And right now I had more important things to think about. Chiefly: Alebayo. The good news was that I hadn’t done anything I wouldn’t have done had I, in fact, been a photo-journalist. If he interviewed Gunner or any of the other men who had been on the plane, they wouldn’t be able to report anything incriminating. And there was nothing in my bag that shouldn’t have been there.

The bad news, of course, was that I had already crossed paths with him. He had been suspicious of my cover then, and it had changed since. Not substantially, but perhaps enough to be a problem. I’d told him I was working for The Times, assigned to follow the PM’s trip in Lagos. If he remembered that (and I had a feeling he might), he would naturally want to know what I was doing several hundred miles away, and under the aegis of Agence France-Presse.

I decided the best thing was to bluff it out, and insist that I was still working for The Times, but simply teaming up with Isabelle. As long as she didn’t crack and I stuck to my guns, there would be no easy way for him to prove otherwise. My trump card was that I was British. That meant he couldn’t do too much without provoking an international incident - if I made enough of a noise, perhaps nothing at all. Hopefully I’d be away from here within a couple of hours, leaving me plenty of time to find my way to Udi.

More light was entering the jeep now, and the road had suddenly become much smoother. Peering through the rain, I saw rows of small houses, a few of them with lit windows, and then what looked like a grass tennis court. That must have been a mistake, though, because I couldn’t imagine many towns in the area had a tennis club.

The truck started to slow, and our guards took their guns off safety with an audible click. It was our stop. Without a word, the soldier with the scars on his face released our chains, and we were pushed out onto a smooth asphalt surface. The truck sped away.