Once back in the brightness of day, Saskia looked at the framed photograph of Everleigh she had taken from the key table in the corridor on her way out. He was about fifteen years old in the photo, and he looked so very happy. It was hard to imagine that only four years later he had died an awful and tragic death.

Saskia placed the photo more carefully than she had intended in her rucksack. She blamed her need for care on the gentleness she had just witnessed between Kuki Coetzee and Beatrice Beit-Beauford. Women …

In Flat 2A, at the corner of Selborne Avenue and Borrow Street, Johan and Gemma Coetzee were eager to tell Saskia all about Emil. It would be their pleasure. He had been a good boy who had become a great man of history. His was an amazing life so, quite naturally, someone wanted to write about him and, quite naturally, they were happy to oblige by sharing. They especially loved the title she had come up with for the biography: Emil Coetzee: A Real-Life Hero – how very fitting.

Johan and Gemma Coetzee had a wealth of information about the one they called ‘Our Boy,’ even though he was now – wherever he was – a man of fifty-something. They brought for her to peruse and parse photographs of him as a child, yearbooks of his adolescence at the Selous School for Boys, and newspaper and magazine clippings of him as an adult. As Saskia looked at the photograph of the toddler Emil Coetzee walking into the Indian Ocean holding his mother’s and father’s hands, she wondered why they had only one photograph of him as an adult. This photograph had been taken at his wedding. In the photograph, the bride was missing and Emil Coetzee, looking happy enough, was flanked by his obviously overjoyed parents. Behind them all stood, rather ominously, a towering, tiered wedding cake.

Saskia could easily see how Emil Coetzee had had no choice but to be so handsome; his parents had been and still were very beautiful. There was something especially bygone-era about them, like movie stars from the silent era. Perhaps knowing this about themselves, they had the tragic self-absorption and self-indulgence of former celebrities. In listening to them talk about Our Boy, Saskia got the distinct impression that his story was merely an extension of their own story. They loved him as one would come to love a favourite accessory: not for the thing itself, but rather for the fact that it made its possessor look good and, perhaps, feel better.

‘I thought one or both of you were deaf,’ Saskia said, once she felt comfortable enough to broach the subject. ‘People say you communicate with each other in sign language.’