The Noble Path

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

They drove to Heathrow in silence. David glanced at Lisa sitting pale and impassive in the passenger seat. He suppressed lingering feelings of anger at her unreasonable behaviour. They had fought furiously over her trip. She had faced down his angry protestations with a childlike obstinacy. Of course she knew the dangers that faced a girl of her age alone in Bangkok! He knew she did not. And it was not just ignorance. She wore her innocence like a badge. Not even the death of her mother had brought her into the real world. She lived still in that strange, protected never-never land in which she had grown up.

Grown up! He almost laughed at the irony. She had never grown up. Never had to. She had the arrogance of the adolescent, the unswerving belief of the child in the triumph of good over evil, the certainty that if something bad was going to happen, it would never happen to her. In an odd way, it was this very naivety that had first attracted him.

And now he blamed himself for failing to protect her from her own innocence. His damned temper. He should have known better.

He had asked her how she thought she was going to find her father in a city of eight million people. Eyes blazing defiance, she had turned on him. ‘I’m training as a reporter, aren’t I?’

He hadn’t been able to help himself. ‘Reporter! You really have no idea, do you? Newspapers are for grown-ups, Lisa. You’ll be lucky if you end up writing knitting patterns for the woman’s page of the Torquay Gazette!’ Instantly he had wanted to bite his tongue, but it was too late. She had turned away, her face red with anger and embarrassment, refusing to discuss it further, determined to prove him wrong. He was still cursing his stupidity.

There had been a reconciliation since then — of sorts. He had made all the running, apologized, said he was angry and frustrated and hadn’t meant what he’d said. He asked her to reconsider. She refused, and was relieved when he seemed to accept it. In truth he had realized, at last, that there was no point in fighting her. She was obsessed with finding her father. So, let her find him. He could never live up to the myth she was creating in her own mind, or accord with the excuses she had been making for him. He probably wouldn’t even want to know her — why else would he have stayed away all these years? But, whichever way it went, she would have to get it out of her system, and David had decided it was easier to swim with the current than against it. When the river of her obsession ran dry, as it was bound to, Lisa would be his again.

He still did not fully understand why it was he wanted her so much. Perhaps because she was one of the few things in his life that had not come easy. Winning had always come easy to David. Lisa was a challenge. One he was determined to beat.

For her part she was glad they had made up, was in need of his moral support. There was no one else, after all. She glanced at him as he drove. She wanted to say, I’m scared, but was frightened to admit it. All those brave words — I’m going to find my father. The reality was very different. And she was frightened, too, of the unknown. Of the stranger she was going to find. She would have liked to turn to David and say, I’ve changed my mind. But it was too late now. She was trapped by her own pride.

‘Listen, I want you to telephone me when you get to your hotel,’ David said. ‘So I know you’re alright.’

‘I will.’

He allowed himself an inner sigh of relief. As long as she kept in touch by phone he would retain some measure of control over what she did.

They checked her in at the British Airways desk and took her luggage, and she and David sat in the departure lounge waiting for her flight to be called. She had gone very quiet, subdued by nerves. He took her hand and squeezed it.

‘It’s a long flight,’ he said.

She nodded.

‘I’m looking forward to meeting him.’ She looked at him, surprised, and he forced himself to laugh. ‘After all, he’s the one I’m going to have to ask for your hand in marriage.’

She tensed and drew her hand away. ‘Don’t, David.’ It was as though he was making fun of her.

‘Oh, come on, I’m sorry. It was a joke, that’s all. I know you don’t want to hurry things. And I don’t want to push you.’ He took her hand again and decided to steer the conversation in a different direction. ‘You know what hotel he’s staying at?’

‘The Narai.’

‘And if he’s not there?’

She hesitated. ‘I went back to see the Sergeant.’

He turned his head sharply. ‘You never told me.’

‘I was going to. But I thought — well, I thought that you might be angry.’

‘Why would I be angry?’

‘Because you’ve behaved very strangely over everything to do with my father.’ The defiance in her voice again.

I’ve behaved strangely! he thought. But all he said was, ‘What did he say, the Sergeant?’

‘He said he thought my father would still be in Bangkok. If he wasn’t at the hotel he gave me another address to try. A man who might be able to help me. A man called Tuk Than.’

Chapter Nineteen

McCue had been watching the pig for some time from a concealed position a metre back from the path. It was somnolent and off-guard in the late afternoon heat, snuffling about in the undergrowth, foraging idly for something to eat. Elliot and Slattery were sleeping, and McCue was nearly at the end of his two-hour stint on watch. He was refreshed and alert after five hours’ sleep. The pig moved nearer the trap, infuriatingly slowly. But the tunnels had taught McCue patience. The beast was quite large and thickly haired with a long snout and two sharp tusks. McCue knew the dangers of provoking a wild pig into attack. It could knock a man over, and its tusks could inflict serious injury, often dangerously close to the femoral artery on the upper leg. He had seen a man bleed to death from such an injury.

Something close to McCue seemed suddenly to draw its attention, and it began lumbering down the path towards him, still contentedly unaware of his presence. As its forelegs broke the tripwire, the sapling sprang and the two sharpened bamboo stakes plunged deep into its chest. It let out a blood-curdling squeal and rolled over on its side, still twitching. It was not dead, but quickly failing. McCue approached with caution. It could still be dangerous. He raised the butt of his automatic and moved in to finish the job, clubbing the beast several times over the head. The twitching subsided and it lay quite still. A rustling in the undergrowth behind him made him swing round, drawing his knife to meet his assailant. It was Elliot.

‘What the hell’s happened!’

McCue smiled a rare smile. ‘We got pork for dinner,’ he said.

Slattery still slept while Elliot put water on the fire to boil and then made his way to the small clearing McCue had hacked out with his machete to prepare the dead animal. Four stakes were hammered into the soft earth and lashed together into A shapes, a bamboo pole laid across the top. The pig was hung upside down from the pole, tied by the hocks. McCue had made two neat incisions in the carotid artery behind the ears, allowing the blood to drain into a pot beneath the head. ‘We should save the blood,’ he said.

Elliot shook his head. ‘We can’t carry any more than we’ve got. We’ll have to eat what we can and leave the carcase.’

McCue shrugged. ‘Pity. This little mother could have fed us for days.’

Elliot watched, fascinated, as McCue wielded his hunting knife with dexterous ease to gut the pig. He pinched the abdomen as high as he could, raising a pouch of flesh and cutting a slit big enough for him to slip in two fingers. Using the fingers as a guide for the knife he cut upwards towards the anus, taking care not to damage the internal organs. Then he cut downwards the same way as far as the breastbone, holding back the gut with his left hand as it began to spill outwards. When he had completed the cut, he let the gut hang down so that he could inspect it for signs of disease. ‘Looks okay,’ he said. He removed both kidneys and the liver, then cut through the membrane covering the chest cavity and took out the heart and lungs and windpipe. ‘Better bury this stuff.’

Elliot started digging a hole to take the animal’s innards. ‘You not going to skin it?’

McCue shook his head. ‘You never skin a pig. We’ll have to remove the hair over the fire. Did you boil that water?’

Elliot nodded. ‘Where’d you learn to use a knife like that?’

McCue sat silent for a while, his lean cadaverous face taut and thoughtful. ‘My Pa was a small-time farmer in the Midwest,’ he said. ‘He was a real hard bastard, but I guess I loved him. Ma died when I was just a kid and Pa had to raise me and my three brothers on his own. I was the baby of the family. When we was having bad times, like when the crop would fail or the animals got diseased, he would pack me off to his sister’s. I spent half my life there when I was a kid, but I guess they didn’t like me too much. I was none too happy staying there neither. I used to run off sometimes, and then I would get sent home and my Pa would beat the crap out of me. I didn’t mind that, though. I just wanted to be home.

‘He didn’t have much patience, my Pa, and his temper worked on a short fuse, so I got the buckle end of his belt more times than I can remember.’ He paused, lost in some childhood past. But there was reverence in his voice, more than rancour, when he spoke of the beatings. ‘He taught me to use my fists. Stand up for myself. I was a bit of a runt, even then, and he said I had to be big in other ways.

‘I was about nine or ten when he took me out in the yard one day and gave me a knife and told me it was my turn to kill a pig. ‘You seen how it’s done,’ he said. ‘So do it right. Kill it with the first stroke. You get it wrong I’m gonna beat the shit outa you.’ So I got it with the first stroke. He taught me everything I needed to know about using a knife. Never needed nothing else since.’

‘Is he still alive?’

There was a moment of pain in McCue’s eyes and his voice took on an edge as sharp as his knife. ‘Two of my brothers was killed in Nam. The other got a bullet in the spine. He’s in some hospital somewheres for the rest of his days.

‘While I was out there the bank foreclosed on my Pa’s loan, tried to put him off the farm. Some shit, huh? He’s worked that land all his days, two of his boys is killed fighting for their country, they give a third wheels for legs and stick me down a hole chasing gooks. They took all his boys, he wasn’t about to let them take his land. It was his life, you know? So he blew his brains out in the back room.’ He examined the blood on his hands. ‘God bless America.’ He got up to cut down the pig. ‘Better get this old hog on the fire.’

Slattery awoke to the smell of meat cooking. ‘Jeez,’ he said. ‘I had this dream. I was at this big medieval banquet. They was just about the serve up the pig when I woke up. Christ, I can still smell it!’ He looked at Elliot and McCue crouched around the embers of the fire. ‘Hey, what you guys doing? Shit, am I still dreaming?’

‘It’s no dream, Mike,’ Elliot said. ‘It may not be a banquet, but the pork’s just about ready.’

It was dark when they set off again to cross the paddy fields in the valley below. The moon was not yet up, and it was fully twenty minutes before their eyes adjusted to the pale light cast over the land by the stars. Picking their way along the narrow paths that ran between the lines of irrigation ditches on either side of the paddies, it took them another half-hour before they reached the spot where the soldiers had dumped the bodies earlier in the day. The corpses, some still semi-clothed in torn black rags, others naked, were already being claimed by the mud. Men and women, some young, some old. Most had been stabbed, probably with bayonets. One or two had been shot in the head. Single bullets. The need to conserve ammunition. Slattery crossed himself. An instinct from a long-forgotten past. But neither he nor the others spoke, and they moved on in silence.

They were almost two-thirds of the way across when Slattery slipped, the soft earth of the path falling away under his feet, and tumbled into the mud below the film of brackish water. He cursed under his breath and spat out a mouthful of sludge. Elliot and McCue reached out hands to pull him out. But something had snagged on his backpack. He turned to shake himself free and saw a half-decayed hand clutching his shoulder. He let out an involuntary yell and thrashed about to try and get away, bumping into arms and legs and bloated heads, decaying skulls grinning in the mud.

‘Get me outa here for Chrissake!’

The others grabbed him and pulled him free. He scrambled to his feet on the path, shaking, eyes wide, jaw chattering almost uncontrollably. It was not cold that made him shiver. It was naked fear.

‘Jesus,’ he panted. ‘Jesus, did you see that!’

Elliot’s voice was calm. ‘We’d better move.’

But Slattery couldn’t bring himself to put one foot in front of the other. ‘Jesus Christ, this whole fucking place is one mass grave! There must be hundreds of them in there. All around us. Jesus, I wanna wash!’

McCue’s face moved close to his, hot breath on his skin. ‘If you don’t move, Slattery, I’ll cut your throat and chuck you in there with them.’

Slattery stared at him, the words slowly filtering through the film of fear that fogged his mind. Then he blinked several times and glanced at Elliot. Fear gave way to shame. He said, ‘Sure, sure. Let’s get the hell out of here.’ And they moved on quickly, but careful not to risk another fall.

A sense of horror had gripped them all, turning the hot night cold, fear closing like icy fingers around their hearts. Fear of what? Elliot wondered. The dead? The dead couldn’t hurt you. But they filled your mind, touching your soul, a reminder that you too were only flesh and blood and would one day return to the earth. Dust to dust.

It was with relief that they reached the dark safety of the trees and followed the ground upwards again over a ridge. For nearly two hours they hacked their way through tangled undergrowth, compelled by the urge to put as much distance as possible between them and the paddy fields.

Sweating and breathless, Elliot finally called a halt and they dumped their backpacks and slumped to the ground, leaning back against the trees. They sat, recovering breath, each with his own thoughts, not a word passing between them for fifteen minutes or more. The mud on Slattery’s face and outer clothing had dried and caked. He checked and cleaned his pistol and automatic and looked grimly at the others, giving voice for the first time to their unspoken thoughts. They had not come across a living soul or sign of life in more than three hours.

‘Jeez,’ he said. ‘Is there anyone left alive in this goddam country?’

Chapter Twenty

The truck bumped and rattled through the night over the shell-pitted road from the airport to the city. No one had bothered to repair the road after the fierce fighting for the airport and the capital four years earlier.

Hau sat in the back of the truck with a dozen other boy soldiers and their commanding officer, Ksor Koh, a small, ugly man of about thirty who enforced a sadistic discipline. Though it remained unspoken, the boys both feared and hated him. He worked them long hard hours and saw to it that they received only minimum rations. Tears, or the least display of childhood vulnerability, were mercilessly ridiculed.

There was one exception. Yos Oan, a burly, sullen boy, older than the others. Ksor’s lieutenant, he saw to it that they followed their commanding officer’s instructions to the letter. He carried a short, stinging cane with which he beat the others without pity if they so much as looked at him the wrong way. They had all suffered at his hand, and often watched with hate in their eyes and dark thoughts in their hearts as he wolfed down almost double their rations. Though he too had been brutally beaten by Ksor on many occasions, he had accepted his fate with the philosophical forbearance of one who knows that there is always a price to be paid.

Since being trucked into the airfield at Pochentong, they had been worked from first light until well after dark, digging and repairing defences around the perimeter. Bone-weary, hungry and aching for sleep, they had been told by Yos that they were being taken south. And within an hour they had been herded into a truck and were heading for Phnom Penh. The rumour had spread quickly, in whispers among the boys, that from there they were to be sent south to Takeo to join in the fighting to repel the Vietnamese invader. There was fear in all their hearts, for they had heard rumours that the Kampuchean armed forces were suffering heavy defeats and that the Vietnamese army was making steady progress north. Why else would they have been building defences around the airfield?

Hau had been waiting and watching for a chance to escape. But not a single opportunity had presented itself. They were watched at all times. And now, as they approached the city of his birth, he knew that time was running out for him. He had told no one of his plan to run away, keeping his silence and his secret safe in a heart still with fear. He saw that Yos was staring at him — a long penetrating stare — and for a moment he wondered if it was possible that his heart had spoken aloud and that Yos had been listening. Or perhaps it could be read in his face. A surge of hatred welled up inside him, even greater than the fear that gripped him, and he turned away to look out the back of the truck where a canvas flap was whipping in the slipstream.

Not a light shone anywhere as they rumbled through the deserted, broken-down suburbs in the ghostly moonlight. Past the wrecks of armoured vehicles, a legacy of Lon Nol’s defeated army, rusting cars lying abandoned at the roadside, refuse tumbling across the road in their wake. Not a sign of anything living, of any human existence, just the wreckage of another life, another time.

None of the boys possessed guns, except for Yos, who rested his AK-47 across his knees, a symbol of his privilege, carried with a careless arrogance. Ksor’s automatic was slung over his shoulder, a pistol holstered on his belt. He sat with his eyes closed, swaying with the motion of the truck. Hau knew he would have to get the rifle from Yos, that he would probably have to kill to be free. But they had made him kill before. He owed them nothing but death. And yet he was still only a child, twelve years old. Old enough to take life, but not old enough to live with it. The nightmares were almost unbearable. He thought of his sister and his mother, the years of separation, the nights of secret, silent tears, the longing for the warmth of his mother’s breast, his sister’s lips, the fear of sleep.

He shook himself free of such thoughts. They would only make him weak, and he had to be strong.

The city centre, too, was deserted, apart from the occasional army truck or jeep that would rattle past. There was an eerie, haunted quality about the empty streets, the years of neglect, the absence of people or life where once they had thrived. Hau’s fear was beginning to yield to despair. He knew that once aboard the truck south his chances of escape would rapidly diminish. And where would he go? He was not equipped to survive on his own in the jungle. The city was his natural habitat. It had to be here. Panic was planting irrational thoughts in his head. Of snatching the weapon from Yos and leaping out the back. But the road ran fast beneath them. He would surely be killed or badly hurt. He glanced desperately around the other faces. They were without expression, each boy silent, guarding his own thoughts. How many of them could he trust? Trust! It was a word he barely remembered — an act of free will that was little more than a distant memory.

Suddenly the truck lurched violently to one side, tyres screeching, a smell of burning rubber as it mounted the pavement and smashed into a derelict shop front. The shock flung them all from their seats, and in the confusion Hau heard Ksor shouting, demanding to know what had happened. He caught a glimpse in the moonlight of the driver’s face as he turned, blood streaming from a gash in his forehead.

‘A puncture!’

Ksor cursed and kicked his way through the confusion of bodies to the back of the truck and jumped down into the road. Hau saw Yos’s AK-47 on the floor where it had fallen. He looked up and Yos’s black eyes met his. Yos was on his knees, clutching his arm where he had hurt it in the fall. From the pain he knew it was broken. The two boys grabbed together for the gun, but Hau was faster. He swung it up and pushed the barrel into Yos’s chest. Yos went rigid, his face taut.

‘You wouldn’t dare!’ he hissed.

The other boys, too, had frozen, chilled to the bone by the drama unfolding in front of them. Outside they heard the voices of Ksor and the driver. Yos relaxed with Hau’s hesitation, knowing that he would not dare. A slow smile spread across his face as Hau squeezed the trigger and a burst of fire flashed in the dark, sending the older boy thudding backwards, his smile replaced for an instant by disbelief, and then, for eternity, by death. Hau was wet, and wondered for a crazy moment if it was raining. Then he realized it was blood. Yos’s blood. It was everywhere. Spattered across the clothes and faces of all the boys.

A shout, and feet running on the pavement, pulled him back from the horror, and he spun round to see Ksor’s dark outline rising up at the back of the truck. He fired again and Ksor fell backwards without a sound. The bloodied face of the driver appeared briefly at the opening before he turned and sprinted away into the darkness.

The silence that followed was deafening. Small boys all with their eyes on Hau. He looked round the frightened faces.

‘I’m not going to fight the Vietnamese,’ he said. But no one spoke. He pushed through to the back of the truck and jumped down on to the road. Ksor lay on his back, eyes staring, dark blood pooling on the tarmac. Hau scanned the street. There was not a sound to be heard or a light to be seen. He knelt down and gingerly removed Ksor’s pistol and picked up his automatic. He tucked the pistol in his belt, slung a rifle over each shoulder and started running, back they way they had come, long loping strides. When he reached the end of the street, he looked back and saw the dark shapes of small boys spilling out from the back of the truck and running off into the night.

Chapter Twenty-One

Lisa was not prepared for the sticky heat of the Bangkok night, with its noise and babble of Thai voices and lazily swinging ceiling fans. She was still dressed for the English winter she had left behind. Jeans and boots, a cotton blouse under a thick woollen jumper and quilted anorak. She had known it would be hot during the day, but thought the nights might be cool.

She queued uncomfortably, anorak over her arm, at immigration, and was disconcerted by the unsmiling scrutiny of the immigration officer. He slapped her passport on the desk and waved her through. Baggage reclaim and customs was another trial, encumbered as she was by a large suitcase, her shoulder bag, her anorak and the jumper the heat had compelled her to remove. Flushed and perspiring, exhausted by the journey and the heat, she faced a bewildering confusion of signs and people in the terminal building. Seedy and crowded like some oriental bazaar, it was not at all as she had imagined it. Quite unlike the clinical, ordered efficiency of Heathrow.

‘Excuse me,’ she inquired of anyone in the crowd who would listen. ‘Can someone tell me where I can get a taxi?’ But no one paid any attention, bumping and pushing past, Thai faces flashing occasional curious glances. She was fair-skinned, fair-haired and alone. A curiosity here.

She felt eyes upon her as she struggled through the crowd, but they were eyes that wanted only to help themselves. She felt a panic rising in her breast. She was stumbling at the first hurdle and felt vulnerable and very much alone. Then, to her great relief, she saw a TAXI sign and hurried towards it. Through a doorway to find herself outside. Here, if anything, the night was even hotter and more airless. There was a line of taxis parked at the kerbside. A tout approached and tried to take her case.

‘You want taxi, Miss. I get you taxi.’

She clung grimly to the case and pushed on towards the first in the line of cars. ‘No thank you, I’ll get one myself.’

A wizened old face leered at her from the driver’s side. ‘Bangkok?’

‘The Narai Hotel,’ she said with relief.

The driver pulled a lever inside the car, the boot swung open and she realized she was expected to put the luggage in herself. Trickles of sweat ran into her eyes as she lugged her case round to the back of the car and heaved it into the boot, slamming it shut as a small gesture of annoyance. No tip for you, she thought.

‘You sit in front,’ the driver said, patting the front seat beside him.

‘I’ll sit in the back, thank you.’ She slipped in, sinking into the soft, worn leather of the back seat, leaning back and closing her eyes. God, she thought, on my way at last.

The taxi took off with a jerk and she clung tightly to the door handle. With her free hand she took out a handkerchief to dry her face, careful not to smear her eye make-up, and breathed deeply in a vain attempt to find more oxygen. She watched the city grow up darkly around her as they drove from the airport. Modern blocks of squalid flats, temples, shops and offices, curious ramshackle vehicles among the traffic that belched its black fumes out into the night. Sights and sounds unfamiliar and strange and slightly frightening.

They had been driving almost fifteen minutes when she noticed that there was no reading on the meter. She tapped the driver on the shoulder.

‘You forgot to set the meter.’

His grin revealed a set of crooked brown teeth. ‘Not working. I give you good price.’

She sighed and sat back in the seat. She didn’t suppose there was any point in arguing about it. She would just have to pay whatever he asked. She closed her eyes again and felt a wave of fatigue sweep over her. For a moment she was back home on the rug in front of the fire, warm and slightly drunk, David there, hot hands on her breasts, his soft whisper at her neck, It’ll be alright, Lisa. It’ll be alright. And then she was jerked back to the present as the taxi drew in abruptly at the doors of the Narai, the driver grinning at her from the front.

‘Four hundred baht.’ She did not bother to work out the exchange equivalent, but handed him the notes in the certain knowledge that she was being fleeced. Definitely no tip, she thought. He pulled the lever to release the boot as she got out.

She heaved her case out along with the rest of her bits and pieces and was damned if she was going to close the lid. She turned on the steps as the taxi pulled sharply away, and the lid swung down and snapped shut on its own.

Air conditioning, she decided, when she had passed through the sliding glass doors, was the best thing ever invented. She put down her case and stood for a moment, drinking in the cool sweet air, almost chill after the heat outside. It’s strange, she thought, how when you are hot you cannot believe you could ever be cold again. As when you are cold, being warm is hard to imagine. She smiled to herself, feeling better. She’d got here, hadn’t she? And she picked up her case and walked past the curious, faintly hostile stares of the girls in the Don Juan bar, to the reception desk.

‘Lisa Elliot. I have a reservation.’ The girl pushed her a form to fill out and asked to see her passport. ‘Can you tell me what room Mr Jack or John Elliot is staying in?’

The girl checked through her files and shook her head. ‘I am sorry, Mr Elliot checked out two nights ago.’

Lisa lay back in her room numb with disappointment. To have come halfway across the world and miss him by only forty-eight hours! The sergeant had not told her exactly what her father was doing here, though she suspected that she might not want to know. But she had expected him to be here for some time. She took a piece of paper from her shoulder bag and unfolded it. Tuk Than. Sukhumvit Road, Bangkok. She would call in the morning.

She washed and undressed ready for bed, and out of idle curiosity switched on the television set. The previous occupant of the room had left it on the video channel and the late movie was a soft porn one. God, she thought. Sex! The world was obsessed with it. She pressed the top button on the set and caught an old episode of Rawhide dubbed into Thai. The dialogue bore no relation to the lip movements, and it seemed incongruous to see a young Clint Eastwood squawking in a guttural alien tongue. She lay down on the bed, head propped against a pillow, and watched with amusement, eyes growing heavy as she drifted in a state that was neither sleep nor wakefulness. From somewhere deep in the memory of the Lisa she had been, she seemed to recall having seen a rerun of this episode as a child. She tried to remember how it went, but it was as elusive as her father, not quite tangible and always just out of reach.

She woke at eight to the hiss of the television, the screen a shifting mass of white dots. She dragged herself wearily out of bed and wondered if she had slept at all. She still felt just as tired as the night before. A coffee and croissant in the pizzeria downstairs helped to revive her, though she became uncomfortably aware of the many eyes that watched her here in the hotel lobby. Men and women seemed equally curious, though there was an intent in the dark eyes of some men that frightened her. She supposed it was unusual for a young Western girl to be on her own in a place like this.

Back in her room, she asked the hotel exchange to get her a number for Tuk Than. She rang several times over the next hour, but there was no reply. Her spirits, which had lifted a little with the morning, sank once again, and she began to think this whole trip was nothing more than a wild goose chase. She lay back on the bed and wondered what to do. She could always phone later, or even call round to the house. In the afternoon, perhaps. But what would she do till then? The city scared her. A place like Bangkok, a girl on her own.

Oh, to hell, she thought. I’ve come all this way, I’m damned if I’m going to spend the entire time sitting in a hotel room. And, anyway, if I’m ever to be a reporter... She remembered reading in a magazine on the plane an article about the Grand Palace. So she showered, and changed, put on her make-up, then went boldly down to the lobby and left her key at reception.

The city beckoned through the glass doors, a bustling street thick with traffic and people. She summoned all her courage and went out, and the heat wrapped around her like a hot, wet blanket. The heat. She had forgotten about the heat, and her courage wilted in it.

‘Taxi?’ One of several men loitering in a group outside approached her, touts trying to scrape a living from the tourists. He leered at her suggestively.

She hesitated, for a moment about to turn back to the safety of the hotel, then looked him straight in the eye and said with a confidence she did not feel, ‘Yes, please.’

He seemed surprised. ‘You wait.’ And he went down on to the pavement and waved an arm at the passing stream of cars. Almost immediately a white car with a taxi sign on the roof pulled in at the kerbside and a good-looking young man, with short, dark hair and a disarming smile, leaned across from the driver’s side and rolled down the window. The two men had a brief exchange, then the driver nodded and got out the car. ‘This man will take you,’ the tout said.

Lisa felt quite pleased with herself. Perhaps she would manage better than she had hoped. She passed the tout a few coins and he grinned and nodded his thanks. The young driver opened the rear passenger door for her. And now she was surprised. Things were looking up after the unpleasant experience of the night before. She smiled and got in, grateful for the cool of the air-conditioned interior. ‘Thank you.’

The driver spoke a polite, stilted English and, she thought, he really was very good-looking. ‘Where would you like to go?’

‘I have some time to kill. I thought I’d see the Grand Palace.’

‘You are tourist, then?’

‘Sort of.’ And she supposed that’s what she was, although it was not what she had come for.

‘If you want, I take you on tour of Bangkok.’

She hesitated. That might come quite expensive. But she had money, hadn’t she? She could afford it. ‘Why not? Starting at the Grand Palace.’

‘Okay.’ He smiled at her and leaned on the back of the seat, waiting, as though expecting her to say something more. Then, ‘How much?’ he asked.

She frowned. ‘Well — just set the meter.’

His smile widened and he shook his head at her naivety. ‘In Bangkok,’ he said, ‘all taxis have meters. But they never work. You must agree price before or else driver will rip you off.’

‘Oh.’ She was not at all used to this. ‘Well — how much do you want?’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘You want me rip you off?’

She laughed at his directness. ‘I’d rather you didn’t. But I’ve really no idea how much.’

He began to laugh. ‘You are too innocent, lady.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Two hundred baht, and I take you anywhere you want for the day.’

She made a quick mental calculation and was pleasantly surprised. ‘Alright. But you decide where we go. I really wouldn’t have a clue. Do you want the money now?’

‘No, you pay after.’ He put the car in gear, slipped out into the traffic and glanced at her in the mirror. ‘You know anything about Bangkok?’

‘Well, no, not really,’ Lisa admitted. ‘Except it’s the capital of Thailand and Thailand used to be called Siam.’

He shrugged. ‘Is a start.’ He talked as he drove. ‘You know that Bangkok is only what foreigners call our city?’ She shook her head. ‘In Thai it means place of olives, but it is only small part of the city. You want to know real name?’

‘Well, yes, I suppose I should.’

Grinning, he took a deep breath...

‘Krungthepmahanakhornbowornrattanakosinmahintarayuthaya-mahadilokpopnparatratchathaniburiromudomratchaniwetmahasathan.’

She giggled. ‘You’re kidding!’

‘No,’ he said solemnly. ‘That is official name. But many Thai people smoke cigarettes and have no breath left to say this name, so we call it Krung Thep for short — the city of angels.’ Lisa was not at all sure that he wasn’t pulling her leg. There was such mischief in those smiling eyes in the mirror. ‘My name is Sivara,’ he said. ‘If you tell me your name I don’t keep calling you lady.’

‘I’m Lisa.’

‘Lisa. This is good name.’

Sivara parked the car off Maharaj Road and walked her through the Grand Palace. Wide, elegant squares flanked by grand buildings and temples — built in the Ratanakosin style, he told her — inlaid with glittering mosaics of glass and ceramic and gold and precious stones. Giant statues of colourful Thai warriors guarded every flight of steps, every entrance. A long and elaborate fresco mural lined the inside walls of the compound in the shade of arched colonnades — the Thai version of the Indian epic Ramayana. He took her to the adjoining Wat Phra Keo. ‘The Temple of the Emerald Buddha,’ he said.

An armed guard stood in the doorway. A sign warned that visitors must not take photographs of the Buddha, and rolls of film ripped from the cameras of tourists who had ignored the warning hung from a wooden rack just inside. ‘Can we go in?’ Lisa asked.

‘Of course. But you must take off shoes first and never point feet directly at Buddha. It is great insult.’ They left their shoes at the door, walked into the cool of the wat and knelt on the cold stone tiles. The Buddha sat high up in a glass case draped with a fine shawl. ‘To keep Buddha warm,’ Sivara said.

Lisa stifled a laugh. ‘Warm! In this heat?’

‘It is our cool season,’ he said gravely. ‘The King himself changes the robe on the Buddha at start of each season.’

‘God, if this is cool, I’d hate to be here when it’s hot.’ She looked up at the pale green carved Buddha and wondered if offering it a prayer might help her find her father. ‘Is it really solid emerald?’

Sivara smiled knowingly. ‘It says so in the guidebooks.’ He paused then added, ‘Actually, is made of jasper, like jade. Come, I take you to Wat Traimit, the temple of the Golden Buddha.’

He parked opposite the temple in Charoen Krung Road, in front of a row of dark shops that disappeared into the crumbling interiors of dilapidated buildings. Incurious Asian faces peered out from the gloom. The temple itself was an undistinguished building set in a small, scrubby garden. Inside, it was dark and smelled of burning incense, and against one wall sat the Golden Buddha. It stood a massive three metres high and shone brightly as though burning. Lisa looked at it in awe. ‘It’s never solid gold!’

