He’d stopped short of saying he owed me one, but it felt as if that’s what he meant, and for a second I thought he might actually have come along simply to admit he’d been at fault and to show he was grateful I hadn’t mentioned his bloody machete to anyone. But did he have an ulterior motive? Something about the bashful look on Amelia’s face made me suspect so. All her life she’s stared straight at anyone she’s talking to, but today, saying goodbye to Caleb, she was fixated by the SUV’s aerial. Caleb’s ears were pretty much purple now. In what seemed to me slow motion, he leaned towards Amelia and kissed her on the cheek before swinging his stupid kitbag up onto his shoulder and walking away.

30.

I imagined Langdon would take charge at the police station, that the whole conversation would be in French and that I’d have to rely on Xander to translate, but I was wrong on all counts. Langdon led us into the breeze-block building and asked the sergeant on the desk if he could find someone who spoke English. When, some minutes later, a Detective Hubert arrived on the scene with a very clear, ‘How can I help you?’ Langdon flipped his thumb in my direction and said, ‘This poor boy has lost his parents and wants to report them missing.’

Detective Hubert’s sympathetic face made something well up inside me. I struggled to hold it together: the last thing Dad would want me to do in this situation is blub like a baby. But Langdon saying out loud that I’d ‘lost’ my parents brought it all home. It stoked my fear, clouding my head with panicky sparks. I tried to stay focused. The policeman picked up a laptop from a nearby desk awash with papers, snapped it shut, tucked it under his arm and took us to an interview room. Somebody in the station evidently liked spider plants. The one shelf in the room, high on the back wall, was a forest of them. Spider plants spread by growing new miniature versions of themselves at the end of long thin droopy stalks. All those spider-plant offspring searching for soil in mid-air made the panic roar up inside me again. My face grew red with it. Detective Hubert offered me a glass of water before we began.