‘You change your thinking,’ he said as he left the veranda, ‘you find me at Popondetta police station. Sergeant Thomas.’

The next day the rain came crashing down the mountain with an angry, slanting force that sent sago-leaf thatch flying from roofs, chickens squawking into the eaves, pigs blundering about, trying to find shelter. All night it thundered down, dripping through roofs, gusting into rivers and streams, pooling on the ground beneath the houses. Leonard and Rika moved their sleeping mats from one side of the dark room to another, avoiding the drips and the wet that slid through the plaited wall.

Did Don have any idea of the consequences of what he’d done? This was the question Rika wanted answered.

Leonard didn’t know. At first, he said, Don had obeyed the sensibilities of the village; Josephine hadn’t come to him at night until the village was still, and she’d left again before dawn. Leonard never liked it. For a start, he said, the girl was too young. But Alex seemed to think the village knew what was happening, and that as long as Don recompensed the father, they accepted it. It wasn’t the first time he’d encountered this in the field.

‘In the field?’ Rika shouted. ‘The field is their lives.’

She shouted again when Leonard said that Alex had told Don to be careful not to humiliate the family, and to be sure to leave the girl’s father a gift. But there came a time when Don wanted more than a short visit. In full view of everyone he took Josephine’s hand, gave her gifts, and during his last week in the village he’d persuaded her to sleep through the night with him. When she emerged from the house in the full light of day, it was tantamount to a declaration.

‘Alex should have made him leave,’ Rika shouted over the thud of the rain.

‘He wanted him to write his book.’

‘Is that more important than this?’ She was standing, with Leonard’s anorak around her, gesturing out towards the village, barely visible through the rain. They were in cloud. Swé, it was called.

Nanaji came across from his house with a wide banana leaf held over his head. There had been a meeting of the duvahe. Nanaji and Leonard sat face to face on the mat, Boja hovering between them. Rika’s secret burrowed deeper from view as the two men came up with a financial settlement for Josephine’s father and another one for Hunter and Josephine to marry. There was also to be a pig for the preacher, and Leonard agreed that this, too, should be paid for by Don, though it was he who went to his trunk and counted out the notes.

Rika watched with furious eyes, unable to intervene as Leonard and Nanaji made decisions that would determine the shape of two young lives. She left them to it and ran through the rain to the cookhouse.

‘Did anyone ask Josephine if she wants to marry Hunter?’ Rika asked Janape. She was crouched by the fire, arranging the sticks over the embers, blowing the fire into life for the kettle.