She did not notice how Sivara ran appraising eyes over her body as she stared at the Buddha. ‘Five and half tons,’ he said. ‘Solid gold. It was discovered only thirty years ago. It had skin of plaster and when it was being moved it fell and broke and they found gold underneath.’

‘It must be worth a fortune.’

‘Buddha does not measure life by wealth,’ Sivara said. ‘Is not important.’

She watched Thai worshippers buying small flakes of gold leaf which they stuck to images of the Buddha, and she turned to Sivara. ‘If he places so little value on wealth, why is it all his images are made of gold or precious stone, or stuck with gold leaf?’

His smile faded. ‘You have seen enough now? I take you back.’ He turned away, out of the temple and across the road towards the car. She chased after him.

‘Sivara, Sivara, I’m sorry — I didn’t mean to give offence.’

‘If I come to your country I do not say such things of your God,’ he said.

Lisa said, ‘I’m not sure I have a God.’

In the taxi she said, ‘It must be about lunchtime. Can you take me somewhere to eat? You must know the best places.’

‘Of course.’ But he did not smile, and the mischief had gone from his eyes.

He pulled in on Siam Square, near the station, and pointed out a large noodle shop called Co-Co at the corner of one of the many alleyways leading off the square. ‘Very good Chinese food,’ he said.

‘That sounds great.’ She started to get out of the car, but he made no move. ‘What about you?’

‘I wait in car.’

‘Oh, don’t be silly, you must come and eat with me.’

‘Is too expensive for me.’

‘Not when I’m paying, it’s not. Oh, come on.’ She gave him a playful push on the shoulder. ‘I don’t want to eat on my own, and I wouldn’t know what to order anyway.’

For a moment she thought he was going to refuse, then he turned and smiled, the mischief back in his eyes. ‘How can I refuse beautiful lady like you?’

Sivara ordered, and endless bowls of rice and noodles and chicken and beef and fish in various sauces arrived at their table. They drank sake and laughed a lot at the way she was frightened to try things, and all the questions she asked before she would even take a taste. ‘It’s not like the Chinese restaurants at home,’ she said.

She felt herself getting quite light-headed with the sake. She was relaxed and felt good for the first time in weeks. He told her about himself and his family, eyes sparkling at her the whole time. Fine, dark, laughing eyes. She laughed when he told her about his young brother who would arrange himself on the pavement, outside one of the big tourists hotels, early in the morning, so that he appeared to have no legs. He easily filled the bowl he placed in front of him, appealing to the fragile conscience of affluent Westerners. And at the end of the day he would get up and walk away with his takings on stiff legs. Sivara got up and did a stiff-legged walk around their table to impersonate his brother.

When he sat down again and her laughter had subsided, he looked at her very seriously and said, ‘You really are very beautiful, Lisa.’ And he slipped a hand over hers. She withdrew her hand slowly, not unflattered by his interest. And it occurred to her, through a warm haze of alcohol, that she had been picked up and was paying for the privilege.

Sivara ordered more sake and Lisa drank and felt giddy. But she didn’t care. She was having a good time and Sivara was lovely. She suddenly remembered that she had not phoned David as he had asked. To hell with David, she thought. Sivara talked and talked. How he would like to visit England and America. He had seen so much of these countries on television and would really like to go. But he was only a taxi driver. He could not afford such a trip. Travel was for the wealthy. And Lisa told him how this was the first time she had ever been out of England. When the bill came she paid and asked, ‘What shall we do now?’

‘We could go to floating market at Thonburi,’ he said. ‘You like that?’

‘Oh, yes, let’s. Is it far?’

‘We go by boat, on the klongs. But you must pay.’

‘Oh.’ She looked at the dwindling number of notes in her purse. ‘I need to change some more money.’

‘Is not problem. I will take you to money changer.’

In a small, airless room at the back of a shop in a nearby sidestreet, an obsequious little man with no hair and one tooth changed a traveller’s cheque for her. Sivara sat waiting impassively in a chair at the back of the room, looking cool in his neatly pressed white shirt. ‘Is this the proper rate of exchange?’ she asked him.

He nodded gravely. ‘It is very good rate, Lisa. This man is friend of mine.’

Lisa didn’t much like the look of Sivara’s friend, but he passed her a bundle of notes in exchange for her cheque and didn’t even ask to see her passport. It was certainly simpler than going to the bank and, she thought, he had a funny face. When he closed his mouth his single yellow peg of a tooth protruded over his lower lip. But she was glad to get back to the taxi, sitting in the front now beside Sivara, as they drove down to the landing stage at the Oriental Hotel.

Sivara got them a hang yao and told her she would have to pay the driver, but that he had got her a very good price. She paid and sat behind Sivara, holding on to his shoulders as the long sleek boat powered its way down the Chao Phraya river and into the Klong Dao Kanong. Children, standing waist-deep in the klong water, waved as they passed. A boatload of saffron-robed monks smiled serenely. Lisa was exhilarated by the wind in her face, the spray from the water, the sights and sounds of an alien culture; teak houses on stilts, rickety bridges, and the dozens of boats, sampans, water-buses and rice barges that trafficked up and down the klongs. Old ladies, wearing reed-woven sunhats like upturned lampshades, sold hot meals from floating kitchens.

The floating market at Thonburi was thick with tourists and boats selling all manner of goods, from vegetables and live chickens to opium pipes and herbal remedies. Dozens of boats bobbed gently together on the water, owners engaged in lively conversations with competitors, or bargaining with potential buyers.

Sivara got their driver to cruise slowly among the boats so that Lisa could look at everything. She bought them some fruit, a straw hat for herself and, despite his protests, a couple of shirts for Sivara. ‘That’s for being so good to a stranger in Bangkok,’ she said and kissed him lightly on the cheek. She did not see the look in his eyes, only the smile.

They bought drinks from one boat. A concoction of various fruit juices and Thai whisky. Lisa was a little dubious. But Sivara encouraged her. ‘Is very good. Very refreshing,’ he said. ‘You like it.’ And she did. It was cold and sweet, and she felt a glow across her cheeks. ‘Another?’

‘No,’ she laughed. ‘I think I’ve had quite enough. I feel as though I’m getting very drunk.’ But more than the drink, she was intoxicated by the seductive allure of the Orient, by her new undreamed-of freedom, by the good-looking young Asian man who so clearly found her attractive.

On the way back she put her arms around his waist and rested her head on his back. ‘I’m so tired,’ she whispered. ‘So tired.’ He turned his head to look back and smile at her, and he squeezed one of her hands. She barely noticed.

It was almost dark when they got back to the Oriental landing stage, and Lisa put her arm through his as they walked to the taxi. ‘I have to go back to the hotel,’ she said, suddenly remembering. ‘I have to make a phone call.’ She turned to him as he opened the car door for her. ‘Thank you, Sivara. I’ve had a really lovely day.’

He smiled, his hand brushing her arm. ‘I enjoy it, too, Lisa.’

She got in beside him and they drove through the dark streets in silence. She felt pleased with herself. For a novice in these matters she had managed very well on her first day in the mysterious East. She was even beginning to get used to the heat.

They seemed to be driving for a long time through dark, narrow streets, away from the main thoroughfares. The buildings on either side were very old and shrouded in night. ‘Are we nearly there?’ she asked.

‘I must collect parcel from friend first,’ Sivara said. ‘Will not be long.’ And for the first time she had a dark sense of foreboding.

‘Couldn’t you drop me off first?’

‘Quicker this way.’

‘Please, Sivara. I must make that phone call.’

‘Shut up!’ His voice was sharp and ugly and hit her like a slap in the face. Her heart was thumping.

‘Sivara, stop the car, I want to get out.’ She grabbed the wheel, and he turned and struck her viciously across the mouth with the back of his hand. The blow knocked her sideways and she struck her head hard against the side window. She felt dizzy and sick and her mind was fogged with fear and confusion. Why was he doing this? He had been so lovely, so kind.

The car turned into a blind alley and jerked to a halt. She heard the driver’s door open, and then he was round at the passenger side, opening the door and dragging her out. She tried to pull away, but felt weak and sick and he was much too strong, hands holding her wrists with a grip like a vice.

‘Sivara, please...’ He threw her back against the wall and she struck her head hard and slid to the ground. She was aware of him grabbing her bag and taking out her passport and purse. He dropped the passport and pushed the purse into a back pocket and threw the bag away. Then he was standing over her, undoing the buckle of his belt. The mischief in his eyes had been replaced by lust and malice.

‘English slut!’ he hissed.

She tried to get to her feet, but he grabbed the neck of her T-shirt, ripping it away and exposing her breasts. Then he punched her in the face and her world went black.

The doctor looked cool in his white suit. He had cropped, silver hair and a wrinkled, brown face. He was carrying a small black bag in his right hand. Tuk was waiting for him in the hall at the foot of the stairs. He led him through to the study and poured them both a drink. He could smell the spice of the doctor’s aftershave. ‘Well?’ he asked, and handed him his drink.

The doctor took a sip. ‘She is concussed, of course. Has several nasty contusions about her face and wrists. But nothing serious, nothing broken. She is also in a state of shock. She should rest for several days.’

Tuk nodded thoughtfully. ‘And?’ he asked.

‘There was no intercourse,’ the doctor said.

‘How can you be sure?’

The doctor smiled. ‘Because she is still intact.’

Tuk was surprised. A virgin! ‘What age would you say she is?’

The doctor shrugged. ‘Late teens — eighteen, nineteen.’

‘You will make your report to the police, of course.’

‘Of course.’

Lisa opened her eyes and saw nothing but white, a brightness that almost blinded her. She felt as though her head were stuffed with cotton wool, and through it there was a distant sensation of pain. She closed her eyes and opened them again more slowly. This time, form gradually took shape in the light. Something dark passing in long, slow sweeps over her face. She tried to focus. It was a ceiling fan turning lazily in the heat. Now she felt the draught of it. As she tried to lift her head the pain drew closer, but she saw that she was in a large, square room with white walls and slatted wardrobes. Full-length white curtains were drawn on tall windows and a curious scent of spice hung in the air. A big soft bed enfolded her, her head sunk deep in a voluminous pillow. And then she realized that under the sheets she was naked, and she had a momentary, flickering image of Sivara standing over her, a face distorted by lust.

But full recollection was slow in returning. It came in fragments, pieces of a jigsaw that made no sense. Then, suddenly, the whole picture was clear to her, the full horror returning, and she tried to sit up, panic rising in her like bile. But her body would not respond.

She heard a door open, but could not raise her head far enough to see who was there. Then a man’s face leaned over her, smiling, kindly, with fine black hair brushed back from his forehead. ‘And how are you now, my dear?’

‘Where am I?’ The fear was clear in her voice.

‘Now, you mustn’t be afraid.’ He sat lightly on the edge of the bed and carefully brushed the hair from her eyes. ‘You are quite safe. My name is Tuk Than. You were coming to see me, I think. The police found my name and address in your handbag. When they contacted me, of course I insisted they bring you here. Unfortunately your passport and money were gone with your assailant.’

She looked at him, trembling. ‘Did he — am I...?’

‘The doctor says you were not violated, my dear. Perhaps he was only after your money. Perhaps he was interrupted. We will only know when they catch him. Now you must rest. The doctor has given you a sedative and we shall see how you are in the morning.’ He rose from the bed. ‘Perhaps, though, you might tell me what a pretty young English lady was doing carrying my name and address around in her handbag.’

‘I’m looking for my father.’

He frowned. ‘Your father?’

‘Yes. Jack Elliot. I was told you might know where he is.’

And a shadow fell across Tuk’s face.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Slattery switched off the shortwave radio and stowed it away in his backpack. He looked grimly at Elliot. ‘Looks like we could be running out of time, chief.’

They had slipped from one year into the next almost without noticing. But 1979 had not brought them much nearer to their target. From their vantage point high up among the trees they looked down on the main road east from the northern town of Sisophon. Their progress had been much slower than Elliot had allowed for. Tangled subtropical jungle had reduced their advance south to only a few kilometres a night. Almost impenetrable in places, it had forced them to take several detours to find a way through. The previous night they had reached Sisophon and made a wide sweep round the eastern flank to avoid risking a possible encounter with Khmer Rouge patrols. Having reached a point several kilometres south-east of the town, they laid up during the hours of daylight, catching a few hours’ sleep and watching the activity on the road below. Armoured vehicles and trucks full of troops had been heading south-east to Siem Reap all day. The war with Vietnam was not going well, and the Khmer Rouge were having to commit more and more troops to the conflict.

It was dark now, and Elliot was examining several maps by the light of a pencil torch. McCue was on watch. Elliot acknowledged Slattery’s observation with a solemn nod. ‘We’re going to have to make Siem Reap by tomorrow night at the latest. If they’re moving troops in large numbers they may start to move civilians. I don’t want to get there and find Ang’s people gone.’

‘Shit, chief, that must be a good seventy kilometres or more. How are we going to do that?’

They turned sharply as McCue slipped through the undergrowth to join them from where he had been watching the road. ‘There’s a truck pulled up almost immediately below us. Supply truck with a driver and two armed guards. Looks like they got a puncture.’

The truck driver glanced at the two guards smoking idly at the roadside and cursed under his breath. They would not condescend to lend him a hand to change the wheel. And he knew that while he had to drive through the night, they would be curled up in the back of the truck sleeping. He manoeuvred the large unwieldy wheel into position, lined up the holes with the bolts, and slipped it into place. Quickly, he screwed each nut as tight as it would go by hand, and then used the brace to finish the job. He lowered the jack and chucked the tools in the back.

‘That’s it. We’d better move,’ he told the guards, and climbed up into the cab. The guards threw away their cigarettes.

From his position, lying flat in the bushes not five metres away, Slattery saw one of them hand the other his automatic and start walking towards him. Jeez, he thought, he can’t have seen me! The other guard swung himself up into the back of the truck where Elliot’s hand closed like a vice across his mouth, and a long blade glinted in the dark before it slipped between his ribs and into his heart.

Slattery watched the silhouette of the approaching guard until it was less than a foot away. The guard had stopped almost above him and was loosening the cord on his trousers. For a moment Slattery wondered what he was doing, and then truth dawned and he pushed his face down into the earth with sickening anticipation. A warm jet of urine splashed over his head and trickled down his neck. Slattery swore inwardly. Where the fuck was McCue! The jet lessened, became a trickle and stopped. The guard buckled at the knees and fell forward into the bushes, landing beside Slattery, eyes wide and lifeless and staring into his. Slattery looked up and saw McCue grinning down at him.

‘Enjoy your shower, buddy?’

‘Bastard!’ Slattery hissed. ‘You waited on purpose.’ He shook his head, like a dog shaking off water, and moved quickly out of the bushes. Crouching, the two men ran to the back of the truck and climbed in. Elliot was bent over the prone figure of the other guard, stripping him of his black pyjamas and kramar. He chucked them at McCue.

‘Put these on. You could almost pass for one of them in the dark.’

The driver revved the engine several times and shouted something from the cab. The three men froze and looked at one another. None of them had any Cambodian. Elliot leaned across and banged twice with his fist on the side of the truck. They waited for a tense moment, then the driver gunned the engine and the truck jolted into motion.

Slattery grabbed the chequered scarf from McCue and rubbed his stubbly wet head and neck with it vigorously. He threw it back. ‘Bastard!’ he said again. Elliot looked blankly from one to the other.

McCue shrugged and slipped on the black pyjama top. ‘He finally got that wash he was after.’

The truck bumped and rattled over the broken surface of the road, trying to make up for lost time. Elliot prised open two of the crates stacked in the back. He whistled softly.

‘Mortars!’ He lifted out one of the lightweight 60mm mortar launchers and examined it. ‘Chinese-made by the look.’ He handed it to McCue. ‘You can carry it.’ And he turned to Slattery. ‘You and I’ll carry a couple of rounds each. We might need the firepower.’

McCue took out the dead guard’s cigarettes and passed them around, and they all had their first smoke for days. After about an hour, the truck slowed and they went through a small neglected-looking town. Broken-down shops with corrugated-iron roofs. Decaying houses and empty gaps. There were no lights, no signs of life except for a dog that bayed at them as they passed. McCue sat up at the back beside the open canvas flap, in black pyjama top, chequered scarf wrapped loosely around his neck, AK-47 resting across his knees. Elliot and Slattery lay flat on the floor beside the stiffening corpse.

‘Alright,’ McCue said, and they sat up again as the town receded into the night.

‘What place was that, chief?’

‘Must have been Kralanh.’ Elliot squinted at his map in the torchlight. ‘That would put us about halfway to Siem Reap.’ He checked his watch. ‘It’s early yet. We could be there by midnight.’

The driver turned his truck towards the lights in the centre of town, a refuelling stop for the convoy south.

Siem Reap was his home town, and a deep sadness ran through him at the ghost it had become. He remembered, as a boy, bathing in the palm-shaded river that ran through the town. People had loved to bathe in it then, dipping themselves in the milk chocolate-coloured water to cool themselves in the noontide heat. The rickety waterwheels that had once turned and creaked all day, feeding water into a crazy, wasteful network of bamboo conduits to water the little pocket handkerchief-sized gardens, stood idle now, broken and abandoned. The houses too stood empty, fallen into disrepair, perched on sinking stilts above long-decayed piles of garbage. Once, in a workshop here, Cambodian craftsmen had etched out scenes from the Ramayana on leather murals, squatting on the ground, dressing and marking out the hide with chalk and then punching out the patterns. They had enjoyed the patronage of the King.

The driver supposed he was lucky to be alive, but all that life held for him now was a handful of memories, like fading snapshots in a family album. A past that could never be recaptured, a future he was afraid to think about. He pulled the truck into the line of vehicles awaiting refuelling, and supposed he ought to try to find a replacement for his spare tyre, or at least attempt to have it repaired. The chances of either were slim, but if he had another puncture on the road he could at least say that he had tried, and perhaps they would not shoot him.

He switched off the engine and banged on the back of the cab. ‘You can get out and stretch your legs if you want,’ he shouted. ‘We’ll be stopped for a while.’ He jumped down on to the road and breathed in the cool night air of his home town. But even the air did not smell the same anymore. In his memory it had always been laced with the scent of nuoc mam, a pungent fish sauce that smelled foul and tasted wonderful. It was a taste he had not had on his tongue for years.

No sign of the guards. He banged several times on the side of the truck. ‘Hey, wake up guys!’ When he got round the back he pulled out the pin to drop the loading flap. As it swung down, the naked body of the dead guard tumbled on to the road, and the driver screamed.

Elliot, Slattery and McCue moved quickly through the forest, eyes scanning the moonlit gloom for the tiniest movement, ears straining to pick up the slightest sound. Each held his automatic ready, for everywhere here there were signs of human activity. Many trees had been felled and there was a criss-cross network of footpaths and cart tracks. Much of the undergrowth had been hacked away, creating access for more tree felling. From time to time they came across piles of cut and stripped trunks awaiting transport. The moonlight splashed down through the thinned-out forest in irregular patches, like liquid silver, but they stuck as far as possible to the shaded areas.

They had dropped, one by one, from the back of the truck as it neared Siem Reap, and regrouped in the trees. Elliot had used his compass and the stars to fix, as best he could, their position. According to the refugees’ accounts, the commune where Ang Serey and her daughter were being held lay four to five kilometres north-east of Siem Reap, almost within sight of the temples of Angkor Wat. Beyond the trees, in what had once been open savannah, work had begun on digging a new irrigation network to create more paddies for increased rice production. Further to the east, a new dam was being built to feed the irrigation canals, all part of the Khmer Rouge grand plan to turn Cambodia, now Democratic Kampuchea, into an agrarian Stone Age society based on a self-sufficient rice economy.

They had made steady progress through the woods for nearly an hour when the sound of a vehicle engine stopped them dead in their tracks. It came from somewhere away to their right. At a signal from Elliot they fanned out through the trees, treading cautiously in the direction of the sound. The ground began to fall away, the trees grew more sparse, and they dropped flat as the lights of a truck raked the ground below. A wide open plain stretched ahead in the moonlight, partially flooded and divided into neat rectangles marked out by irrigation ditches under construction. Along the near perimeter ran a winding dirt track, and it was here that the truck bumped and clattered its way over ruts and potholes. Apart from the driver it appeared empty. It passed below within fifty metres.

When it had gone they moved back up into the trees and continued east, following the line of the road. McCue again took up point, moving silently and carefully through the shadowed areas, stopping every twenty or thirty seconds to check out the lie of the land ahead. After a while the ground started to rise steeply and they followed it upwards.

Now Elliot saw McCue crouch down suddenly and signal them to stop. Still crouching, he sidled to his left, then waved them forward again, gesturing that they should keep low. They approached with great care to finally draw level and find themselves looking down on a collection of huts, some raised on stilts, around a small compound. Half a dozen oxen stirred restlessly in a pen beside a large hut raised only two or three feet from the ground. A few metres away was a second, smaller hut, raised to the same level. Facing them across the compound, about a dozen long huts stood high on stilts that rose two or three metres above piles of refuse, sturdy bamboo ladders climbing to small open doorways. The roofs were thatched with dry palm fronds. To the far right, looking out over the fields, and with a view of the compound and the approaching road, stood a rickety watchtower. They could see the silhouette of a guard leaning on the rail smoking.

Elliot checked the layout against the rough map he had drawn based on the refugee accounts Ang had acquired. ‘This is it,’ he whispered. ‘The big hut houses the cadres. There are about half a dozen of them. The one next to it is the guard hut. The civilians are in those long huts across the compound. According to my information there are ten or twelve armed guards at any given time. As well as the one in the watchtower, there are usually another two on perimeter patrol.’

Slattery whistled softly. ‘That’s a lot of bodies, chief.’

Elliot said, ‘We have an advantage over them. Their function is to keep people in, not out.’ He checked his watch. Nearly 0200 hours. There was no sign of life from the cadres’ hut, but a thin line of light marked the door of the guard hut, and through the silence came the faint sound of voices. Elliot turned to McCue. ‘Check out the perimeter, numbers and positions of guards, and report back.’ McCue nodded, took off his backpack, laid it carefully down with the mortar and slipped off through the trees.

‘What’s the plan, chief?’

Elliot was thoughtful for a moment. ‘We can’t afford to get involved in a firefight with ten or more guards. We’d be heavily outnumbered, wouldn’t stand a chance. We’ll have to remove the perimeter guards one at a time and then take out the guard hut in a oner.’

‘Mortar?’

Elliot shook his head. ‘Can’t be sure of a direct hit. And if we miss, we lose the advantage of surprise. It’ll have to be grenades.’

Slattery grinned. ‘That’s for me, chief. No troubles.’

Elliot thought for a moment. Then he said, ‘Alright. As soon as you’ve put them out of commission I’ll let off at the cadres’ hut with the mortar. I’ve got four shots at it.’ He smiled. ‘Bound to get it with one of them.’

They waited nearly fifteen minutes before McCue crept back through the trees. ‘Two guards, plus the one in the tower.’

‘Can you take them?’ Elliot asked.

McCue nodded. ‘The guy in the tower’s going to be tricky. But, yeah, I can take them.’

‘Okay. We’ll not move till we see you up there, and you can cover us when we move in.’

They spent another ten minutes going over it all, twice, in detail, then Elliot checked his watch. ‘Alright, go.’ And McCue slid away into the night, still clad in black pyjamas and chequered scarf.

The murmur of voices from the guard hut drifted across the compound on the warm night air as McCue slipped through the trees and into the shadow of the civilian huts. He ran softly among the stilts, making his way to the east side of the compound where he had seen one of the guards sitting on a woodpile, his AK-47 laid carelessly among the logs beside him. He was still there, striking a match to light a cigarette, and McCue saw his face flicker briefly in the light. The guard drew deeply on his cigarette and sighed, contemplating without enthusiasm the long hours of night watch ahead. He heard the faintest sound, like a whisper in the wind, and a chill ran through him as the long, lethal blade of McCue’s hunting knife slid into his heart.

McCue pulled him backwards over the logpile and laid him out in the shadows. He lifted his AK-47, checked that the magazine was fully loaded, and left his own M16 beside the body. Then he crouched for several moments, listening and watching. There was no indication from the tower that the guard there had seen or heard anything.

Bent almost double, McCue took long, loping strides back into the shadow of the huts, and started to work his way round the edge of the compound to the west side where the second guard was posted. He was in his element, high on adrenalin, a born killer working in the dark as he always had in the tunnels. One on one. Always, until just seconds before the kill, he would be almost rigid with tension, and then in those last seconds every muscle relaxed and he felt warm and good, like that moment of letting go when you make love to a woman.

He circled the stinking pile of refuse behind the guard hut, and drifted back into the shade of the trees, moving freely round to the west flank. But the guard was gone. McCue froze, then dropped to his haunches, searching for any sign of movement among the shadows. Nothing. Where had he gone? He heard a twig snap underfoot and turned to find the guard almost on top of him. The man had his rifle slung across his back and was preoccupied with retying the cord of his trousers. The thought flashed through McCue’s mind that all these guys seemed to do was piss. The guard did not see him until the last second, would almost certainly have walked into him if McCue had not risen from the ground like a black ghost. The Cambodian had no time to draw breath before McCue’s blade slid up through his rib cage. He fell forward, and McCue held him for a moment in an embrace of death, slowly withdrawing the knife before lowering him gently to the ground.

McCue took a moment to steady himself. That had been too close for comfort. He wiped the blade clean and resheathed the knife. Through the trees he saw that the guard in the tower was still smoking. There was no way he could approach the tower unseen or, even if he could, climb to the platform unheard. He took a deep breath, and the tension seeped back into his muscles. He adjusted the scarf at his neck to hide the jungle camouflage beneath the black pyjama top, and walked out from the shade of the trees into the naked moonlight of the open compound.

From their position among the trees above the commune, Elliot and Slattery saw a guard approach the tower. Elliot tensed. ‘Where’s McCue? Something must have gone wrong.’

Slattery grinned. ‘Nothing wrong, chief. You’re looking at him.’

Elliot looked hard at the figure crossing the compound. ‘Jesus,’ he whispered, ‘that guy’s got balls.’

‘Time I moved,’ Slattery said. He hesitated. ‘Anything goes wrong, chief, it’s been nice knowing you.’

‘Just make sure nothing goes wrong, you ugly bastard.’

Slattery grinned and slipped off through the trees. Elliot felt the seed of fear growing in his gut. But he knew that fear was not such a bad thing. It was when you stopped being afraid that you would die.

From his platform high above the compound, the remaining guard saw McCue approach. ‘What’s up?’ he called. The figure below merely waved in response. The guard frowned. What was going on? He didn’t recognize the approaching guard. The face always seemed to be in shadow. The figure disappeared below the tower and he heard the creak of the ladder. He went to the open trap and watched the figure climb up towards him.

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ He still couldn’t see the man’s face. Who was it?

Almost at the top, McCue held up a hand for the guard to help him up. The guard obliged and found himself looking into a strange face that smiled in the dark. The questions that filled his head went unanswered, and death rattled briefly in his throat. McCue rolled him to one side and picked up the cigarette that had fallen from his mouth. It was still wet with the dead man’s saliva as he took a single draw and threw it over the side. He unslung his automatic and crossed to the rail that gave him a commanding view of the compound. A stalky, oddly familiar figure was strolling across the open ground towards the guard hut. It was Slattery, McCue realized, humming to himself as he walked, as if he was taking a casual stroll along Bondi Beach. McCue’s jaw slackened with disbelief as he recognized the soft strains of Waltzing Matilda. ‘Mad sonofabitch!’ he whispered.

In the hut, four guards sat around a table playing cards by the light of an oil lamp. The others lay sleeping on bunks around the walls. One of the players lifted his head and frowned as he heard a tuneless voice softly humming a strange melody. They all looked up as the door opened and Slattery stood framed in the doorway, grinning.

‘Good day,’ he said and rolled two hand grenades into the centre of the hut. He slammed the door shut and took several steps back, hearing the clatter of panic inside before the grenades went off, blowing the door outwards. He felt the force of the blast, but stood his ground before swinging his M16 round and stepping back into the doorway. He emptied the magazine into the confusion of smoke and destruction in two sweeps of the room, quickly banged in another and waited for the smoke to clear. His eyes flickered over broken, bleeding bodies, making a quick professional assessment. All dead.

He turned and ran back out into the compound as the door of the cadres’ hut flew open and a man, half naked and still half blind with sleep, staggered out. A burst of automatic fire from the tower cut him down, and Slattery heard the soft whistle of a mortar shell. He threw himself flat and heard the shell explode just behind the hut. The bugger’s missed, he thought. But he didn’t get up, still pressing himself flat in the dust and listening for the second shell. He heard shouts of fear and confusion from inside the hut, and there was another burst of fire from the tower. Come on, Elliot! He gritted his teeth and covered his head with his arms as the second shell whispered through the warm night and ploughed into the roof of the hut. The explosion sent large splinters of wood singing out across the compound.

The dust hung in the air like silver mist in the moonlight. Slattery got slowly to his feet and looked around him, but could see very little. McCue shinned quickly down from the tower, collected his M16 and joined him.

‘Jeez,’ Slattery said. ‘It’s so quiet it’s eerie.’ He looked towards the civilian huts, but there was no sound, no sign of movement. ‘Where is everybody?’

A tall figure walked towards them, through the settling dust, from the other side of the compound. Elliot looked grim. He dropped their backpacks at their feet and glanced round.

‘Sure we got the right place, chief?’

Serey had awoken from a shallow sleep with the first explosions of the hand grenades, and wondered if she had been dreaming. Then bursts of automatic fire had sent chills of fear through her. All the women in the hut were awake now, sitting up and staring with frightened eyes in the dark. She had felt Ny move at her side.

‘What is it?’

‘I don’t know.’

Then two huge explosions had rocked the whole commune. Their hut had shaken on its stilts. Ny held tight to her mother’s arm. Still no one in the hut moved, and a deep silence followed. Then the sound of voices from somewhere across the compound. Men’s voices. Strange voices, speaking in a strange tongue. There was a further silence, then a loud call. ‘Ang Serey.’ Ny’s fingers tightened around her arm and she thought it was the voice of death calling her. ‘Ang Ny,’ the voice called this time, and Ny’s eyes opened wide with fear. Mother and daughter clung to each other, too afraid to move.

‘Serey, Ny.’ The voice was insistent. ‘We have come to take you away. Come out.’

Confusion penetrated the fear. Serey frowned. Now she recognized the words. The man was calling in English. A language she had not heard for four years, a language whose words she had never dared utter for fear of betraying a background that would have meant certain death.

‘It’s a trick, Mother,’ Ny whispered. ‘It must be a trick.’

A murmur ran among the other women in the hut, their eyes all on Serey and Ny. ‘Go,’ one of them said, ‘or they will kill us all.’ But still mother and daughter could not move.

‘Serey, your husband Yuon sent us.’ The voice again. And Serey knew for certain it must be a trick.

‘Go! In the name of Buddha, go!’ the woman hissed. The hands of other women pushed them towards the door.

Ny took her mother’s hand. ‘We have no choice.’ They rose up and the others shrank away. Serey thought, if I am to die, I will die with dignity. But her heart wept for Ny.

