Not used to sleeping in an unwelcoming bed, Spokes woke up before sunrise the next morning. He went to the station and dragged six very reluctant and disgruntled officers to the village with him to go and investigate what had happened to Emil Coetzee. Besides the beige bakkie, Emil Coetzee had left absolutely no trace behind. No spoor suggested that anything untoward had happened to his person. The only thing they found of interest was a spray of vomit, but that seemed more consistent with the tracks that must have been made by the two boys from intelligence that the villagers said had come the day before to investigate. Another thing the villagers told him that they had not hazarded to reveal to him over the party line was that the two boys from intelligence had come out the bush carrying a man’s hat, and that the hat looked very much like the one Emil Coetzee had worn in all those photographs they had seen of him in The Chronicle – the hat that made him look like the Sundance Kid.

Kuki

KUKI

Kuki looked at the Chief Inspector with his closely cut salt-and-pepper hair and magnificent moustache, and he slightly frowned and studied her as though she were speaking a foreign language. Of course he did not understand. How could he possibly? African lives were so much simpler. ‘I do not want them,’ she repeated. ‘They are no longer mine.’ The Chief Inspector looked at the bunch of keys in his hands, obviously not knowing what else to do with them. Kuki envied him because he was blissfully oblivious, in a way that she could not be, that the little key at the end was for the treasure chest Emil had bought Everleigh for his eleventh birthday.

And then she was crying again.

The Chief Inspector, not knowing what else to do, tentatively offered Kuki his handkerchief, and she gratefully accepted it, which surprised them both.

‘My son died last year … the war,’ Kuki explained as she wiped the tears from her eyes.

The Chief Inspector’s brow uncreased itself.

‘He was a beautiful, golden-haired boy,’ Kuki hiccupped. She saw the Chief Inspector reach out to touch her and then hesitate. Instead, he looked at the images of the boy that graced every surface of the living room.

‘The war … it took so much,’ he said as his eyes came to rest on her.