‘Oh yes.’

He let my hand go. ‘Try not to worry, Miss Montrose.’

He turned and started to walk across the sand and I called, ‘Thank you…for everything.’

He turned round and flashed me his wonderful smile. ‘My pleasure.’

Jack was leaning against the wooden railings. ‘He’s one of the good guys. You OK?’

I went and leant against him. ‘T’m fine. I just want to know as quickly as possible.’

After lunch Fleur went to her room and I fell asleep next to Jack, who was lying reading. The waiting was going to be awful. I thought I wouldn’t sleep, but I did.

EIGHTEEN

Fleur could not sleep. She paced, got up to drink water from the fridge, lay down with her book, kept reading the same line. She closed her eyes, tried to banish the memory of that small grave and could not. How was she going to feel if it was not Saffie? Relief that it was not her daughter buried in that lonely place for all those years? Or terror that it was some other child and that she and Nikki would never discover where Saffie lay?

She turned under the overhead fan in the hushed, hot afternoon and the silence pressed in upon her, weighing her down with the memory of that last time, sickeningly clear as if it had been yesterday.

The mosquito net stirred in the draught from the fan, ballooned gently round her like a parachute, and she was back, back in another room in a dusty wooden house long demolished.

Two weeks after the funeral in England Fleur flew back to Singapore with her parents and the twins. They had all stayed with David’s colonel and his wife. Fleur had wanted to go back to their quarter, but Peter had vetoed it. Ah Heng was no longer sleeping there and it would be traumatic for Fleur and the twins to return there without David and Ah Heng.

The pilots in David’s squadron and their wives were a close family unit and Fleur knew there would have been gossip. She and David had rowed publicly the night before he died. But when she returned to Singapore, people went out of their way to approach and reassure her.

‘Fleur, we all row,’ her friend Lucy said. ‘Please don’t let it eat you up. Everyone knows how close you and David were. You adored each other…It’s just made the…losing him worse for you…Just keep remembering how good you were together…’

Fleur wondered how she was going to get through another emotional ceremonial church service. The English funeral had felt unreal, but this packed army church full of uniforms and unfailing support was harder. David had been a charismatic and popular officer and the anguish and shock his sudden death had caused in the other pilots he worked with did not seem to have diminished in two weeks.

So many people had an anecdote, an incident they burnt to relate, and Fleur sat next to her father twisting her hands, dry-eyed, listening to every word as it took her back vividly to the man she had lost.