Mia turned around to see a tiny elderly woman in a ragged green floral dress hugging herself with stick-thin arms. Mia stared, aghast. The old housekeeper’s face was a criss-cross of ragged pink scars. Both nostrils had been slit, and her right ear appeared to be missing beneath a dirty bandage. Repairing the damage was going to take extensive reconstructive surgery.

‘Millie? What have they done to you?’

The old woman wept as they embraced.

‘You’ve come back. Oh, thank God, Dokta Mia, I’ve been waiting and praying someone would come.’

Millie led her outside, to a circle of massive European oak trees which Paul had told her were planted more than seventy years ago by his father. In the centre was a sandstone pillar with the name FORD carved in prominent Times Roman. At its base was a pile of raised red earth.

‘My nephew laid him to rest.’ Millie sniffed. ‘He put Dokta Paul there, good and deep.’

Mia began crying. Funny how it took a grave to make it real. She put her hand on the stone and traced her fingers over the names chiselled in italics: Elizabeth and George. Curiously, there were no dates. Paul’s mother’s name was more eroded by the decades of rain. All Mia knew was that she had died when Paul was very young. He had told her it was too painful to talk about his parents, so she had let it be.

Who would carve Paul’s name on the stone now? Mia wondered. Because the bereft and emaciated old woman beside her was like a living ghost among the death and destruction.

Mia put her arm around her. ‘Paul loved you so much.’

‘It’s OK.’ Millie’s hand felt like a small bird’s wing as it patted her forearm. ‘God has answered my prayers. You’ve come back to run the mission for Dokta Paul!’

‘Oh, Millie . . .’

A wave of conflicting emotions washed over Mia. She had planned to come back and work here for at least five years, open to the possibility that, with Paul’s guidance, it might become her life, but what did she know about funding and hospital administration, let alone working under the Indonesian regime?

It reminded her of Sura’s evil, and an icy resolve to get even filled her body.

‘Tell me what happened here, Millie. Tell me everything.’

Haltingly, the old woman explained how two very bad Indonesian men had tortured Paul for gold, and something else he kept in the vault, before executing him.

‘Gold, did you say?’

‘Yes. They took a box, but they said there was much more hidden.’

Mia’s head was spinning.

Why would Paul have kept gold out here? And where did he get it?

She listened in mounting dismay as Millie recounted how the Indonesians had gone on to get drunk and raped Nurse Jilly, before shooting everyone, except her, because they thought she was already dead.