Siew Li’s letters started coming, all addressed to the children, not a single one to him. As if he’d never existed. He read them anyway, every word, saw the pictures of her in her new life. It was as Mollie said, she’d been forced to flee. Still, he couldn’t forgive her the abandonment. Was this unfair? He couldn’t stop feeling that if she’d done something different—he couldn’t say what—they’d still be together.

His life shrunk to a tiny point. No one at work had ever been particularly friendly with him, and now it was worse. He wasn’t a pariah exactly, but the situation was strange enough that no one quite knew what to say. It was the same meeting old classmates—Siew Li’s name had been in the papers, and everyone knew she was a fugitive. One chap made a joke about Communist honeypots, and Jason almost bit his head off. They sought him out less after that.

So there was just Mollie. The bank wasn’t far from his office—she’d call now and then to say she was downstairs, come out and have some lunch. After work, she’d come round with packets of food, knowing he’d probably not bother eating otherwise. They’d eat in warm silence, then sit on the sofa listening to the radio, or else she’d play with the children as he watched, easier with them than he would ever be. She saved him, in those first two years after Siew Li. Having her there was an anchor. Who knew where he’d have drifted to otherwise? And if she’d been around longer—

Here again the endless circles of thought: if Siew Li hadn’t left, if Mollie hadn’t insisted on staying at her job, if Barnaby had been enough of a man to stop her, if the Indonesians had chosen another building—all the decisions, big and small, that could have saved him if any one of them had been different. All those years like a dark corridor growing steadily narrower, returning to Mollie’s death, the point at which the last fragment of his self fell apart, the moment he gave up hope of ever being whole again.

•

In the sickly light of the false dawn, Jason uses his fingers to count off the events leading up to MacDonald House. He knows them all so well; they glide through his mind like rosary beads.

The first bomb went off at Katong Park, on 24 September 1963, a day after the Malaysian Federation was formed. Marine commandos landed with instructions to destroy the Britannia Club on Beach Road, but found too many people in the building to work unobserved. Unwilling to leave without accomplishing anything, they walked to the park where they blew up the first car they encountered.