He slipped the lighter back in his pocket and sat back on his heels, his eyes closed and his hands together in prayer as he emptied his mind of everything save his wife and three dead daughters. When his first two daughters had died he had been powerless to help and by the time he was in a position to do anything the men responsible were hundreds of miles away. He’d thirsted for revenge then, he’d wanted to tear the men apart with his bare hands, but there was nothing he could do. It had been a long time since the two young girls had suffered, all those years ago in the South China Sea. He remembered how he’d had to watch. How they’d screamed and begged him to help, and how something inside him had died. The urge for revenge had never died, in fact if anything it was stronger now than it had ever been, though it was tempered by the knowledge that he had done everything he could. But this time he would not allow the deaths of Xuan Phoung and Kieu Trinh to pass unresolved into memories. He would not allow the men responsible to escape unpunished. He swore to himself he would not. On the souls of his family he swore it. He didn’t move for almost an hour and when he opened his eyes again they were moist, though no tears rolled down his cheeks. He slowly stood up, his joints clicking and cracking as he stretched his legs. He had decided what he was going to do, but he knew there would be a thousand details that he still had to work out, so he took a pencil and one of his daughter’s unused exercise-books from a drawer in the kitchen and sat down at the dining-table and began writing.

It was dark, so dark that the man could see the car’s headlights from more than a mile away, carving tunnels of light through the blackness. He lay down in the grass and waited for it to pass. It was two o’clock in the morning so cars were few and far between along the road connecting the A4008 with the A409 near Bushey Heath, just south-west of the M1. The man was lying face down on farmland, his nose close to the dew-damp soil, listening to the engine noise grow louder and then fade away. He got to his feet, picked up the spade and the metal detector by his side and walked towards a small brook that cut through the fields. He had memorised the location and if he was unlucky enough to be caught he’d say that he was just a treasure hunter out looking for buried coins, but getting caught was the last thing on his mind. He heard the trickling water before he reached the bank of the brook, and turned left and followed its meandering path to a small copse. He pushed his way through waist-high bushes until he came to the base of a towering beech tree. One of its roots, as thick as a man’s thigh, crawled along the peaty ground for six feet or so before plunging into the earth, and it was midway along its length where the man began to dig. He was well-built and used to physical exercise, and though he was breathing heavily after half an hour he had dug a hole four feet deep and three feet across. He began to take more care then, and before long the spade clunked into something that sounded vaguely metallic. He bent down and pulled up a long thin package, wrapped in polythene. He laid it on the ground next to the tree and unwrapped it. Under the polythene was a sack, tied at one end with a piece of wire. He undid it and pulled the sack down.