His fault? Did it matter? I couldn’t focus, stared wildly around me. Some of the gorillas had already disappeared into the greenery. The wounded baby was nowhere to be seen, nor was the silverback, Spenser. Others were moving off, disappearing into the jungle in an unhurried, methodical procession. With clumsy fingers Marcel was trying to wind the crepe bandage over the top of the blood-soaked pad of Amelia’s shirt, but that quickly darkened with blood as well. So much blood. It didn’t seem possible that a person could lose it, and it wasn’t. Poor Innocent’s breathing, which had been laboured and broken, became shallower and shallower until he wasn’t breathing at all.

‘Non, non, non,’ Marcel whispered. The tears were running down his cheeks now. ‘Non!’

Patience broke free of Amelia and pressed her face into her father’s blood-soaked chest. ‘Non, non, non!’ she wailed.

No.

No.

No.

The word made me suddenly furious.

Denying a fact doesn’t change it.

Wounded by the charging silverback, our guide Innocent, now a still shape beside me on the blood-soaked jungle floor, was dead.

24.

An awful stillness descended. The gorillas had gone. Marcel, with his head bowed and eyes shut, was a statue beside me. Amelia stepped away and dropped to her knees next to Xander. Despite his own injury, Xander was in tune enough to know from the look on her face that the worst had happened. He fell back against the leaves and lay there staring up into the clotted treetops. I was still cradling the dead guide’s head; with my free hand I shut his eyes and stroked his daughter’s shoulder. She wouldn’t let go of her father. I laid the two of them down together, easing myself out from beneath them. What was going through Patience’s mind? I couldn’t bear to think of it, backed a step or two away from them both, giving the girl some space. My trousers were sodden with his blood. I couldn’t have cared less. Innocent looked even younger in death. That wispy beard, the relaxed line of his mouth. Marcel tried to comfort Patience now, taking hold of her wordlessly, lifting her away, the pair of them weeping silently together. I’m sure I was imagining it, but even the jungle seemed quieter, as if someone had turned its incessant pulsing soundtrack down a notch.

Caleb was the last to realise what had happened. He’d wandered off muttering to himself and now stood at a distance, scratching his head in a daze. After nobody else had spoken for what seemed ages but was probably only a minute, he looked up and said, ‘What?’

None of us answered him.

‘But what?’ he repeated.

‘Il est mort,’ said Marcel.