Kuki looked at the Chief Inspector, and it occurred to her that the war was paradoxically the one thing that had united the country. She remembered all those situation reports, all those thousands of dead black bodies – the bodies that had given her so much confidence that her side was winning. It hit her with the force of a true revelation that all those black bodies had had people grieving them all the while. Before they had been bodies, they had been people. They had belonged to families: they had been wives, husbands, daughters, sons, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins – even grandmothers and grandfathers. Kuki knew, from years of having to grant leave to servants whose relatives were ill, dying or dead, that African families were an intricate and vast network. The loss of a great-aunt was as deeply felt as the loss of a sister. There was no remove for them – just family. All those dead black bodies had been connected, part of an imbricated and intimate web. Where Kuki had simply seen a dead terrorist, another woman might have seen a dead son and wondered at the callous cruelty that allowed his body to be photographed and the image disseminated for the whole world to see. Kuki could not even imagine seeing the image of the blown-apart dead body of her beautiful, golden-haired boy on the television screen. Some things were meant to be sacred.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Kuki apologised, ‘I cannot seem to stop crying. Having a really bad time of it, I’m afraid.’

The Chief Inspector nodded his understanding.

‘It is sombre, isn’t it? The mood and atmosphere after the ceasefire,’ Kuki said. ‘You cannot even tell that today is Christmas Eve.’

The Chief Inspector nodded again.

Kuki stood up and went to retrieve something that she handed to the Chief Inspector. It was a photo album filled with the Coetzees’ holiday pictures – an archive of the family’s happy moments throughout the years. The Chief Inspector paged through the album and watched the boy, Everleigh, grow up and Emil and Kuki grow older on various different kinds of film stock.