Two days after burying her mother’s ashes in the summer of 2008, Liz McGregor received a devastating phone call. Her 79-year-old father, Robin, was also dead – and his house 75 miles north of Cape Town, where she lived, was now the scene of a murder inquiry. His car, a bronze-coloured Mercedes that had for years been his pride and joy, had been discovered by police a few miles away in a poor neighbourhood with its lights on. A man was arrested as he tried to run away and officers found blood on his clothes. In the house itself there were no fingerprints, because whoever had murdered Robin McGregor had been wearing gloves.
So began a story that brings McGregor face to face with South Africa’s brutal history and the violence it has spawned. Her new book, Unforgiven: Face to Face with My Father’s Killer, is so unflinching that it challenges its readers to look away first: it’s her way of processing the horror, she says. “It changed me fundamentally. When you get such a profound shock, you rethink everything. I’ve always lived my life afraid of what might happen, and when this earthquake happens, at the start you become slightly numb, then you become grief-stricken and terrified and angry, and gradually you become slightly more inured to things.”
