We were escorted onto the plane before the other passengers and a little group of policemen including Mohktar saluted as they wheeled the tiny coffin to the plane. I felt Fleur beside me. We were both remembering Dad’s coffin entering the vast cargo-hold of an army flight, long ago, and we moved nearer to one another in silence as Saffie was tenderly carried across the tarmac by a huge turbaned Indian and a Malay officer.

We shook hands with the courteous Malaysian police. Blythe had left the night before for the UK. When I reached James Mohktar I felt such a sense of loss that I was afraid it would show in my eyes. Perhaps he knew, because he was brisk, shook my hand, and drawing me away from the others he took a small box from his pocket and opened the lid.

‘These are the smallest pair of shoes I could find. One shoe is for Saffie to guide her safely into the next world, and one shoe for you, Nikki, to guide you forward without her. You think that one shoe is no good without the other. It is not true, for wherever you go in this life she is with you. You will always be one half of a pair and death does not change that.’

I stared down at the tiniest pair of little bejewelled Chinese shoes and then Mohktar put the lid on and folded my hands around the box. ‘The reality of your days here will fade like a dream, but the essence of something, of your spirit and your sister’s, will remain. You will live on in my memory, Nikki.’

I looked into his strange and complex face. Such a mixture of cultures lay behind his eyes. ‘I am so glad to have known you, James Mohktar.’

He smiled. ‘Take care, Nikki.’

He turned abruptly away, back to his colleagues, and Sam and Fleur and I boarded the plane. As it motored along the runway I craned out of the window. There was one policeman standing alone waiting for the plane to take off. I knew he would watch it until we were a speck in the sky and then he would turn and drive home through the palm oil plantations on the long, straight road back to Singapore, to his wife and his child.

I sat in the long grass of the meadow and considered the strange intensity and familiarity between us. I knew it would seem unreal as the months passed; all part of finding Saffie in a place that had so many conflicting memories. Mohktar, somehow, has not touched my real life, just enriched it.

If I felt loss, it was for the passing of strangers who would never meet again and a glimpse of another culture which embraced the unknown and unseen and saw it as normal, a link and passage between worlds; a journey from a state of life to an afterlife. Not a death.

The spirit of Saffie will always be with me. Sleeping or waking. I do not need to dream. I do not need to conjure her from darkness and loss. She has always walked beside me, her small feet in sure and perfect time with mine. This was the simple and obvious truth that James Mohktar had given me.