David, startled, stared down at her and then twirled her round, roaring with laughter. ‘Do you indeed?’

Fleur would not let him get away with passing it off as a joke and moved her hands up round his neck. ‘I mean it,’ she said softly. ‘I mean it.’

‘You’re only seventeen,’ he said carefully, smiling gently into her eyes. ‘And far too lovely for me.’

Fleur reached up and kissed his mouth, pressed her small dancer’s body against him. ‘No,’ she whispered, ‘but I suppose you’re too lovely for me. You’ve got all those teachers…especially that blonde one who was all over you in the boat. Have you taken her out?’

‘No, I haven’t.’ David gently disentangled Fleur from him, glancing quickly towards the beach. Embarrassing if Laura and Peter saw their teenage daughter wrapped round him.

‘I’m not a child,’ Fleur said, knowing exactly why he was holding her away. She felt a moment’s triumph because she had caught something in his eyes and knew she had aroused him. If he had thought of her as a little sister he didn’t now.

‘You certainly are not!’ David said. ‘You’re a little hussy. Race you back up the beach!’

He had been amazed to be stirred by her slim little body which he knew so well. Amazed and a little startled. He let her words lie there, new and shiny and intricate, but sharp too, and enticing, like coral.

FOURTEEN

I gathered up my mother’s things and put them in with our luggage in the hired car. Inspector Chan had asked the local Malaysian police to look out for Fleur in Seremban and Port Dickson. Detective Sergeant Mohktar had travelled ahead to Kuala Lumpur where there was a main police station and would join us in Port Dickson later in the day. Apparently he had grown up in the Seremban area and been a cadet all those years ago when Saffie had gone missing. He had remembered our name and the incident of a small English child disappearing, and the fact that she had never been found and that no one had been arrested for the crime.

I liked James Mohktar, a man with gentle eyes. I thought he looked more like a priest than a policeman. Jack had bought a map and as we set off through the traffic I tried to breathe deeply to contain my anxiety. I kept thinking of Fleur making her way to that small grave, alone.

It was stupid but I wondered if she would think that those old colonial rest houses still lay on acres of empty coastline. Jack had used the hotel computer and all we could see were rows and rows of hotels and complexes.

I imagined her arriving in a place that must have been clear and vivid in her head and finding a modern world had erupted from the empty paradise she had left behind. The deserted beaches would be gone and the spaces filled with concrete buildings. The jungle that met the edge of those government rest houses would have been beaten back to make way for water sports and rampant tourism. I saw her baffled and alone, not knowing in which direction to turn, the compass of her memory and imagination muddled by progress and a world that had moved on. I wanted to be there before her and it wasn’t possible.