All my life I have wanted to go back to a time of safety and happiness, when we were a real family. Mum and Dad, Saffie and me. When the tropical sun shone down but never burnt. When the rains were swift but no one ever drowned in the monsoon drains. When Saffie and I drew little square houses with windows and a garden path with flowers and a matchstick mum and dad with happy, smiley faces.

This is what Fleur was bravely protecting me from the whole of my life. The moment when you realise none of it really exists; it is just an illusion, the sunshine and the smiley faces. It is what lies behind that counts.

I think of Jack. ‘No worries,’ he always says, as they do in New Zealand, whatever happens. ‘No worries, darlin’.’

Damn. I’m not crying. I’m not.

THIRTY-NINE

Inspector Blythe was waiting for an update from London. He had asked for the current whereabouts of everyone staying at the government rest houses in 1976. He did not care if they were now living in Timbuktu. He wanted them located and their movements traced back from the 1970s to the present day. He wanted to know when they left the forces and why. He wanted to know their progress through the last twenty-eight years, and if anyone was dead he wanted to know where and how.

He got up early to sift through every witness statement. He went over and over their movements that afternoon to see if there was any small thing they had missed the first time round. As everyone, except two of the teachers, had slept in the afternoon, there was little to find.

The two teachers in question had been in Kuala Lumpur for the night so they were ruled out. Of the other two, the only tiny significant paragraph was that one of them, a Daphne Broadbent, had heard running footsteps and a door slamming somewhere. So had Mrs Christine Dury, because she had got up to breastfeed her sixth-month-old baby. But a door slamming somewhere was hardly indicative of murder.

The pregnant Mrs Addison, apart from Mrs Campbell and Nikki of course, had been the last person to see Saffie alive that day. Before Mrs Campbell’s parents had left for Penang, they had asked if the Addisons would keep an eye on Fleur for them. Beatrice Addison had gone to see them on her own around lunchtime. Her husband, Alex, recovering from the same crash that had killed David Montrose, had thought it would be better if he stayed behind as his wife was better at the emotional stuff.

Beatrice, being pregnant, had a couple of soft drinks with Fleur. She had admitted reluctantly that Fleur had had at least two strong lunchtime gins, and who could blame her?

Both husband and wife had slept after lunch. Beatrice had slept longer than Alex. He had got up before her to take a walk, but he had seen no one except Major Gardam of the British High Commission, who had gone down to the beach in the late afternoon to swim with Andrew and Paula Right. They had been at different ends of the beach but had waved at one another. None of them had seen anything out of order or vaguely suspicious.