The men in the compound looked from hut to hut, searching for a response. Then the shrunken figures of Serey and Ny appeared at the door of one of them, and started down the ladder. When they reached the bottom they stood and looked at the three soldiers in amazement.

‘Jesus,’ Slattery said. ‘They’re little more than skeletons.’

Elliot turned to McCue and pulled the chequered scarf away from his neck. ‘Get rid of those.’

McCue obliged, slipping quickly out of the black pyjamas to reveal his jungle camouflage. Elliot walked over to the two women and was stunned by the appearance of the mother. Fleshless yellow skin stretched tightly across every bone, arms and legs flawed by open sores, grey hair thin and matted. A shrunken wreck of a human being. He was reminded of the photographs he had seen of pitiful souls in Belsen and Auschwitz. The girl looked fitter, stronger, a lustre in her hair. Perhaps youth had provided her with a resilience that her mother had lacked. And, yet, while Serey’s eyes seemed dead, Ny’s burned brightly with something he could not put a name to.

He spoke softly to Serey.

‘My name is Elliot. I’ve been paid by Yuon to bring you out of Cambodia.’ He paused. ‘Do you understand me?’ She nodded, but the eyes were still dead. He looked at Ny. ‘And your daughter?’

Ny said, ‘I understand.’

Elliot was relieved. A language barrier would have made things difficult. ‘We must leave this place quickly. Our guns will have been heard for many kilometres. There will be soldiers here very soon.’

He took Serey gently by the arm and led them across the compound to where McCue and Slattery stood watching. Both were kitted up, ready to go. They too were shocked by Serey’s appearance.

‘Do you know where your son is?’ Elliot asked her, and the first flicker of life appeared in her eyes.

‘He is in Phnom Penh,’ she said.

Elliot cursed inwardly. ‘Then we can do nothing for him.’

There was no emotion in her voice as she said, ‘I will not leave Cambodia without him.’

Slattery nudged Elliot and nodded towards the huts. In the moonlight, men and women, young and old, were descending ladders, pathetic figures in ragged black pyjamas. Big dark eyes staring from shrunken heads, bones and joints stretching skin like crepe, blemished by sores and shrivelled by the sun. A hundred, perhaps more, pairs of feet shuffled through the dust of the compound towards them. Slattery felt the sting of tears in his eyes. These creatures were scarcely recognizable as human. ‘What the hell have they been doing to people in this country?’ His voice was barely a whisper.

‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ Elliot said.

‘I will not leave Cambodia without my son,’ Serey said again.

Elliot strapped on his backpack. ‘We’ll discuss that when we’re safe.’

‘What about them?’ Slattery nodded towards the eyes that watched them with a dull curiosity and the faint light of hope.

‘Well, we can’t take them with us, can we?’ Elliot snapped. ‘They’re going to have to take their chances on their own.’

‘What chances?’ Slattery looked at him. ‘They have no chance, Jack.’

McCue suddenly broke ranks and sprinted across the compound. A figure darted through the shadows of the huts, running for his life. McCue caught him before he reached the trees and brought him crashing to the ground. He pulled him, struggling in an armlock, back across the compound. He was a young man, full-faced and well-fed. He wore the black pyjamas and red-chequered kramar of the Khmer Rouge. His eyes were black with fear.

Ny’s heart skipped a beat as she recognized the young cadre who had come for her every night all these months. ‘What do you want me to do with him?’ McCue asked Elliot.

‘Kill the bastard!’ Slattery said and drew out his pistol.

‘No!’ Ny stepped forward and stopped him. The young man’s knees almost buckled with relief. She was going to save him. Ny smiled a strange smile and drew Elliot’s knife from its sheath. A look of disbelief flashed across the face of the cadre as she drove it deep into his belly and, with both hands, pulled it up high under his rib cage. The scream choked in his throat as blood bubbled into his mouth, and he fell dead in the dust. Ny stood, pale and trembling, and the bloody knife fell from her hands. There was not a sound as the tears welled up and spilled from her mother’s eyes.

And, then, one by one, the ragged creatures that had once been men and women stepped forward to spit on the body of the cadre until it ran with saliva that glowed almost luminescent in the moonlight, like the ghost of all their suffering. Elliot picked up his knife, cleaned and sheathed it. He had seen many men die, but rarely had he felt such a sense of shock. Not for the man who had died, but for this young girl, still little more than a child, whose hatred had robbed her of her innocence, corrupting her in a single act of cold-blooded killing. He thought, she could have been my daughter.

‘Elliot.’ He turned. McCue’s face was very pale. ‘We’re running out of time.’

Elliot nodded. ‘Look after the old woman. I’ll take the girl. Slattery, get us out of here.’

Serey glanced back over her shoulder as McCue led her away across the compound after Slattery. How many times she had dreamed of freedom, of escape. But now, with the eyes upon her of all those who had shared her misery and pain, she felt empty and sad, cheated of her moment. She wondered if any of them could ever escape from the memory. She saw the man called Elliot take Ny by the arm and lead her after them. And she turned away quickly. She had done everything she could to protect her, but it had never been enough, and now she was lost.

‘Stick close to me at all times,’ Elliot whispered to Ny. ‘Do everything I tell you, without question.’ If Ny heard, she gave no sign of it. He felt her trembling still, but she offered no resistance.

As they reached the trees, Elliot became aware of a shuffling sound that whispered in the darkness and seemed to fill the air. He turned. A hundred pairs of leathery feet padding in the dust. The whole commune was following behind. As Elliot stopped, they stopped too, their eyes upon him. He felt uncomfortable under their gaze, and a sense of shame made him angry. ‘For God’s sake!’ he shouted. ‘Don’t you people understand? We can’t take you with us!’ They stared back in silence. Slattery, McCue and Serey stopped at the sound of his voice. Elliot turned to Serey. ‘You tell them,’ he said. ‘Together we are dead. If each goes his own way then at least some of us will survive.’

‘Why should I tell them what they already know?’ she replied simply. ‘You gave them their freedom, so they will follow you.’

Elliot’s eyes went cold. There was no time for this. Already there would be soldiers on their way to investigate the gunfire. He drew his pistol and levelled it at the crowd. ‘Then tell them that I will shoot anyone who follows us.’ And he raised his pistol a little and fired a single shot over their heads. There was an involuntary ducking, a shuffling of feet.

‘Hey, steady on, chief.’

Elliot ignored Slattery. ‘Tell them,’ he said again to Serey, single-minded, insistent.

She looked at him with contempt, then turned to the waiting eyes and spoke a few short sentences in a high, clear voice. And she, in turn, felt their contempt for her. She had betrayed them as surely as the Khmer Rouge had. She turned back to Elliot and spat in his face. ‘The Khmer Rouge shamed my daughter. Now you have shamed me.’

Elliot wiped the spittle from his face with his sleeve and glanced at Slattery and McCue. There was no sympathy in their eyes. ‘Fucking move!’ he barked. McCue took Serey gently by the arm and led her away at a trot after Slattery. Elliot holstered his pistol and found Ny staring at him. He hesitated a moment under her gaze then, ‘You, too,’ he growled, and pushed her ahead of him to hurry after the others. As he glanced back through the trees, he saw the dozens of dark figures still standing on the edge of the compound, and knew he had just sentenced them to an almost certain death.

They made slow progress through the forest. Serey and Ny were both weak, and the old woman had to stop and rest frequently, pale and breathless, a dry cough rattling in her throat. McCue gave them both water and a little food. He knew they would not be able to eat much. Stomachs shrunken by the paltry Khmer Rouge rations, conditioned to a daily intake of a few grains of rice, unable to cope with anything richer. It would be some time before they could eat a sustaining meal.

They had stopped to rest for five minutes, squatting in the cover of a dry river bed. Slattery had gone ahead to scout out the lie of the land. Serey looked at Elliot. ‘Why?’ she said. He frowned, not understanding. ‘Why would you risk your lives to save us?’

‘Your husband is paying us well.’

Her laugh was without humour, full of bitterness. ‘Does he think he can buy us, too?’ She looked at Ny. ‘Does he think he can buy back his daughter’s innocence?’ Ny lowered her head, unable to meet her mother’s eye. ‘What value does he put on our lives?’

‘He told me, everything he has,’ Elliot said.

She snorted her disgust. ‘Except his life and his freedom.’ She shook her head. ‘Time will mend a broken heart, but does he really believe he can pay for his soul?’

‘Frankly, Mrs Ang, I don’t know, and I really don’t care,’ Elliot said. ‘He’s paying me to do a job and I’m doing it.’

‘I have already told you,’ she said, ‘that I will not leave without my son.’

‘If he is in Phnom Penh then he is lost.’

‘No. He will wait for us there.’

Elliot sighed. ‘So you are going to go to Phnom Penh — on your own?’

‘If I have to.’

‘And how far do you think you would get?’

Her smile was serene with a fatalism that a Westerner would find hard to fathom. ‘Not far, perhaps, but I will die rather than leave him.’ She paused. ‘But you must take Ny with you.’

‘No!’ Ny turned on her mother, eyes burning, and spoke rapidly in her native tongue. Then she turned to Elliot. ‘I go with my mamma to Phnom Penh.’

Elliot looked at McCue, who shook his head. ‘What you gonna do, Elliot? Tie them up and carry them to Thailand?’

A rustle in the undergrowth brought both men sharply back to their present danger. Elliot swung his automatic round as Slattery crawled through the thick bank of ferns overhead to drop down to the river bed beside them. He was breathing hard and sweating. ‘Khmer Rouge,’ he whispered. ‘A dozen, maybe more. Coming this way.’

‘Move!’ Elliot hissed, and he pulled Ny roughly to her feet. ‘Which way?’ he asked Slattery.

Slattery nodded up ahead. ‘Better stick to the river bed.’

‘Okay, we’ll follow you.’

Slattery led them, through patches of dappled moonlight, at a half-run, half-crouch, east along the stony bed of the dry stream, ferns and creepers snagging on clothes and hands and faces. Serey stumbled and fell several times, and McCue half dragged, half carried her for several hundred metres before the strain on his arms began to take its toll. He slumped back against the bank, and damp, crumbling earth showered down over both of them. Beads of sweat left tracks in the dirt on his face. Elliot and Ny caught up and stopped. McCue caught the look on Elliot’s face. ‘Shit, man,’ he gasped. ‘Got to take a breather. The old lady ain’t got the legs for this, and I can’t carry her for ever.’ Elliot nodded and whistled softly into the darkness ahead. After a few moments, Slattery came back along the stream bed to join them.

‘What’s up, chief?’

‘We’re going to have to lie up for a while. Check our position.’

Slattery nodded and slipped over the north bank and melted silently away through the trees. Perhaps two kilometres to the west came the distant sound of automatic gunfire. Eight or ten bursts. And Elliot knew that the killing of those left behind had begun.

Slattery took a wide sweep through the trees, north then west, before crossing to the south side of the dry stream and turning east again to head back towards the others. There was no sign of the soldiers he had seen earlier. Perhaps they had headed west, back towards the commune in an attempt to cut them off. He heard sporadic fire from that direction and felt sick at the thought of those poor shambling creatures, unarmed and defenceless, being cut down as they made their hopeless breaks for freedom. They had not asked to be set free. They had not deserved to be enslaved. Perhaps death was now the only freedom they would ever know, their only possible escape.

Slattery’s few moments of lapsed concentration were fatal. He missed the shadows that slipped darkly through the trees away to his left. The snap of a twig crashed into his thoughts, through the haze of pain that came from the ache in his gut. But that split-second warning was not enough. He turned just in time to see the flash of an AK-47 and feel the pain of its burst of bullets as they tore through his left thigh and knee, shattering bones and arteries. The leg buckled under him and he fell face-first into the damp earth and humus. And he thought he smelled death in its bitter odour. The pain, at first, was crippling, and he found he could not move. He heard footsteps approach cautiously through the undergrowth. He cursed his careless stupidity, his lack of professionalism. His cancer seemed such a small thing now, and he thought, in that moment, that he loved life more dearly than he had ever done before.

The initial, all-consuming pain receded now before a wave of warmth that spread upwards through him from his shattered leg. He raised his head a little and saw his automatic lying two feet away, where it had fallen. He reached forward to grasp it, but only in his mind. His body would not respond. He managed to incline his head to his left and saw six or seven figures in black pyjamas approaching, AK-47s held at the ready, dark eyes burning with a triumph fuelled by fear and confusion. They stopped, no more than two or three metres away, and looked at the prone figure on the ground. One of them stepped forward and raised his automatic. Slattery watched the barrel lift to point at him, like the finger of God passing judgement. And the sentence was death. Even in these last seconds it struck him as odd that he should think now of God, when he had not thought of God in all the years of his life. He closed his eyes as the sound of automatic fire exploded in the dark.

So this was death. He felt confused. It seemed no different from life. The pain, the heat rising in his body, the smell of the forest. He opened his eyes to see four Khmer Rouge soldiers lying dead and bleeding only a few feet away. In his confusion he thought he saw others running away through the trees. Another burst of fire brought two of them crashing down. A third swung around, returning a swift burst, before vanishing into the night.

A hand pulled Slattery gently over on to his back, and he found himself looking up into Elliot’s grim, smeared face. Slattery grinned feebly. ‘Strewth, chief,’ he whispered, ‘you took your bloody time.’

Elliot jumped down between McCue and the two women, and lowered the now unconscious Slattery from his shoulder into the bed of the dry stream. ‘Tourniquet, quick!’ There was an urgency in his voice that McCue had not heard before. His face and shirt were dark with Slattery’s blood, and McCue wondered, briefly, if it was tears that glazed his eyes. But the thought did not linger. He unsheathed his knife and expertly cut away the blood-sodden trouser leg above the wounds, peeling it slowly back to reveal the shattered flesh. The full extent of the damage became apparent. He glanced at Elliot, and the look that passed between them left no room for words. He cut a strip of cloth and tied it round Slattery’s upper thigh, tight enough to stop the blood that was still gouting from the wounds. Then he took out a plastic bottle of spirit and several gauze pads from his backpack to wash away the blood and clean out the wounds.

Serey and Ny watched, transfixed with horror, as McCue clipped and then tied off the severed arteries as best he could, and the fleeting security they had felt with these men evaporated into the night.

Elliot, working in fevered silence, unravelled a roll of lint and wrapped it tightly around the pads that McCue placed over the wounds. He tore the ends, running one back around the leg to join with the other and tie the bandage in place below the knee. The whole process took less than two minutes, both men ignoring the frequent bursts of gunfire that seemed increasingly nearer. Slattery’s face was chalk white, his breathing shallow.

Now they could hear voices and many feet tramping through the undergrowth, not more than three or four hundred metres away. Elliot pulled Slattery into a sitting position then heaved him up over his shoulder. McCue lifted his own and Slattery’s backpacks and jerked Serey to her feet. ‘Listen, lady, you’re going to have to run or we’re all dead.’

‘I help her,’ Ny said, and she held and squeezed her mother’s hand.

McCue nodded to Elliot. ‘Go.’ And they started to run, along the bed of the dry stream at first, then up over the bank and through the trees, away from the sounds of the approaching soldiers. Ny put her mother’s arm around her neck and her own arm around her mother’s waist, and half-dragged her after Elliot. McCue came behind, automatic held in one hand ready for use, frequently turning to glance back, eyes searching the darkness on either side. Elliot’s long strides took him quickly through the forest, bending at the knees, transferring the strain of the extra weight he carried to his thighs. Within a few minutes his shoulder, arm and neck were aching. But there could be no stopping. Pain at a threshold of intensity. If you passed through it, then it became bearable, and you could live with it a little longer. His sweat almost blinded him, salt stinging his eyes. But he found a rhythm, of stride and of breathing, that carried him on for ten, perhaps fifteen minutes before his knees began to buckle and gradually his rhythm was lost, becoming a stuttering, staggering stumble.

He barely noticed how the trees had grown sparse, and was almost surprised to emerge from the darkness on to a bright moonlit track rutted by cartwheels and pitted by the hooves of many oxen. He lost his footing and dropped to his knees, acid rising in his throat. With leaden arms, he lowered Slattery to the ground, lungs pumping hard to feed oxygen to starved and aching muscles.

He felt light-headed and sick as he heard Ny and Serey stagger up behind him. Breathless sobs caught in Serey’s throat as she fell down beside him, utterly exhausted, unable to take another step. Ny was pale, her face stained and glistening with tears and sweat. Elliot looked up and saw pain in her eyes, but also courage there. McCue’s whisper seemed to fill the night. ‘We can’t stop here!’

Elliot nodded. He took a few more seconds to catch his breath. ‘How far behind us are they?’

McCue shrugged. ‘Difficult to say. We may have lost them — for the moment. But we gotta keep going. I’ll take the Aussie.’ He stooped to heave the dead weight of Slattery on to his shoulder, and visibly buckled under the strain. Elliot dragged himself wearily to his feet, wiping sweat from his eyes, and lifted Slattery’s discarded backpack. He took Serey gently by the arm and raised her upright, slipping an arm round her waist to support her. He looked at Ny, whose face gave no clue as to what was going on behind it. She reached across and took the backpack from his hand and slung it over her shoulder.

The stricken group stumbled east along the rutted path, at little more than walking pace, for ten to fifteen minutes. The path grew wider, the trees receding on either side, quite suddenly and unexpectedly opening out to reveal a large moon reflected in black water. And from myriad lakes and waterways, awesome and dark, rose the lost temples of Angkor Wat.

Serey dropped at once to her knees, pressing her palms together and bowing towards the sacred ruins. The sheer scale of the wat filled their eyes and minds, gathering itself in the distance, rising above a long, low-lying portico, its lotus-broken reflection carried on the still waters of the moon-silvered lake. Elliot glanced back through the trees, watching for movement, listening for sounds of pursuit. But he saw nothing, heard nothing. The Khmer Rouge must have assumed they would head north, rather than south towards the Wat and the dead-end shores of the Tonle Sap. The silence was broken only by the mumblings of Ang Serey as she offered prayers to the Lord Buddha. Slattery’s face was a waxen, grey mask shining with sweat. His grin was a grimace as he raised his head to look out across the waters at the temples.

‘Shit, chief,’ he said, ‘it don’t hold a candle to the Sydney Opera House.’

Serey was weeping now. Ny knelt beside her, an arm around her. ‘What is it, Mother?’

Slowly Serey raised her head, drawing her daughter’s eyes to where a red flag hung limp in the still night air above the temples.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Elongated slats of bloodless light, like the bars of a prison cell, fell across the floor, distorted by the debris that littered it, extending upwards across a wall daubed with revolutionary slogans. They had no substance, these bars. The light of the hidden sun reflected on earth by the moon and casting only shadows. And yet they locked Hau in, as securely as if they were steel. Like fingers reaching through the darkness, they held him in their grip. It was his fear that gave them their power. The power to back him up against the wall, knees pulled into his chin, arms folded around his shins. He pulled his legs in tight as though he might somehow be able to make himself so small as to be invisible.

The night was hot and humid, but still he shivered. A broken shutter hung down across the window in the breathless dark, swinging slowly back and forth. At first he was puzzled by its motion. There was not a whisper of movement in the air. What magical energy was there at work, what hidden fingers tipping the shutters to and fro on rusted hinges? The breath of what invisible demon stirred the still night air? He wanted to scream. To shatter the fragile peace of the night. But he could raise no sound in his throat. He closed his eyes and felt hunger gnawing at his stomach like some devil eating him from the inside out. The whole room tilted towards him now.

He had found his old home as dawn broke. A pale misted dawn that allowed the world to etch itself with only a pastel imprecision upon the day. A tracery of cracks had opened up across the suburban streets, grass and weeds poking up through broken kerbstones. Once grand villas, set in secluded grounds, lay dilapidated as the first tendrils of primeval jungle reached up through devastated gardens to reclaim what man had so recently stolen and now abandoned. The house seemed only faintly familiar, a dream of a previous life. Windows and shutters had been smashed, doors ripped off. Everything of value had been taken, everything else destroyed. Every conceivable hiding place had been sought out, floorboards torn up, walls smashed. And then this broken monument to defeated imperialism had been left to rot.

Hau had shuffled despondently through the rubble, from room to room, trailing his automatic rifle on the floor behind him, hope draining from him with every step. Home — that place he had always held in his memory safe and inviolate, nourished with thoughts of his mother and father and Ny, the one place in the world he could escape to — no longer existed. Home, he realized as he stumbled through the devastation, was not a place. It was the people who filled it. And the emptiness he now found in what had once been his home cut deep into his soul, like the jagged edge of a blunt razor, bringing the searing realization that he had no home, no family, no place to go.

Now, he opened his eyes in the dark, heart pounding, the room still tilting him this way and that. And he realized that it was not the room that tilted back and forth. Nor the shutter swinging in the still air. It was his own movement as he rocked gently from heel to toe. And, suddenly, it seemed a warm, comforting movement.

He saw his AK-47 lying abandoned on the floor where he had dropped it. It seemed a strange, hard, metallic thing. A toy in a catalogue. How could such an inanimate object take life? Of course, he knew, it couldn’t. Not on its own. It took him, or anyone with a will, to pull the trigger. It took intent. It took malice or jealousy or fear or greed. And he had had such intent. At once he felt shame and anger and hurt at this knowledge, and he kicked out at the rifle, sending it clattering across the room. But he could still see it in the moonlight, staring back at him, reproachful, accusing.

He picked up the dusty, threadbare teddy that lay beside him and clutched it to his breast. He’d found it lying torn and broken in a corner of what had once been his bedroom. It brought an instant comfort. It shared all his secrets, all his fears. He buried his face in its fur and immediately smelled something disturbingly familiar. It took him a moment to realize it was himself that he smelled. A smell so familiar it frightened him, unlocking a door on the past, on a lost innocence, on the boy he had once been. Who was he now? He squeezed the teddy tight. Tears sprang from his eyes, salty and stinging, and he wondered how long it would take him to die.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Four tiny figures moved with the infinitesimal speed of crippled time along a stone causeway flanked at exact intervals by pairs of seven-headed serpents. Above them rose the towers of the wat, the moon casting their shadows long and deep, the still mildewed lakes spanned by the causeway drowning their reflections. Elliot carried Slattery over his shoulder. He felt blood soaking through his fatigues, life ebbing from the dying weight. Behind him, the smack of bare feet on cool stone, Serey leaning heavily on the arm of her daughter. The gentle clatter of McCue’s webbing as he moved slowly backwards, eyes focused into the dark of the trees whose shelter they had left, seemed to fill the hot damp air. Behind them lay only darkness and silence. Ahead lay the towering emptiness of the wat, and beyond that the watery vastness of the Tonle Sap. The sheer size of everything that lay around them, that was against them, reinforced their sense of smallness.

‘We shall be safe in the temple,’ Serey had said. ‘The Lord Buddha will protect us.’ Ny wondered why the Lord Buddha had failed to protect them from the Khmer Rouge for four years.

But Elliot felt drawn to the temples, felt an unaccountable sadness at the imminent loss of his friend. At the loss of all the lives he had taken. Of all the deaths he had encountered in a life that was more about dying than living. As they at last reached the end of the causeway and mounted the steps into the black and cavernous mouth of the temple, he wondered why he should feel now, for the first time, what he had not felt in all those years. Was it the proximity of death? And yet he had been close to death many times. Perhaps, as the wat swallowed them into its darkness, so hell would swallow him into eternity. And the seductive allure of death stirred somewhere deep inside him. Perhaps all his life had led him to this place only to die.

In the blanket of darkness that enveloped them, the faintest sound rustled and echoed off invisible surfaces. Elliot eased Slattery gently on to the icy slabs and a soft grunt escaped his lips in a breath. McCue knelt beside him.

‘You okay, buddy?’

‘No troubles.’

And McCue heard him grin in the dark.

Elliot struck the flint of his lighter and held a small flame up above his head. A tiny halo burgeoned into the almost tangible darkness that engulfed the flame and snuffed its light. Elliot’s sweat grew cold on his skin. He shivered, taking several steps into the void, seeking a surface that would reflect his light. Faint grey images flickered back at him. Thick-limbed peasants with coarse, clownish faces; the bodies of the damned trodden underfoot by horsemen and torn by wild beasts; aristocratic faces smiling beatifically from long boats, secure in the knowledge that, sooner or later, they would appear in the honours lists as minor gods. A cockfight seemed to reflect the futility of their own struggle. Elliot stepped closer to run his hand lightly over the cold carved stone and feel its slimy humidity. For a moment, a memory of the tiny engravings on Grace’s silver necklace and bracelet, crafted by Sihanouk’s own silversmith, flickered through his mind. A memory from another world. He put his hand to his neck and found that the thong was broken, the ring she had given him gone — the only part of her that would ever return to the soil of her birth. His fingers found only his own St Christopher.

‘Hey, Elliot. We gotta do something for Mikey.’

Elliot turned back, the lighter now burning his fingers. Ny and her mother squatted on the floor beside the prone figure of Slattery and the kneeling shadow of McCue. Faces glowed palely in the light of the searing heat that grew from his hand. All turned towards him. Looking for answers. From him. His responsibility. Hadn’t it always been that way?

‘Better light a fire.’ He wondered for a moment where this strange voice had come from, metallic and soulless, echoing out of nowhere — before he realized it was his own.

McCue took less than half an hour, returning several times with armfuls of dry wood, to get a fire burning. Elliot laid out a sleeping mat, eased Slattery on to it, and covered him with another. The Aussie’s face was so pale it almost glowed, drained of blood and life. Elliot fingered the sticky warmth of the blood that oozed around the tourniquet on Slattery’s leg. He knew that if he took it off Slattery would bleed to death. If it stayed on much longer he would lose the leg.

The flames of McCue’s fire licked up around the small group, yellow light flickering across faces lost in fatigue and hopelessness.

‘Sleep,’ Elliot said. ‘I’ll take first watch.’

The shadows of lions couchant and many-headed serpents rose up around him. He walked slowly through the slabs of silvered light that fell between the tall stone columns guarding the hideously carved outer walls of the wat. People devoured by crocodiles, butchered by swordsmen. Elliot wondered if this barbarous culture had somehow proved a breeding ground for the horrors of the Khmer Rouge to come.

He glanced back along the length of the causeway, across the long grass and the still lakes, to the distant line of the outer walls and the jungle beyond. Not a sound, nor a movement, stirred the night air. It did not seem natural. McCue had pumped Slattery full of painkillers and the Aussie had fallen into a restless slumber. McCue himself had been asleep almost before his head touched the floor, curled up in a curiously foetal position close to the fire. A sleeping child. Elliot had left Ny wide-eyed and sleepless watching over her mother. ‘Don’t let the fire go out,’ he told her.

The scrape of a foot on stone brought his thoughts to an abrupt halt. He turned to find Ny staring up at him out of the gloom, dark eyes turning black. ‘You should be sleeping,’ he said curtly.

She shrugged. ‘No can sleep.’

He took in her slight, fragile frame, and for the first time realized just how small she really was. Like a child half her age. And yet there was a maturity and experience in her eyes that might have belonged to a woman of twice her years. In her gaze was a sense of knowing, as if she had known him all her life. As if she knew him all too well, as only he did. The idea discomfited him. He rested his M16 against the wall and squatted down on the top step, leaning back against a pillar and taking out a cigarette. He lit it and felt the smoke, dry and acrid, burn his mouth, and he sucked it deep inside him and felt the tightness across his chest relax.

‘Smoke?’ he asked, and held out a cigarette.

She shook her head. ‘When cadres smoke it smell bad. Bitter. Like...’ she searched for the word ‘... privilege.’

He smiled. ‘You’re too young to have thought that one up for yourself. You hear it from your mother?’

She tilted her jaw defiantly. ‘My mamma clever. She keep us stay alive.’

Elliot nodded seriously. ‘Sure.’ He drew again on the cigarette. ‘Weren’t you ever curious? For yourself?’

‘About what?’

‘Smoking.’

She met his look with the same directness, mirroring his seriousness, unaware that he was laughing at her. And at once he regretted his flippancy.

‘I remember see ladies smoke, Phnom Penh. It make them look like bad woman.’

‘Sounds like your mother talking again.’

‘You no laugh me, Mistah Elliot.’

He heard, with something like shock, her father’s voice in hers. The way she said his name. And he remembered she was somebody’s little girl who’d grown up without a father.

‘You no — curious?’ she asked, rolling the word around her tongue, savouring its newness.

‘About what?’

She looked at his blankness and wondered if it could be real. A little half smile. ‘You no curious.’

‘If you mean about what happened to you and your mother, to this whole godforsaken country, I’m not paid to be curious. Just to get you out.’

‘You only thinking and doing what you paid to.’

‘Yes,’ he said. And he remembered the heat and the white blinding brightness, and then the sightless dark, the smell of sweat and fear. And after, through the red mist, smoke clearing, eyes adjusting, the broken bleeding bodies. Children, like Ny, and younger. ‘It’s an old army trick I learned years ago. Otherwise you end up drunk somewhere, or shooting junk.’

She didn’t speak for a long time, sitting on the edge of the stone balustrade watching him. He let his head fall back against the pillar, the cigarette easing his tension. And as the tension eased, so he felt the first seductive waves of fatigue. His eyes were gritty and sore and he closed them for just a moment. And saw himself standing beneath the stark winter trees in the rain watching the stranger in black who was his daughter being led away by another stranger — a young man with red hair. He knew she’d seen him. But of course she had no idea who he was. A stranger at her mother’s funeral who was her father. She commented on him to the young man with red hair who flicked angry eyes in his direction before steering her away toward the line of cars.

‘Will your friend die?’

Ny’s soft, stilted voice startled him. He opened his eyes and saw her still sitting on the balustrade. Birds fluttered around in his chest and stomach. He saw that his cigarette had burned down to the filter and gone out. ‘What?’

‘Your friend who is shot. He will die?’

The blunt, emotionless quality of her question was unnerving. She accepted death with the same ease she accepted life. But, then, hadn’t she known as much of one as the other? ‘I don’t know,’ he lied.

She seemed to accept this, nodding thoughtfully. Then, ‘My mamma mean what she say.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Elliot searched his pockets for another cigarette.

‘Will you take us Phnom Penh?’

He found one and looked at her irritably. ‘You ask a lot of questions, don’t you?’

‘No answer without question.’

He lit his cigarette and got to his feet. He was getting tired of her fatalism. ‘Sometimes the last thing you want to hear is the answer, so you don’t ask the question.’ And he walked back into the temple to the glow of the dying embers of McCue’s fire. He heard Ny’s bare feet behind him. ‘I thought I told you not to let the fire go out.’

Without a word she padded towards the circle of light and picked up a log to poke among the ashes before piling on fresh wood. McCue sat up, instantly awake. His eyes shone like polished coals, fastening on Elliot as he stepped into the flickering light. ‘My watch?’

Elliot nodded. ‘Wake me at first light.’

The blood drained out of the dawn sky leaving it a blue so pale it was almost yellow. A mist lay across the water like gently undulating gauze slowly smoking into the morning haze as the sun rose to scorch the air. McCue and Elliot stood, silent statues, staring out across the causeway towards the jungle. With the light, they realized how vulnerable they had been through the night. The wat was surrounded on three sides by flat swampland, tall trees growing sparsely through the swollen waters of the Tonle Sap. They had limped up a blind alley without knowing it. Had the Khmer Rouge picked up their trail the night before, they would have been trapped. As it was, they were still in danger, and Elliot wanted them out of here fast.

