Gently, Fleur took the dress from Nikki and replaced it on the rack. Then she led her away to an outside café and sat her down. Nikki took a small, battered straw hat from her bag and placed it on her head so that her face was hidden. She blew her nose and said, ‘Sorry…I wasn’t trying to hurt you, Mum.’

Fleur ordered two cold drinks and they came in monster glasses full of watermelon and orange and mint. Nikki cooled her fingers against the glass.

After a moment, Fleur reached out and tentatively took her hand. ‘Don’t be sorry, I know you weren’t, darling…I’m just so glad that you’re here with me. Nikki, you must try not to let anything spoil the enjoyment and excitement of your baby.’

Fleur stopped because she was frightened of saying the wrong thing; of the small hand in hers withdrawing, snatching itself away. She searched desperately for the right words. She wanted to reach Nikki, to help her understand that life had to go on, had to be lived and loved and enjoyed for the most each day had to offer.

How many times do we have to learn this in one lifetime? Fleur wondered. There was Jack, and Nikki must think of him and her child and a future full of opportunities and good things.

Saffie was dead. She had been dead for a long, long time.

But not to us. Not to us. The refrain was a familiar wail inside both of them. It is not Saffie’s death now that is going to haunt us but the manner of her dying.

Nikki looked at her mother. ‘When I was a child I used to think about Saffie with foreign parents, unable to speak the same language and terrified. Then, to make it better, I thought of her as eventually having to accept this and changing…letting herself be loved by another family, because she must.

‘In the night I used to cry thinking of her lying with other people, out there somewhere far away in the dark, trying hard to keep us, her real family, alive inside her head. If it had been me, I couldn’t have coped, I would have fragmented…gone mental. If it had been me who had been taken I would rather have been dead than without Saffie…without anyone I knew or loved…’ Nikki looked down at her hand in Fleur’s and slowly withdrew it. ‘Now we know she really did die that strange, horrible afternoon. That all these years she has lain buried underneath boulders up there, under the trees…’ She gestured up towards the promontory. ‘And it seems so lonely a place to die, to lie in the dark…worse than if she had been snatched to live with foreigners who could neither speak her language nor understand her. So sad, Mum, I can hardly bear it…’

Fleur wondered how many times you quietly died in one lifetime.

She took a deep breath. ‘Finding Saffie after all this time is like a nightmare returning, Nikki, but if we dwell on how she might have died…it will drive us mad…would be…wrong.’