Gales of joy shook the camp. Mother Wu, always supple-spined to Rosie, showed her heavy gold teeth soldered together in a thick yellow bar in her upper jaw, the gumfiesh green at its junction with the metal. Fong Kiap rocked so hard she fell off her stool.

Each morning on her way to camp Rosie Yip stopped the driver of her police car at the red shrine of Kuanyin the Mother of Mercy, the All-Compassionate.

She sat, the goddess whom none entreats in vain, her small black face sedate with crust of years of dirt and incense; the altar table in front of her heavied with pewter burners, candlesticks, oranges and pomeloes and cakes in pyramids, the stone three-legged oven with its bronze pagoda roof always smoking, sheaves of paper money rising in smoke redolent with prayer to the Heavenly Mother Never Implored in Vain.

The nun in charge, with polished shaven head, lay stuporous upon her mat, savouring a cigarette and smiling at Rosie, while the Tamil nurse Doremy, already in starched white uniform on her way to the hospital, sank the syringe of a liver injection into the barely uncovered buttock. The wireless blasted swing music from Radio Malaya to entertain the Deity as Rosie made obeisance, planted some incense sticks in the sifted ash of the burners, and then saluted smartly, entreating the All-Compassionate in somewhat peremptory manner: ‘Keep the devils away from the wire, keep the devils away from my camp.’

Each evening Rosie asked her large eldest daughter:

‘Fat one, have you done your praying today?’

Daughter was a Catholic, a convert, student at the girls’ convent school, and recited the rosary daily to ease her mother in whose tolerant and ubiquitous mind Kuanyin and the Holy Virgin had much in common except a quibble of names; both incarnations of the same principle of mercy and all-compassion, both efficient housewives and mothers, and sharing with Rosie the quality of a good policewoman, keeping watch and ward over their devotees.

And to reinforce the polymorphic safeguards Mother Wu went round with two respectful policewomen, sprinkling with wisps of feather magic on to the wires whose barbs, like rigid birds’ feet, clawed the metal strings encompassing Rosie’s domain.

But peace was not to be, for the whispered precursors of dreadl had seeped and sunk like water in a swamp, whose surface may! dry but will one day crack hugely revealing the sogginess below.

It began – like the thunderless lightning lacing, above the palms, a backcloth of grey pachydermatous cloud – when Neo Saw’s child, Son, now aged fourteen, sexually assaulted the bought child of Mother Wu, a girl of eight.