‘You might not, but I do,’ said Amelia quietly. She’d turned her face from me. For a horrible moment I thought her shoulders had begun to quiver. Had I hurt her feelings? Was she actually crying? I immediately felt bad: Amelia’s straight-talking cleverness is what I like most about her, after all. The stress of not knowing where my parents were was obviously getting to me.

I reached out to pat her upper arm and said, ‘Sorry.’

She turned back to me and I was relieved to see anger in her eyes, not tears. ‘Does that actually mean “sorry”, or something else, like: “Amelia, you’re an idiot.”’

‘It means I’m sorry.’

‘You should feel better now that I asked him those questions anyway, not worse.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Because he’s obviously telling the truth.’ As if talking to a moron she said, ‘That’s what I meant when I told him I believed him.’

I resisted the temptation to say, ‘Told you so,’ though that’s what I wanted to do as we cut back through the market. One of the stallholders recognised us, or Amelia at least, and offered her a mango. When she accepted, he sliced it in half and filleted it, his knife a blur, before offering her the result turned inside out, a sort of spiky mango hedgehog. Amelia tried to pay him but he waved her money away.

‘Weird business model,’ she said with her mouth full.

The guy heard and understood her. ‘Tu seras de retour,’ he said with a smile.

‘Possibly,’ Amelia agreed, and we walked on.

This exchange, and what had felt like a mini-breakthrough at the police station, meant that I returned to the hotel with a spring in my step. It was a surprise to find Xander in the lobby, doing the man-on-crutches equivalent of pacing about. Careful not to fall into the told-you-so trap with him either, I quickly filled him in on our conversation with the detective. He read between the lines though – as he always does – and said, ‘So you were right all along. I’m glad to hear it.’

‘Right, wrong, it doesn’t matter,’ said Amelia. ‘The point is the police appear actually to be on the case.’

‘What are you doing hobbling about anyway?’ I asked him. ‘The whole point of leaving you here was to give you a chance to rest your leg.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘But I got bored. And there was something going on out here so I came to see what was happening.’

‘What was it?’

‘I’m not exactly sure. Some delivery guy in a motorcycle helmet causing a fuss. The receptionists called security on him.’

‘Not many people here bother to wear them. They were probably just curious,’ I said.