‘Do we go north or south?’ McCue asked without looking at him.

‘North.’

‘What about the old woman?’

‘She’ll have to be persuaded.’

‘That will not be possible.’ They turned, startled, to find Serey there, calm, almost serene, Ny standing a respectful distance behind her. ‘And I am not such an old woman. Even if I look it.’

‘Lady, I’m sorry for calling you old, but we got no choice but to head for Thailand.’

Serey remained implacable. ‘Perhaps you do not. I do. My daughter and I are going to Phnom Penh.’

‘Shit!’ McCue glanced at Elliot. ‘What’s there? There’s nothing there, is there? No hospital, no doctors, nothing. They emptied the goddamned place, didn’t they?’ He shook his head. ‘Mikey’d never make it.’

Elliot was impassive. ‘He’ll never make it to Thailand either.’

McCue regarded him with disbelief. ‘Shit, man, you’re not going along with this crap? Phnom Penh! That poor bastard ain’t got a chance! Be like putting a gun to his fucking head — never mind ours!’ He turned towards Serey. ‘You want that, do you, lady? You want the man’s blood on your hands? Maybe ours, too?’

‘I didn’t ask you to come,’ she said simply.

‘We’d better move,’ Elliot said.

McCue grabbed his arm, frustration boiling over. ‘Where to? Phnom Penh?’

Elliot’s silence was his confirmation.

‘Why, for fuck’s sake? Why are you doing this?’

‘Because we can’t make them go north with us, and they haven’t a hope if they go south on their own.’ He paused. ‘Then Slattery would have died for nothing.’

McCue ground his anger out through clenched teeth. ‘He ain’t dead yet.’

‘Only a matter of time,’ Elliot said, and he pulled free of McCue’s grip and walked into the cold grey gloom of the temple.

McCue shouted after him, ‘You’re a callous fucking bastard, Elliot, you know that!’

Slattery’s face was a mask. He raised himself on one elbow with difficulty and grimaced at Elliot. ‘Not like Billy boy to go shooting his mouth off. What’s the trouble, chief?’

‘No trouble,’ Elliot said. ‘Time to go.’

The constant but irregular bumping jarred his whole aching being, sending pain in random waves through a hazy consciousness that was clearly focused on only what hurt. And that clarity centred upon his leg, a leg that seemed to have swollen larger than anything in his forty years’ experience, enveloping everything, filling all of time and space. It left him feeling like some infinitely small being attached somehow to one of its vast curved surfaces. But even that infinite smallness was full of pain. His throat was swollen so that he could barely swallow and his head was filled with a fire that burned and raged.

He was only vaguely aware of Elliot and McCue taking turns to drag his crude bamboo litter through this eternal landscape. Overhead, light flitted erratically through the broken canopy, drifting in and out of focus. And from time to time a face would swim into his field of vision, disembodied concern, eyes that blinked to hide their hopelessness. He wanted to say, Stop! Enough! His lips moved, but there were no words.

Elliot looked into Slattery’s clouded eyes and knew he didn’t have long. He brushed flies from dried cracked lips that tried to move and he heard the breath that rattled in his throat. Then suddenly the dying man’s hand clutched Elliot’s wrist, every last ounce of his strength pressed into the grip. And his eyes opened wide, burning with a diamond-sharp blue-grey intensity. For a moment Elliot thought it was death that gave them their brief, bright life, before he saw, with a sudden shocking clarity, that it was not death itself, but an appeal for it. And he felt a sack of bile knot in his stomach.

McCue was on point. He came quickly back through the trees. They had been circling south-east around the top end of the Tonle Sap, avoiding the small towns of Roluos and Kompong Kleang, trying to reach the shores of the great lake. The one thing Elliot and McCue had agreed on was that the only way they were likely to reach Phnom Penh was by boat. It would be the fastest, most direct route, south-west across the Tonle Sap, eventually feeding into the wide, slow-moving, southbound waters of the Mekong, a great river highway that led past the city and on down through Vietnam, before finally debouching, through the nine dragons’ mouths of the Mekong Delta into the South China Sea. McCue crouched breathless beside Elliot.

‘We’re about quarter of a mile from a small fishing village on the lake shore. Half a dozen huts on stilts. It’s partially flooded and looks deserted.’

Serey and Ny squatted silently in the grass, gnawing on small hard biscuits that Elliot had taken from his pack. The heat was devastating, stealing away all their energy, sapping their strength and will to move. The air chirred with the sounds of countless insects, while high above strange birds cawed and screamed in the canopy. Elliot wiped the sweat from his eyes with his sleeve and nodded. ‘Okay.’ He inclined his head towards the two women. ‘We’ll give them five.’

McCue looked at Slattery. ‘How is he?’

‘Do you need to ask?’

A moment of contempt flickered in the American’s eyes, but he said nothing. He stood up and turned away, only to stop as the incongruous sound of voices in idle chatter reached them through the trees. Three Khmer Rouge soldiers walked into the clearing. Stunned by the sight of the two women, they stopped abruptly as McCue and Elliot snatched weapons, the clatter of gun metal on webbing, to cover them. Taken completely off guard, they reacted too late. One swung his AK-47 from his shoulder and fell in a burst of fire from McCue’s automatic. The other two stood in frozen horror, staring in near-disbelief at the Western faces.

‘Mrs Ang, tell them to put their weapons on the ground, very slowly,’ Elliot said. Serey was scared but hiding it. She and Ny were both on their feet, Ny breathless with fear, holding her mother’s arm. Serey glanced at Elliot then uttered a few halting words to the Khmers. They hesitated, just boys with frightened faces. And then the snap of a safety catch from behind forced Elliot into a half-turn. A fourth Khmer was standing over Slattery with a pistol pointed at his head. The soldier’s face was distorted by fear as he shouted a cryptic command.

‘He says if you do not throw down your weapons your friend will die,’ Serey said.

‘Fucking ironic, isn’t it.’ Elliot half-smiled. ‘Keep those bastards covered, McCue.’ And he dropped his M16 and drew out his service pistol.

McCue shifted uneasily. ‘What the fuck are you doing!’ Elliot raised the pistol, levelling it at the soldier’s head. ‘Elliot!’ McCue shouted. And with the fear there was now confusion in the Khmer’s face.

The air hummed with the silence that had fallen after the first shots. Elliot’s eyes met the Khmer’s, and the Khmer could not understand the gratitude he read in this alien face. Then Elliot’s eyes dropped to where Slattery lay on the stretcher. And in a single swift movement he lowered his revolver and shot Slattery through the temple. A small fountain of blood looped briefly through a patch of sunlight. The sense of disbelief was paralysing, the Khmer standing pointing his gun impotently at a corpse. His mouth gaped as he stared at the body then looked up to see Elliot as he raised his pistol to shoot him in the face. A bloodcurdling scream filled the air as McCue squeezed the trigger of his M16, venting his anger and confusion on the other two soldiers, bodies torn apart by two dozen bullets as they fell broken to the ground. Then he spun round, cracking the butt of the rifle across the side of Elliot’s head, knocking him over. Specks of spittle frothed at the corners of his mouth. He pointed the weapon at Elliot’s chest and screamed, ‘You bastard! You fucking bastard! I’m going to fucking kill you!’

Elliot shook his head to clear it, and felt blood running sticky down one side of his face. He stared back into McCue’s fury for several long moments, then he pushed the hot, smoking barrel aside and got back to his feet.

‘We’d better get out of here.’ He wiped the blood from his face and picked up his M16.

Chapter Twenty-Five

The freshly watered grass was cool and crisp under her feet. She felt vulnerable barefoot, wrapped only in a flimsy silk dressing gown, but was comforted by the hand of the girl in the yellow dress who held her lightly just above the elbow, guiding her from the dark interior and into the glare of the garden. The air was velvety warm, cooled by the fine spray that filled the air and carried the scent of winter blossoms across the lawn. A gardener, dressed all in black, played a hose liberally over flower beds across a haze of green, while in the centre of the lawn a sprinkler sent millions of tiny droplets flickering through the morning sunlight, making perfect little rainbows.

Under the shade of a large tree Tuk sat at a white, circular table eating breakfast, a morning paper folded beside his plate. He looked up and smiled across at her and stood as she approached.

‘Good morning, my dear. And how are you feeling today?’

‘Confused,’ she said, and was suddenly aware that the girl in the yellow dress had gone, a glimpse of pale lemon melting into the cool darkness of the house. Tuk pulled out a chair for her and she sat down.

‘But of course,’ he said. ‘I understand. You must have many questions.’ He paused. ‘And perhaps a few answers.’ He regarded her speculatively for a moment, then he waved his hand dismissively. ‘But there will be plenty of time for both. First you must have a little breakfast. Juice?’ He sat down, about to pour her some freshly squeezed orange, but stopped, inclined his head a little and reached out to run his fingers lightly down one side of her face. She winced and drew back from his touch. ‘Such a nasty bruise,’ he said. ‘That man must have been an animal. Such beauty as yours should be treated with reverence.’

She had seen her own face earlier, when the girl in the yellow dress had come to wake her. An ugly purple bruise extending from her swollen upper lip across her cheekbone. One eye, too, was bruised and swollen and almost closed. Her whole body ached, and she was surprised not to find its creamy whiteness covered by bruises. The girl had not spoken to her, only smiling as she led her gently into a lilac-tiled shower room. There, to Lisa’s embarrassment, the girl had washed her down with a large soapy sponge under a stream of steaming hot water that relaxed her so that her legs felt weak and almost buckled. Then she rubbed her down with a big soft towel before holding the silk robe for her to slip into.

Lisa felt better now, seated in the soft drowsy shade, and only realized how hungry she was when the sharp sweetness of the orange juice nipped her tongue. Over his paper, Tuk watched with a half-smile as she tucked into slices of freshly toasted bread running with melted butter and honey. He sighed with satisfaction when the girl with the yellow dress brought a fresh pot of scented tea and poured them a cup. Lisa flicked uncertain darting glances at him when she thought he wasn’t watching her, building up a series of tiny snapshot impressions to sketch in the detail she had failed to take in at first sight. His freshly starched white shirt and trousers bore creases like razors. You could cut yourself just touching him, she thought. And she smiled to herself as it occurred to her that he brought new meaning to the phrase sharp dresser. And with that, she realized how much better she was feeling.

His short dark hair was oiled back. Dyed, she guessed. It was too uniformly black for a man of his age. He had a not unpleasant face, brown as a nut, smooth and unlined. But his eyes, she noticed, dark unyielding eyes, never reflected the smile that played constantly about his pale lips. She took in the manicured nails, the three gold rings, and the diamond on his little finger, and smiled up at him from the last of her tea.

‘Better?’ he asked.

She nodded vigorously. ‘Much.’

He folded his paper and put it aside, clasping his hands over his crossed knees. ‘So,’ he said. ‘Shall we exchange a few confidences?’

‘You do know my father?’ she asked.

‘Oh, yes, I know him well. In fact, he was seated here with me at this very table less than a week ago.’

Her heart leapt. ‘You know where he is, then?’

‘Yes, I do.’

She felt both excitement and relief in a single emotional response. She had found him, finally, after all these weeks. And, yet, now that he was within reach, she felt an involuntary drawing back. Fear. Perhaps, after all, he would not want to see her. ‘When will I be able to see him?’

Tuk smiled. ‘I’m sorry, my dear, I really don’t know.’

‘But you said you knew where he was.’

‘Oh, I know where he’s gone. But not when, or even if, he’ll be back.’

She frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

He leaned on the table and put a hand over hers. ‘How well do you know your father?’

She hesitated, then drew her hand away, and felt herself withdrawing inside, suddenly aware that she knew nothing about this man, or how she came to be in his house.

‘Enough,’ she said, and felt clumsily defensive. ‘Where is he?’

‘Kampuchea.’

‘Kampuchea?’ She had heard of it, of course, but her grasp of south-east Asian geography and current affairs was sketchy.

‘You have heard of Cambodia?’ Tuk asked.

‘He’s gone there, too?’

Tuk grinned, genuinely amused. ‘They are one and the same, Miss Lisa.’ And he paused long enough for her to feel foolish. ‘Cambodia is bordered on the north by Laos, to the north and west by Thailand and the Gulf of Thailand, and to the east and south by Vietnam. She was a casualty of the war in Vietnam. A bystander caught in the crossfire between the Americans and the communists, and has now fallen prey to a kind of political cannibalism that we call the Khmer Rouge.’

Lisa knew little of the war in Vietnam, but she had heard of the Khmer Rouge, a vague memory of obscure reports on the evening television news bulletins. They had never seemed relevant and she had never got interested.

Tuk said, ‘Your father has been paid a great deal of money to go into Cambodia to try to rescue a woman and her children who, like everyone else in the country, are prisoners of the Khmer Rouge. He came to me for’ — he picked his words carefully — ‘equipment and supplies. But of course, you already knew that.’ He raised an eyebrow and she realized it was a question, not a statement.

She shook her head. ‘No. I had no idea who you were.’

‘Your father didn’t say?’

She avoided his eyes. ‘No. He doesn’t know I’m here.’

‘Then who gave you my name?’

Lisa ran her hands back through her hair. ‘I’m beginning to feel tired, Mr Tuk.’

‘Of course, Lisa,’ Tuk said, full of ersatz sincerity. ‘But it is important that we know certain things about each other, don’t you think?’

‘I suppose,’ she said reluctantly. She felt herself being inextricably drawn into a question-and-answer session in which she really did not want to participate. ‘But I’m not sure I should say.’

‘Oh, come now, my dear, it’s not a secret, is it?’ His patient amiability was very persuasive.

‘I suppose not.’ But still she hesitated.

‘Well?’ There was just the hint of an edge in his voice now.

She could see no polite way out. ‘It was Sam Blair.’

‘Ah,’ Tuk said, apparently satisfied by this. ‘Mr Blair. Of course.’ He thought for a moment. ‘So your father was not expecting you?’

She hesitated for a long time before she decided, finally, to tell him the truth. After all, she thought, there could be no harm in it, could there? ‘Mr Tuk, all my life, until just a few weeks ago, I thought my father was dead. As far as he knows, I still do.’

If Tuk was surprised it registered for no more than a fraction of a second on his smooth, smiling face, and Lisa could not be blamed for missing the gleam of malice that burned briefly in his dark eyes. His smile broadened. ‘Then he has a surprise in store when he returns,’ he said. He rose to his feet and offered her his arm. ‘But now you must get dressed. You have a visitor coming very soon.’

‘Do you remember any of the numbers on the plate? Or the licence number of the cab?’ The captain of police asked his questions wearily, as if he wasn’t really interested in the answers.

Lisa shook her head, frustrated and angry. ‘Why don’t you ask the man outside the hotel? He spoke to him. I’m sure he knew him.’

Captain Prachak glanced across the room at Tuk. ‘We spoke to several of the touts outside the Narai. No one even remembers you.’ His eyes met Lisa’s briefly, then flickered away.

‘You’re not going to get him, are you?’ she said angrily. ‘You don’t care whether you do or not!’

The police captain had an unpleasant face, streaky brown like a badly stained piece of wood, flat, high cheekbones, with narrow suspicious eyes. His patience was wearing thin. Tuk intervened. ‘You must understand, Lisa, that Bangkok is a city of five million people. Many cabs operate illegally on the streets without a licence. Without something more for the captain to go on it is very difficult.’

Lisa was on the edge of tears. ‘I told you! His name is Sivara, and he’s got a brother who...’

The captain cut her off. ‘Yes, you did,’ he agreed. ‘Several times.’

‘And what about my passport? He took my passport! How am I supposed to get home?’

‘Don’t worry, my dear.’ Tuk put a comforting hand on her arm. ‘I’ve already been in touch with the British Consul. Everything is in hand.’ He turned to Prachak. ‘I think we could finish this another day, Captain. The girl has had a bad time.’

‘Of course.’ Prachak looked relieved. ‘I’ll be in touch.’ He opened the door to the hall.

‘I’ll see you out,’ Tuk said, and the two men left Lisa sitting in a tearful silence under the downdraught of the ceiling fan. Her throat felt swollen and her head ached. She was depressed and frustrated and afraid.

When Tuk had led her in from the garden he had sent her upstairs to dress. He’d had her bags sent round from the hotel and paid her bill. As well as her passport, Sivara had also taken her money. She was grateful and embarrassed and a little ashamed of the niggling doubt she’d had about Tuk — a grain of uncertainty that had lodged itself somewhere in her unconscious. She protested when he said that, of course, she must stay — at least until she got things sorted out. He had shrugged and said, ‘Where else would you go?’ And she had known he was right. But she disliked the thought of being so totally dependent upon him. Her brush with Sivara had shaken much of her young faith in her fellow humans, and in herself.

She wiped the tears from her cheeks and became aware of the murmur of voices from the hall. Tuk and Prachak were still engaged in conversation, hushed and barely audible. The door lay slightly ajar, and through it she could see the dark reflection, in a tall mirror, of the two men standing in the doorway. She saw Prachak hand Tuk something that he slipped into his inside jacket pocket. Her vision of them was still blurred by tears, and she rubbed her eyes and strained in the gloom to see more clearly. She wished that all the shutters were not closed against the heat of the day and that there was more light to see by.

The two men shook hands now and Prachak left. Tuk moved out of sight but did not come back into the room. She heard soft footsteps above the hum and rattle of the fan, a phone being lifted and a number dialled. Then Tuk’s voice talking softly to someone on the other end. She gave up trying to hear and looked around this large impersonal study with its cold, tiled floor and marble ashtrays on glass tables. Shiny hard surfaces, austere and lacking in comfort or warmth. Even the chairs were unyielding. She wondered what kind of man Tuk really was, and in what way the truth was reflected in the nature of this room. Despite the temperature outside, she shivered. Cold, she thought. In spite of all his smiles and words of comfort, he was cold. Like the room.

She heard the receiver being replaced and then soft footsteps again. Tuk appeared, smiling, in the doorway. ‘Good news,’ he said. She raised an eyebrow. He came and sat beside her and took her hand in both of his. ‘I know you are uncomfortable with the idea of staying here. A young woman living alone in a house with a man she barely knows...’

She began a half-hearted protest which he brushed aside.

‘No, no. I understand. And so a very good friend of mine has agreed to take you in for a few days, just until we get things sorted out. You’ll like her, I’m sure. She knows your father quite well, I believe.’

After she had gone up to her room to lie down for a few hours, Tuk sat for a long time in satisfied contemplation. From his inside pocket he took out the small black book Captain Prachak had given him. He looked at the elaborate gold crest on the cover and thought how pretentious the British were. Inside, Lisa’s innocence stared back at him from a cheap colour photograph. A very pretty girl, he thought. When the bruising was gone...

He snapped the passport shut, held it for a moment, then crossed the room to lock it away in his desk drawer.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Lisa awoke to the gentle touch of fingers on her bruised cheek. The room glowed with the muted light of the early morning sun, shutters still drawn, sunlight burning in bright sharp lines around their edges, trying to insinuate its way inside. She turned, still cloudy with sleep, to look up into Grace’s soft smile.

‘The swelling is down a little this morning,’ Grace said.

And Lisa remembered arriving the night before on Tuk’s arm, delivered into this sumptuous colonial villa in East Bangkok, still bewildered, a little frightened. The gentle warmth in the sympathy and welcome of this woman who knew her father had comforted her. Fear melting with the reassuring touch of her hand, the gentle kiss on her forehead. ‘Poor child,’ she had said, and led her into a soft-cushioned room that seemed heady and seductive after the cold austerity of Tuk’s house.

‘It’s very good of you,’ Lisa had mumbled.

Grace, smiling, had brushed the hair back from Lisa’s face with delicate fingers and tilted her jaw, turning the bruising to the light. Shaking her head, she’d said, ‘Men can be such animals.’ And Lisa had caught the look that flashed darkly in her eyes as she glanced at Tuk.

When Tuk had gone Grace had given her a hot sweet drink laced with the taste of alcohol, and sat with her for what seemed like a very long time, holding her hand in one of hers, gently stroking the back of it with the fingers of her other. The soft murmur of her voice, the silky quality of her touch, had been reassuring. Lisa had heard the words without listening. Instead she let the alcohol and the gently undulating waves of fatigue wash over her with a grateful relief. And, now, as she gazed up into the delicate oriental beauty in the face of this older woman, she had no recollection of having come to this room, or of falling asleep in this bed. But there was something safe in the smile, comforting after all the uncertainty of the past few weeks and the traumas of the last few days. She returned the smile. ‘What time is it?’

‘Early. I thought a little waterborne breakfast might restore you. The floating market gets up early. And so must you if we are to catch it at its best.’

Grace’s car took them to the landing stage at the Oriental Hotel, and Lisa was surprised to find it driven by an attractive young girl in uniform. She glanced at Grace, realizing how little she knew of her. Although clearly many years older than Lisa, old enough possibly to be her mother, her beauty was still startling. She was dressed casually in a long white wraparound skirt and white blouse, cool and radiant in the early morning heat, her skin the colour of milky coffee. Her gleaming dark hair was drawn back in a white-ribboned bow. She caught Lisa looking at her and smiled. ‘We should get you some clothes,’ she said. ‘Perhaps when we get back from the market.’

‘I’ve got clothes with me,’ Lisa said, a little uncertainly.

‘Hardly a wardrobe for every occasion,’ said Grace. ‘And who knows how long you might have to wait for your father’s return. There are places I should like to take you where you might feel a little out of place in jeans.’

Lisa found Grace’s self-assurance intimidating. ‘The truth is,’ she said, ‘I don’t have any money. It was all stolen.’

Grace laughed. ‘That’s no problem, Lisa. You’re my guest.’

Lisa blushed. ‘I couldn’t possibly let you...’

‘I insist.’ Grace cut her off. ‘And that’s an end to it.’ Lisa felt like a schoolgirl who has just been rapped on the knuckles for a breach of etiquette, and she lowered her eyes. Grace laughed again and put a hand over hers, giving it a tiny squeeze. ‘My child, forgive me if I bully you, but your father would not be happy with me if I failed to look after his little girl.’

Lisa met her eyes again and wondered if she detected a hint of mockery in their laughter. ‘Do you know my father well?’

‘Well?’ Grace smiled reflectively into the middle distance. ‘No, I should not say I know him well.’ She turned to meet Lisa’s gaze again. ‘But do I know him intimately.’ Again that sense of mockery in the eyes that left Lisa feeling unsettled. And the deliberate manner in Grace’s choice of words had an ambiguity calculated apparently to leave her guest confused and insecure. Lisa drew her hand away from Grace’s and locked it together firmly with her own in her lap. She felt Grace’s eyes still on her, but kept hers averted, pretending that something on the street had caught her interest. She wanted time to sort out her feelings, to know how to respond. Sivara had shattered her young innocence. She would not be taken in so easily again. ‘You will like the floating market,’ Grace said. ‘It attracts many tourists.’

‘I have been before,’ Lisa replied, and she did not need to look to know that Grace was surprised.

They waited by the car at the landing stage while the chauffeur went to hail a water taxi. Crowds thronged the pier waiting for one of the many motor launches that criss-crossed the river. Pop music blared from the speakers of a ghetto-blaster on the shoulders of a young man dressed in peasant black pyjamas and wearing a reed-woven sunhat. Lisa searched vainly among the many faces for one that might be familiar. Eyes full of mischief that had turned to lust. But one in five million, she knew, was long odds. A small boy in shorts and a khaki-green shirt several sizes two large for him pushed through the crowd with a large, circular bamboo tray on his head. Coloured ribbons hung down around its edges. He turned this way and that, arms up holding his tray steady, appealing to each face he encountered.

‘What’s he doing?’ Lisa asked.

‘Selling jasmine-blossom garlands,’ Grace said. ‘The blossoms are associated with good fortune. They can be left at temples as offerings, or kept by the purchaser for good luck — or presented to friends as gifts.’ She waved her hand and called him over. He ran up to them eagerly. Grace haggled over the price. Several exchanges in bursts of staccato Thai. At last the boy shrugged and handed her one of the garlands in return for a few coins. He melted away into the crowd again, disgruntled with his sale. Grace crushed the blossoms gently in her hand and inhaled the heady fragrance with satisfaction. Then she turned to Lisa, smiling, and placed the garland around her neck. ‘For good luck,’ she said. ‘And such a pretty child as you deserves a pretty fragrance.’ Her fingers brushed Lisa’s bruised cheek. ‘Such a shame,’ she said. ‘But it won’t last long — like the blossom.’

Or like my luck, thought Lisa. She felt sure now that she was being mocked. And her initial feeling the previous evening of security, and gratitude towards Grace, was being replaced by a growing sense of unease.

The long, narrow hang yao knifed its way through the choppy waters of one of the larger klongs, weaving between the rice barges and water buses and sampans. And for a time Lisa forgot her misgivings, enthralled again by the sights and sounds of this exotic waterborne culture that engulfed the senses. Women hung from their reed-woven lampshades like fat black light bulbs, squatting in tiny sampans. A canoe, groaning under the weight of a huge load of golden hay, turned into one of the many smaller klongs, heading east to feed the buffalo that ploughed the neighbouring paddies. Grace pointed out the flotilla of Royal Barges housed in a special pavilion along the canal, and Lisa’s gaze strayed up to the giant statues guarding the entrance to the Wat Arun, whose central porcelain-studded tower flashed in the morning sunlight.

The sun had risen mercilessly high in the pale blue sky by the time they reached the market itself. It was cooler on the water than elsewhere, but the heat was still oppressive. Their hang yao had slowed to less than walking pace, bumping its way gently among the hundreds of bobbing craft. Grace ordered their driver to stop by a boat selling headgear, and she bought them each a wide-brimmed straw hat. ‘To protect that pretty white skin,’ she said, brushing Lisa’s hair back and placing the hat on her head, tilting it forward to shade her face from the sun. Lisa was again reminded of her trip with Sivara. She had bought a straw hat then, too.

All around them clicking Thai tongues bargained and fought over purchases and sales, and Lisa became aware of Grace’s eyes on her. She turned boldly to meet her gaze. Grace smiled disarmingly. ‘You must be hungry.’

Lisa nodded. ‘Starving.’

Grace spoke to their driver and he eased their hang yao through the other craft to a sampan selling fresh fruit. They bought a bamboo tray laden with slices of watermelon, papaya, pineapple and halves of lime. As they ate the juicy red flesh of the watermelon and squeezed lime on the papaya, Grace reclined, supporting herself on one arm, and gazed speculatively at Lisa. ‘What brings a young English girl to the other side of the world to find a father she has never known?’ she asked.

‘My mother died,’ Lisa said simply. ‘Wouldn’t you have done the same?’

Grace gave a tiny dismissive shrug. ‘It never occurred to me.’

Lisa frowned, unbalanced by this unexpected response. She had thought her question hypothetical. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘My father was a Frenchman in the diplomatic corps. I was the result of a brief liaison with my mother. His name was Jacques. Beyond that I know nothing of him.’

‘But weren’t you ever curious? I mean, didn’t you want to know who he was?’

Grace shook her head. ‘No. He had no interest in me. Why should I care about him?’

‘That’s very sad.’

‘I don’t think so. I was educated in Paris, you see. My mother thought a great deal of the French, but I never liked them much. I am a Cambodian. Always have been, always will be.’

‘Oh.’ Lisa realized that she was wrong in yet another assumption. ‘I thought you were Thai.’

Grace smiled indulgently. ‘In Vietnam,’ she said, ‘all white men were once French. Then they were American. Now they are Russian. But to the Vietnamese they are all just white. As all the peoples of Indochina were just jaunes once to the French. I have long since ceased to be insulted by it.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Lisa stuttered, wondering how it was that Grace always seemed to make her feel so clumsy.

‘Ignorance is hardly a sin, my dear.’ Grace paused for a moment to squeeze more lime on her papaya. ‘Than tells me you believed your father was dead.’

‘It’s what my mother told me,’ Lisa said.

‘Why?’

‘Because he’d disgraced her. Us. Or so she thought.’ Lisa drew in a deep breath. ‘He was court-martialled and sent to prison for a massacre of civilians in Aden.’ A slightly raised eyebrow was the only betrayal of Grace’s surprise. ‘Didn’t he tell you?’

‘No.’ The faintest hint of a smile played about Grace’s mouth. ‘But, then, that’s hardly surprising.’

‘Why? Because you think he’d have been ashamed to?’

Grace evaded the question. ‘Are you ashamed of him?’

Lisa felt a flush rise on her cheeks. It was something she’d wondered herself many times. How could she answer Grace when she’d never found an answer for herself? ‘I don’t know,’ she said at length. ‘Maybe that’s why I’m here. To find out.’

Grace’s smile faded, and Lisa wondered if it was a flicker of pity she saw cross her eyes. ‘He does not give much away, your father,’ Grace said.

Lisa gazed at her speculatively along the length of the hang yao and wondered if she had ever seen such beauty. A beauty that could in one moment seem warm and enticing, and in another cold and dangerous. ‘What exactly is your relationship with my father?’ she asked.

Grace seemed to consider her answer carefully for some moments. Then, ‘We were lovers,’ she said simply.

Lisa felt the shock in her heart sting her face pink. Intimate. That was the word Grace had used in the car. She had not known him well, but intimately. Lovers. Of course. They had been lovers. This woman, a complete stranger to her, knew her father in ways that she never could. It seemed to explain all the ambiguities. And for a moment Lisa was almost jealous.

Grace sat up suddenly, pushing her tray aside. ‘A little coffee, I think. Then we should get you some clothes.’

Sweat glistened on the firm brown bodies in the steamy heat of the dyeing room. The dark-haired boys wore only gloves and sandals, and the flimsiest of shorts, as they worked with dexterous ease, apparently impervious to the heat, dipping the heavy skeins of silk into vats of hot dye. In the glow of the fires, the smoke and steam that permeated the claustrophobic darkness stung Lisa’s eyes and caught in her throat. Grace, standing at her side, gently holding her a little above the elbow, seemed oblivious. Lisa glanced at her and saw the gleam that lit her eyes as she ran them across the taut young muscles of the bare-chested boys.

‘How can they work in this atmosphere?’ Lisa said, almost choking as she spoke.

Grace replied distantly. ‘They’re used to it.’ Then she turned to Lisa and smiled. ‘You can get used to almost anything. Come. It’s time to choose.’ And she guided her back out into the comparative cool of the factory where women moved vast screens back and forth along three-hundred-metre lengths of undyed silk, printing repeated patterns of exotic jungle scenes. Earlier, Lisa and Grace had passed through large rooms resounding to the clatter of dozens of flying shuttle looms weaving great lengths of raw silk. Their guide had explained to Lisa that Thailand’s silk larvae spun unusually soft, thick fibres, and that the resultant fabric accepted dyes more readily than silk made elsewhere in the world. He was waiting for them as they climbed the steps to the factory showroom, where huge rolls of printed and dyed silks were stacked one upon the other.

