He had a point, but I didn’t bother answering him.

There’s no way I’d have touched the thing with my bare hands but Patience, completely unfazed, picked it up by the tail.

‘It was old,’ said Innocent. ‘Grey hair, look.’

Whether that made my having killed it better or worse I didn’t know.

11.

The following morning we set off in search of chimpanzees. Innocent said the national park we’d be visiting was ‘local’, but the journey still took all day. The easy bit was crossing the lake by boat. After what Amelia had said about the gas in it, I expected the lake to be bubbling, but it was just a huge green-brown mirror reflecting a sky full of enormous clouds, pinpricked with birds. Innocent pointed out a pair of eagles riding a thermal and handed round his battered binoculars for us to take a better look. The birds were huge wedges of black with wide, ragged wings and short white tails, and while I was watching them the bigger of the two dived down towards the other and seized hold of its talons and the pair spun towards the lake like a huge sycamore leaf, only breaking apart just in time to stop themselves from hitting the water.

‘They’re friends,’ Innocent explained. ‘Male and female.’

Caleb, who’d brought his own binoculars with him, had also watched the birds fall. I overheard him tell Amelia, ‘They could have hung on to one another a second longer and still made it.’

If I’d said anything that stupid she would have given me a lecture on terminal velocity or something, but annoyingly she left his statement unchallenged.

Xander, ever the smooth-talker with adults, got Innocent to tell us his life story – or some of it at least – on the journey. He was raised by his mother in the capital, the eldest of four kids. They had little money, so to help support the family he’d joined the army as soon as he could. This, he ruefully suggested, was, ‘Very silly, a big mistake.’

‘Why’s that?’ asked Caleb.

Smiling, Innocent simply shook his head.

‘How old were you when you joined up?’

Still with the faraway smile, Innocent replied, ‘Very young, very young indeed’.

‘Where did you serve? And in what capacity?’ Caleb asked in a voice that seemed to imply he’d be able to relate to Innocent’s experience, whatever it had been.

‘Here and there. Mostly they sent us to fight in the east.’

Amelia nodded. ‘Makes sense. That is the part of the country that has been most at odds with itself. And it still is, with all the militia groups fighting each other for control.’

‘That’s why Innocent here is the best man to keep us out of harm’s way,’ said Xander. ‘Isn’t that right? We’re lucky to have you.’

Innocent’s face said, Oh yes, for sure.

And with that the conversation would have ended, if Caleb hadn’t ploughed on. ‘I bet you experienced some stuff, eh,’ he said. ‘What was the sketchiest action you saw?’