She’d come such a long way to warn him, just to fail in the last moments. The thunder rolled on through the hot, muggy early afternoon and small pieces of fibreglass and twisted chrome rained down on the deck around her. A large cinder fell on her neck and burned the exposed skin. She yelped and swiped it away, the sudden pain jerking her back into the moment, after shock had threatened to numb and dull her responses.

‘Quick, we must hurry, Miss Julianne.’

She heard Shah’s rough voice as though muffled by many layers of cotton wool. His grip on her upper arm was firm enough to be uncomfortable, as he dragged Jules to her feet and back to reality. Acrid smoke stung her eyes and she could taste diesel fumes at the back of her throat. Hundreds of birds screeched and swooped overhead. She coughed as she tried to take a deep breath. Her head swam and she was afraid she might lose her balance and tumble into the oily water.

The Nepalese soldier urged her forward, pushing her past the grotesque scene of a man hugging a headless female corpse and wailing as if to call her back from the dead. Boats burned and the heat roiling off the inferno seemed to shrink the skin on Jules’s face. She squinted and raised a hand to her eyes. A useless gesture. She staggered on anyway, but Shah had left her behind – he was running into the conflagration now, leaping onto the deck of a blazing cruiser, bounding across and diving into the water. She heard the splash but nothing else, as a secondary explosion drove her back.

Voices. Some shouting. Others screaming in pain or horror.

She stumbled over the leg of the crying man. He had spooned himself into the back of the dead woman and they were lying as if in bed. He was moaning in a way she’d never heard before. It looked as though he was trying to bore his head into her back.

She apologised for tripping over him, immediately struck by the banality of her mumbled ‘Sorry’ when measured against the bloody ruin of the crater where the woman’s head had been separated from her body.

‘Oh God . . .’

She vomited, reaching for a hand-hold as the contractions doubled her over. Finding nothing to grab, Julianne hugged herself and set her feet to steady her balance while she grunted and heaved. She heard boots pounding towards her and men cursing. An outboard engine coughed and spluttered into life somewhere between her and the marina office, a small shed at the end of Gonzales Road. When she was certain she’d finished retching, she searched for the source of the noise.