Free Chase Your Shadow by John Carlin Page B

pond with three resident swans – unfriendly beasts, Arnold would warn visitors, liable to bite anyone who came too close. The cottage, resembling a hotel suite of the type his nephew used to frequent on his triumphant world travels, consisted of a bedroom, a large living room and a bathroom. Within the limits of his uncle’s property Pistorius enjoyed five-star luxury and, with the cinema, the pool, the gym and a permanent staff of servants on the premises, five-star amenities. But he was a recluse now, a virtual prisoner. The athletics track at the high performance sports center in Pretoria where he used to train was out of bounds. Before, he had sought public attention; now, he shunned it. Before, the fans mobbed him; too many now would turn their backs on him. But he did need company, constant attention, as if he were a small child again. The three women closest to him provided it: his aunt Lois, Arnold’s elegant wife; his cousin Maria, who was four years older than he and lived in the house next door with her husband and child; and, most devoted of all, his younger sister Aimée, whom he had adored from the day she was born, on whose pristine little feet he had fixated when she was a baby and he was just three years old, whose company he craved every waking moment in the first weeks after the shooting. Aimée, worked as an analyst for a South African investment bank, where she had a reputation for quick-mindedness and a talent for finance surprising to her colleagues in one so young.
    Good-looking, as both male and female members of the Pistorius clan tended to be, his sister, cousin and aunt would take turns to sit silently with him, to talk when he needed to talk, to hug him when he wept, each filling the role of his absent mother.
    A fourth woman in whom he sought comfort was his paternal grandmother, Gerti Pistorius, who, as family photographs of her wedding in 1943 showed, had been an extraordinary beauty, of Scandinavian descent. Her husband, who was also still alive, had been a dashingly handsome man. The pair set a family standard for glamor that their famous grandson had matched. Gerti Pistorius had always doted on the legless boy wonder, cherishing the moment years back when he was very small and had appeared at her home wearing his artificial legs for the first time shouting, ‘Grandma! Grandma! Look, I’ve got toes!’ She had been as proud as anybody of his achievements, filling the walls of her home with photographs of him careering down the track in his one-piece Lycra suit and carbon-fibre blades, or posing on the podium with a gold medal draped around his neck. Always elegantly turned out, even at the age of ninety, she lived in Pretoria, as she had always done; but when she saw her grandson now it was not to celebrate but to console.
    Occasionally the sense of imprisonment would overwhelm him and he would risk a sortie into the outside world. He would drive to his grandmother’s, or to lunch at an Italian restaurant with Aimée or Maria in a small shopping center nearby, a simple place with Formica table tops and plastic chairs, where the staff remained welcoming, ready to shake his hand and to go along with the charade that nothing was amiss. Urged on by his cousins’ husbands, muscular men who would sweat alongside him at his uncle’s gym, he would sometimes attempt some pretence of normality by eating out at a fashionable place called Koi, his favorite Japanese restaurant in Pretoria. A couple of times during the year’s wait for the trial he was unable to resist the temptation to flee his cage and attend a party or visit a bar with the fast set he used to enjoy mingling with in Johannesburg. Each time, however, he regretted it because the news would inevitably reach themedia, who would seize on these excursions to portray him as a man cold-bloodedly at peace with the crime he had committed. More often he would go for long drives in the countryside in a white Audi he owned. Driving had