I’d blocked all thoughts of Saffie in case I lost my mind. I pretended to outsiders that I was an only child. I longed for a sister or brother but it never happened. I used to hear Fleur crying and Fergus comforting her. No one knew why she couldn’t conceive, but my mother believed she was being punished for not looking after Saffie; punished with no more children.

I asked to go to boarding school and I broke Fleur’s heart, I think. And there, in the dark of an anonymous place, in the rows and rows of beds and muffled sobs, Saffie came to me. Sometimes she just sat on the end of the bed, the shape of her comforting me, making me feel less alone. Then, as I got older, she would arrive randomly and suddenly. All my life it seemed to me as if she was trying to tell me something. No, not just trying to tell me something but leading me somewhere or to someone.

Now, I knew. It was here, to this place where she left us. But how would I ever understand what she wanted me to know?

I felt cold with fear at the thought of what that understanding might mean. We both used to know what the other was thinking. Sometimes we spoke the same thing at the same time. If I had a stomach ache, Saffie would get unwell too. If she got a fever, my head throbbed. If she had lived I know we would have felt each other’s labour pains.

But I do not want to go through her death. I do not want to know how she died. I am afraid of her fear and dread her last moments which Fleur and I have thrust away from us in order to go on and live our lives.

James Mohktar brought the English detective, who had flown out from London, to the house late in the afternoon. Inspector Blythe had been a young military police detective twenty-eight years ago before he joined the Met. He and Fleur stared as if they should remember each other, but how could they? Look what time does, it changes us inside and out. Fleur had been a young grief-stricken widow. Inspector Blythe had probably been an ambitious and keen policeman.

My mother was now a middle-aged woman with a sad and pretty face. Blythe was a man too heavy, grey with jetlag and a resigned expression, and yet I saw something pass between them, they did recognise each other. I suppose it is our eyes that never change and always give us away.

James Mohktar and Inspector Blythe wanted Fleur to go through the list of the names of people who had been staying at the other government rest houses when Saffie went missing. The names, of course, meant absolutely nothing to me. I couldn’t put faces to them even if they sounded vaguely familiar.

Blythe wanted to know if Fleur had been particularly friendly with any of them, or if my father had, and if she knew where any of them were now. There were photographs of them taken twenty-eight years ago. I watched Fleur as she spread them over the table. From the open window the smell of frangipani was pungent and I had sudden déjà vu, a strange, dizzy catch of forgotten memory as I looked down on a photograph of a young man in uniform. Then it was gone before I could hold it, but my hands on the table shook and I did not know why.