On the walls, between shelves of books and filing cabinets, are aerial maps and satellite photographs of mining and logging sites. When Jericho first came to the office, driven there by Laedi soon after he arrived, she told him to look at the maps as he would a painting. Way to the west, a large expanse of forest runs under the soft belly of the bird-shaped island. Cut by rivers and lakes and areas of swamp, remote from towns, there are few roads out there: villages are scattered, gardens – visible from the air – nestle into the forest, a change in the canopy of trees that rise and fall, soft and billowing when viewed from above. Looking at the maps, Jericho understands why rainforests are called lungs. After the Amazon basin, New Guinea forms one of the great lungs of the earth. Scarring these forests, these breathing lungs, are bald, pocked patches the size of small municipalities. The logging camps are visible as pockets of activity, tin roofs set in straight grids along airstrips that are the only way in or out, unless you’re a forest-dweller and know the paths that criss-cross the forest floor.

‘Illegal clear felling,’ Bili says, pointing to a large, bare area. ‘We got compensation for the landowners. Not that it solves anything. It won’t grow back the forests, or give the people back their gardens.’

Jericho looks at the aerial photos of white and empty earth, stripped of trees, gardens, everything.

‘It’s remote country,’ Bili says. ‘No one much has Tok Pisin, and it’s hard to get in as the logging companies control the airstrips. They tear up your boarding pass if they don’t want you there.’

‘Has that happened to you?’ Jericho feels a chill travel along his spine.

‘Sure it has.’ Her voice is cheerful, though he knows from Laedi that her work can put her in danger. There’s worse than not being let on a plane, Laedi said. Bili’s been threatened with a container. A container? Laedi had to spell it out for him. Being locked in a container and left in the heat to die. It happens, she said. People vanish, and if it’s discovered, which often enough it’s not, it’s an accident, a terrible accident, nobody knew.

In front of the map, Bili brushes off his anxieties. She’s telling him about the first time she went out there. ‘We were taking statements from the landowners,’ she says. ‘We’d been working all morning, when an old woman insisted I came with her right then to see her land. It was a long walk – I could have done without it – and the woman was muttering in language and we only had a small boy who’d done some school to turn the talk. We came up a small rise to the edge of her land and the woman kept asking, “What do you see?” And all I could see, stretching into the distance, was silence and nothing.’ She stops and looks at Jericho, her face insistent. ‘The sounds of the forest were gone – that was almost the worst, an awful empty silence, hard to describe. You don’t notice till you step into silence how much sound there is in the forest. And then nothing. The earth had been bulldozed. The topsoil was gone, and there was nothing growing, some weeds and strangling vines. No birds, no rustling. Nothing. The creeks were silted up. That woman’s land was dead. She looked me straight in the eye and I knew exactly what she was saying even without the small boy who was whispering, “You must help us.” She poked me here.’ With an insistent finger, Bili pokes herself on the ribcage just above her heart. “You,” she said. “You must stop this.”