It seemed to Fleur to be the loneliest place on earth.

THIRTY-FIVE

I could hear their voices outside my room and they seemed to come from a long way away. The ceiling fan stirred the mosquito net; it moved gently around me like a billowing white sail. I felt strange. I was in a sailing boat way out at sea and nothing could touch me. I hovered above myself for the next thing that would happen. Interested, but detached.

Fleur came and lifted the mosquito net. ‘DS Mohktar is here, darling. Do you still want to speak to him?’

I turned to her. I was no longer afloat. I could not escape the words that had to be said. ‘Yes, Mum.’

How tired Fleur looked. How thin and aged. I knew I should get out of bed and wash my face, brush my hair, but I did not have the energy. Fleur put orange juice on the bedside table.

‘You must keep drinking, Nik.’

She went to get Mohktar and I felt myself tremble. I turned the pillow to cool my head and sat myself up, suddenly minding what Mohktar thought of me.

He came in carrying a plate of papaya and melon cut into small pieces with a sprinkling of ginger over them.

I smiled. ‘Ah Heng used to do that when we were children.’

Mohktar smiled back and sat on the chair next to the bed. ‘From Ah Lin. To a Malay it is as comforting as your English toast and butter and marmalade!’

I took a piece and he took a piece. He seemed in no hurry and I began to relax as I ate the fruit. There are some people you could believe you had known in another life and Mohktar was one of them.

‘Tell me about the place you grew up in?’ I said. ‘Did you have a happy childhood?’

He hesitated, his dark eyes watching me. ‘I had a very happy childhood in a small kampong by a river. I ran wild with my brothers. There were many of us and we were poor by western standards but comfortable by our own. My father was a bank clerk and my mother, helped by all her children, raised livestock.’ He smiled. ‘It was a very ordinary, boring childhood, I’m afraid, Miss Montrose.’

‘What made you become a policeman?’

‘Perhaps to give families like mine a voice against corruption. ’

I waited, watching his beautiful face.

‘Two of my brothers were killed by faulty scaffolding. They fell thousands of metres to their deaths. The builder was never prosecuted. He paid off the police and the judge. My mother was never the same again. I was in England at the time, studying. I returned with new eyes and could not go back to the old ways of acceptance of corruption.’

‘I could have gone into law, but you see, I like jigsaws. I like the process of discovery and solving and I am not adversarial enough for the law.’