‘There you are,’ said Pang, tenderly, with voice and look guiding Ah Mei forwards across the floor to stand before me. ‘There she is, doctor, safe and sound. I’m sure you’re very glad to see her back.’

His words, gentle, mocking, contained an impalpable menace. His laughter hung about me; it spiralled in the room, sinuous as the wooden arms of the strangling fig winding up its tree – choking it to death, preying upon its substance until it crumbles to nothingness – as with polite movements of his hands he gestured Ah Mei to sit down.

I had expected a change. Now I did not know what I had expected … but surely not this. Perhaps haggardness, despair, something lost and broken in her eyes, which surely must betray her suffering, the tearing out of herself, of her real but concealed self, the Ah Mei inside the other Ah Mei’s, Small Cloud her inner self … her love, then, to use this odd, strange word I no longer understood. The true abiding love which was the core of herself.

I had sat in the evenings, unhappily imagining … imagining a final loyalty finally wrested from her, her loyalty to the man who had been so many many years in the jungle – and what was he like by now? What did the jungle do to one who lived in it, never to come out? – to the man who would never surrender.

Brooding over Ah Mei, I thought that she had done what I would do, what any woman would do to safeguard herself; she had become someone else to remain the self left between the trees, left washing clothes for the People Inside, on the river bank, in a clearing between the coiled roots of the mangrove trees.

I had suffered, visioning Luke Davis and Che Ahmad and Pang exhuming her files from the locked steel strongboxes where files are kept; checking and re-checking and cross-checking what she had said with what she now revealed. In my imagination’s eye I saw them pore over the thin cigarette paper and scrutinize the characters, the handwriting, attempting to identify it … perhaps finding, in her clothing, other letters, letters not censored through the Police Department, as they were supposed to be, but brought by heaven knows which ‘Uncle’ or ‘Aunt’, couriers for the People Inside, delivered in the Sultan’s flower gardens, at the turn of the road under the dove-orchids perhaps … and the relentless interrogation, hour by hour, words squeezed out of her by questioning as she twisted and turned and wept, words pinned down, set out in black ink on the white foolscap pages … I had endured it all. I had had nightmares.

But it was not so at all. For here sat Ah Mei, smiling, in a flowered top and trousers, with bare baby feet tucked politely under her; her clothes had a pattern of pink roses. Light and graceful, she smiled, a happy child, happy to be home again.