The man straightened up holding on to one of her arms.

‘Come along. Can you hear the monkeys? Let’s go and see if we can spot some.’

‘No! No! I want to go home now. I want to go back…Let me go.’

‘Sorry. You wanted to walk, young lady, and we are going to walk…’

Saffie began to cry, then to kick and scream. ‘Let me go! Let me go! I’ll tell Grandpa! I’ll tell…’

Suddenly the man whirled her sharply round and put a hand over her mouth to stop her screaming. I rushed. I rushed between them and held Saffie tight to me and I was screaming too. He was hurting. He was hurting…His hand was covering my mouth. I could not get my breath. I could not breathe. I kicked and twisted and the pressure on my neck increased and pain shot through my body. I could not move. Suddenly there was a crack, a painful pop in my neck and darkness came; an endless, endless darkness. ‘Oh, God! Oh, God! What have I done?’ he was saying over and over again. ‘Oh God, I didn’t mean…’

He lifted me, I saw myself dangling over his arms. He carried me into the darkness of trees. He was crying and shaking, I could feel his whole body shaking. ‘What am I going to do? What am I going to do? Oh, dear God!’

He put me down on the ground and walked away and I heard scrabbling. I heard him kicking something and pulling and grunting. Then he came back for me and I saw what he was going to do…and I screamed.

‘Don’t bury me. Don’t bury me. I don’t want my face covered. I don’t want to be buried under the ground.’

He drops me with a small sound like a sob and rolls me underneath the boulder and covers me with another stone and I disappear into the earth. I disappear screaming into the earth…

Suddenly, Saffie is with me, her arms lift me up and away and we are running, running across the sand, back home to Fleur, and I know Saffie is not so alone any more because I know now. I know what happened.

Saffie had my dress on. Saffie was killed because he thought it was me. He thought I was the twin who saw him that day.

THIRTY-TWO

Fleur knew she would not sleep. She had a shower and climbed into bed under the mosquito net with her books.

If you could have your life again who would you choose, David or Fergus?

It had always been impossible to explain truthfully about the two loves of her life.

How do you explain to your daughter that there are many different ways of loving? That if you are desperate enough to keep the person you love you will compromise, you will do anything to keep them.

Nikki was thirty-three. By the time Fleur was twenty-five, David and Saffie were dead, and her life had been blown apart. By the time she was thirty-three she was living another quite different life.