‘She must be one of the villagers,’ Wolf said to Ben. Then switching to Pashto, which he spoke as fluently as Ben did, he pointed at the houses and asked her, ‘Safiya, do you live here with your mum and dad?’ The girl stared at him in confusion for a moment, then shook her head.

‘Where did you come from this morning?’ Ben asked her. She raised a skinny little arm from the folds of her robe and pointed, not at the village but up the hill in the direction he and Wolf had come. Ben shook his head and was about to say, ‘No, you can’t have come from there,’ when he realised what she was telling them.

‘She doesn’t live with her mum and dad,’ Ben said to Wolf in English. ‘She doesn’t have any. She’s one of the orphans.’

Turning back to the girl and speaking again in her own language he asked, ‘Do you know a lady called Francine Blanchet?’

Safiya’s doe eyes opened wide in surprise and she nodded, all the fear vanishing from her face at the mention of the name. ‘Mère Blanchet,’ she replied, pronouncing it the French way. ‘She’s our teacher. She looks after us.’

‘And where is Mère Blanchet now?’ Ben asked. Without hesitation the girl raised her arm again and pointed in the same direction as before, up the hill towards the orphanage. Which made no sense. But then Ben suddenly understood that she wasn’t pointing at the orphanage, but beyond it, in the direction of the escarpment to the west. That was when everything Madison had been telling him came back in a flash.

‘The caves,’ he said to Wolf. ‘They’re hiding up in the caves.’

‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ Wolf muttered. ‘They were there the whole time, right under our noses.’

Trying to keep his voice calm in case he frightened her, Ben said, ‘Tell me, Safiya. Are all the other children there? Is everyone okay?’

Yes, she replied in a tiny voice, but they were very hungry and thirsty, and terribly scared. Mère Blanchet was too old to walk such a long way, with her stick, so she had been sending the older girls down in turn to fetch water and whatever food they could find in the village. They’d brought back all they could but there was nothing left to eat, and they could only carry a little water at a time. As she talked, tears welled up in her eyes and she began to cry. ‘I did my best to fetch the water. I didn’t want to let Mère Blanchet down. But my ankle hurts so much. Is it broken?’