‘I’ve never talked about this to anyone,’ Toby said, after another couple of minutes of silence. ‘Not my editors at the time, not Sylvie, not my doctors, not my therapist…’

He fell silent again, gathering his thoughts, trying to begin. Rachel watched the waves, with no intention of rushing him.

‘It was my first trip to the African continent,’ Toby said eventually. ‘I was still a cub reporter, really, although I wouldn’t have recognized that myself, at the time. I was sent to Liberia to cover the second civil war in the late 1990s, early 2000s. The first civil war had already devastated the country. Thousands dead, infrastructure destroyed, citizens traumatized. I spent my first two days there in the hospitals and what I saw was… well, terrible, as you can imagine. The worst I had seen up until that point, I think.’

He looked out at the water, at the waves charging full-tilt at the village under the cliffs, and fell silent for a while.

‘My stringer set me up with a driver to take me into an area where fresh fighting had broken out. His name was Soumanwolo. God knows how much he was paid – it must have been a fortune, at least for him, to be willing to risk that trip.’ Toby made a sound in his throat, shook his head. ‘I didn’t even hesitate. As if I was invincible or something. Anyway, when he arrived to pick me up it was in the most beaten-up pickup I’d ever seen. He told me to get in the back and keep my head down. I spent the next three hours bumping over roads ruined by the craters left by shells, listening to more shells fall in the distance and knowing that’s where I was headed. It was hot, dusty, jarringly uncomfortable. I couldn’t make notes. I just watched everything pass me by.’

Toby stopped, so wrapped up in the memory that Rachel thought he was probably right back there, reliving that drive, feeling every bump in the road, hearing every ominous sound of war growing closer.

‘We slowed down as we passed through a township and I saw this old van by the side of the road. It was a wreck. It could have been there for a year or ten years or for fifty, it was impossible to tell. The rubber of its tyres had rotted into strings, the hub caps were cracked and rusted. The windows were long gone. Any paint still visible was turquoise, faded pale. But… it was beautiful. And what made it so were all the thousands of bullet holes that had been fired into it. Every inch of metal had been peppered with gunfire, and it looked like lace. I wanted to take photographs of it, so I banged on the cab window until Soumanwolo stopped, even though he clearly didn’t want to.’

Toby stopped talking. He rubbed one hand over his face before he resumed.

‘He was so anxious – he kept telling me we had to go, we had to go, we had to go now. But you know what cameras were like back then. I still had an analogue beast, it wasn’t even digital. I wasn’t sure I’d got the image I wanted – I wasn’t even sure what the image was that I was wanted. I kept taking one more picture, then one more, then just one more.’ Toby cleared his throat. ‘A truck came up the dirt road, fast, like a bat out of hell, churning a dust cloud behind it. Soumanwolo yelled at me to get back in the truck and to hide. It didn’t even slow down as it passed – one of the men inside shot him from the window while I was couching behind the back wheel, clutching my camera.’ Toby looked up at her, but Rachel wasn’t sure she was what he was seeing at all. ‘They just shot him, and left him lying in the dust.’