‘I must have slept, though I don’t remember that I did. Or Rika. Maybe it was more like a trance-state that we were awoken from. It was dawn and something was bumping against the walls of the house. That’s what woke us. You and Bili were sitting up, eyes wide open. Jacob pulled the door tight. Through a small gap in the plaited wall, I could see people on the grass outside the house, there was an eerie quietness about them. Because we were inside, I’m not sure of anything. I’ve come to see that fear makes its own images. It divides friend from friend, skin from skin. It was as if every corner of that room held a demon, and even now I can’t say how many were of our own imagining.’

Jericho is nodding and Martha leans towards him, maternal, a hand on his leg. ‘Are you okay?’ she asks.

‘Fine,’ he says, and he is. ‘Keep going.’ His breathing is strong and even. The tap, tap, tap of anxiety that came down the hill from the resort with him, that swam out into the fjord with him, has gone.

‘Whatever it was that hauled us from sleep,’ Martha says, ‘had put Rika on alert. For the first time in all those hours she was focused and attentive. She held you close, and I held Bili. We were silent, all of us.

‘Jacob was outside on the grass in front of the guesthouse. “Listen,” he said. Then Noah; I recognised the voice. “He was a great orator. He raised our name. He is gone. Why?” Then other voices – some placating, some hostile, a range from grief to anger, a howl from aya Aita. Then Jacob’s voice.’

Again Martha is silent. Looking at her, Jericho can see how painful this tumble into memory has been. For her, more than for him, oddly. As she’s talked, as she’s taken him back to that day so long obscured with not-knowing, he’s felt a lightening somewhere inside him as her words have merged with his own submerged remembering. Right then he can see Bili standing on the rocks beside the water, eight years old again. She is wearing red shorts. They are as clear to him as if she were standing there in front of him. He knows it’s just an image forming in his mind, probably not memory at all – or a memory from some other place, some other time. He laughs.

‘What?’ Martha asks.

‘Just the strangeness of memory. So vivid. I’ve had Bili down here on the wharf, in front of us, right here. Eight years old and in red shorts.’

Martha laughs too. A short, sad laugh.

‘How long did it go on like that?’ Jericho asks.

‘With us trapped inside?’

Martha didn’t know. An hour? Maybe more. The sun was still low in the sky, early in its journey out of the ocean, when the dinghy arrived. The mangroves at the end of the point made perfect silhouettes against a pink and orange sky, and somewhere in her mind she registered again the beauty of the place.