Mohktar’s phone rang, and as he answered it I thought that I would like to speak to the people my mother had fleeting contact with. He was listening intently to the person on the other end of the phone and his eyes, watching me, changed suddenly as he fired questions in rapid Chinese. When he came off the phone he was silent and Jack reached for my hand as if he too expected bad news.

DS Mohktar continued staring at us, his expression unreadable.

‘Constable Ahmed is on his way here. He has some information for me. Also, I understand that a girl serving in the café in the gardens thinks she might have served your mother, at about twelve thirty, before her shift ended. The woman talked to her about how the gardens had looked many years ago, and appeared normal and relaxed…So, if we assume that your mother was going to return to the hotel in time for her flight bus to Singapore airport, whatever happened occurred after twelve thirty p.m…Lah?’

At that moment an Indian policeman walked into the room. He held a file of papers in his hand and he glanced at me curiously as he placed the foolscap in front of Mohktar.

Mohktar read without expression for five minutes or so and the tension felt unbearable. Jack held on to my hand, but despite the air-conditioning my hand in his grew slippery with anxiety. Eventually Mohktar looked up. He smoothed the first piece of paper for a moment as if gathering his thoughts then he met my eyes and said quietly, ‘You did not think to tell me, Miss Montrose, that your father was killed here in Singapore in a helicopter accident in 1976?’

My throat felt dry. I suddenly saw how relevant to Fleur’s disappearance that accident we had all watched a lifetime ago must seem to the detective.

I looked at him. ‘I’m sorry. It was so long ago and my mother has had another life since then and another marriage. I don’t think her disappearance now is connected to my father’s accident, really I don’t…’

But I was shaking because I knew what other memories might have been invoked and I did not want to talk about them. I did not want to conjure them up from the darkness inside me. I did not want to voice and make commonplace what was just one more case to these policemen, not a monstrous thing they carried round inside them like a wound.

Jack stirred uneasily and the two policemen did not take their eyes from my face. James Mohktar leant forward suddenly.

‘Miss Montrose, you had a sister, did you not?’

I nodded and Jack moved imperceptibly closer.

‘Five weeks after your father was killed your sister went missing from the government rest houses in Port Dickson. She was never found, was she?’

How quiet the room was now, and the air-conditioning made my bare arms cold. I shivered. I looked down at my hands. At the small eternity ring Jack had given me instead of a wedding band.