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vulnerability that might help swing a verdict. Pistorius’s defense lawyers clutched at what they thought might be grounds for optimism in a remarkable case from 2011 in which Nair had presided over the bail hearing.
    At the center of that case was an Afrikaner rugby player called ‘Bees’ Roux, who was arrested and charged with murder for beating a black policeman to death. At a pre-trial meeting, attended by Roux and his lawyer, as well as the state prosecutor and the brother and wife of the victim, Roux expressed sincerest regret and explained what had happened. He had imagined that the policeman, whom he had encountered at night, had planned to rob him, possibly kill him. An exceptionally large man, Roux struck the policeman with force, knocking him unconscious. He sought to revive him, Roux said, but it was too late. In tears, Roux apologized to the policeman’s relatives and implored their forgiveness. They granted it. First the brother, also weeping, embraced Roux; then the policeman’s widow made a short dignified speech in which she thanked Roux for his candor and said that she did indeed forgive him. The prosecutor proposed a deal. Roux would plead guilty to culpable homicide, the South African legal term for unpremeditated manslaughter, he would pay the family of the dead policeman compensation and receive a suspended sentence of five years in jail. The presiding magistrate concurred, and Roux was a free man.
    Would Nair, seeing the possible parallels between the two cases, show similar leniency over Pistorius’s bail application? His lawyers tended to think so. There was another, more personal, reason thatmight help their cause, too. Research by the defense had revealed that Nair was in the midst of his own family tragedy. His first cousin had recently killed her two children, then herself, with poison. Pistorius’s team hoped that at the Tuesday hearing Nair’s private suffering would sharpen his compassion for the fellow sufferer who stood before him with sorrow written all over his face, and that Nair might rule in his favor.
    But Tuesday was still several days off, and as Pistorius was led out of the courtroom where he had just been charged with murder and into the police car that would take him to another police station, in the middle-class and previously all-white Pretoria suburb of Brooklyn, his thoughts dwelt on the horror of what he had done, but also on those that might lie ahead. He would be spending at least the next four nights in a cell; if he were denied bail, it would be for every night until the trial was over, whenever that might be; and if in the end he were found guilty, he would be spending much of the rest of his life in a dank and dangerous prison with some of the worst criminals in the world for company. Should he be found guilty as charged, of premeditated murder, the sentence would be twenty-five years, minimum.
    The scrum of TV cameras outside the courtroom, mobbing the car that drove him back to his police cell, brought home to him how fascinated the world was with the prospect of a figure as heroic as he had been falling so low. The mystery behind Reeva’s death made the drama all the more compelling. Had the story of what happened at his home in the early hours of Valentine’s Day been cut and dried, had it been beyond dispute from the beginning that he had killed Reeva Steenkamp either deliberately or accidentally, interest in the case would not have been so great or so enduring. What was to keep the story bubbling, month after month, all the way through tothe eventual verdict, was that the events of that night remained so open to speculation. Endless debates would be held at dinner tables across the globe on the question of whether he had wanted to kill her or not.
    His fame and her beauty – but especially his fame, because people felt they knew enough about him to venture informed opinions – enlivened the debate. But the fact that two other contemporary cases had