A shrunken man with a bald, brown pate, he bowed and smiled. ‘Your friend enjoyed her tour, La Mère Grace?’

‘Did you?’ Grace turned to Lisa.

‘Very much,’ Lisa said. She laughed. ‘I feel like a child in Santa’s grotto.’

‘Then let me be your Father, or should I say Mother Christmas — although we are a week or so late.’ Grace’s smile seemed to conceal a greater amusement at the idea. She waved a hand expansively around the room. ‘You choose. But something fine, I think, and self-coloured, and dark to contrast the whiteness of your skin.’

Lisa finally chose a deep, lustrous crimson in a very fine fabric. Grace seemed pleased with her choice, running the material sensuously through her fingers. ‘Red for passion,’ she said. ‘Are you a passionate creature, Lisa?’

Their guide smiled.

Lisa flushed deeply. ‘I really don’t know,’ she stammered. ‘Red has always suited me.’

‘We’ll take five metres,’ Grace told their guide. ‘On my account, of course.’

‘Of course, La Mère Grace.’

In the car Lisa asked, ‘Why did he call you La Mère Grace?’

‘It is how I am known,’ Grace said. ‘My business name, if you like.’

‘What business is that?’

‘Oh, I have many business interests. Property, entertainment, clubs, restaurants.’

Lisa was intrigued. ‘And you run them yourself?’

‘Of course. You seem surprised.’

‘I’m sorry — I just thought—’

‘That there should be a man behind it?’

‘Isn’t there?’

‘My business interests were inherited from my mother. When I was forced to leave Cambodia, I re-established myself here. The women in my family have been very singular, Lisa. Men have their place, but not in our hearts or our lives. And certainly not in our business.’

‘What other place is there?’

Grace turned a smile of genuine amusement on the young girl beside her. ‘You really are very innocent, Lisa,’ she said. ‘In our beds, of course.’

The House of Choisy was in the Patpong 2 district, an upmarket boutique with the latest fashions from Paris, London and New York. A twittering middle-aged lady fussed and fluttered around Lisa for nearly fifteen minutes in the dressing room, taking every conceivable measurement. ‘Beautiful lady, beautiful lady,’ she kept saying. ‘I make you beautiful, beautiful dress.’ She thought, too, that the fabric Lisa had chosen was beautiful. Grace sat smoking and watching the proceedings with idle amusement.

They leafed through a well-thumbed brochure looking at hundreds of designs. Lisa was flustered and indecisive. ‘I’m spoiled for choice.’ She shrugged helplessly at Grace. In the end it was Grace who chose — a full-length, close-fitting dress, split to the knee at the left side, sleeveless and with a daringly plunging neckline. ‘Along traditional Thai lines,’ she said, and looked Lisa up and down. ‘With one or two concessions to the modern world. You will be stunning.’

Lisa was uncertain. ‘I’m not sure it’s really me.’

‘You mustn’t underestimate yourself,’ Grace said. ‘You have the looks. This will lend you the sophistication. A woman must make the most of herself.’

Grace also chose an off-the-peg short brocade jacket, subtly patterned in deep blue, violet and crimson, to go with the dress. The tailoress tucked and pinched at it when Lisa tried it on. ‘Need alteration,’ she said.

‘This is all going to cost a fortune,’ said Lisa, turning to admire the jacket in the mirror. She stopped to look ruefully at Grace. ‘I really can’t accept.’

‘It gives me pleasure,’ said Grace. ‘You wouldn’t deny me that, would you?’

Lisa shook her head in embarrassed resignation. ‘I really am very grateful.’

Grace turned to the tailoress. ‘You will have it ready by Saturday?’

‘Of course, La Mère Grace.’

‘Good.’ Grace turned a charming smile on Lisa. ‘Then Cinderella shall go to the ball.’

Back in the car Lisa asked, ‘What ball?’

Grace laughed. ‘Not exactly a ball, Lisa. A dinner at one of my clubs. There will be some very influential guests. I hope you will be able to come.’

Lisa was still flushed with the unaccustomed pleasure of her purchases. Her earlier ambivalence towards Grace had mellowed and, although still uncertain about this bewildering and contradictory woman, she felt somehow closer to her now, knowing that she and her father had been lovers. Being close to her was like being close to her father. She took Grace’s hand, feeling genuine affection, and squeezed it. ‘I hope so, too,’ she said.

The south-facing windows along one wall of the dining room were closed against the heat and brightness of the midday sun. But large French windows at one end opened out onto a shaded area of the lush green tropical garden that grew wild behind the high walls that surrounded Grace’s villa. The rumble of traffic from the road seemed distant and unreal, like a dream on waking. The hum of insects, and the squawking of tropical birds among the luxuriant greenery of the trees, was the only real intrusion on the peaceful semi-darkness of the room.

Lisa sat alone at the long dining table, drinking strong black coffee under the gentle cooling downdraught of the fan overhead. The girl who had served them lunch had cleared the table, and Grace had left the room a few moments earlier to take a phone call. Lisa could hear the soft murmur of her voice somewhere deep in the house. She drained her cup and got up and walked slowly to the open French windows to stand framed in the doorway, smelling the damp, sweet fragrances of the fleshy-leaved tropical plants and flowers. The garden was a profusion of wild growth, a lotus pool choked with leaves, fruit trees untended, papaya, mango, the fruit of countless seasons rotting in the dark damp soil.

Over lunch, Grace had seemed distracted. She was quiet for a very long time before suddenly looking up and asking Lisa if she was still a virgin. Lisa had, again, flushed deeply. It was something she had never discussed with anyone. Even her mother. Anything to do with sex had been a subject of great embarrassment in her house. It had come from her mother and transmitted itself to Lisa. She had known nothing about the periods that would afflict her in adolescence until the first blood ran from between her legs at school. Then she had panicked, locking herself in the toilets and weeping hysterically in the certain knowledge that she was dying. The brutal truth had been conveyed to her by an unsympathetic form mistress who had sent her home with an angry note for her mother. Lisa’s mother had, in turn, been angry, masking her embarrassment by accusing Lisa of stupidity, as though somehow the child should have known without having to be told. In the years that followed, it had only ever been referred to in the house as the curse.

Sex was something she had learned about from giggled tales told by fellow schoolgirls, vulgar jokes provoking raucous laughter. For a long time Lisa had laughed too, without fully understanding why. In retrospect she had often wondered how many of her friends had been equally mystified. True knowledge seemed to rest in the hands of just a fortunate few. She could smile now at her ignorance, but the fear of the unknown, the sense of taboo, had never left her.

‘Well...?’ Grace had inclined her head, amused by her embarrassment.

At first Lisa had denied it. Of course she wasn’t a virgin, she’d had lots of boyfriends. Grace had raised a sceptical eyebrow, and her penetrating gaze seemed to see through Lisa’s flustered deceit with startling ease. Lisa felt her cheeks burn again. ‘Well, one anyway,’ she said.

‘And he has made love to you?’ asked Grace.

‘Not exactly.’ Lisa stared hard at her hands on the table in front of her.

‘Then you are still a virgin.’

‘I suppose so.’

Grace smiled fondly at her, marvelling at such innocence. ‘Well, don’t worry about it,’ she said. ‘It’s not necessarily a permanent condition. There is a cure.’

In spite of herself Lisa smiled. ‘Only it doesn’t come on prescription.’

‘I should hope not!’ The idea seemed to shock and amuse Grace. ‘The only cure for virtue’ — she smiled wickedly — ‘is vice. It’s delicious. Not a bit like medicine.’

Lisa wondered now, as she gazed out at the garden, if Grace had simply been poking fun again. She knew she must seem very naive to a woman like La Mère Grace, but wondered what pleasure the woman derived from taunting her with it. There seemed no malice in her, just amusement, but it did nothing for Lisa’s confidence, serving only to increase her sense of vulnerability.

She remembered that, not so long ago, what she had craved most was safety, the security of her home, her mother, David; and for a moment she almost regretted forcing open the trunk in the attic. It was as if, in that one action, she had closed down her past and opened up a future of bleak uncertainty, where the only light, glowing faintly in the distance, was the knowledge that somewhere in this hostile world was a man who was her father. She knew that somehow she thought that in finding him she might find herself. But it appeared that the closer she got, the less, rather than more, certain she became of who she really was. What was she doing here? What did she hope to find? And, in that moment, she was almost overwhelmed by a feeling of being completely and hopelessly alone.

A movement in the garden caught her eye. A glimpse of pale lilac caught in dappled sunlight. It was the girl who had served them lunch. She wore a simple lilac shirt over short, baggy, black trousers. Her dark hair was bobbed, cut short high into the nape of her neck, and her feet flapped in open rubber sandals as she padded from the house along an overgrown path. There was something odd in the nervous, secret intent of the girl’s carriage that banished Lisa’s thoughts of only a moment before, and aroused her curiosity. She stepped out on to the terrace and ran quickly down the half-dozen steps to the garden to follow the girl along the path.

By the time Lisa reached the spot where she’d last seen her, the girl had disappeared and the path seemed to peter out among the fronds that grew in prolific clusters all around. The garden appeared to stretch endlessly away on either side, and Lisa stood on tiptoes trying to catch a glimpse of the lilac shirt. She listened intently in the hot broken shade for some sound to give her a clue, but all she heard were the insects and the birds, and a rustling among the undergrowth that might have been a snake. She pushed quickly on through the fronds and found the garden opening up, suddenly, into a paved clearing.

The paving stones bore all the scars of neglect that characterized the rest of the garden, cracked and broken, weeds reaching up from the rich damp earth below. At the other side of the clearing, the girl in the lilac shirt was sunk on bended knee, sticks of burning incense pressed between palms raised to her bowed forehead. Her discarded sandals lay on the ground behind her. In front of her a large square stone table stood before a jumble of shrines raised on brick pillars, tiny replicas of houses and temples bedecked with flowers and strings of jasmine blossom. Laid all around, pointing upwards towards the shrine, at an angle of forty-five degrees, were a dozen or more red and white cylinders, some of which were four or five feet long. The upward ends were round and elongated like helmets, and Lisa realized, with a sudden sense of shock, that they were giant phalluses, an arrangement of enormous erections directed towards the shrine.

She stood for a moment, then turned, startled by a touch on her elbow. Grace stood by her side, smiling.

‘Erotic, isn’t it?’ she whispered.

‘What is it?’ Lisa asked.

‘The fertility shrine of San Chao Mae Tap Tim. The phalluses represent the Hindu god Shiva. Phallus worship is an ancient tradition in Thailand. But, of course, it originated in my own Cambodia more than seven hundred years ago.’

‘It’s disgusting!’ Lisa hissed, embarrassed by her own arousal.

‘Sex is never that,’ Grace said calmly. ‘It can be the most poignant experience life has to offer, if treated with respect.’

‘But what’s she doing?’ Lisa asked, nodding towards the girl.

‘She wants a child. She is praying for success. I pray that she doesn’t have it. She is one of the best girls I have. But, then, who am I to stand in the way of the procreation of the human race?’

The girl finished her prayer, arose and turned to slip back into her sandals. She was startled to find Grace and Lisa watching, and a blush coloured her cheeks.

‘I’m sorry. Forgive me, La Mère Grace,’ she whispered, and she hurried past them, head bowed, back towards the house.

Grace laughed. ‘If the girl wants to throw away her life...’ She glanced at Lisa. ‘Come, take a closer look.’ She took Lisa’s reluctant hand in hers and led her across the uneven pavings. ‘Shiva is the third member of the Hindu trinity. Although represented here by the phallus, he is also sometimes known as the Destroyer. In human form he is portrayed with four arms, a third eye in the centre of his forehead, and often wearing a necklace of skulls. Sex, my poor ignorant child, can be very beautiful, but also sometimes very dangerous.’ She turned a provocative smile on the younger woman. ‘Things you will no doubt learn for yourself, in time.’ And to Lisa’s acute embarrassment she leaned towards her and kissed her lightly on the lips.

‘I think I should go back to the house,’ Lisa said, flustered, her cheeks burning. And she turned and hurried away across the clearing.

‘Perhaps you should lie down for a couple of hours,’ Grace called after her. ‘The afternoons are so hot, and I shall be out until this evening.’

Lisa didn’t look back, but hurried through the tangle of vegetation until she stumbled into the cool darkness of the dining room.

Her bedroom, at the top of the house, was hot and humid. She pulled the shutters closed and undressed quickly to slip between the cool sheets, then lay a long time in the dark, listening to the rapid beat of her heart. After a while she heard Grace’s voice down in the main hall, then the front door slamming shut. Somewhere, from the front of the house, came the sound of a car starting, the engine revving as it moved off down the drive. Then a deep silence. Lisa closed her eyes and let drowsiness take her in the airless heat of the room.

‘So what do you think?’ Tuk sat back in his favourite hard leather chair and sipped at his whisky through large cubes of ice.

Grace waited until the girl in the yellow dress who had brought her iced Perrier left the room. ‘I think she’s very young, very naive and very beautiful,’ she said. Her heel scraped on the tiles as she crossed her legs.

Tuk smiled. ‘And English. Such lovely white skin, and a virgin, too. A valuable commodity.’

‘Very,’ Grace agreed. She lifted the glass to her lips and let the cold, aerated water slip back over her throat. She enjoyed its tartness.

Tuk watched her with pursed lips and a gleam of malicious amusement in his eyes. ‘And tempting.’

Grace flicked a darting glance in his direction, then took another sip of the Perrier. ‘My interest is entirely commercial,’ she said.

‘Of course.’

‘She could become the most sought-after property in Bangkok — at least for a while.’

‘My thoughts exactly.’

Grace studied him for a moment. ‘And just what exactly are those thoughts, Than? I hardly see what you stand to gain from all this.’

‘Ah,’ Tuk smiled, ‘now that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. My interest is personal rather than financial.’

‘In what way?’

‘Who she is, of course. How can I put it...?’ He tugged gently at the ends of his fingers. ‘A little insurance policy.’ She raised a quizzical eyebrow. ‘In the unlikely event of Elliot returning, a little leverage would not go amiss.’

‘And why would you require a little leverage, Than?’ Grace was intrigued.

Tuk shifted uncomfortably. ‘Let’s just say that certain events which occurred last week may be open to misinterpretation.’

‘You mean you double-crossed him.’

‘That is one interpretation.’

‘The one that Elliot is most likely to make?’

Tuk shrugged. ‘Who knows? Elliot is a dangerous man. I do not wish to take any risks.’

Grace nodded her understanding. ‘Wasn’t that exactly what you were doing when you didn’t play it straight with him?’

Tuk smiled ruefully. ‘The best-laid schemes.’

‘So.’ Grace relaxed a little now. She had the measure of the situation. ‘What exactly is there in it for me?’

‘I have my insurance, you have the girl. She is of value to us both.’

‘But if Elliot returns?’

‘I think that very unlikely.’

‘But if he does, you have your insurance. Where does that leave me?’

‘She is your insurance also.’

‘But as things stand I have no need of insurance.’

Tuk waved his hand dismissively, irritated by her persistence. ‘He will not return.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘Do you not read the newspapers, listen to the radio?’

Grace inclined her head, smiling at the foolishness of the question. ‘When do I have the time, Than? Or the inclination?’

‘You should make a point of it, Grace. These are unsettled times.’

‘So what have I missed?’

‘The Vietnamese have won decisively in the south. The Khmer Rouge are retreating north. It can only be a matter of days before Phnom Penh falls. If Elliot is hoping to come back out through Thailand he is likely to find himself in the thick of the Khmer Rouge retreat. Unless he makes it in the next forty-eight hours, I think one can safely assume he never will.’

Grace drank all this in thoughtfully. ‘And what will happen to the girl, then?’

Tuk showed his teeth, but it could hardly be described as a smile. ‘When you have finished with her, I have plans of my own. A small revenge, perhaps, for her father’s threats, but there will still be a satisfaction in it.’

A chill ran through Grace’s heart.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Shards of reflected moonlight danced on the gently rippling black waters of the Tonle Sap. The thick stillness of the night was broken only by the sound of water slapping softly against the sides of the small wooden fishing craft. Elliot sat in the stern drawing on his last cigarette. It was several hours since the outboard motor had packed in. All day they had been heading south, keeping the eastern shore just in sight. To the west, the great lake stretched to the horizon and beyond. They had seen no one, no other craft. There had been no sign of life all day except, in the mid-afternoon, for an aeroplane flying very high and crossing their bows some miles to the south. A military aircraft.

In the deserted fishing village close to where they had been attacked by the Khmers the previous day, they had found a small abandoned fuel dump, and a number of flimsy fishing boats scuttled on the shore. Two of them were fitted with outboard motors, neither of which worked. Although tension between Elliot and McCue was still high, professional instinct and the cause of their survival had forced them to work as a team. Posting Serey and Ny on lookout, they had laboured in feverish silence to repair the least damaged of the boats and refloat it, before tackling the outboards. They had stripped each down to its casing, before selecting the best parts and rebuilding one sound motor. Black with grease, and running with sweat, they had taken more than fifteen minutes, and a dozen adjustments, before coaxing it to life.

They had loaded the boat with every fuel can it could safely carry, in addition to themselves and their packs, and it was almost nightfall when they finally pushed off from shore, dangerously low in the water. At little more than walking pace, they had headed south, a hundred metres offshore, hugging the shoreline which they could see brooding darkly, first by starlight and then, when it rose, by the pale light of the moon.

McCue and Elliot took turns at the helm in two-hour shifts. The two women slept, curled up in the bottom of the boat, waking up to bale out only when the water they were shipping began to slop about their faces.

At dawn they had been spotted, from shore, and fired upon by a ragged Khmer Rouge patrol. McCue, then at the helm, had gunned the motor and turned the boat quickly out across the lake until the shore was a distant smudge on the horizon. He had then resumed their southbound course and adopted a slower pace to conserve fuel.

As the sun rose through the day, the heat became unbearable, eyes burning in the glare and reflected blaze from the water. Only the faintest relief came from the breeze created by their slow progress south. They improvised headgear by cutting up a sleeping mat, and McCue contrived a makeshift awning to provide a tiny area of shade at the prow of the boat, using a sleeping bag and two crossplanks. They took it in turns to squat, uncomfortably, under its protection.

Slattery was still a presence among them, like a ghost. Although the subject had never been raised, the anger burned deeply still in McCue’s eyes. Elliot’s sullen silence seemed devoid of remorse. Serey had watched them both for long periods. She had read the anger in McCue’s eyes, recognized the hatred that simmered there. It was something she had seen many times before, in the early days of the Khmer Rouge, before all those angry young men with hate in their hearts had forgotten their justification for killing, and death had become an end in itself. It was the dead quality in Elliot’s eyes that frightened her most, a chill, emotionless quality that glazed rather than burned — windows without reflection on a man without a soul. Ironically, it was this that had made her decide that, should she ever face a choice, she would side with Elliot. It was with him, she had concluded, that the best chance of salvation lay. Not for herself — she hardly cared any more — but for Ny, if that were at all possible.

She glanced frequently at her daughter, distressed by her brooding silence and outward calm. She had mourned the loss of Ny ever since the girl had plunged Elliot’s knife with such ferocity into the soft belly of the young cadre at the commune, severing not only a life, but the last lingering ties between mother and daughter. The shock of it was with her still. She had understood then, as now, why. And with understanding had come guilt, as if she were somehow responsible. Should not a mother lay down her life to protect her child? And yet she had done nothing, said nothing, all those nights when the cadre had come and taken Ny off in the dark.

Once, as she was baling out water with a tin mug, Ny had caught her mother watching her, and Serey averted her face, ashamed to meet her daughter’s eye. She had failed her. Nothing could be the same between them again. And she felt tears filling her eyes. Ny watched her for some moments then turned back to her task with a leaden heart. Her mother, she knew, was ashamed of her.

Elliot had been aware of the change of pitch in the engine for some time. It was slight, almost imperceptible, but it rang an alarm in his head. McCue heard it also, raising his head and glancing towards Elliot with concern. Elliot shrugged, and they waited, through what seemed like eternal minutes, for confirmation of their fears. From that initial change in pitch, the rhythm of the engine had begun to falter and choke, like phlegm gathering in its throat. Elliot swung the rudder in and turned the boat in the direction of the shoreline, gunning the engine to carry them faster towards its distant, hazy outline. Serey and Ny were alerted, sitting up and watching with alarm. The outboard finally coughed and spat before choking on its own failure.

In the silence that followed, the sound of McCue clambering to the stern of the stricken boat seemed unnaturally loud, echoing across the stillness of the water.

With no exchange between then, the two men loosened the clamps and pulled the inert engine on board. McCue made a quick examination. ‘Ain’t fuel,’ he said.

Working with oily, black fingers, he took the outboard apart and reassembled it several times without success. Elliot had watched, with growing despair, as they drifted further and further away from the safety of the shore. McCue tried again, pulling repeatedly on the starter only to hear the engine cough into life and then choke again, like a sick man’s dying whisper.

Darkness had gathered quickly from the eastern shore, before finally enveloping them and ending their hopes of repairing the engine before dawn. McCue’s face had flickered briefly in the light of a match as he lit a cigarette. ‘Shoulda killed us all when you had the chance, Elliot,’ he said grimly. ‘We’re as good as dead now.’

As the moon rose, they drifted, helpless, further out into the watery vastness of the Tonle Sap. Elliot knew that he had finally lost control of his own destiny. If there was a God, then they were all in his hands. He felt no fear, just an inner numbness, as when a man has swallowed a bottle of pills and succumbs drowsily to the onset of the final sleep. His mind turned away from looking back on the wasteland of his life, and there seemed little point in looking forward, since he could see no further than the dark night that surrounded them. He took a final draw on his cigarette and threw the last inch of it away into the night, hearing the briefest sizzle as it hit the water. Fatigue engulfed him. He turned at the sound of a whisper at his side, and found himself looking into Ny’s pale, moonlit face.

‘We going to die?’ Her voice seemed very tiny.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘We all die sometime.’

She dropped her eyes and shook her head in frustration. ‘No, I mean...’

‘I know what you meant,’ he interrupted her.

‘Then, why—’

‘Because I don’t know!’ There was irritation in his voice.

A long silence in the dark. Then, ‘My mamma is shamed of me,’ she said. Elliot glanced quickly at the dark shape of the older woman lying sleeping in the bottom of the boat. ‘Because I kill man.’

‘Are you ashamed of yourself?’ he asked.

‘No.’ Her voice was hard. ‘He deserve to die.’

Elliot shrugged. ‘Lot of people do.’

‘Like your friend Mistah Slattery?’

A seed of anger grew for a moment inside him, but failed to germinate. ‘No,’ he said. ‘He didn’t deserve to die.’

‘But you kill him.’

‘I’ve killed too many people to draw distinctions.’

‘I no understand.’

He sighed. ‘No. Most people don’t.’

‘But if he no deserve to die, why you kill him?’

For a moment he studied the earnest child’s dark eyes that genuinely sought answers, and wondered why it should matter to her. Then it struck him that his daughter would probably have asked the same questions, and he was glad he would never have to face her, never have to tell her the truth, or face it himself.

‘If you are a soldier, if you are prepared to kill — for whatever reason — you must be prepared to be killed.’

‘And you are soldiers? You and your friend?’

‘Yes.’

‘I no understand. What is your army?’

Elliot searched for another cigarette, then remembered he’d smoked the last one. ‘We have no army,’ he said irritably. ‘We are soldiers of fortune.’ And he pre-empted her ‘No understand’ by adding, ‘We do it for money.’

‘You kill to live.’

Elliot nodded. ‘Yeah, I suppose you could put it that way.’

‘Why?’

Why, indeed, he wondered. He remembered his pride in donning his first uniform, his determination to excel in training, his aspirations to leadership. And then, the grim reality of action. He closed his eyes and, as the red mist dispersed, saw again the bodies of women and children lying dead and dying in the fly-infested heat. ‘Governments train you,’ he said, ‘to defend your country, they tell you. A proud tradition, a heritage of freedom. War, they say, is about the nobility of one man sacrificing himself for the freedom of another. And so you go and kill people in the name of freedom and you believe you are right. And maybe sometimes you are. But when you find yourself a long way from home, in a strange land where the people see you not as a liberator but as a jailer, perhaps you begin to question who is right and who is wrong. And then all that matters is survival. You kill in order not to be killed. If you stop to think about it, you die. So you stop thinking. And then you just kill. After all, it’s what they trained you for.’

A shiver ran through him, a quick unaccountable chill in the heat of the night.

‘And when they have no further use for you, you find it hard to stop. It’s what you know, it’s what you do best. It has become a habit. So you sell yourself to whoever will buy. No proud tradition, no heritage of freedom.’ He paused. ‘No hypocrisy.’ He smiled without humour, a heavy irony in his chuckle. ‘For what we do we would once have been heroes. Now we are despised.’

‘Despised?’ Her brow crinkled in a frown of confusion.

‘Hated.’ He wondered how much she had really understood, wondered what it mattered how little she did.

‘And you no mind?’

He smiled at the absurdity of her question. ‘What’s to mind?’

‘If you choose be hated,’ she said solemnly, ‘then no one love you.’

Elliot’s smile faded. ‘That’s right, little girl,’ he said. ‘No one loves you.’

They sat in silence for a long, long time, and Elliot thought how comforting the night was, the dark wrapped around them a cloak of safety, all things hidden from the world. Ironic that they should be safe in the dark, the stuff of most men’s nightmares. It was with the light, he knew, that danger would come, perhaps death. He glanced at the child’s face beside him and felt awkward in the presence of such innocence, an innocence that could kill, incorruptible in its silent accusation. And yet, he knew, it was not her innocence that accused, but his guilt. ‘You should sleep,’ he advised.

Her eyes were unflickering as they gazed off into the blackness. ‘Every time I close eyes I see his face,’ she said. ‘He was so — surprise. Did he really think I love him? Did he think I choose to go with him all those time?’

And now Elliot realized why she had done it, and he too wondered at the cadre’s surprise. He was aware of the turn of her head, her eyes watching him for a long moment, almost as though she knew what had gone through his mind.

‘You see your friend when you close eyes?’ she said.

His face stung, as if she had slapped him. His mouth and throat were dry and he wished like hell he had another cigarette. ‘He was dying,’ he said, his voice little more than a whisper.

‘Mistah McCue don’ think so.’

‘Mr McCue didn’t know.’ He turned to see confusion in her frown. ‘It wasn’t his wounds,’ he said. ‘You see...’ He searched for the words. ‘Mr Slattery came here to die. He had stomach cancer.’

‘Cancer?’ The word meant nothing to her.

‘A sickness,’ he said. ‘Something bad that grows inside you and kills you. Even if he had survived his wounds, the cancer would have killed him. He only had a few weeks left, maybe months.’

‘And you would have not kill him if he had not this — cancer?’

It was the question that had filled his own thoughts for the last two days. One he could never answer. ‘I don’t know,’ he said simply, and stared hard at his hands clenched together on his knees in front of him. She reached out and placed her small hand gently over his. He tensed, her touch like an electric shock. And suddenly all tension seeped away, like a burden lifted. For the first time in as many years as he could remember, he had lifted a self-imposed embargo on himself. He had shared a part of himself with someone else. With the sharing came relief. But it also brought a feeling he had not known since childhood. Of vulnerability. And with that, fear.

He withdrew his hands from her touch and glanced down the length of the stricken craft. Serey still slept in the bottom of the boat and, at the far end, McCue dozed lightly, his mouth gaping a little. Moonlight reflected on the water seeping slowly but insistently through the boards of the hull. Elliot handed Ny a tin mug and lifted one himself. ‘Better start baling,’ he said. ‘We’re shipping more water.’

The dawn took them by surprise. The darkness lifted suddenly, receding west as the first rays of early morning yellow light fanned out from the watery horizon. McCue stood bleary-eyed scanning the endless expanse of Tonle Sap that surrounded them. He flashed a grim glance in Elliot’s direction and shook his head.

‘How’s our water?’ he asked.

‘About one more day.’ Elliot arched his eyebrows, creasing his forehead. ‘If we go easy.’

‘Is there any point?’ Serey glanced wearily from one to the other. ‘We are going to die out here anyway, are we not? And without food or water, it will be a very slow death.’

‘Not if my buddy here put a bullet through our heads. Then it could be quick and easy, just like it was for Mikey. That right, Elliot?’ McCue’s smile was a humourless grimace.

Elliot moved towards the stern. ‘I suggest we try and get this outboard working,’ he said as though McCue had not spoken. Ny watched him, concerned. Why didn’t he say something to defend himself? Why didn’t he tell the American the truth?

McCue moved to the back of the boat to join him, and the two men crouched over the motor to resume the hopeless task of stripping and reassembling. Ny turned to her mother. ‘We’re not going to die,’ she said in a high, almost hysterical voice. ‘We’re not!’ Serey sat unmoved, staring across the water, her face grey and gaunt. She gave no indication that she had even heard.

By mid-morning, after repeated failure to restart the outboard, McCue and Elliot gave up and collapsed into the bottom of the boat, running with sweat, gasping in the heat. Serey watched them expressionlessly from the shade of McCue’s makeshift awning. ‘Goddam!’ McCue shouted in sheer frustration. ‘Goddam this fucking country!’

‘Shhhh!’ Ny waved a hand to silence him. She had moved up to the stern when the two men had given up on the outboard, and was staring intently out across the lake.

Elliot pulled himself quickly on to his knees and followed her eye line. He could see nothing. ‘What is it?’

‘A sound,’ she said. ‘Listen.’

McCue sat up, too, and strained to hear. ‘I don’t hear nothing.’

But Elliot was still listening. ‘It’s an engine,’ he said, and his eyes raked back and forth across the horizon.

McCue focused all his attention on the apparent silence before he too picked up the distant growl of a motor. ‘Got it,’ he said.

‘There!’ Elliot pointed suddenly to the south-west. And out of the blur of blue, shimmering heat, a tiny dark speck seemed to grow on the horizon.

‘A boat,’ McCue whispered.

The power launch had once been the property of a wealthy Phnom Penh businessman who kept it moored at an exclusive marina outside the city, using it for weekend fishing trips and pleasure cruises on the Great Lake. It had been lavishly appointed with six berths and a small galley finished in rich mahogany and polished brass. Since 1975 it had been used to ferry important Khmer Rouge cadres and officials back and forth across the Mekong, between Phnom Penh and the Royal Palace, with occasional trips up the length of the Tonle Sap. As it powered its way north yet again, across the endless expanse of the largest body of inland water in Indochina, it had changed hands once more.

Hou Nim stood at the helm, a short wiry figure in his late thirties. His black tunic and trousers hung limp on his lean frame, and a little of the tension that had held him like a clenched fist these last hours had begun to ease. His eyes were dry and gritty, and screwing them up against the reflected glare from the water he felt a wave of fatigue wash over him. He blinked several times, striving to refocus his wandering concentration. The cabin was stifling. A small fan mounted above the dashboard followed an erratic path from left to right and back again, barely ruffling the oppressive airless heat.

