The heat was a shovel to the face, a blunt force smacking her entire body. Now she remembered. She’d braced herself for mere temperature, but this was altogether fiercer, the saturated air swaddling her so in seconds she was gasping slightly, her blouse soaked and hair clinging to her forehead. Was it possible the climate had become more hostile than in her childhood? Yet the locals seemed unbothered, moving minimally and not too fast, going about their business as if this whole country wasn’t a furnace.

Mr Leng, the lawyer, met her at the airport. She was surprised he’d come in person rather than sending someone, but he brushed away her thanks, he enjoyed the drive out here anyway, there was a stall nearby with the best nasi lemak, always good to have an excuse to go there. Would she like some? Oh, of course, she must be exhausted, how long was her flight? Well, he’d take her directly to the hotel.

The Herald had booked her into the Hotel Merlin, a startlingly luxurious establishment, at least to her eyes: a tall slab of concrete and glass windows. From her room on the twelfth floor, she could see all the way to the horizon. Did the ringgit make things cheaper here? Or had she stumbled into a different level of her career, one in which there was somehow money where none had been before, the way the paper managed to pay Ian Spender significantly more than her, even though he took naps after his long lunches and turned in maybe two articles a week.

Mr Leng said as soon as she’d freshened up, he had a couple of people for her to meet in town.

The first visit felt like a warm-up, someone who’d already spoken to the papers at the time—the headman of the village that the women and children had been brought to after their houses were set alight. After his place, too, was razed, he’d come to the city to live with his brother. They sat in a cracked concrete courtyard, on rickety wooden stools. Everything he told her was already in the coverage, but it was useful to have it restated, and she’d be able to say it was as fresh in his mind as if it was yesterday. Readers liked that, to feel the past brought to them.