I wanted to stop. I wanted to turn back to the sunlight and the cries of people having fun on the beach; to the ordinary safety of the real world. I stared ahead and fleetingly caught the expression on Saffie’s face, her mouth open in surprise, her eyes wide with fear, then she was gone and my mouth was so dry I could not swallow. I tried to open my water bottle but my fingers were trembling and I dropped it.

I bent to retrieve it and as I did so I felt suffocated. I could not breathe, it was as if someone had placed a hand over my mouth and nose and I frantically twisted my head and gulped air so that I would not pass out. The pressure on the back of my head and neck was unbearable and I moaned with fear and cried out.

Then, it was over. I could breathe again and I knelt on the path taking deep breaths. I knew Saffie had gone. I got clumsily to my feet knowing what was round the corner.

There it was, well off the path in a small clearing, the sad remnants of ticker tape and the gaping upturned boulder which had housed her cold and lonely grave.

TWENTY-TWO

Fleur took a deep breath in the empty room. It seemed a very long time since she had been alone. She did not move for some minutes after Jack and Nikki left the house. She closed her eyes against the bright sunshine and concentrated on slowing her rapid heartbeat. Sounds and smells drifted in and turned in the air. Chinese music and chattering rose and fell with the smell of the sea; curry; seaweed.

Fleur wanted to fly away somewhere safe with the small bones of her lost child; to mourn again for a life so carelessly lost. She wanted to wrap and comfort Saffie in a warm, soft blanket and rock and rock her in a shady place, to keen in peasant fashion and hold her child as safe now as she ever could be.

Not goodbye; not yet. Not a resting place, but a private lament, easily resurrected because it had never left her, its ceaseless cry had lived on in the folds and creases of her life, touching and colouring everything she did, tingeing all she was.

Saffie.

To think of her end was too hard, it made Fleur’s limbs twitch and her throat constrict. It made her heart feel it would burst from her chest. She knew that this way madness lay. She got up and went to the window and looked out at the distant sea. It seemed that her life was vanishing again in the moment of shimmering heat and that everything between that time of horror and this moment now, here in a room alone, was disappearing once more, like her life with David and the twins had vanished long ago.

She suddenly heard Fergus’s quiet voice: ‘Fleur, you can go on and on blaming yourself for the rest of your life, like a monk whipping himself until he draws blood. Or, you can accept the fact that someone wicked took Saffie’s life while you slept, and you slept because you were human and grieving for someone you loved. You are not responsible for Saffie’s death.’