As soon as we reached the spur where the old track split from the bigger dirt road, Marcel cut round me and opened up, firing us into the bush as quickly as the ruts and potholes would allow. He clearly didn’t want to be caught by Langdon’s men any more than we did. Amelia, her hair bouncing around wildly below her helmet, struggled to hang on to him, and I struggled too: my bike was a live thing I had to wrestle if I was going to keep up. It took such concentration, and was such physically hard work, that I was immediately thrown into a sort of split-screen state. I was super-intent on what I was doing and yet totally distracted by what I’d just witnessed, by fear and by hope, at the same time. What would Caleb do when Langdon woke up? What would I do in his situation? I’d try to restrain him, buy time. Might Caleb have tied his father up? Dragged him into the container he’d rescued us from, even? What would Langdon do to him in return when he got out? What would he eventually do to me? One thing was for sure, I didn’t doubt he would want revenge.

We rode without let-up for what seemed days on end. Of course it wasn’t; I just lost track of time completely. I suffered a terrible waking dream, or out-of-body experience, in which I saw myself from afar, a speck inching across an enormous and indifferent landscape, a million miles from Mum and Dad wherever they were, the future as huge as the country we were travelling through, with nothing but a great expanse of loneliness ahead.

I’d never cope without them. And yet did I really think I could find them? It took every ounce of my willpower to keep a tiny flame of hope alive that day. I couldn’t afford to give up. Every mile we could put between ourselves and Canonhead counted. Night fell and we battled on. Our headlights swarmed with insects. In the next village we reached, Marcel bartered us a hut for the night. We were up before dawn and would have set off on empty stomachs, but as we were packing up the woman whose hut we’d slept in popped up with three helpings of a sticky, dough-like stuff called fufu, accompanied by a savoury sauce, all served in folded banana leaves. I’ve no idea what was in the sauce. Not much meat, that’s for sure. But it filled a hole in my shrunken stomach, and helped me hang on to that bike, and Marcel’s back wheel, all morning.