“Where is everyone? Where are the survivors?” Jason clutched at uniformed arms as they passed, asking first in English and then Malay. The police shrugged, pointed at the crowds on the pavement. There was no order to this, no one was tallying lists of the living. There were too many to take in—human mountains, human oceans, they say in Chinese. “Are there still people inside?” Nobody could answer this. Rescue workers carted rubble out in wheelbarrows, manhandling great slabs of concrete out of the way.

When they began bringing the bodies out, he knew. He tried to get closer, to rip the concealing blankets off, but they stopped him again. Go to the hospital, they said. Not here, not in the open.

No one offered him a lift, and he had to cycle again through the slick streets, up New Bridge Road and into Outram. The morgue was in a basement, painted sickly green. The assistant made him stop shouting before he would show him the bodies of first two strangers and then his sister.

Mollie’s face was crusted with blood, her familiar eyes open but filmed over. Flecks of rubble were lodged under her tongue, behind her perfect teeth. The attendant stopped him from touching the evidence. Jason was only required to nod for identification. Then the corpse was taken away to be labelled.

He declined tea and slumped in the corridor. Who would pick the children up from his parents’ flat? Mollie usually got her daughter before he came for his twins. He tried to do something, call their parents, but the air seemed to press on him, keeping him immobile. There were things he wanted to say to Mollie, but of course she was not there. He was later unable to work out how long he’d spent in that basement. When he emerged, the rain had stopped and a weak sun was shining.

The bombers were arrested three days later, two Indonesian guerrillas caught trying to escape by sea. They had been given a Malaysian Airways bag containing between twenty and twenty-five pounds of nitroglycerine, and told to detonate it in any public building. They had landed at eleven in the morning and, after lunch, left the explosives up a flight of stairs in the imposing bank.

In Jason’s memory, the killers died very soon after that, even though he has looked up the dates and knows it took three years for them to exhaust their appeals. They were hanged within the high walls of Changi Prison on 17 October 1968. Like many people, Jason stood at the prison gates that day, waiting for the flag to go up to indicate the executions had taken place.