Martha has lapsed into silence. She doesn’t want Jericho to hear in her voice that she is aggrieved, still, after all this time. Besides, she doesn’t have the words to describe the long night while Jacob sat smoking in the doorway to the guesthouse. Outside, small fires were burning as people arrived from other villages. The wailing and the crying rose and fell, rose and fell.

‘You know,’ she says to Jericho, ‘I sometimes rerun that night as if it were an entirely different film. In it we leave the guesthouse and walk over to Aita and the women. We confront them with our anger, our grief, and refuse this terrible, frightening separation. In that film, Rika and I sit among them, call out aya, and let our grief be absorbed into theirs. In this film, she holds Aaron’s head in her lap and anoints it.’

Jericho knows the impulse to reorder the pieces. How many nights has he lain awake in his flat in Shoreditch re-spooling his life? And before that in beds going back all the way to when he was a schoolboy in Oxford. If Janape hadn’t died. If Bili wasn’t so proud and would come to London. If Rika had told him what happened, all of it, exactly. When Martha describes her crawling on the floor, rocking and moaning, he can visualise the woman cast low. She looks like Rika, the Rika of photos, but she is not the Rika he knows.

‘Strange, the things we remember,’ Martha says. ‘Naomi gave you and Bili some pawpaw, and Bili left a piece of it for Rika. It sat there most of the night while she lay beside it, and eventually I ate it.’

‘Bili remembers a man in a black cape attacking Rika. His teeth were sunk in her neck, and she was crying.’

Martha knows exactly what that was, and when. It wasn’t at the guesthouse in the village. It was afterwards, two days later, at the government station, before they left. She had Bili by the hand when she opened the door of the room where Rika was sleeping, and there they were. Jacob and Rika. Her head was back, tears coursing down her face, crazed with grief, clinging to Jacob, clinging to life. He was kissing her throat, and she was arched towards him, her hands pressed low on his back. When she saw Bili and Martha at the door with fruit and a thermos of tea, she jolted back, pushed him away. ‘You,’ she said to Martha. ‘It’s always you.’

So, Martha thinks, Bili doesn’t remember. Martha’s long wondered. She lets herself agree with Jericho that, yes, somehow a vampire movie has got mixed up in it. Odd, the ways of the mind.

‘So how did it end?’ Jericho asks.

‘Late in the night, I heard someone come up onto the steps, the low exchange of voices. Then someone else arrived. Jacob called inside for paper, a pen. I took them out, and recognised two young men from the top village, boys really, who’d been to school in Moresby. They greeted me. “Do not be afraid,” they said. “The village, they are sad, that’s all. We take a message to the kiap.” One of Aaron’s uncles came over from the house where the women were maintaining their lament. More low voices, talking in language. And then the sound of a canoe leaving. From the door I saw it glide into the fjord, paddling westwards, up this way, towards the station. The moon cast shadows that added to the sense of ghostly movement swirling around the house where Aaron’s body was. A wind had got up, and the tops of the palms were swaying.