A small girl was leaning against the pickup’s tailgate. Instead of telling her to clear off, Innocent introduced her. ‘This is Patience, my daughter and right-hand man. She’ll be coming with us. She’s learning how to track and is already ten times better than I was at her age,’ he said proudly. This Patience only looked about ten, but she stepped forward with a confidence that made her seem much older. She had the biggest, steadiest eyes I’d ever seen, and she gazed at each of us in turn without blinking, the absolute opposite of being nervous to meet us. Caleb had put his pack on the floor. Without asking him, Patience – who couldn’t have weighed much more than the pack – swung it up into the back of the pickup in one clean movement and motioned for the rest of us to follow suit. We climbed in ourselves after our luggage, at Innocent’s instruction. Caleb tried to assert his authority by telling us – pointlessly – that all this was normal. He’d done something similar before, many times. What ‘all this’ was I don’t know. ‘Rest assured,’ he went on, ‘my dad’s people will have done thorough due diligence on this safari outfit.’

Apart from cringing a bit – he’d said this right in front of Innocent and Patience – I didn’t react to this statement. The truth was, I didn’t know what ‘due diligence’ meant precisely. Amelia must have noticed, because she said, ‘He means Langdon’s done background checks on our guides, but we know your mum and dad did that before they booked us onto the trip, so I’m not exactly sure why he said it.’

‘Belt and braces,’ Caleb said, looking away.

Before we set off, Innocent introduced our driver, explaining that although he was brilliant at negotiating dirt roads he spoke no English. In the Toyota’s big wing mirror I saw the man had bloodshot eyes. He did speak French as well as the local language, but it seemed he did that grudgingly; after he’d fought the pickup through the weaving motorbikes to our hotel Xander offered him a ‘merci beaucoup’ and said something about the traffic and got just a grunt in reply.

I say hotel, but this place was nothing like where we had stayed in Kinshasa. That one was posh; this one was not. Like just about every other building I saw on our way into the incredibly busy town centre, it was low-rise with a corrugated roof, and bits of it hadn’t yet been built. Someone had put plastic flowers on the reception desk though, and the floor looked clean enough.

After we’d checked in, Amelia, Xander and I went to explore the hotel garden, which was also half finished. In the middle of an incomplete patio stood an empty fountain with rocks in the bottom. There being no chairs, we sat on the concrete lip, dangling our feet into what would have been water if the fountain had been full. It was late afternoon. In Kinshasa the heat had been constant and oppressive; Goma, today, was cool by comparison. The sky above us was the colour of a fresh bruise and there was a sulphurous rotten egg smell coming from somewhere. When she heard me mention it to Xander, Amelia said, ‘It’s because of the geography, not a lack of sanitation.’