‘Caleb said he wanted to help,’ said Amelia, a note of indignation in her voice. ‘What’s hard to get about it?’

For me: everything! Why would Caleb rat on his dad like this? When I searched his face for an answer he looked at his feet again, so I asked him outright: ‘What’s in this for you?’

‘Since I arrived here I’ve talked to people,’ he muttered. ‘I’m the boss’s son, the heir to the empire, so to speak. Naturally they think I’m on his side. Also, they’re kind of scared of me. So they have to tell me the truth. They’ve admitted a lot of these smaller mines we get stuff from are inside the national park. Sooner or later the government will let people mine there anyway, they think, so all they’re doing is getting ahead of the game. They’re proud of it! But I’m not.’ Though his chin was still low, he met my eye for the first time and went on quietly, ‘I can’t undo what happened to Innocent. We all know it was my fault. The best I can do is honour his memory. He was all about protecting Congo’s wildlife. I don’t want any part in destroying –’

A metal-on-metal shriek rose up from the mine to slice the end off Caleb’s sentence, but it didn’t matter. Everything about him in that moment – his slumped shoulders, the way his fingers were gnawing at one another, his quick-blinking eyes – told me he was sincere. I trust my instincts. Marcel seemed to have to come to the same conclusion. He put a hand on Caleb’s shoulder, left it there for a moment, then patted his upper arm twice. If he could offer Caleb this forgiveness, how could I not do the same? I wanted to. Amelia, as so often happens, beat me to it.

‘Satisfied?’ she said.

Sometimes an apology can be hard to take. You have to climb down off your own high horse to accept it. Amelia’s clunky, obvious rightness, swept the awkwardness away. It made me smile at Caleb. Only briefly, but enough to prompt a nanosecond-long half-smile back. This was enough.

‘Let’s get on with it then,’ he said.

‘With what?’ asked Amelia.

‘Finding Jack’s parents,’ he said, holding his hands out, palms up. ‘So we can help them clean up this mess.’

50.

With the air between us cleared, Caleb sprang into action. Though he’d shrunk with shame in the time we’d been apart, he inflated again as we approached his father’s foreman, who was among a group of workers squatting beside a digger with a broken caterpillar track.

‘Butcher!’ Caleb hollered as soon as we were within earshot.

A fat white guy in a hard hat jumped up.