Oxygen fizzled out of Ford’s bloodstream.

They know.

Hearing this stranger exposing their dark secret – a secret kept safe for more than seventy years – was appalling. The ramifications cascaded through his mind. The hospitals would close. He would end up in jail. And then there was the shame, the irreparable damage to their legacy. As the Indonesian’s almond eyes bored into his, Ford fought to keep his expression calm. No matter what happened, they must never find it. Never. And the chances of them doing so were next to none – as long as he kept his mouth shut.

Perhaps sensing this new-found resolve, his interrogator barked, ‘Send her in.’

For one, long, terrible moment, Ford thought they had Mia, and his heart almost burst, so powerfully did it beat. When the taller man dragged in Millie, relief flooded through his body, and was just as quickly extinguished by shame. Dear Millie had been there from the very beginning. She was his sister. The mother he’d never had. Goodness personified.

Millie had been savagely beaten. Predictably, she shed no tears, just stood there in quiet dignity, with a bloody nose and a livid-looking contusion on her cheek. Seeing the ruined morphine on the floor, she dropped her head.

‘So sorry, Doctor Paul. They kill patients if I don’t tell them combination.’

‘It doesn’t matter, Millie,’ he replied gently.

The stocky man drew a lethal-looking commando dagger with a serrated underblade and roughly shoved the old woman’s head onto the desk. Using the tip of the blade, he scooped a bleeding divot from her right cheek. The brutality was incomprehensible.

‘What the hell are you doing, man?’ Ford roared, struggling against his bonds. ‘Leave her alone, you bloody swine!’

The man chuckled. ‘You care for the old monkey?’ Pulling Millie’s right ear taut, he cut it off in one savage motion and tossed the severed ear into Ford’s lap, where it lay like a desiccated mollusc, weeping blood. ‘Now I take the other.’ He wrenched her head back the other way. ‘Then we cut off her nose, all right?’

‘Stop!’ protested Ford. ‘For God’s sake . . .’

With knife poised, the man waited.

‘There is gold in the vault . . . under the hospital.’

Ford led them outside to the hospital entrance, where Old Max, his faithful ridgeback, was splayed at the foot of stairs, shot between the eyes. A nurse lay flat on her back. An exit wound had inflicted such terrible damage that Ford only recognised it was Frances by her lurid red nail polish. From inside the ward they heard moaning and crying. Ford identified Mrs Vuata, who was close to term, begging for assistance. Millie briefly met his eyes. Did she know, he wondered, about their dirty secret?

Leading them around the side of the building, Ford stopped by a nondescript timber door built into the brick foundations.

‘There is a key in my pocket.’