I pulled the cover back and swung my feet onto the floor and I saw her shake her head slowly once.

‘Pinot. Pinot,’ I begged. ‘Don’t go, Saffie. Don’t go.’

I think she turned or the shadows in the room changed. I saw her face briefly and there was no expression there at all. Yet the room was full of her pleading. Then she was gone.

‘Saffie!’ I whispered. ‘What is it? What do you want me to do?’

Beyond the shadows, beyond the mosquito screen in the window, I saw the frangipani trees moving as the wind got up. I thought I heard the faint sound of crying, but I couldn’t be sure.

Fleur was impressed by Jack. She had expected a rather detached man’s man, but she saw immediately he was a gentle person and very protective of Nikki.

Her daughter’s reaction in the pathology department had alarmed Fleur. It was as if Nikki had immediately regressed, frighteningly quickly, to the days after Saffie’s disappearance. Twenty-eight years had not diminished Nikki’s loss or prepared her for the finality, the evidence of Saffie’s death.

Fleur got up and went to the door of the bedroom where Nikki was sleeping with the help of a relaxant from a softvoiced Indian-woman doctor. Safe for a pregnant woman, she had assured Jack.

Nikki lay in exactly the same position on the bed, heavily asleep. Fleur moved back along the veranda and sat down with Jack again. She had been jerked out of her own shock by Nikki’s distress, but she was fighting exhaustion.

The small bones of her child, curled as if for sleep, remained behind her eyes like a clear photograph through all that she was saying to Jack. Seeing Nikki pregnant and vulnerable, her detached and cool exterior blown away, Fleur realised that all these years Nikki had maintained a furious defence against a loss she had had to endure but had never come to terms with.

She said, as she looked at Jack’s worried face, ‘Twins, especially identical ones, are immeasurably close. Closer to each other, in a way, than they are to their parents. I learnt, when I had Nikki and Saffie, that I could never be cross with one twin or the other would be outraged. Sometimes you could never be sure which one you were talking to because they liked to play games. I used to dress them in different colours so people would not get confused, but they would swap their clothes around and imitate each other’s mannerisms, so from a distance even David and I had trouble knowing who we were talking to…’

She met Jack’s eyes. ‘Of course, as they grew up it would have got easier and easier as their mannerisms and characters developed…but…’

Jack leant towards her. ‘I can’t imagine what you must have felt in there…or what you’re feeling now, Fleur. Nikki gave me a hell of a turn back there. She’s not the fainting sort…but she’s not having an easy pregnancy.