But how can we go home . . .

Casey forced herself to gaze at the plastic flowers.

Where is she? The jolt again. Where is this baby right now?

10.49.

A woman screaming. Somewhere, out in this city.

Hands, clenching. Flesh, tearing.

And all the pain for nothing.

Casey thought of husbands. Waiting out in the corridors, beside cream polyester and red plastic flowers and strip lighting pinned to the ceiling. There, and not there. Vital, and quite insignificant.

10.50.

Who is she, this woman?

A mother, and yet not a mother.

What happens, in those last frantic minutes, when the pain is all there is? Gripping, and raging, and howling.

And that sudden first squall. She’s alive. She’s alive.

A baby, brought around, just for a moment: small, slippery, mewling. A hand reaching out, for a second. And the baby abruptly lifted away.

10.52.

Then the drugs, to stop the milk.

My child, and not my child.

All the dreams of a lifetime, and only a couple of seconds.

The love of a lifetime, gone. The cries, fading away down a corridor.

You never know how you can run, until you run for your daughter.

And Emily, somewhere. A mother, and not a mother.

10.56.

The double doors flew open.

Beyond the banqueting room, they were all in play. Miranda, just off the plane, was sitting in the hotel lobby, casual in jeans and an embroidered tunic. Outside, a tuk-tuk waited patiently. Up in Bhatiari, to the north of the city, Hessa was lingering just outside the gate to the shipyard, sitting on a low wall in her old blue sari.

Casey had called Savannah too.

‘I need your eyes. Can you spare a day?’

‘Well, I haven’t had a day off since I arrived in this wretched country,’ said Savannah, ‘so I guess I am owed a few.’

‘Can you come up to Chittagong?’

‘Course.’

Savannah was sitting in the entrance to a hospital in Chittagong, the one that a woman might be moved to for emergency surgery. Invisible in her charity-branded T-shirt and jeans.

‘Layla wants to help too,’ Savannah had called back, a few minutes after Casey had spoken to her. ‘She says she’s seen too much in the camps, doing all her translating work. That she wants to do something proper.’

‘That,’ Casey had said, ‘would be amazing.’

Layla was positioned a few steps away from the factory in Sagorika, queuing at a street corner, in her oldest sari.

‘But it’s still not enough,’ Casey fretted. ‘They could be being held anywhere, these women. In a suburb in Chittagong. Or out in a village in the hill tracts. Anywhere.’

‘It’s the best we can do,’ Miranda had tried to reassure her. ‘Let’s work out the rest of the plan.’

They had all strategised for hours up in Casey’s hotel room, eating endless biscuits and crisps. Casey hadn’t questioned Miranda about her sudden arrival.