The shock of it never diminished. Fleur let her grief flow through her, as familiar as the blood coursing through her veins. The growing horror when she had been forced to understand that this was not a childish prank but something infinitely more sinister. The torches in the dark; the endless calling of Saffie’s name. The Military Police and local police arriving in Jeeps full of men. The loudspeakers; the willing Malay and English volunteers who beat for hours with sticks to the very edge of the jungle and found nothing.

The knowledge that in that noisy cicada-rubbing vegetation, the jungle sprang back relentlessly, hiding human interference as if it had never been. A small body covered forever.

Until now, this moment, when the world narrowed again to a small isolated focus. No David. No Fergus. Just her and Nikki again, walking a dark, familiar path. Just the two of them.

And me.

The flimsy door behind her banged in a sudden breeze and Fleur shivered and jumped at the shadow the palms made over the sand below her. It was as if a small child brushed past her, touching her briefly in a torn dress with little pink flowers.

She went back inside the house to bed, pulling the mosquito net down behind her. Saffie. Naughty little Saffie. She let herself wonder for a second how it would have been to have both her daughters, laughing and joking together; married and having children. She smiled at the thought of the endless telephone calls and private jokes and screams of mirth. All the trivial things that families and siblings took for granted. Nikki and Saffie as close as two peas in a pod.

She had to stop herself in supermarkets or on busy streets, when she saw a small child being slapped for being grizzly, for being tired, for being a child. She wanted to scream out, ‘Stop it! Don’t you realise how lucky you are?’

She shut her mind abruptly; thought again of Fergus. How good he had been at deflecting this persistent inner voice that pulled her back, back into the shadows of her first life, obsessively going over what she could never change.

THIRTY-THREE

Fleur bumped into Fergus on a flight home to Singapore from Brize Norton. He had been David’s best man and at the twins’ christening as one of their godfathers, but he and Fleur had never really had a conversation.

David had flown on back to Singapore with the twins. Fleur was recovering from a bad dose of dengue fever and had stayed behind recovering with Peter and Laura. She had spent ten days in a military hospital. Her army doctor wanted to take blood tests and try to stabilise her weight loss before he allowed her to fly back to Singapore.

On that flight home she had the strange light-headedness that comes after illness and excessive weight loss and she felt very odd to be travelling without children.

Both sets of parents had been worried about Fleur and David’s decision to extend his tour of service for another two years. Peter believed that three and a half years in the tropics at one time was enough. Health and marriages suffered, in his opinion, in that relentless humidity. It was unusual to be offered an extension, but David’s OC had gone sick, and David, as his second-in-command, knew the job better than anyone.