Mohktar said, ‘There was the Malay girl in the main room. She was asked to stay in the house to keep an eye on the children when they woke. She too had fallen asleep, but she would not have seen or heard either twin as they both climbed out of the bedroom window. She said it was late, about five to five thirty when she took Mem a cup of tea. She did not wake her but left the tea beside her. Neither twin was with their mother, but she heard Nikki in the bathroom and thought both children were in there. She had slept too long so she hurried to her own quarters to shower and change ready to help the Chinese cook with dinner.

‘She was not employed as an amah, lah? She was just an eighteen-year-old girl who had been asked to stay in the house because of the children…’

‘I remember her,’ Blythe said. ‘She was very pretty and very upset. We had to keep reassuring her it was not her fault. I wonder what happened to her.’

Mohktar smiled. ‘She is married now with five children and she is rather fat.’

‘Oh!’ Inspector Blythe smiled back, his memory spoilt. ‘So, between about three thirty p.m. and five thirty when Mrs Campbell woke up, the other twin, Saffie, disappeared from the face of the earth. Possibly murdered between the rest house and where we found her remains.’

‘Unless she was taken somewhere else and buried there later.’

The two men looked at each other. Blythe said suddenly, ‘Do you ever have a strong gut feeling about a case?’ Mohktar looked puzzled. ‘Does murder upset my stomach? Indeed, Inspector, how can it not, especially when a child is involved, when families are destroyed.’

Blythe laughed dryly. ‘I meant – and I felt this twenty-eight years ago and I still feel it now – that the answer lies within the army community, not with a local man. Yet they were all officers, they were all acquaintances, if not friends. A sexual motive seems perverse in this setting. And it can never be established now.’

‘Unless,’ Mohktar said quietly, ‘the child saw something she should not have seen on a hot afternoon when she should have been sleeping?’

Blythe looked at him with interest. ‘A bit of extramarital activity would certainly not be unknown.’

‘It could be that her murder was a mistake, an accident.’

‘You mean he did not mean to kill her but was too rough, broke her neck by mistake?’

‘Yes.’

‘You didn’t tell the mother and her daughter that the child’s neck was broken, did you?’

‘No. It is too much information for them. I see no need unless they ask. I agree with you, Inspector, I too think the answer lies in the British community. It was, and still is, very rare here for a Chinese or Malay to harm a child.’

Blythe got to his feet. ‘I’m retiring. I thought on the plane flying out here how good it would feel to solve this last nasty little murder before I go, but we’re not going to, you know, Mohktar, we’re not going to.’