He had been at the wheel for nearly six hours since he and his two younger companions had slipped stealthily through the midnight shadows of the deserted Phnom Penh docks to board the vessel in which he had so often ferried the leaders of the revolution: the pompous, self-important Pol Pot, with his fat face and fish eyes; the shrewd watchful countenance of Khieu Samphan; even, once, the darting, frightened, rabbit eyes of Prince Sihanouk himself, unwilling accomplice and virtual prisoner of the Khmer Rouge — a diplomatic sop to the constant stream of wary Chinese advisers in Western suits without whose backing the revolution could never have survived. And, in these last months and weeks, he had seen the corrupt confidence of absolute power gradually vaporize, replaced in his passengers’ eyes by a growing panic, that only fuelled their toxic fanaticism.

Fear stalked the empty streets of the capital now like all the ghosts of the Cambodian dead come back to haunt their murderers. The tattered remnants of the Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea were heading north in disarray. Phnom Penh was being abandoned to its fate, though the leadership were still there, clinging insanely to the hope that the Vietnamese, less than fifty kilometres to the south, could yet be stopped. Only hours before Nim had taken his fateful decision to escape the city, he had listened to Pol Pot announcing over Radio Phnom Penh that the Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea would achieve certain victory over the Vietnamese invader. But the procession of Chinese diplomatic personnel, technicians, military advisers, and dependants, heading for the airport, clearly demonstrated that the Chinese thought otherwise.

Nim, like his companions, had been a fisherman before the revolution — the old people as they had been called, as opposed to the new people from the cities. It was his knowledge of boats that had saved him from a wretched existence digging endless canals or toiling in the paddies. Their relatively privileged position, maintaining and operating the launch for the Party hierarchy, had meant they were well fed and well billeted in almost civilized conditions. But they were now under no illusion that the period of comparative security they had enjoyed in the last four years was drawing to an end.

It had been Nim’s idea to take the launch and head north across the Tonle Sap. Rath, the son of a former village chief and friend of Nim, and his cousin, Sien, had taken little persuading. They looked up to the older man who had promised Rath’s father that he would keep them safe. They had survived the years of horror virtually unscathed, and were ready to trust him again. The lake, Nim had argued, was their safest means of escape. It would be fast and, since the Khmer Rouge had little in the way of waterborne transport, once they were out on the Great Lake there would be virtually no danger. The riskiest part of the plan was sneaking the boat out of the docks, and the first stage of their journey up the short stretch of the Mekong into the river that flowed out of the Tonle Sap itself. Which was why they had decided to make their break during the hours of darkness. And in the confusion and slack security of the besieged city it had, in the event, proved surprisingly easy. Now they were heading for a small village on the north-eastern shore of the lake. They had no idea what might await them there, but it was home — and they hadn’t seen home for a very long time.

Rath was asleep down below on one of the bunks. Sien was on the roof of the cabin, supposedly keeping watch and manning the six-barrelled machine gun that had been mounted there four years earlier. But he was probably asleep, too. Nim glanced at the large compass set into the mahogany fascia in front of him, checked his bearing, then looked up again, beyond the fluttering red flag at the bow of the boat, sweeping his gaze across the unending horizon ahead. For a moment he thought he must have been mistaken, a brief dark speck in his peripheral vision. His eyes flickered back in its direction, and he frowned into the glare. A boat? It was still too far away to be certain. It might be debris of some kind, a tree perhaps. He was tempted to give it a wide berth — it was very small, whatever it was. But he was curious. If it was a boat, what was it doing out here in the middle of the lake? He changed course, tilting them to the east, and the bow of the launch knifed its way towards the distant object.

As he drew closer, within half a kilometre, Nim saw that it was indeed a boat. A small, open fishing craft, little more than a canoe. He pulled back on the throttle, slowing their approach, and banged on the roof.

‘Hey, Sien, wake up! Boat ahead!’

Sien was awake instantly, uncurling from his foetal position and springing to his feet. He blinked several times in the flashing sunlight before focusing on the small fishing boat bobbing aimlessly on the water a few hundred metres away. Rath, roused by Nim’s voice and the sudden change in the pitch of the engine, emerged sleepily on to the deck.

‘What is it?’

Nim pointed ahead and Rath turned his gaze in the direction of the fishing boat. Quickly he ducked back into the cabin and re-emerged clutching an AK-47. Nim had reduced their speed to a crawl, and he approached cautiously.

‘Any sign of life?’ he called up to Sien.

‘Nothing yet,’ Sien shouted back. He clasped the grips of the heavy machine gun and swung it on its mounting to point at the small craft as they approached, hooking a nervous finger around the trigger. Rath moved warily along the rail towards the prow of the launch, keeping his eyes fixed on the gentle motion of the fishing boat.

As he was almost upon it, Nim swung the wheel hard left and careened to a stop, side on, towering over the stricken craft and causing it to roll dangerously. He moved out of the cabin and joined Rath at the rail to find himself looking down into the leaking hull of the tiny vessel and raising astonished eyebrows at what he saw.

A sheet of torn and dirty matting had been draped across two planks to create a makeshift shelter at one end, and huddled in its shadow among a pile of canvas packs were an old woman and a young girl. The stern was strewn with the pieces of an unserviceable outboard, and two tin mugs bobbed in the water sloshing back and forth in the bottom of the boat. It was clearly leaking badly and would not stay afloat much longer. From the skin hanging loosely around her neck, the cadaverous cheeks pitted with sores, and the skull that stretched the skin of her shrunken face, Nim saw with a shock that the old woman was barely alive. Her dead eyes stared listlessly up at him from the shadows. The girl, though strained and frightened, looked in better shape. Her eyes burned black with fear.

‘Runaways,’ Sien called from the roof of the cabin, the relief audible in his voice. And he relaxed his grip on the machine gun and laughed. ‘I don’t fancy yours much, Rath.’

Rath grinned. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘You always did go for older women.’

But Nim was still tense. ‘What have you got in there?’ he called to the women.

‘We need help.’ Ny’s voice was quivering. ‘We are sinking.’

‘We have no room,’ Nim said.

Rath turned to him. ‘Of course we have. We’ve no use for the old one. But the girl... When was the last time you had a woman, Uncle Nim?’

Sien jumped down from the roof to join them and leered over the rail. ‘She’s a pretty little thing, that one. I’ll get her.’ He swung a leg over the rail, but Nim grabbed his arm.

‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘I don’t like this. What are they doing here — two women on their own?’

‘Runaways, like Sien said.’ Rath glanced back at the girl and felt the stirrings of lust between his legs.

‘You’ve just forgotten what it’s like, old man,’ Sien snarled, pulling free of Nim’s grasp. ‘Me and Rath, we’re younger, we’ve got needs.’

‘The only thing we need is to survive,’ Nim snapped. ‘There’s something not right about this. Where did they get these?’ He pointed to the canvas packs under the awning.

‘Who knows, who cares?’ Rath sneered. ‘How can an old woman and a young girl be a danger to us?’

‘I’ll check it out,’ Sien said, and he skipped over the railing before Nim could stop him, and clambered down into the boat. Ny’s grip tightened around the butt of Elliot’s revolver hidden below her tunic.

On the far side of the launch, Elliot and McCue slipped quietly out of the water and pulled themselves noiselessly aboard. Elliot pointed to the machine gun on the cabin roof. McCue nodded and climbed, catlike, up the side of the cabin, hidden from the view of the three Khmers whose attention was still focused on Serey and Ny. Elliot drew a long hunting blade from his belt and crouching low, inched his way around the forward side of the cabin, bare feet leaving soft wet footprints in his wake.

Sien grinned lecherously at Ny. He pulled one of the canvas packs out from the awning and, squatting in the bottom of the boat, started rifling through its contents. He arched his eyebrows in surprise. Maps, a shortwave radio, various foreign provisions. He looked up at the two women and frowned in suspicion.

‘Where’d you get this?’

‘What is it?’ Nim called.

But Sien paid no attention. Instead he drew a knife from his belt and moved towards Ny. ‘I asked you a question!’ he hissed.

Ny stiffened with fear, and almost involuntarily started to draw the revolver. But her clumsy movement alerted Sien and he grabbed her wrist, twisting it backwards so that the revolver swung up and then fell harmlessly from her grasp. ‘Well, well,’ he said grinning, ‘a dangerous little thing, aren’t you?’ And he glanced at the revolver, his expression hardening. ‘Now where would you get something like that?’ His body partially masked the view from the launch, and Nim leaned nervously over the rail.

‘What’s going on?’

Sien barely registered the movement beside him, turning instinctively to find himself staring into the barrel of McCue’s revolver clutched between Serey’s trembling hands. For a moment he tensed, then relaxed and stretched his lips across yellowing teeth in a humourless grimace as Serey jerked the trigger. The explosion was deafening in the confined space, and Serey and Ny felt a singeing flash of heat. Warm blood spattered across their faces as the bullet punched a hole through Sien’s face, hurling him backwards into the bottom of the boat.

There was a second of startling confusion in Rath’s mind before he swung his AK-47 towards the women in the boat below. But his finger never reached the trigger. A burst of fire sprayed half a dozen bullets into his lower back, cutting him almost in two and launching him over the rail to sprawl across the corpse of his cousin below.

Nim threw himself backwards, instinctively, against the wall of the cabin and out of the line of fire from above. Fear and confusion tumbled together through his mind in a moment of blind panic. There were weapons below. He turned towards the hatch and literally ran on to Elliot’s blade, gasping in pain and surprise as the cold steel ruptured his spleen and slid upwards through his stomach towards his heart. Elliot’s cold blue eyes met his, and he knew in that moment that he would never see his home again.

Elliot withdrew his knife and let the dead weight of the lifeless Khmer drop to the deck, a pool of dark red spreading quickly across the boards. He crossed to the rail and looked down into the boat below. The bodies of the two younger men lay in a grotesque embrace. Ny clutched her mother’s head to her breast, the older woman sobbing uncontrollably, McCue’s revolver lying at her feet where she had dropped it.

‘Elliot!’ There was an urgency in McCue’s voice.

Elliot turned to find McCue standing with the machine gun trained on his chest. His face was tight and pale. The two men stared at each other for a long moment.

‘Get the women on board,’ Elliot said. ‘I’ll check out the rest of the boat.’ And he moved towards the hatch, and swung himself down the steps below deck and out of sight. McCue remained motionless for a few seconds longer, still rigid with unresolved tension, before pushing the machine gun aside and jumping down from the roof.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

In the deserted streets the clatter of the bicycle, flat tyres shredding rubber on cracked tarmac, echoed back from the long abandoned blocks of flats. Its rider, in tattered black trousers and ragged tunic, seemed unaware of the devastation around him. Metal security grilles, once drawn across shop doorways, hung smashed and rusting from broken hinges. The carcasses of cars and motorbikes and cyclo-pousses littered the streets and pavements like the rotting corpses of wild game killed for sport. In the heat and glare of midday, the shattered remains of Phnom Penh were silent and unmoving, like death itself. Only the distant and occasional rumble of heavy artillery stirred the silence, unheard or disregarded by the cyclist. The rider turned left, along a broad boulevard lined on either side by palm trees. Banknotes fluttered briefly along the gutter in the breeze of his passing. A torn teddy hung from the handlebars, spinning slowly, eyes as sightless as the boy’s.

Hau’s AK-47 was slung across his back. His hands and face were sticky with the juices of the fruit on which he had earlier gorged himself — wild tropical fruits growing in profusion in the overgrown gardens of the villas near his home. He felt again the fierce cramps in his lower stomach, signalling yet another emptying of his aching bowels, and he began to sing to take his mind off the pain. A tuneless rendering of the Khmer Rouge national anthem. He did not think about the words he sang. They were a reflex action, almost instinctive, dinned into his impressionable young mind at countless compulsory national culture meetings at the commune.

Bright red blood which covers our fields and plains,

Of Kampuchea, our motherland!

Sublime blood of workers and peasants,

Sublime blood of revolutionary men and women fighters!

The Blood changing into unrelenting hatred

And resolute struggle,

On April 17th, under the flag of the Revolution,

Free from Slavery!

The dark shadow of a vulture swooping overhead flashed across the road ahead of him. Its claws rattled on a corrugated iron roof as it landed on a building opposite, its beady black eyes watching with intense interest the figure on the bicycle below. But Hau didn’t notice it. His singing faltered as the cramps in his belly increased in intensity. He pulled up and climbed stiffly off the bike, letting it fall to the road in his haste to wrench down his trousers and squat in the gutter. A stream of foul brown liquid squirted from under him to splash into the dust. After a few moments the cramps subsided and he pulled his trousers up and picked up his bike. He felt weak, a little giddy, his mouth parched and dry, a hungry knot in his stomach. He remounted the bike and pushed off, the strain of regaining momentum taking its toll on the wasting muscles of his legs. For a while he tried to remember the song he had been singing, but it seemed strangely elusive, and he soon gave up to let his mind wander as aimlessly as his bike.

He passed a dilapidated petrol station, its pumps long since torn away, the charred remains of vehicles behind the barbed wire of what had once been a second-hand car lot. A yellow SHELL sign still rose high on a pole above the smashed building, an oddly potent reminder that life here had once been very different.

A pall of midday heat hung over Monivong Boulevard, very nearly tangible in its humid intensity. The dirty rag wrapped around Hau’s head, to keep the mat of tangled black hair out of his eyes, was sodden with sweat, and tiny rivulets of sweat ran through the grime that clung to his smooth round young face. He was finding it hard to breathe, and he stopped amidst the rubble on the pavement outside the towering Monorom Hotel. This time he leaned the bike against the wall and clambered over the splintered timbers and broken glass into the semi-darkness of the lobby. Shattered glass and the remnants of smashed furniture lay everywhere, a dusty cool in the air.

He shuffled past the elevator to what had once been the reception desk and smacked his hands, palms down, on top of it, raising a thick white stour in the stillness, almost as if to summon the desk clerk with his room key. Only silence greeted him. He picked his way through the upturned tables and chairs in the main dining room, to where double swing doors leading to the kitchen had been torn from their hinges — doors that had swung back and forth countless times as the food prepared by Cambodian chefs had been carried out by Cambodian waiters to feed the voracious appetites of the Americans, and the French colons before them.

The kitchen was largely intact, although the tiled floor was thick with broken crockery. Blackened pots and pans lay about where they had been pulled out of cupboards or torn from hooks. Two enormous refrigerators stood in the dark with their doors hanging open. Hau hurried across the kitchen with a quickening heart and the false hope that there might still be food in them. But they were empty, shelves ripped out, a cracked ice-tray lying on the floor. It was nearly five years since electricity had powered these icons of Western decadence, inducing them, improbably, to produce ice from water in tropical temperatures. In a fit of temper he kicked out at one of them, then thumped into it with his shoulder, rocking it back and forth till it crashed on to its side, rupturing the network of pipes at the back of it to release a trickle of milky white chemical on to the floor.

The noise of the crash still reverberating in his ears, Hau turned away in disgust and stumbled over a small round metal object beneath his feet. He stooped to pick it up and found himself holding a tin little larger than a hand grenade, its label blackened by time and dust. He wiped it furiously on his sleeve then crossed to the door to examine it in the light. A faded blue-lettered Nestlé Milk was just discernible. The words themselves had no meaning for Hau, but there was something vaguely familiar about them, evoking a misty childhood memory of his mother’s kitchen and something sweet. With a rising excitement, he realized that it was food, and he turned the tin round and round in his hands, staring with sparkling eyes. He ran his tongue across parched lips and squatted on the floor, drawing his knife from his belt. He stood the tin in front of him, took the knife in both hands and drove it several times into the lid, causing a thick white substance to ooze from the punctures. He collected a little on the tip of a finger and raised it tentatively to his tongue. The sweet taste almost burned his mouth, and in an instant he had snatched the tin from the floor and lifted it to eager lips that sucked fiercely at the cloying sweetness. When the tin would yield no more, he placed it once again on the floor and stabbed at it repeatedly with his knife until he could force the jagged lid out and dip fingers inside. Again and again he ran them around the inside of the tin and sucked at them hungrily until he had cleaned out every last drop. Then he threw the tin away and turned back into the kitchen, eyes probing each dark corner in search of more.

For half an hour he tore the kitchen apart, ripping units from the wall, searching on hands and knees among the debris on the floor, before slumping, unrewarded and sweating, against an upturned table in the centre of the room.

He sat in the semi-darkness for a long time until his breathing and his disappointment had subsided, and he realized that he was thirstier than ever. But now he felt weak again too, the sweet taste of the Nestlé milk already a distant memory, almost as though he had dreamt it. He closed his eyes and felt himself swimming backwards through space. Faces ballooned at him through the darkness and he saw his own hands reaching out to pull plastic bags tight over their heads, holding them in place, ignoring the frantic fight for breath that came from within. Hands reached out towards him like claws, fingers grotesquely curled in a last desperate attempt to hold on to life. He felt them tug at his trousers, at his tunic and, finally, at his face, sharp nails drawing blood.

He awoke with a yell and felt scurries of movement all around him. His cheek still hurt where the nails of the hand in his dream had scratched him. When he put his hand to his face he drew back bloodied fingers. The floor had come alive and seemed to be moving beneath him. He drew in his knees and found himself staring into hundreds of tiny black eyes, twinkling with pinpoints of light. For a moment he thought he must still be asleep before he realized that the floor around him was indeed alive — with rats. He heard himself scream as he leapt to his feet, swinging the Kalashnikov from his back and firing wildly at the floor around him, raising clouds of choking dust and sending splinters of tile and crockery spanging off in all directions. The rodents scattered in a squealing panic, several exploding in a bloody mush, caught in the spray of bullets as they fled.

Hau stopped screaming as he stopped firing and found himself breathless and shaking uncontrollably. He didn’t wait to count the rats he had killed, but turned and ran from the kitchen, through the dining room, crashing into tables and chairs as he went, oblivious of the pain. Into the gloom of the lobby, back past the elevator to stumble over the rubble in the doorway and out on to the street, where the heat and glare of the afternoon sun hit him like a wall. He screwed his smarting eyes against the light and snatched his bike from the wall, mounting it and pedalling blindly away along the boulevard.

When, finally, Hau became aware that his progress had slowed almost to a halt, he had no idea where he was. He had pedalled furiously through a dozen or more deserted streets, unseeing, uncaring, driven only by the desperate desire to escape the nightmare presence of the rats that had crawled over his sleeping body to tear at his face in the dark empty kitchen of the Monorom Hotel. He swung his leg over the saddle and staggered to a halt, the hot pavement burning the leathery soles of his feet. His fitful gasps for air seemed to scorch his lungs.

He glanced around at the crumbling buildings with all their broken windows, the trees and bushes that grew in thick profusion in deserted yards. And his eyes came to rest, across the street, on the high walls and open gates of the deserted Phnom Penh High School. Beyond the walls, and the desolation of the empty playground, stood three plain buildings built in the early Sixties by the Sihanouk government to serve as one of the city’s principal high schools. Hau could not, at first, identify what it was about these buildings that seemed odd, until he became aware that all their windows were intact. But more than that, a dreadful silence seemed to emanate from the very heart of the school, smothering all sound around it. Nothing moved, nothing stirred. There was no birdsong. A pall of something you could almost touch seemed to hang over it, drawing Hau’s curiosity, yet at the same time provoking a dread that he could not identify.

He leaned his bike against a tree and very slowly crossed the road, watching keenly for any sign of movement. As he passed through the gates and beyond the walls he stopped, suddenly, and listened. What had seemed like silence was developing into a deep, distant hum, a vibration like the sound of a motor or a high-tension electricity pylon. Although ever-present, it was not a constant sound, but rose and fell in unusual cadences. And as Hau neared the main entrance, the intensity, though still muted, increased. It had a disquieting effect, and for a moment Hau hesitated, and considered turning back. But something compelled him on, to push open the door and step inside.

The stench of decay closed around him, sickly sweet, almost overpowering in the heat, and his ears filled with a buzzing that roared in the stillness. The air was black with flies. Engulfing, smothering clouds of them. He struck out blindly as if he could somehow fend them off, and quickly ripped the cloth from around his head and clamped it to his nose and mouth. The door he had entered by swung shut behind him, and in his panic he stumbled towards the light shining through another to his left. He found himself in a long corridor divided into cubicles by crude brick partitions. Sunlight slanted through the windows all along one side, almost obscured by the flies. His entrance seemed to infuriate them, their rage redoubled to a pitch that was almost unbearable.

The air was virtually unbreathable, and Hau choked behind the filthy rag he clutched to his face. His only thought was to get out. But the heat, his fever, the gnawing in his gut, combined with the stink and the flies, had a disorientating effect. Afraid to go back, uncertain now of which way he’d come in, he stretched out a hand to support himself against a brick partition and staggered forward to reach an opening. Turning into the cubicle, he tripped over a petrol can, falling and spilling an acrid yellow liquid across the floor beside him. Bile rose in his throat as he reached up to grasp the skeleton metal frame of a bed without a mattress, and found himself staring into eyes that gaped back at him from a half-decayed face — a face that seemed almost animated by the flies that crawled over its putrid flesh. The nose had gone. Black and broken teeth protruded from a mouth that gaped in a hideous grimace. Hau screamed in terror and fell back against the wall. The corpse was tied to the bed frame, hideously mutilated, still straining against the agony of a death that had not come soon enough. An empty chair sat by the side of the bed, and beyond it a blackboard still bore a bizarre list of instructions:

The walls were plastered with grotesque black and white photographs of hundreds of dreadfully tortured faces and mutilated bodies.

Hau was shaking uncontrollably now, and he heard his screams like some disembodied sound from another world. He slithered across the fly-infested urine he had spilled on the floor, and ran down the corridor. More faces leered at him from every opening; twisted fingers, their bones poking through fetid flesh, grasped at him from beyond the grave, as they had done in his dream. Only this was no dream. Through a door to a classroom, all light nearly obliterated by the flies, Hau stumbled and fell. Stinking corpses piled up in the dark clasped him to their bosoms, a nightmare of arms and legs whose rotted flesh fell away in his hands. Accusing eyes stared in the gloom, open mouths breathing death in his face. Somehow, for he no longer acted with any will, he pulled free of their embrace and tumbled back through the door and along the corridor, flies in his ears and nose and mouth, tears blinding him. Through another door, and another, until suddenly he collapsed down a short flight of steps into bright afternoon sunshine and lay retching in the yard.

Still crawling with flies, he tore away his ragged calico tunic and trousers and ran naked across the yard, out through the gates and across the street. He grasped his bike, still racked by the sobs that tore themselves painfully from his chest, and ran pushing it up the street, almost unaware of his nakedness, certainly unashamed by it. For he knew now that there could be nobody left alive in this world but him.

The speeding black American saloon car wove its way through the debris-littered streets; the charred, rusted remains of civilian and military vehicles, the belongings of a lost population dragged out on to the street and left to the ravages of time. Its driver wore a kramar over his black tunic and trousers, but his three passengers were incongruous in their dark Western suits: two expressionless Chinese and a small, ageing Cambodian with a sad round face and deeply ringed dark eyes.

Sticky and uncomfortable in the airless heat of the car, they were jolted again and again by wide cracks and potholes in the road. The Cambodian gazed out at the ruins of his city. The desolation of what he saw was reflected in his heart. Pol Pot and the others had left ahead of him, no doubt in futile resistance to the invader, but still the Chinese adhered to their ally, insisted on providing his safe passage out of the country. He was after all, as the legitimate ruler of his beloved Cambodia, their last vestige of international credibility, as he had been since the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975. He himself had been powerless, clinging despondently to the hope that the madness must end sometime, and that he could play a part in the rebuilding. But now he knew that for him it was over.

His thoughts drifted back to the past, how it had all once been — in his mind an enchanted, happy time; court dancers performing to the music he himself had written, extravagant royal banquets, the gatherings of joyous, colourful crowds on the river to witness the Fêtes des Eaux. And he frowned as he recalled the tide of events, his attempts to keep his country out of the war that raged between America and Vietnam. And then the bombs and the coup, conspiracy and betrayal feeding the cause of the Khmer Rouge. And finally the murder of his people, and now his own enforced exile. He wondered what the future could possibly hold for him.

As they sped past the Phnom Penh High School he shuddered inwardly. He had built it to educate. The Khmer Rouge had used it to re-educate. Such an innocent word to describe the torture and murder that raged inside S.21, the Tuol Sleng extermination centre. All in the name of a people who had been brutalized just as savagely. The madness, he knew, had no parallel. Even Hitler had not enslaved and destroyed his own people.

At the top of the street, the car turned north towards the airport where they would catch the last flight out to Peking. A movement caught the Cambodian’s eye, and he turned with amazement to see the naked figure of a small boy pushing a bicycle and running away down a side street. Their driver braked hard, slamming the car to a halt with a squeal of tyres.

‘What are you doing!’ Prince Sihanouk demanded.

‘Deserter!’ spat the driver, and swung himself out of the car. He drew his pistol, steadied it at arm’s length on the roof, and levelled it at the back of the running boy.

‘Leave it!’ snapped one of the Chinese. ‘There is no time!’

The driver cursed. The boy was out of range anyway. He holstered his pistol and jumped back into the driver’s seat, his lips curled in annoyance.

‘Go,’ said the Chinese. ‘We are already late.’

As the car screeched away with spinning tyres, Sihanouk saw the naked boy turn safely out of view to be swallowed up by the doomed city. It was to be the Prince’s last sight, he knew, of his beloved Phnom Penh. And it filled him with a deep despair.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Serey and Ny squatted on facing bunks by the light of a small oil lamp, gorging on large bowls of steaming rice. Outside, the rumble of thunder sounded ominously in the black night sky, and warm rain battered on the deck above. Ny glanced nervously at her mother. They had not spoken in the hours since the shooting on the boat. The initial tears had dried up. The warmth of their embrace, as Serey clung to her daughter in the moments after the shooting, had turned cold, and that brief vulnerability had dissipated, leaving her brittle and aloof. Ny’s burden of guilt seemed greater now than ever.

She looked at the frail, shrunken figure in peasant pyjamas and longed simply to hold her. Through all the silent years, when family loyalties and affections had been dangerous, banished by the higher demands of Angkar, they had grown apart. Confidences had become almost as rare as conversation. Increasingly, all that had tied them was the umbilical cord of the past, memories, how they had once been. Mother and daughter. They were like strangers now, embarrassed by the knowledge of what each had done, what each had become. They had no secrets. Whatever Hau had done or become, only he knew. And he knew nothing of their shame. Perhaps Hau would be their only salvation. I have done things. They made me do things, he had told her that night beneath the hut at the commune. She hadn’t wanted to know then, didn’t now. She wanted never to know. She remembered his small, boyish face with its old eyes, and the tears that had run down his cheeks as he left. I will go to our home in Phnom Penh. If our country is freed tell my mother to look for me there.

‘Do you think Hau will be in Phnom Penh?’ she asked suddenly.

Her mother’s sad eyes flickered slowly up to meet hers. ‘There is no point in asking questions that cannot be answered.’

It was like a slap in the face, and the old woman turned back to the last of her rice, unaware of the tears that filled her daughter’s eyes, blinking hard to hide her own.

Directly above them, in the cabin, Elliot was slumped in a fixed swivel seat by the wheel watching the rain run down the windows. His cigarette glowed in the dark as he sucked deeply at the hot burning tobacco. Along with the sacks of rice in the galley, they had found other provisions: tinned foods, cartons of cigarettes, a crate of beer. They had eaten their fill, then taken a course south across the deserted wastes of the Great Lake. As the sun set, they had reached the southern end of the lake and navigated slowly through numerous waterways before debouching into the wide, chocolate-brown waters of the slow-moving Mekong. These had been tense moments, exposed as they were to attack from either bank. But they had seen nothing, no sign of human activity or habitation. An eerie calm blanketed the land, unnatural in its stillness.

‘Where is everyone — anyone?’ McCue had muttered under his breath. He was unsettled by the pall of silence, broken only by the gentle put-put of their engine, that hung over them.

With the ending of the day, the heat and humidity had intensified, great dark clouds rolling in from the west to blot out the sky before night fell to cloak them in darkness. Elliot reckoned they were less than an hour upriver from Phnom Penh itself, and they had decided to drop anchor in the lee of the west bank and wait until just before dawn to make their final approach to the city. The rain had started not long after.

Elliot took a slug of beer and checked his watch. Almost half-past ten. It would be a long night, through which the fear of tomorrow would deny him sleep. He was annoyed by the fear that knotted in his stomach and held all the muscles of his body hard and tense. It was unaccountable. Less than eight hours earlier he had accepted, without fear, that death was inevitable. And now, the hope that glimmered feebly in the promised light of dawn had made him fear again. Perhaps, he thought, it wasn’t death he was afraid of, but life.

The sound of bare feet slithered across the roof and McCue dropped lightly down in the open doorway. Elliot could see his dark form faintly silhouetted against the sky beyond. The American stepped in out of the rain, dripping on to the dry boards. ‘No point in keeping watch. We can’t see and we can’t be seen in this rain.’ He spoke quietly, but his voice seemed very close.

‘Sure,’ Elliot said.

‘D’you get anything on the radio?’

‘Voice of America, Radio Moscow, World Service.’

‘And?’

‘The Brits and the Yanks say the situation is confused. Moscow says the Khmer Rouge have abandoned the city and are fleeing north. The Vietnamese are expected to take Phnom Penh tomorrow.’

McCue shifted uneasily in the dark. ‘What do you think?’

Elliot took another draw on his cigarette. ‘I think things are bound to look confusing from a Bangkok massage parlour, which is where most of the American and British correspondents will be right now. The Russians’ll be getting their briefing from the front line.’

‘You still plan to go in before dawn?’

‘Have you got a better idea?’ The tension between them crackled like electricity in the dark.

‘You know the kid won’t be there.’

‘Sure.’

‘So what then?’

Elliot sighed and brushed the sweat from his eyes. ‘I don’t know.’ He sounded weary. ‘The woman and the girl shouldn’t have anything to fear from the Vietnamese.’

‘You ain’t suggesting we give ourselves up?’

Elliot raised a bottle to his lips and let warm flat beer run back over his throat. ‘Can’t say I particularly fancy an extended stay at the Hanoi Hilton.’

The Hanoi Hilton was the name given to the re-education centres in Hanoi where hundreds of American servicemen captured during the Vietnam war had been imprisoned and tortured, brainwashed into making public denouncements of their country’s involvement in the war. Many had eventually been released, but it was rumoured that many more still languished there.

‘So what are you suggesting?’ McCue’s voice was cold.

‘Seems to me,’ Elliot said, pulling the last lungful of smoke from his cigarette, ‘that our best hope is to reach the coast, try and get across the Gulf of Thailand.’

‘Shit, man! How are we gonna do that with an old lady and a young girl in tow?’

Elliot shook his head. ‘We can’t.’

There was a long silence. When at last he spoke, McCue’s voice was brittle and flinty. ‘You’re saying we dump them.’

‘Even if we could take them with us, they wouldn’t go. Not without the boy.’ Elliot’s voice was calm and even. There was no hint of defensiveness in it. He was simply stating the facts as he saw them. He wasn’t prepared for McCue’s lunge across the cabin, the hands that grabbed him in the dark. Hot breath hissed in his face.

‘You bastard, Elliot! If you were ready to dump them, what the fuck are we doing here? What did Mikey die for?’

