in the street, this group was toyi-toying and chanting war songs. Guerrillas … the people he had gone to the war to fight. The former guerrillas seemed intent on growing in number, and kept on collecting and co-opting – sometimes by force – vendors, beggars and passers-by into their ranks.