Chief Cele Mkhize was on the other end of the line, and he informed Spokes that a man … a white man … had walked into the bush and not walked out of it. The man’s beige bakkie was still parked where he had left it. There was a long pause before Chief Cele Mkhize informed Spokes that the two mujibhas who had seen the white man said that it was the same man who had found Daisy’s body all those many years ago. The fact that Chief Cele Mkhize chose to give him a clue and not a name let Spokes know that there was more to the story than was being communicated.

It took Spokes quite a while to realise that the silence that existed was waiting for him to speak. ‘I will be there as soon as possible,’ he said. He looked out of the Chief Superintendent’s office window and noticed for the first time that the sun was setting. ‘I will be there first thing tomorrow morning,’ he corrected himself.

Spokes held the handset to his ear long after Chief Cele Mkhize had hung up. He listened to the busy signal and found its incessant sound oddly comforting. The man who had found Daisy’s body all those years ago: Emil Coetzee. The man who had been so disturbed by what had happened to Daisy that he had established The Organisation of Domestic Affairs: Emil Coetzee. The man who had brought the lovely Loveness back into Spokes’s life and who, for that reason, would always be the man to whom he owed more than a debt of gratitude: Emil Coetzee.

‘Is someone on the line?’ a white woman’s clipped and officious voice enquired, startling Spokes. ‘Whoever you are, please get off the line at once! I would like to place a rather urgent trunk call,’ the voice said before the line was filled with clicking sounds as the woman on the other end pressed on the plungers of her phone. ‘Party line, you see. You need to get off the phone now,’ the voice said before adding, ‘Good grief! Some people.’

Spokes slowly hung up the phone and continued with what had become a most unexpected day. The twenty-third of December was usually an unremarkable day. Understanding as it did that it came right before the two most important days in the country’s calendar, it was a day that tended to behave itself as it allowed people to do their last-minute Christmas shopping and make their long-yearned-for journeys home. However, this particular 23 December, in 1979, perhaps understanding that it needed to be different since it came just two days after the ceasefire had been announced – or perhaps sensing that, in the next decade, 22 December would become Unity Day and, therefore, that it, 23 December would be forever squashed between three very important days – had decided to have its first and last hoorah.