For the first time in many hours all Elliot’s tension fell away. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I really don’t.’ And somehow the words relieved him of the burden. ‘Things just didn’t work out the way I planned.’

‘Fuck you!’ McCue raised his eyes to the ceiling in frustration and he let go of Elliot to slump back into the chair. He thought about Lotus, and his baby who would be asleep now on the rush mat in the back room of his klong house. Tears welled in his eyes with the realization that the boy would never know his real father, that Lotus would probably take another husband. That he was, after all, going to die. He sat limp, his arms dangling loose at his sides. ‘When I don’t need you any more, Elliot,’ he said softly, ‘you’re a dead man.’

Elliot’s face glowed red, briefly, in the flare of the match he struck to light another cigarette. ‘You’re too late Billy,’ he said, his voice tight with emotion. ‘I died a long time ago.’

Chapter Thirty

‘Have you known La Mère Grace long?’ The fat smiling face of the General leaned closer beside her at the table, a confidential air in his voice. His attentive eyes twinkled into hers.

‘No, not long at all,’ Lisa said. ‘Less than a week, in fact.’

‘Ah,’ the General said, as if this was deeply significant and he was being made privy to a secret. ‘She is a fine woman,’ he added.

Lisa nodded. ‘Yes, she’s been very good to me.’

The General was a large man, tall by Asian standards, overweight but impressive in his army dress uniform. He had a fine head of thick steel-grey hair and black, bushy eyebrows above smiling eyes. His lips were a little too thick, purplish and wet. In his mid-fifties, he was not an attractive man, but full of charm, Lisa thought. He had been particularly attentive and put her at her ease in this gathering of strangers. She heard the sound of Grace’s voice raised in laughter and she glanced down the table to see her in animated conversation with a small, ugly man in an expensive-looking grey silk suit. There were twenty round the long table, silver cutlery and cut crystal glasses sparkling in the candlelight. Much wine had been consumed with the meal and the conversation was lively, punctuated by frequent bursts of laughter.

Most of the men were middle-aged or elderly; politicians, high-ranking army officers and senior policemen, Grace had told Lisa. Influential friends. Their female companions were all very young, Lisa’s age and a little older. Dazzlingly beautiful, delicate oriental girls, demure in traditional costumes of patterned Thai silk, or in long figure-hugging Vietnamese ao dai.

Lisa’s dress, when it had been delivered that morning, had delighted her, the deep crimson complementing the hint of strawberry in her rich blonde hair, the daring cut exposing a wide slash of creamy white skin across the swell of her breasts. Grace had regarded her with obvious pleasure, nodding, satisfied, and said, ‘You’ll be the belle of the ball, my dear.’

But when she first arrived at the club, Lisa had felt very conspicuous, tall and big-boned and rather clumsy beside these sylph-like Thai girls. Her skin, she thought, seemed an ugly, blue-veined white compared with the smooth golden brown of these lovely creatures. She felt very unattractive. So she had been surprised, and then flattered, when very quickly she had become the centre of attention, eyes dwelling on her with undisguised admiration. She had caught the jealous glances of several Thai girls and felt her confidence returning, taking a heady delight in the attentions of such important people. Once or twice she had caught Grace’s eye, and Grace had nodded, smiling encouragement.

The General introduced himself early, fetching her a drink and telling her that she must sit beside him at dinner. A young white girl, particularly one as beautiful as Lisa, must take great care in a city like Bangkok to choose carefully the company she keeps, he had told her. His mischievous smile had instantly endeared him to her. She had laughed. But still she remembered Sivara.

The meal was served discreetly by white-jacketed waiters who flitted soundlessly among the guests like ghosts. Seafood platters on beds of rice, tender beef curry and coconut in scooped-out pineapple shells, cellophane noodle salad and sticky rice with coconut cream. For the most part the men drank Thai whisky and the women sipped at glasses of expensive French wine. At the other side of a small, dimly lit dance floor, a quartet of musicians played lazy American jazz music that drifted across the conversation.

Lisa felt warm and relaxed, and was gently tipsy from too much soft, fruity, red wine.

‘Grace tells me your father is in Cambodia.’ The General’s simple statement startled her. In the days she had spent lying around reading, lazily flipping through Grace’s huge collection of books on erotic art, accompanying Grace on occasional shopping trips, she had almost forgotten why she was here. The nightmare of the attack by Sivara had retreated from her memory like a bad dream, and for the first time since her mother’s death she had begun to relax, succumbing to the warm somnambulant comforts of Grace’s sumptuous villa with its pretty maidservants and good food.

‘Yes,’ she replied, and she felt her face flush with guilt. Why did it seem so much less important now that she find her father than it had only a week ago?

The General shook his head sadly. ‘It’s a bad business.’

‘What do you mean?’ A stab of fear pierced Lisa’s complacency.

‘Have you not read the newspapers? Refugees from Cambodia and many deserting Khmer Rouge are flooding over the Thai border in their thousands. The Khmers have been well beaten in the south and are retreating north into country which, by all accounts, is now ravaged by famine. And the Vietnamese seem poised to take Phnom Penh any day.’

‘But what does that mean for my father?’

The General put a comforting hand over hers. ‘I’m afraid, my dear, that any Westerner caught up in events south of the border has little or no chance of surviving them.’

‘It will be a difficult time, too, for Thailand.’ A dapper, middle-aged member of the government sitting opposite poured himself another whisky. ‘Just when we thought we had the communists under control at home, there could be anything up to half a million of them flooding over the border.’

‘Frankly,’ an earnest middle-aged journalist cut in, ‘I see a bigger threat from having the Vietnamese along our border. At least the Khmer Rouge kept themselves to themselves. The Vietnamese are well known for their territorial ambitions.’

The General lit a fat Havana cigar. ‘There are already several divisions of our troops on their way to stiffen border security, Lat, as you well know. It would be very unhelpful of you to print such scaremongering speculation in your newspaper.’

The politician added, ‘We also have the full financial and political backing of the Americans.’

The journalist curled his lips in a sardonic smile. ‘A lot of good that did Thieu in Saigon or Lon Nol in Cambodia.’

‘You mean there could be a war?’ Lisa felt nonplussed by this exchange on a subject of which she had so little grasp.

‘Oh, I doubt that,’ the General smiled. ‘A little sabre-rattling, perhaps.’ He patted her hand reassuringly. ‘I’m sorry to alarm you about your father, my dear. Perhaps he will survive. He is a soldier, after all, is he not?’ Lisa was shocked by how much he seemed to know. He leaned closer and whispered, ‘La Mère Grace has told me everything. She thought I might be able to help.’ She smelt the whisky and cigar smoke on his breath.

‘And can you?’ Her voice seemed very tiny.

‘I will certainly do whatever I can. My people on the border have been well briefed. If your father succeeds in crossing back into Thailand he will be in safe hands.’

If she’d had a little less to drink, Lisa might just have detected the subtly ambiguous stress placed by the General on the word safe. She might also have noticed the envy in the eyes of his companions across the table. But as it was, she felt nothing but gratitude towards this benevolent father figure who had steered her with such gentle assurance through the evening. He pushed his chair back and rose to his feet, holding out a hand towards her. ‘Dance?’

Startled out of her reverie, brief thoughts about her father and why she was here, Lisa glanced towards the dance floor and saw that several other couples were already dancing. ‘Yes, of course.’ She took his hand and he led her on to the floor. He held her firmly, but formally, not too close, and guided her in a slow shuffle around the floor to the dreamy music of the small jazz band. Lisa noticed that most of the other couples danced with bodies pressed close, hands and arms entwined, and felt that she and the General seemed very out of place.

‘Are you not married?’ she asked suddenly.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘I was married for nearly twenty-five years. My wife died eighteen months ago. Cancer of the throat.’

‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’

The General smiled sadly. ‘We had not been close for many years. It was important to me that she give me sons. We tried for a long time. Then the doctor told us she could not have children and gradually we grew apart.’ He stared off somewhere over her shoulder, eyes glazed. ‘My fault really. I suppose I blamed her. As I blamed her for dying and leaving me, finally, on my own.’

It was a sentiment Lisa understood only too well, and she gave the General’s hand a squeeze of sympathy. ‘But if you weren’t close...’

‘It is strange,’ the General mused, ‘how we grow to depend on people. Just her presence had always been a comfort to me. Now my house seems cold and empty without her. Even yet.’ He seemed to return from some distant place, and he smiled as his eyes flickered back to meet hers. ‘Of course, my life, as it always has been, is consumed by the army. And these are demanding times. Although in my few moments of relaxation I always have my...’ he hesitated a moment ‘... my books and my pipe.’

Lisa laughed. ‘Your pipe?’

The General acknowledged her misunderstanding with a small secret smile. ‘Not as you understand it, my dear.’

It was a moment before realization dawned. ‘You mean opium?’ she asked, horrified.

‘A small vice, commonly practised in the East. Harmless in moderation and wonderful therapy for a troubled spirit.’

Lisa remained unconvinced. ‘But — isn’t opium just like heroin?’

The General laughed. ‘Heroin is merely a derivative, processed for Western tastes, cheap and nasty like American junk food. The experienced smoker uses his opium, is not used by it.’ He glanced around the room. ‘I doubt if there is a single one of my colleagues here who does not enjoy the occasional pipe.’

‘Isn’t it illegal?’

But the General’s smile only widened. ‘You have, I think, a lot to learn, my pretty little English rose.’ Which left Lisa feeling very foolish and very young.

She turned at a touch on her arm to find Grace there, radiant and with a little smile of apology. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt,’ Grace said. ‘I’m afraid I have been called away to attend to some business. I don’t want to break up the party, so please carry on for as long as you wish.’

‘When will you be back?’ Lisa asked.

‘I shall go straight back to the house,’ said Grace. ‘I have invited a few of my guests there for drinks. General, could you see that Lisa is delivered safely home?’

‘It would give me great pleasure, La Mère Grace.’ The General made a formal bow of apology. ‘Unfortunately I have to return home. I am expecting an important phone call around twelve.’

‘Then perhaps Lisa could go with you, and you could bring her to my house after your call. I am sure the midnight curfew does not extend to army generals.’

‘Well, of course. I should be only too happy to oblige.’ He turned to Lisa. ‘Assuming you have no objections, my dear.’

‘No. No, of course not,’ Lisa said a little uncertainly.

‘Good, that’s settled, then. Thank you, General.’ Grace beamed and kissed Lisa on the cheek. ‘À toute à l’heure, ma chérie.’ And she drifted away through the dancers towards the table, where a waiter hovered with her shawl.

‘Well,’ said the General as Lisa turned back to him, ‘at least I shall have the pleasure of your company for a little longer than I expected.’ He raised his arm to look at his watch. ‘We should leave soon. My home is on the other side of the city.’

The General’s house lay at the end of a dark soi off Rama I Road, next to the Klong San Saep. It was built in traditional Thai style, mostly from teak, and was set in beautiful floodlit gardens. The General had to negotiate an elaborate security system to let them in. He clapped his hands and called for his houseboy to fetch drinks, and then switched off the floodlights in the garden. The houseboy — he could have been no more than fifteen — brought warmed rice wine, and Lisa sank back into a comfortable settee and let her eyes wander over the collection of Asian art and artefacts that filled the sitting room: Japanese watercolours, a series of paintings depicting scenes from the Buddhist Jataka tales, Chinese and Thai porcelain, and literally dozens of Buddha images from all over south-east Asia. She sipped the warm, slightly bitter wine. ‘You have quite a collection,’ she said.

‘It was my wife who collected,’ said the General. ‘Something to fill her days.’ He sighed, a touch of melancholy in his smile. ‘Oddly, I get more pleasure from it all now than I did when she was alive.’ He followed her gaze to the collection of Buddhas. ‘You like the Buddhas?’

‘They’re beautiful,’ Lisa said. ‘Are you a Buddhist?’

‘A very bad one,’ he said with a rueful grin. ‘I suppose there are bad Christians, too.’

Lisa returned the grin. ‘You’re talking to one.’ She rose and crossed to a tall, slender and pensive image sitting cross-legged on a stone pillow. She reached out a hand to touch it. ‘May I?’

‘Of course.’

It felt smooth and cold to the touch. ‘So many images to worship.’

‘The images are not for worship,’ he corrected her. ‘One worships Buddha, but merely venerates the image.’ He paused to sip his wine and watch her contemplatively. ‘Do you know anything of our religion?’

‘Nothing,’ Lisa said. ‘I’m afraid I’m really very ignorant.’

The General eased himself out of his chair and wandered across the polished teak floor to join her. ‘Buddha,’ he said, ‘gave us Four Noble Truths. Life is subject to sorrow; sorrow is caused by ignorance, which leads to desire; sorrow can be eliminated by eliminating desire; desire can be eliminated by following the Noble Eightfold Path.’

‘What is the noble eightfold path?’

He laughed. ‘No doubt as a child you learned the books of the Old Testament, or the Catechisms. Do you still remember them?’

‘No.’ She returned his laugh. ‘Probably not.’

He shrugged. ‘My problem has always been in eliminating desire.’ And he reached out and ran his hand through her thick, short, blonde hair. She took a step back, alarmed by the unexpectedness of his touch. ‘You mustn’t worry, my dear,’ he smiled. ‘It would be unnatural, even for an old man like me, not to have his desire aroused by your beauty.’

For the first time, Lisa felt a stab of doubt, followed by an acute sense of vulnerability. Was it a mistake to have come here alone with this man? And yet he was a friend of Grace. She searched for something appropriate to say, but nothing would come.

Somewhere in the depths of the house a phone rang. ‘My call,’ the General said. ‘Please make yourself comfortable, have some more wine. I should not be too long.’ And he hurried away to disappear down a dimly lit passage at the far side of the room.

Lisa took a deep breath and told herself she was in no danger. How could she be? She took another sip of wine and crossed back to the settee and perched herself gingerly on the edge of it. In a short while they would be heading back across the city to Grace’s house.

She sat for what seemed like a very long time looking idly around the large sprawling sitting room, oriental rugs scattered across the polished teak floor, black lacquer tables laden with ornaments, several beautifully painted lacquer screens. She was startled when the fan overhead suddenly hummed into life and began turning lazily. She glanced round to see the General’s houseboy emerge from the passageway and climb the open-slat staircase to the upper floor. He did not look in her direction. After a while she grew restless and more nervous. Her wine was finished and she laid her cup on a table and stood up to wander round the room, touching things distractedly.

‘I’m sorry to have kept you, my dear.’

She turned and saw, with a sense of shock, that the General was dressed only in a black silk robe with red trim and a red belt. On his feet he wore soft open slippers.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked, with a sudden foreboding. But he remained relaxed and smiling.

‘I’m afraid I must wait for a further call. Thirty, forty minutes, no more. I have asked my boy to prepare a couple of pipes while we wait.’

Lisa picked up her purse, panic rising in her chest. ‘I think I’ll just get a taxi.’

‘I regret that will not be possible. It is already after twelve and the curfew is in force.’

‘I should phone Grace and let her know, then.’

The General smiled. ‘I have already done so.’ He held out a hand towards her. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Think of it as an education. The broadening of your experience.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Lisa said.

‘Nonsense.’ He crossed the room and took her hand. ‘You cannot come to the East without experiencing a little of its magic. You must grow up sometime.’

Reluctantly, because she did not know what else to do, she let him lead her to the stairs, and as they climbed slowly to the upper floor he said, ‘The Noble Eightfold Path leads to the abolition of suffering.’

‘I thought you’d forgotten.’ She was startled by this unexpected tangent.

‘I looked them up. For my own enlightenment as well as yours. Shall I go on?’

She nodded mutely as they reached a landing and turned down a narrow hallway with concealed lighting.

‘Right understanding,’ he said, ‘meaning an intellectual grasp of the Four Noble Truths; Right intention, meaning the extinction of revenge, hatred, and the desire to do harm...’ He opened the door into a large study bedroom. A bed draped with mosquito netting, a polished mahogany desk and leather swivel chair, two leather armchairs, a lacquer coffee table. One wall was lined with books, on another hung a huge map of South East Asia. Soft, deep-piled rugs covered the floor, and the only light came from a brass desk lamp with a green glass shade. The room was filled with a peculiar stale, musty smell, and the General’s houseboy knelt over the naked flame of an oil lamp on a low bedside table. In his hands he held the General’s pipe — more than two feet of straight bamboo with carved ivory at each end. About two-thirds of the way down, a small bowl was set into the bamboo, dark and polished by the frequent kneading of opium.

Lisa concentrated hard on the General’s words to still the fear that was growing in her. ‘Right speech,’ he droned on, ‘meaning telling the truth, avoiding rumours, swearing and conceited gossip; Right action, meaning the decision not to kill or hunt any living thing, not to steal or to commit adultery...’

The houseboy was kneading a little ball of hot paste on the convex margin of the bowl, and Lisa smelled for the first time the pungent sweet odour of fresh opium.

‘... Right effort, meaning the conscious choice of good over evil; Right mindfulness, meaning the awareness of the divisions of contemplation: the body; sensation, the mind, and the Dharma...’ The General guided her to one of the leather armchairs and indicated she should sit. She sat uneasily as he crossed to his desk and poured them each more wine from a small porcelain jug. ‘And Right concentration, meaning the mental absorption on actions to be performed rightly.’ He handed her a cup and paused. ‘Was that seven or eight?’

‘I lost count,’ Lisa said nervously

The General laughed. ‘So did I. I think I may have forgotten one. But, then, forgetfulness is one of the privileges of old age.’ He turned to his boy and barked something in Thai. The boy nodded and the General drained his cup in one draught before crossing to the bed. ‘Excuse me, my dear. I like to make myself comfortable.’ He arranged himself on the bed, propping himself up with several pillows. Lisa watched with a fascinated horror as the houseboy plunged a needle into a tiny cavity in the centre of the bowl, and with a practised flick of the wrist released the opium and reversed the bowl over the flame. He held the pipe steady as the General leaned forward and took the end of it between his lips. The bead of opium bubbled gently as he inhaled in one long smooth pull before lying back on the pillows, slowly releasing the smoke from his mouth and nostrils. He sighed with a deep satisfaction and visibly relaxed. He barked something again in Thai and the houseboy immediately began preparing another pipe. ‘I have asked him to prepare you a pipe,’ he said without looking at her.

Lisa sat frozen in her chair. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. But there was uncertainty in her voice, something seductive in the sweet smell of the smoke. Her head swam with confusion and alcohol and the temptation of something forbidden. She took a mouthful of rice wine.

The General rolled over on to his side, propping himself on one elbow, his fat smiling face almost beatific. ‘But you must. We are on this earth for such a short time. It would be criminal not to taste the fruits that it offers at least once. And once tasted, never forgotten. You will not regret it, I promise you.’ But still she hesitated. He shrugged, arching his eyebrows in a gesture of regret. ‘Of course, I cannot force you.’ He spoke again to the boy, who plunged the needle for a second time, flipping the pipe over the flame and holding it steady for his master. The General sucked long and deep and lay back again, eyes closed, as the smoke drifted up from his open mouth.

Lisa finished the wine in her cup and rose unsteadily to her feet. Her resolve seemed to ebb away, her throat constricting in anticipation. She seemed drawn, irrevocably, to the pipe, sudden desire overcoming all doubts. ‘Alright,’ she said, her voice barely a whisper.

The General uttered a short command to the boy and rolled over on to his side once more. His eyes, though dark and strangely glazed, shone brightly. He held out a hand. ‘Come.’

She crossed to the bed and sat on the edge of it, watching fascinated as the houseboy kneaded a third ball of the hot paste on the convex margin of the bowl. She was aware of the General shifting on the bed beside her, of her shoulders being taken gently in his hands. The room seemed darker than when they had entered it. All fear, all doubts had gone, as though somehow she had left her will to resist downstairs among the Buddha images. Her mouth was dry and her face flushed hot. The General’s voice was soft and breathy, very close to her. ‘Do not try and draw it all in at once. You will find it hot on your throat at first. You may choke. Try and draw as much of it into your lungs as you can and release it slowly. The second pull will be easier.’

The boy plunged the needle, released the opium and flipped the bowl over the flame. The General eased her gently towards the outstretched pipe till her lips touched the ivory mouthpiece. The boy held it patiently as she took her first tentative draw, breathing it in as the General had told her. At once the smoke burned the back of her throat and she choked in a fit of coughing. The General held her firmly. ‘Again. Don’t be afraid, it will be easier this time.’ Her mouth and nostrils were filled by a musty, sweet taste, her throat still burning. She drew again and this time felt the smoke filling her lungs. And as she slowly exhaled, a soft relaxing wave seemed to break over her. ‘Again,’ the General’s voice was softly urging. She drew a third and fourth time before exhausting the opium and lying back, filled with a wonderful warm sense of euphoria. She closed her eyes, hardly aware of the General gently lifting her to lay her out along the length of the bed. Weightlessly she drifted back through space. Falling. Flying. Free.

When, finally, she opened her eyes the room seemed oddly cool. She shifted her head a little to one side. The oil lamp had been doused and the houseboy was gone. A hand turned her head back to face front, and soft wet lips pressed against hers, a tongue forcing them apart, flicking into her mouth. Panic rose in her throat. ‘No,’ she said, turning her face to one side, and the sound of her refusal seemed to come from very far off. She tried to push the General away, but her arms had no strength. ‘No,’ she said again, hearing the urgency in her own voice now. But it was all too late.

Chapter Thirty-One

The rain raised a fine spray like mist from the river in the first grey light of dawn. It battered on the tin roofs of the buildings all along the wharf, filling the air with a constant drumming, drowning the slow chug-chug of the launch as it nosed its way gingerly into a deserted berth. The docks had a haunted air, eerie in the half-light, devoid of any sign of human existence.

McCue crouched, dripping, on the roof of the cabin, supporting himself on the machine-gun mounting and peering keenly through the saturated gloom. For a moment he tensed as he thought he saw a movement beyond the dark shadows of the empty sheds, then relaxed as he realized it was only a skinny scavenging dog nosing its way through the debris in search of food.

There was a jarring bump, and a grinding of wood against concrete, as the launch came to rest against the wharf. The engine coughed and was silent, and McCue saw Elliot emerge from the cabin, crouching as he ran through the rain to the forward section of the boat to gather up the coiled painter. The Englishman glanced back at McCue, who nodded once and watched as Elliot leaped on to the quay and quickly wound the painter around a rusting metal capstan. Elliot now dropped to a crouch, swinging his M16 into readiness, and glanced around him. McCue jumped down on to the deck. Two pairs of frightened eyes peered back at him out of the gloom of the cabin.

‘Right,’ he whispered. He heaved his pack on to his shoulder and lifted a second. Ny already had Slattery’s pack firmly strapped to her back. They were heavy, stuffed with as many of the boat’s provisions as they could carry. McCue flicked his head towards the door. Supporting her mother on her arm, Ny moved out into the rain and headed forward towards the sodden red flag of the defeated Khmer Rouge.

Elliot waited with outstretched arm to help the two women on to the quay, M16 pointing up toward the leaden sky. Ny looked around in the growing light. She remembered the last time she had stood on this quay, with her mother and father and Hau, one family among thousands waiting to board the boats that would take them across the river to the Royal Palace to celebrate the Fêtes des Eaux; a colourful happy crowd, noisy and excited. Elliot touched her arm. ‘We’ll follow you.’

She nodded. He swung his pack on to his back, gripping her upper arm firmly, and the four moved off through the falling rain, passing beyond the vacant, dripping sheds, west towards the centre of the city, unaware that less than ten kilometres to the south the leading Vietnamese divisions were already on the move and would be here in a matter of hours.

Serey hobbled along behind, struggling to keep up, clinging to McCue’s arm, half dragged, half carried by him. The hard paving felt odd beneath her feet after the years of soft mud squelching between her toes in the paddies. Even the smell of the city seemed strange, though it was different now — not as she remembered it. There was a stink of decay carried in the air by the rain, like stale cooking and rusted metal. All around them lay the carcasses of war: tanks burned out by the victorious Khmer Rouge in ’75, jeeps overturned, APCs with noses buried in the walls of buildings. Drab, rain-streaked apartments loomed overhead, gaping windows staring down like sightless eyes, doorways smashed in like so many missing teeth in a sad smile.

She hardly knew where they were. Up ahead she caught glimpses of Ny pointing uncertainly, the tense figure of Elliot urging her forward, clinging to the shadows of empty buildings, hesitating at every junction. And always, the voice of the American whispering close to her ear, coaxing, encouraging. On, on. Somewhere, far off to the west, the distant crump of an artillery shell increased the urgency. Serey found it difficult to breathe, a pain tightening across her chest, legs buckling as her head swam. Daylight had grown around them almost without their noticing, the ghost of the city emerging from the shadow of night to reveal its full horror. It was unreal, like some flickering monochrome image from an old movie. This was not her home. She didn’t know this place.

Almost as suddenly as it had begun, nearly twelve hours before, the rain stopped, and the tropical sun rent a great chasm in the dark sky, lining black clouds with gold. The streets were immediately awash in soft light shimmering and reflecting from every wet surface to create the illusion of a newly painted world in which the paint had not yet dried. The sticky humidity gave way to a scorching heat that burned their skin, and they felt naked and exposed. Steam rose like smoke from the wet streets, and from their sodden clothing.

They emerged into a large, empty square, and Serey gasped as though struck by a blow. On one side, the station towered above them, an imposing facade crumbling from years of neglect. A row of tumbledown apartment buildings led her eyes to a vast open space the size of a football pitch, incongruous, like a piece missing from a jigsaw. Mist rose in clouds from rainwater gathered across it in great pools. McCue put an arm round her waist to keep her on her feet.

‘What is it?’ But she could not speak and he followed her gaze.

‘The cathedral,’ she whispered at last. ‘It is gone.’ She remembered seeing it as a child, vast and imposing, a monumental stone edifice to a strange God. It had dominated the centre of the city, built by the French colons in the Thirties, the symbol of civilizing Catholic colonialism. How could it be gone? It had seemed for ever. And yet not a stone remained.

Serey’s head dropped. If the cathedral was gone, what hope of finding her son in this bedevilled place? She had known all along that he would not be here. Hope had remained alive only for as long as Phnom Penh had seemed an impossible goal. She felt her heart wither inside her. A soft hand on her arm raised her eyes to see a reflection of herself twenty-five years ago, and she recognized the same hopelessness in the eyes. ‘We are almost there. We must not give up now.’ The hope in Ny’s voice belied the desolation she felt.

The crump of artillery shells came again from the west, but closer now. Somewhere out towards the airport.

Elliot’s voice was strained. ‘We must keep going.’

Ny led them on past the site where the cathedral had stood, along a tree-lined avenue leading to a tree-covered hillock, Le Phnom, from which the city had taken its name. They hurried by a tall, crenellated building that had been the country’s most famous and celebrated hotel, Le Royal, renamed Le Phnom after the Lon Nol coup in 1970. Once, French colons and their stagiaires, planters and tourists, had sat on its grand terraces sipping Chablis and dining on fabulous fish from the Mekong. Now those same terraces gazed out on the avenue with dilapidated indifference as the stricken group limped by: an Englishman and an American, and two Cambodians who were survivors of a holocaust even the Nazis could not have imagined. Fleetingly, Elliot wondered if the French colonizers on their mission to ‘civilize’ this country a century before could ever have dreamt of such things. History had a power and will of its own which could not be predicted. Only in retrospect could understanding be found, and sometimes not even then.

As they trailed through empty suburban streets the sky swallowed the sun and began again to spit fat drops of rain. It was impossible now to tell whether it was artillery they heard in the distance or the rumble of thunder. Crumbling villas sat in silence behind high walls and fleshy-leaved trees. Elliot carried the semi-conscious Serey in his arms. At first she had seemed feather-light and fragile, as if she might break if he handled her roughly. But now she was a dead weight, his arms aching with the strain, his khaki T-shirt black with sweat. McCue’s rifle hung down at his side, an admission of impotence in the face of overwhelming odds. He turned his face upwards to let the warm rain splash down on his burning skin. They had not seen a soul.

The city was empty, abandoned to history and the Vietnamese. Ny walked mutely ahead, glazed eyes registering the familiar landmarks of her childhood — a time that belonged to another life in another world a million years ago. She heard the faint echo of children playing in the street. Some of the faces she saw quite clearly. Others remained obstinately obscure. Her mother’s voice rang out in admonishment, scolding. They must stay in the garden. It was dangerous in the street. Such simple dangers, so easily avoided.

‘What’s wrong?’ Elliot searched her face with concern. She had stopped, suddenly, in the middle of the road, trembling fingers toying tentatively with each other.

‘We’re here,’ she said simply.

Elliot’s eyes strayed past the broken gates to the streaked facade of the villa beyond. Its smashed shutters hung from windows opening into a gloomy interior. Gently, he put Serey back on her feet and held her arm as she wobbled unsteadily, blinking to focus on the house she had thought she would never see again. ‘You’re home, Serey.’ His voice was husky. A mighty crack of thunder broke overhead and the heavens opened. Elliot could not tell if it was the rain or tears that streaked Serey’s face.

Slowly he led her through the rain up the broken driveway, past the buckled remains of an old bicycle, up a short flight of steps and through the open door. The house was a shambles of dust and debris, the air hot and rancid, and thick with the smell of human excrement. Flies clustered around them, filling the stillness with their incessant whine.

McCue stepped quickly past them and into a front room, stooping to pick up an AK-47 from amongst the rubble. He shook the dust from it and checked the magazine. He looked up at Elliot. ‘Half full.’

Both men turned as a tiny cry escaped from Serey’s lips, and she shuffled through the darkness of the hall to pick up a threadbare teddy lying abandoned in the dust. She clutched it to her chest and dropped, sobbing, to her knees. Elliot glanced at Ny. She shrugged helplessly, almost overcome by emotion.

‘It belong Hau.’

Elliot went forward and crouched to put his arms around Serey. She was shivering and let her weight fall against him, her body racked with sobs. Her thin grey hair clung to her wet face as he pressed it gently to his chest. He could find no words of comfort or hope, and for a moment thought how strange it was that he should even try. Facing him, a door torn off its hinges lay on the floor, thick with a dust broken only by the tracks of small, bare feet. His eyes flickered up, penetrating the darkness of the room beyond. There, crouched against the wall, the naked figure of a small boy, knees pulled up under his chin, stared back at him. Time hung suspended, like the dust, for long seconds. The boom of artillery, the crackle of small-arms fire and the roar of trucks and tanks carried on the rain from the distant edges of the city. ‘Serey,’ Elliot whispered. And, again, more urgently, ‘Serey!’ Something in his voice made her lift her head from the depths of despair. She saw light reflected in his eyes and turned to follow his gaze.

A cry of anguish tore from her throat and she broke free of him, scrambling over the door and into the room.

‘What is it?’ Ny’s voice came from the other end of the hall. Her bare feet padded through the gloom. She stopped in the doorway, her eyes filling with tears at the sight of the skinny, naked figure rocking back and forwards in Serey’s arms on the floor, clutching at her soaking black tunic. Wordlessly, she walked into the room and knelt to put her arms around her mother and brother and bury her face in theirs.

