'Why here?' Emmanuel asked Shabalala when the fire in the rough stone circle was ablaze and the wood crackled and hissed. 'He's a qualified surgeon. Why not Cape Town or even Durban?'

Shabalala rested on his haunches with his forearms balanced on his knees and threw a stick into the fire. A red sun hung over the crest of hills. Emmanuel sank down next to the Zulu constable and waited. Good manners prevented Shabalala from offering a personal opinion without first giving the answer proper consideration.

'I think he is paying,' Shabalala said. 'For something he did, or did not do, in his home country, during the war.'

A scatter of loose stones on the garden path preceded Zweigman's appearance at the fireside. He dragged a dried tree branch behind him and his face dripped sweat. His shirtsleeves were rolled to above his elbows and his pants' legs up to his knees. 'Fuel,' he said, propping the branch against the stack of logs and kindling already collected from the bush. The temperature will drop soon and we will need the fire.'

The women and Nicolai were in the middle house and it was by unspoken agreement that the able-bodied men had settled down outside till bedtime. Sleeping arrangements were made: Shabalala and his wife in their house, Nicolai and Natalya in with the Zweigmans, while Lana was squeezed into the storage hut and Emmanuel was billeted on the clinic floor. He'd slept in colder and rougher places.

The sun dipped lower and the shadows lengthened across the ground. Night in the tropics came quickly and the light would go out like a blown candle. The evening star was already faint on the horizon.

'Mr Shabalala,' Lizzie's voice called into the gathering darkness. 'I need a man to help me. Are you that man or shall I get another?'

The constable moved towards the middle house with a smile and a shake of his head. Zulu tradition called for women to be meek and obedient, but his wife was her own person.

Emmanuel glanced at the clinic buildings. They were strikingly similar to the stone-and-thatch house that Davida stood outside in his dreams. Even the hills etched against the sky echoed the landscape in his mind.

'Do you hear from Davida?' he asked when Zweigman sat down. The doctor and his wife had been like surrogate parents to the coloured girl. 'Is she safe?'

'She is well,' the German man replied and threw small twigs into the centre of the flames where the fire was white hot.

'And happy?' A foolish question, he knew, but it didn't stop him from wanting proof of the impossible: a happy ending for at least one of the victims of the Security Branch's violent intervention.

'She is not unhappy,' came the enigmatic reply.

The red disc of the sun disappeared and darkness swallowed the hillside. Not unhappy. There was a kernel of hope in that bare statement. To be injured but not destroyed was a small triumph.

'I'm sorry to involve you in this business with Nicolai and Natalya,' Emmanuel said. 'Especially after Jacob's Rest. We'll be gone in forty-eight hours and you'll be safe.'

'The only safe place is the grave,' Zweigman said. 'That was one of my grandfather's favourite expressions. He was a peasant with dirty fingernails and stained teeth, so naturally I didn't believe anything he said. I was a medical student destined for great things. I knew everything.'

The fire blazed in the stone circle and Emmanuel held his hands out to the heat. Zweigman rarely spoke of the past. Details of his life in Berlin before and during the war were still a mystery.

'After the Security Branch beating,' Emmanuel said, 'you promised that you'd tell me how you came to be serving behind the counter of a general store in South Africa.'

Zweigman frowned. In Jacob's Rest, the detective had been beaten with professional thoroughness that resulted in broken bones and black bruises that mushroomed across his skin. Most patients with injuries so severe recalled only the pain.

'You remember?'

'Every word,' Emmanuel said.

The doctor brought his hands up to the flames and examined his chipped fingernails and the rough skin encrusted with dirt. He smiled into the firelight.

'You should have seen me fifteen years ago, Detective. I was quite the specimen. A surgeon at Charite Universitdtsmedizen with private consulting rooms furnished to the best of taste. Everything was always the best. The tailored suits, the wine in the cellar and the pretty girls I kept company with, even after I was married. That was Dr Daniel Zweigman. Not the most clever Jew in Berlin but one of them.' The silence that followed was heavy with self-recrimination. 'When rumours of war began, Lilliana came to me. She had a cousin in New York who was willing to take us in, find us an apartment and jobs. I said no. Members of the National Socialist party came to me for treatment. I was Zweigman the healer, Zweigman the first choice for families of quality. I was safe. My wife and three children were immune from the madness. Then it was too late to escape.'

The night settled on them, black and heavy. The Zweigmans were childless now and thousands of miles from Berlin.

'Lilliana and I survived the camps but our children did not. That's what broke Lilliana in the end: being alive when there was nothing left to live for.' The doctor turned to Emmanuel. 'Nicolai and Natalya can stay here as long as necessary. It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.'