‘The important thing to know about an assassination’, wrote Eric Ambler, ‘is not who fired the shot, but who paid for the bullet.’ On 17 January 1961, just six months after his country gained independence, the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, was assassinated by firing squad. Blame was immediately levelled at the republic’s former colonial ruler, Belgium. But the UK and the USA wanted Lumumba dead too. It was Eisenhower’s wish that the man ‘fall into a river full of crocodiles’.

The Lumumba affair is at the heart of William Boyd’s eighteenth novel, Gabriel’s Moon. Thirty-year-old travel writer Gabriel Dax is on assignment in the Congo when Lumumba asks to be interviewed. What Gabriel gets, however, is not so much an interview as a paranoid rant: ‘President Eisenhower wants me dead … There are people here sent to kill me … It’s all about uranium.’ Finding him hard to take seriously, Gabriel returns to London, writes up the interview and forgets about it. Besides, he has problems of his own to worry about. 

The first is that his flat has been broken into – nothing stolen, just a few things disturbed, ‘as if somebody had wanted to let him know that there had been a clandestine visit’. Next, he starts to receive silent phone calls, the silences too ‘deliberate [and] provocative’ to