Was she ill? In her cool room she showered, made tea, then drank the miniature brandy with ginger and two paracetamol tablets and fell onto the bed.

Through the darkness of sleep Fleur still felt the motion of the train carrying her slowly towards her dead daughter. The fear of not finding the place where she lay haunted her until memory surfaced and the world outside her room turned again in to a beautiful lonely stretch of beach below the government rest houses.

All those hundreds of little wooden steps she had watched Ah Heng help the twins down. At the bottom they would run laughing through the sand full of tiny spider crabs that ran ahead of their small feet.

Their beach ended at Tanjung Tuan lighthouse bordering the state of Malacca. Away in the distance, the land curved and became jungle. They used to climb up to the lighthouse to get the view out over the glittering water of the Malacca Straits.

In the dark, Fleur sat upright. It was night and sounds outside were hushed. Now she knew the direction she must take. She pulled the sheet up to her chin and rocked gently as the awful image kept at bay all these years surfaced again.

Saffie’s hand in a stranger’s. Fleur never saw his face, only the back view of him leading the small child away from her towards the jungle where the monkeys cried out and chattered like overexcited children.

The hand was dark, always dark in her mind, and Saffie, her small hand in his, felt no danger. She skipped, her blonde hair bobbing as she walked beside him, wondering what he was going to show her in the long hot afternoon when the grown-ups slept and made love and children should have been safe with amahs.

Fleur shivered and her guilt, forever with her like a second skin, surfaced in a cold layer of sweat. That long ago afternoon she had slept the drugged irresponsible sleep of a selfish woman who had put her own needs before those of her children. She should have made sure they could not leave the room…She should have kept them both safe.

Fleur faced once again in the dark Saffie’s sudden and inexplicable disappearance. She thought about her last lonely and trusting walk to the edge of the jungle, to this moment now, when her small skeleton had been found in a hidden grave. She saw the curled little body, all bones intact, in foetal position, the same position in which she had lain beside Nikki in Fleur’s womb.

Why now? Why had Saffie’s body not been found before? How was it that she had not been taken by animals, all identification of her long gone as her bones were spread about the jungle?

Someone had placed Saffie in that shallow grave. She had lain alone, for a long, long time.

Dimly, Fleur realised she was feverish. She turned and thrashed in the damp bed, neither asleep nor fully awake, until stomach cramps forced her out of bed. She sat up, shakily, realising with a sinking heart, that this was not tiredness or jet lag, she was ill.