Elliot slumped back against the wall and lit a cigarette, his eyes gritty and stinging from lack of sleep. He heard footsteps crunch across the debris and looked up as McCue turned his eyes from the room to meet his. They held each other’s gaze for a long moment, then Elliot looked away. He had nothing to say.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Sunlight slanted through the shutters in long yellow stripes, cutting through the dark interior to zigzag across the contours of the bedroom and the bed. Lisa’s slender white body lay twisted among the sheets, frozen in the final turn of a restless sleep as though bound there by the strips of light. She seemed caught in time, like the dust suspended in the still air. Somewhere, far off in the depths of the house, the faint sound of breaking glass disturbed the silence, seeping into her troubled dreamland to force her up through unfolding shrouds of darkness to the waking light of day.

For several drowsy moments she lay still, feeling nothing but a vague awareness of the slats of light that lay across her like hot fingers. She turned her head a little to the side and saw the oil lamp on the bedside table. A blurred memory pricked her consciousness, fighting to find focus. And then it all flooded back in a sudden shocking wave of recollection, horrifying in its clarity. She sat bolt upright, a fluttering in her chest, a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. She tasted the choking, cloying smoke of the opium, saw the face of the General hovering over hers, twisted to ugliness by the force of his passion.

She looked around her, suddenly anxious that he might still be there, but the room was empty. Only the stale smell of the opium lingered. For a moment she wondered if perhaps it had all been some kind of nightmare induced by the drug. Then she saw the stain of her blood on the sheets and let out a cry of shame and hurt. She turned quickly on to her side as bile rose from her stomach, burning her throat and mouth to spew out on to the pillow. Her eyes blurred as they filled with tears.

She lay for several minutes sobbing painfully, increasingly aware of the raw, tender feeling inside her. Then, slowly, she eased herself from the bed and rose unsteadily to her feet. Still trembling, she picked up the General’s black gown from where it had been dropped on the floor. She slipped into it, hugging it tightly around her, and crossed to the door, each jarring step a painful reminder of her lost innocence. The hall was dark. She made her way along it, pushing each door open until she found the bathroom. The light switch yielded a hard bright light that glared back at her from white-tiled walls. Light-headed and on the point of fainting, she staggered to the washbasin and was sick again, a dry, retching sickness. She looked up and saw, with a shock, her face staring back at her from the mirror. It was a face she barely recognized, eyes swollen and puffy from tears she had no recollection of spilling. She saw the disgust in her expression and turned quickly away to run back along the hall to the bedroom.

Her clothes lay strewn across the floor at the end of the bed. Hurriedly, she gathered them together and slipped into her red silk dress with fumbling fingers. She felt soiled. Dirty. But her desire to get out of this house was even greater than her desire to wash — if it would ever be possible to wash away the shame.

She hurried down the stairs as the General’s houseboy emerged from the kitchen winding a strip of lint round a bloodied hand. He grinned. ‘I break glass,’ he said. ‘Cut myself.’

‘Where’s the General?’ Lisa heard herself asking.

‘Gone,’ said the boy. ‘Early.’

Lisa fought to remain calm. ‘Would you call me a taxi, please.’

‘Sure,’ said the boy. ‘You want breakfast first?’

‘No!’ Lisa heard the panic rising in her voice. ‘Just call me a taxi.’

With a little bow, the boy disappeared back into the kitchen. Lisa saw her purse lying on the settee where she had left it. She picked it up and looked inside. Her heart sank. No money. She put a hand on the back of the settee to steady herself. Think! Think! Grace would pay for the taxi when she got there. Wouldn’t she? Of course she would. She perched on the edge of the settee and waited for what seemed an age. The General’s collection of Buddhas stared at her from shelves and plinths, something mocking in the serenity of their gentle, smiling faces. She found herself shivering, and had to concentrate to stop her teeth from chattering.

Eventually the houseboy came out from the kitchen. ‘Taxi here.’

She almost ran to the door, flinging it open to run down the steps to the waiting car. She slipped into the back seat and pulled the door shut, and only when she saw the driver’s inquiring eyes in the mirror did she realize that she did not know Grace’s address. Again she fought to stay calm. ‘Do you know La Mère Grace?’

‘Everybody know La Mère Grace,’ the driver said with a grin.

‘Can you take me there, please?’ She was surprised at how controlled she sounded.

‘Chez La Mère Grace?’ said the driver. ‘No problems.’ And Lisa let her head fall back, weak with relief, as the car drew away from the house, out into the soi and away from the Klong San Saep towards Rama I Road.

‘La Mère Grace, La Mère Grace! Is Miss Lisa!’ The girl’s shrill Thai voice pierced the brooding silence of the villa, her pale feet pattering across the cool, tiled floor.

Grace emerged anxiously from the dining room wrapped in a white bathrobe, hair pulled back from her drawn face. There was shock in her eyes as she took in the pale, bedraggled figure of the English girl standing awkwardly just inside the door, her new red dress creased, and torn at the shoulder. ‘Good God, child! Where have you been? I’ve been worried sick about you!’ She hurried across the hall to take her arm as Lisa almost fainted. Grace barked an instruction in Thai and the housegirl moved quickly to take Lisa’s other arm. But Lisa took a deep breath and shrugged them aside.

‘I’m alright.’ All the way across the city in the taxi she had wanted only to throw herself into Grace’s arms, to tell her everything, to feel her warmth and sympathy. But now that she was here she felt trapped by her own secret; guilty and ashamed. ‘The taxi is still in the drive,’ she said. ‘I had no money.’

Grace nodded to the house girl, who hurried away to see to it.

‘I’d like a bath,’ Lisa said.

‘Of course, child. Have you eaten?’

Lisa shook her head.

‘Then I will see there is some breakfast waiting for you when you come down.’ Grace watched with concern as Lisa walked to the foot of the stairs. As she climbed the first step, Lisa hesitated, half-turned, and looked back as though about to speak. Grace felt a chill run through her at the penetration of those sad blue eyes. She wondered, with a tiny stab of guilt, if it was accusation she read in them, but whatever it was that Lisa had thought to say, she changed her mind, turning away again to walk stiffly up the stairs. Grace stood for a long time in the hall after Lisa had gone. She was disturbed, confused by the powerful and unfamiliar feelings of guilt that the girl had aroused in her. It was as if some half-remembered conscience had returned from a half-forgotten past to haunt her.

She wandered back through to the dining room and sat listlessly at the long table. A great wave of fatigue broke over her and she let her head fall into her hands. It had been such a long, sleepless night, an agony of waiting. Each time she had closed her eyes, Lisa’s trusting face had materialized in the dark, and she had been forced to open them quickly to dispel the image. She had lain wide-eyed, remembering the touch of the girl’s father. The thought that he might now be dead had only increased her sadness. She heard the faint sound of water running, the bath being filled, and she felt her eyes filling, too. Unaccountably. She shook her head. It was madness! Had she survived a life of corruption, actively pursued it, only to fall victim to the insidious innocence of a young girl? Such feelings, she knew, were a weakness, stealing away her strength and independence. And that could only be dangerous. For the first time she felt a seed of fear germinate deep inside her.

Grace was still sitting at the table when Lisa came down, wrapped in a thin cotton robe, her hair still wet and brushed back from her face. There was something almost shocking in the whiteness of her skin, more naked than naked. With all trace of make-up washed away she looked very young. Her eyes were red and still puffy. She cast a listless eye over the fresh fruit that had been laid out.

‘Help yourself,’ Grace said.

‘I’ll just have some orange juice.’ Lisa leaned over to pour herself a glass. She sipped at it pensively. There was something dead in her expression, something very far away.

Grace watched her apprehensively. ‘Sit down.’

But Lisa turned her back and drifted slowly across to the French windows where she stood in the open doorway gazing out at the sun-dappled garden. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said at length, without turning. ‘I’m not very good company.’

A brightly coloured bird flitted among the dense green growth, screeching some secret signal to a mate. Lisa felt Grace’s hands on her shoulders, warm lips on her neck, and a shiver ran through her. ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’

Lisa did. But she couldn’t. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

Grace moved round to her side and took her hand. ‘It might help. Whenever you feel you can.’

Lisa turned to face her and was struck anew by her perfect beauty. Fine, dark, almond eyes, the curve of her cheekbones, the full sensuous lips; lips that had kissed her father’s. And for a moment she was almost tempted to lean forward and brush her own lips against them. But the moment passed and she took a step away, turning back to the garden. ‘My father’s dead, isn’t he?’

Grace was shocked by the cold fatalism in her voice. She hesitated too long. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

Lisa glanced at her. ‘He should have been back by now. They were talking at the table last night about the Vietnamese, how they have defeated the Khmer Rouge. How things are in Cambodia. Even if he has survived till now he doesn’t stand much chance, does he?’

Grace lowered her eyes and shook her head sadly. ‘I suppose not.’

‘I think I want to go home,’ Lisa said.

‘You’re in no state to travel.’ Grace wondered why the thought of Lisa going induced in her a feeling close to panic. ‘In a day or two, perhaps. You need to rest.’

Lisa nodded distantly. ‘Is there any word of my passport?’

‘I haven’t heard anything. I’ll speak to Tuk.’

Lisa stepped out on to the terrace. ‘You know, when I first arrived here, I thought Bangkok must be the most exciting place on earth.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘Now I just want to go home. I should go to the embassy and see if they have news of my passport.’

‘Tomorrow.’ Grace moved on to the terrace beside her. ‘I’ll take you tomorrow.’ She ran her long, brown fingers through Lisa’s still damp hair. ‘Perhaps you should try and sleep now. Maybe later you’ll feel like talking.’

Lisa was silent for a very long time before she turned to face her, and Grace saw that her eyes were filled with tears. ‘I just feel so dirty,’ Lisa said. And she turned and ran back through the cool of the dining room and disappeared into the hall. Grace heard her bare feet on the stairs.

‘So do I,’ she said softly to herself.

The day passed in a tormented twilight world, somewhere halfway between sleep and waking Even with the shutters closed against the heat of the day, the room was still hot and airless. Lisa twisted and turned, naked on the double bed, tangling and untangling the sheet around her legs, clutching a pillow to her breast for comfort. Her head felt fuzzy, filled with cotton wool. Her throat was swollen and she found it difficult to swallow. For a long time she thought she would never sleep. Her thoughts were vague and curiously elusive. Faces swam before her eyes. Sivara, good-looking, smiling, seductive; and then ugly and twisted, filled with malice. Tuk, with his smiling lips and cold fish eyes. The General, smiling eyes creasing his round, gentle face, then burning with a dark, heartless passion. And Grace. Something in her eyes Lisa didn’t understand. Something disturbing. And always her father, his features unclear except for the livid scar across his cheek, the missing earlobe, the short dark hair greying at the temples. He stood in the rain watching her from a distance. She strained to see his face more clearly, but somehow it remained obscure.

A voice growled close to her ear. You fool! You stupid little fool! How can he be your father? Your father is dead! Dead! She turned to find herself looking into David’s pale, angry face. His mouth was curled in contempt. Do you think he cares? Why should he care? You’re nothing to him! I’m all you have now. She turned to look back at the man standing in the rain, but he was gone. You see, I told you, he’s dead! No, she screamed. No! No! No! And she awoke with a start to find that the room was in darkness, the echo of her voice fading into stillness.

She lay for a moment, breathing hard, disorientated by the unexpected passage of time. She must have been asleep for hours. Gradually her eyes adjusted to the pale moonlight that filtered through the shutters. Shapes and shadows took form around her. A movement caught her eye.

‘Don’t be alarmed. It’s only me.’ Grace’s voice was soft, almost a whisper. Lisa could see her only in silhouette. She moved away from the window towards the bed and sat on the edge of it.

‘How long have you been in the room?’ Lisa asked.

‘A while. I was worried about you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Lisa said. ‘You must think I’m very stupid.’

Grace reached out and ran her fingers lightly down the side of Lisa’s face. ‘Not stupid. Just innocent.’

‘I never thought...’

Grace placed a finger over the girl’s lips. ‘Shoosh. I know. I’ve spoken to the General.’ She paused. ‘I’m afraid there’s really nothing we can do. I’m sorry.’

Lisa nodded in mute acceptance. Then, ‘But don’t be sorry,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

Her words turned the knife in Grace’s wound, and the older woman was glad the girl couldn’t see the guilt in her eyes.

‘I feel as if I’ve been robbed,’ Lisa said. Her voice cracked in the dark. ‘Of something I can never get back.’

‘You have, child. It should have been yours to give. It should have been a wonderful experience.’ A long silence. ‘I feel so responsible. It was me who introduced you to the General.’

‘You weren’t to know.’ Lisa’s innocence was still painful to Grace, and she wondered why she continued to allow herself to be hurt by it, almost sought it, as if somehow the pain could atone for her guilt.

‘It was horrible.’ Grace saw a silver tear roll down Lisa’s cheek. ‘I’ll never sleep with a man again.’

‘Of course you will.’ Grace lay down beside her, propping herself on one elbow and brushing the hair lightly from Lisa’s forehead. ‘It’s the most wonderful thing in the world. With the right man.’

‘I wish...’ Lisa said.

‘You wish what?’

‘I just wish that I could have known my father.’

‘You mustn’t give up hope, Lisa. You mustn’t ever do that.’

‘You can’t hope for the impossible. He’s dead. I know he is.’

‘Oh, Lisa.’ Grace took her in her arms, holding her head briefly to her breast, before rolling slowly away to swing her legs out of the bed.

Lisa caught her arm. ‘Don’t go. Please.’

But Grace only shook her head. And Lisa realized, with a start, that there were tears in Grace’s eyes as the older woman turned toward the door.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Grace sat on the edge of a hard leather chair, gazing bleakly around Tuk’s spartan study. There was no warmth in the room, even in the light of the reading lamp on the desk. She was tired, her eyes gritty. It was almost forty hours since she had last slept. The desire to lie on, pressed close to Lisa’s warm young body, had been almost irresistible. But she had forced herself to leave the temptation of the girl’s room, knowing that she had to act fast if she was to save Lisa’s life.

She had heard Tuk speaking on the telephone in the hall, but it was several minutes since he had hung up and still he had not reappeared. The call had come at an infuriatingly inopportune moment. When she arrived, Tuk had been mellow and relaxed, and she guessed that he had been smoking — there had been that glaze about his eyes. He had listened to her, sipping an iced whisky, gazing off into the distance, his mind on other things. The fate of Elliot’s daughter seemed unimportant. His interest lay elsewhere.

The girl was unaware, Grace told him, that the General had bought her virginity. She thought she had been raped. She had no idea of Grace’s role, or Tuk’s, so she posed no threat to either of them. What harm would it do if they let her go, gave her back her passport and put her on a plane? She was only a child, after all.

And then the call had come, and Tuk’s indifference had shifted at the mention of the caller’s name. It had meant nothing to Grace. Sam Blair. English — or American perhaps.

She looked up as Tuk re-entered the room. His face was creased by a deep frown, his eyes black and thoughtful. Grace grew more tense. It did not augur well. He wandered to his desk without glancing in her direction and lifted his drink. For a long time he stood just holding it, staring into its amber depths, frozen in thoughtful contemplation. Then he turned a speculative gaze in her direction.

‘What I don’t understand, Grace,’ he said, ‘is your motivation. What is this girl to you?’

Grace gave a tiny shrug. ‘An innocent,’ she said.

Tuk showed his teeth in a nasty grin. ‘Have you slept with her?’ Grace made no reply. ‘A week ago you saw only money to be made.’

‘The General paid well.’

‘As will many others.’ Tuk emptied his glass and crossed the room, still holding it. He smiled down at her and reached out with his other hand to hold her jaw, gently squeezing her cheeks between his thumb and forefinger. Grace resisted the temptation to recoil from his clammy touch. ‘You are a very beautiful women, Grace.’ He shook his head. ‘You like girls, don’t you?’

‘Not exclusively.’ Grace’s voice was steady. ‘Unlike you and your boys.’

His pincer grip tightened at once and his smile curled into a sneer. ‘You know what I think?’

‘No, Than. What do you think?’

‘I think you’ve gone soft in your old age, Grace. I think you’ve fallen for that girl.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Than!’

He snapped her head back in a sudden, vicious movement and leaned to push his face very close to hers. She made no attempt to struggle, but held herself rigid and still. ‘Don’t ever call me that!’ She smelled the whisky and opium on his breath. ‘You didn’t think I was ridiculous when I set you up here in Bangkok! When all you had was a reputation and a few thousand baht! I made you, I can break you.’ And he smashed the top of his glass on the arm of her chair and thrust the jagged edge at her face. He felt her trembling in his grip and was pleased by her fear. ‘And I could mark that pretty face of yours so that no man’ — he chuckled — ‘or woman, would ever want to look at you again.’ The light in his eyes reflected the exultation in his power.

‘I’m sorry, Than. I didn’t mean any disrespect.’ She heard the shake in her own voice.

He jerked her head free and stepped back. ‘Good,’ he said.

She raised a hand to her cheek and felt blood oozing from the wound where the glass had pierced her skin. He strode back to his desk and banged down the remains of his glass.

‘Anyway, I have no choice now. I must dispose of her.’

Grace felt sick. ‘Why?’

‘That call.’ He gestured towards the hall. ‘It was from an associate of Elliot’s. He was the one who gave the wretched girl my address. I told him I hadn’t seen her.’ He shrugged and held out his hands. ‘So there you have it. If I let her go he’ll know I lied. I can’t take that risk.’ He seemed annoyed that the decision should be forced upon him.

Grace sought desperately for some kind of reprieve. ‘But surely, she’s still worth preserving as insurance — against Elliot’s return?’

‘Elliot’s dead,’ he snapped. ‘We both know that.’ Then he relaxed again into his habitual humourless smile. She could not raise her eyes to meet his. He watched with satisfaction as tears fell in dark splashes on the white cotton of her dress.

Chapter Thirty-Five

The embers of the fire glowed faintly in the dark, gathered in the small ring of stones McCue had arranged in the centre of the floor to form a makeshift hearth. He squatted cross-legged in front of it, working his needle by the dying light, a crude pattern cut out of canvas with his hunting knife. A pair of shorts for the boy who lay sleeping curled up with his mother and sister.

Elliot glanced at the sleeping bodies of mother and children lying as one, arms and legs entwined. Their first physical contact in nearly five years. Hau’s face was buried in his mother’s withered breast, McCue’s sweat-stained T-shirt drowning his nakedness. Tears had dried, bellies were full. They were at peace, even if only for a few hours. Serey seemed to have drawn strength from the tearful frailty of her son, a rediscovered sense of purpose. Just as Elliot had lost his. She had taken charge of boiling the rice in a pot she had salvaged from the wreckage of her kitchen. She was a mother again, all her maternal instincts driving her to feed and protect her family.

Throughout the day they had heard the distant sound of sporadic gunfire, as Vo Nguyen Giap’s Vietnamese army secured the city. Closer, they had heard the rumble of trucks carrying troops toward the city centre, the roar of tanks moving into strategic positions. It was not a time to be on the streets, and they had stayed hidden and secure in the wreckage of the Angs’ once elegant villa. Elliot knew, however, it would not be long before the people from the countryside, freed from the Khmer Rouge yoke, would start drifting into the city in search of food, families, friends. The situation would be confused, the Vietnamese as yet without controls, or any kind of temporary administration. The fighting would continue in the north. If there was to be any escape it would have to be soon, while the country was still in a state of chaos.

Escape, Elliot reflected, was all that was left. An admission of failure. He wondered what there was to escape to. The life he had known? Hadn’t the acceptance of this job been an escape in itself — from a life that was going nowhere, a past that had effectively destroyed the future? Escape had become a way of life, a mechanical act, accompanied always by the one person he liked least in the world — himself. And always, as a snowball gathers snow, the burden of his past had grown with the years; a burden that was becoming intolerable.

He shifted his focus back to McCue’s needle as it worked dexterously back and forth through the tough canvas. There was something incongruous in his gentle domesticity. ‘You’re full of surprises, Billy.’

‘Like life,’ McCue said without raising his eyes from the needle. ‘Like finding the kid. Like you killing Mikey in cold blood.’ He raised his eyes slowly to meet Elliot’s. ‘Like any of us still being alive.’

Elliot nodded toward the canvas that was beginning to take shape as a pair of shorts. ‘Where d’you learn to do that?’

‘You learn to do a lot of things when there ain’t no one else to do them.’ He turned back to his needle, the taut muscles of his bare chest reflecting the last glow of the fire. ‘What’s your plan?’

‘We’ll head east tomorrow night. As soon as it gets dark.’

‘We?’

Elliot shrugged. ‘Do what you like.’

‘And them?’ McCue flicked his head towards the two women and the boy sleeping against the wall.

‘We are no longer your concern.’ Serey’s voice, soft in the darkness, startled them. ‘Our lives are in no real danger here. And we are together again. If Yuon wants us he can come and get us himself.’ The acrid wood smoke and the darkness obscured her face from them. ‘You have brought my family together. It is you who are in most danger now. If you can escape with your lives then you must try.’

McCue looked at Elliot. ‘So we’re just going to leave them to the tender mercies of the Vietnamese?’

‘Whatever the Vietnamese might be,’ Serey said, ‘they cannot be worse than the Khmer Rouge. If they can rid my country of such an evil then I welcome them with all my heart.’

But McCue shook his head. ‘We came here to get them out, Elliot. We can’t just leave them. A couple of kids and an old woman.’

Serey’s shrill voice silenced him. ‘Mistah McCue, do you know what age I am?’

McCue sighed. ‘No, lady, I don’t know what age you are.’

‘I am thirty-eight.’ She said it proudly.

And Elliot realized, with a shock, that she was two years younger than himself.

‘I may look old to you. Withered, perhaps. But I still have a mind, and a free spirit. I am not stupid. Which is why I am still alive.’ They heard her shift in the dark, but gently so as not to disturb her children. ‘I survived the slaughter of the educated and intelligent by virtue of my education and intelligence. You cannot for one minute imagine what life was like under the Khmer Rouge. To remain silent when all around you saw only senseless destruction. And yet only in silence was there safety.’

Elliot was surprised by her sudden and unexpected clarity of mind. She had barely spoken in the days since the raid on the commune, except to pursue her dogged insistence that she would not leave Cambodia without her son. There was something compelling in her voice now, a power and intelligence that Elliot had never suspected.

‘In the first year after the Khmer Rouge victory, we were moved around from village to village. We were the new people, those from the cities, regarded with suspicion and often disliked by the ancients, the peasants in whose name the revolution had been made.’ She paused to brush stray wisps of grey hair from her face. ‘After several weeks building small-scale irrigation ditches in the paddies, we were assigned to build a larger canal to bring water from a nearby lake.’ Her remembered frustration was audible in a deep sigh. ‘They made us sleep in the open on mats, without tents, close to the site. We were forced to huddle round fires at night to stay warm and keep away the mosquitoes. Every hour of the day was spent digging. Thousands of us digging — a canal that ran uphill.’

The sarcasm in her tone was acid.

‘The site had not been surveyed, there were no plans, no records. The Khmer Rouge appeared to believe that revolutionary fervour could defeat the laws of physics.’

McCue had ceased sewing, his needle held suspended.

Serey’s voice continued to rise and fall in an oddly monotonous cadence, the hint of an American accent in her nasal tone. ‘The banks of the canal were constructed from loosely piled earth. In the unlikely event that water would someday defy gravity and actually run through it, the banks would simply be washed away. If men and women and children had not been dying all around us from exhaustion and hunger, it would have been laughable.’

They heard her breathing in short, sharp gasps in the dark.

‘One poor brave fool who had, until then, concealed his identity as an engineer tried to tell the Khmer Rouge idiots how it should be done. They paraded him before us at a merit festival. He knew nothing about the revolution, they said, and yet he was trying to tell them what to do. He was the living proof of imperialist arrogance. No doubt he died to prove their point. We never saw him again.’ She paused again, her voice trembling now, choked with emotion.

‘Qualifications, they told us, were saignabat — the invisible signal. All that mattered was physical work, saignakhoeunh — the visible signal. That was tangible. Therein lay honour.’ Elliot realized now it was anger he heard in the scratch of her voice, years of pent-up fury. ‘One listens, one obeys, one says nothing. It takes intelligence to create such evil, stupidity to enforce it. You cannot reason with stupidity.’

Elliot glanced at McCue, who appeared not to be listening. He was staring vacantly into the fading light of the fire.

‘In nineteenth-century Cambodian history there was a sage called Puth,’ Serey went on. ‘Puth prophesied that his country would suffer a dreadful upheaval, that traditional values would be turned on their head, houses and streets would be emptied, the illiterate would condemn the educated. Thmils — infidels — would take absolute power and persecute the priests.’ A tiny shower of sparks burst from the embers of the fire and caught her face briefly in its light, eyes glazed now, lost in painful memory.

‘As an educated woman I might once have poured scorn on such prophecies. But Puth also predicted that the people would be saved if they planted the kapok tree. In Cambodian the word for this tree is kor, which also means “mute”. It was said that only the deaf-mutes would survive this period of chaos. Say nothing, hear nothing, understand nothing.

‘I knew the canal we were digging would never carry water. I said nothing, my children said nothing. We just kept digging.’

From somewhere, perhaps a mile away in the direction of the city centre, came the crackle of automatic fire. A short single burst that was smothered by the night, leaving the silence to be broken again only by the screeching of the cicadas. They sat for so long in the quiet after Serey had finished speaking, that Elliot thought she must have drifted off to sleep. McCue had never stirred. The fire was virtually dead. The brief flare of a match momentarily illuminated the room, sending undefined shadows dancing around the bare walls as Elliot lit a cigarette.

McCue inclined his head a little and turned to look at him. His voice was a hoarse, broken whisper. ‘Whatya gonna tell her old man?’

‘Tell him what I told you.’ Serey’s voice drifted softly across the room, and Elliot peered blindly in the dark in a vain attempt to catch the outline of her face. ‘I don’t expect to see him again.’

McCue’s head drooped forward and he shook it slowly. ‘Guess you win, Elliot.’

But Elliot felt no satisfaction. Only an emptiness. And a desire to sleep.

The sound of voices pierced his restless slumber. Shrill, insistent, argumentative. His eyes flickered open to the hard, painful glare of daylight. He blinked away the grit, but they still stung from the smoke that had filled the room the night before. McCue was sitting back against the wall below the window, the smoke from his cigarette drifting in lazy blue ribbons in the still light.

‘What’s going on?’

McCue’s expressionless glance across the room reflected his indifference. ‘Who knows? They’re all in the garden.’

Elliot rolled over and climbed stiffly to his feet to pick his way through the debris to the back door. Serey and Ny were on their knees, digging with calloused hands in the soft damp earth of what had once been a carefully tended flower bed. Now it was overgrown with weeds and creepers that snagged on their arms and wrists. The boy, Hau, stood defiantly before them, hands on his hips, brows furrowed, anxious and intense, speaking rapidly in a husky high voice. His thin brown legs poked out like sticks from the green canvas of the shorts McCue had made. McCue’s T-shirt hung voluminously from his narrow shoulders, gathered at the waist and tucked into the shorts. He bore little resemblance to the pathetic creature they had found huddled in the back room only twenty-four hours earlier. Children, Elliot thought, had the most extraordinary resilience. And, yet, for all his lack of height, and his meagre twelve years, they were old and knowing eyes that he flicked darkly towards Elliot as he appeared in the doorway. Even more incongruous was the Kalashnikov slung casually across his shoulder. A hand slipped instinctively towards the barrel and held it firm. Ny glanced back over her shoulder, but her mother paid no attention and kept digging.

‘What is it?’ Elliot asked.

Ny said, ‘He want guide you through city tonight, put you on road west. My mamma forbid it.’

‘We could do with a bit of help,’ Elliot said. ‘If the boy knows the way...’

‘You can find your own way!’ Serey’s voice was sharp and hostile, but she did not stop digging.

‘Now that’s what I call gratitude.’ Elliot hawked a gob of phlegm up from his throat and spat it into the bushes.

‘Why would you need my gratitude?’ Serey asked. ‘Is my husband’s money not enough?’

Elliot glanced at the boy who was watching him intently. The boy averted his eyes towards his sister and there was a brief exchange between them. Then he turned again to his mother, uttered a few short words, and strode past Elliot into the house, the Kalashnikov rattling at his side.

‘What did he say?’

Ny opened her mouth to speak, but Serey cut in. ‘He said he is doing it anyway and that I cannot stop him.’

Elliot shrugged. ‘I guess you can’t.’

Serey stopped digging for the first time, and she turned on him a stare leaden with hatred. Steam rose around her from the sodden earth, the rain of yesterday evaporating with the heat of the sun. With the slightest shake of her head she turned back to her digging. Elliot inclined his head to meet Ny’s gaze. It wasn’t hatred in her eyes. It was sadness. Or something more. Pity perhaps. He looked away. Hate was easier.

A single harsh word from her mother recalled Ny to the task of digging. They had made a hole nearly half a metre deep. Elliot trod through soft earth towards them.

‘What are you digging for? Gold?’

‘As good as,’ Serey said. And he heard the sound of her fingernails scratching on metal. He crouched down to watch as both pairs of hands intensified their digging, scrabbling hard to uncover a rusty metal box about a foot square and six or eight inches deep. Serey muttered something in her native tongue as they lifted it out and dragged it on to the mound of earth they had dug out. Burrowing insects scuttled away from the sudden light. She fumbled with the clasp, but it was rusted solid.

Elliot took out his knife. ‘Here, let me.’ After several attempts he broke the clasp and prised back the lid. Inside lay a heavy-duty black plastic bag gathered and tied securely at the neck. Serey held her hand out for Elliot’s knife. He handed it to her and watched as she slit open the bag to reveal its hidden treasure: gold and silver jewellery; necklaces and bracelets, earrings, brooches; diamonds, rubies, emeralds glinting in the slanting sunlight. Thousands of dollars’ worth. Elliot stared in amazement.

Serey kept her eyes lowered. ‘We were once very wealthy, Mistah Elliot. When one had no need to worry about food, one spent one’s money on the luxuries of life, the beautiful things, the expensive things. One would have needed ten thousand bowls of rice to buy a single diamond. But you can’t eat diamonds. Now, perhaps, my diamonds will buy a few bowls of rice.’

From the bottom of the bag she drew out a bundle of notes. US dollars, maybe five thousand in hundred-dollar bills. She tossed them to Elliot. He caught the bundle and looked up, surprised. ‘What’s this for?’

She looked at him steadily. ‘I do not wish to be in my husband’s debt. Or yours.’

Elliot felt the cold touch of the golden handshake, the dismissal of the hired help.

Serey delved again into the bag and lifted out a thin, tattered book embossed with the colonial crest of pre-revolutionary Cambodia. ‘What is it, Mamma?’

Ny took it from her and flicked it open. A photograph of a pretty young woman, barely recognizable as the woman kneeling beside her, stared out from its faded pages, a curious half-smile recalling happier days in another life. Serey was still looking at Elliot, defiance in her eyes.

‘It is my passport,’ she said, then turned to Ny. ‘And yours and Hau’s. It is not worth much now. But it is who we were, and who we will be again.’

Elliot rose slowly and walked back to the house. Serey took the passport from Ny and slipped it back into the bag. As she got unsteadily to her feet Ny said to her, ‘Mamma...’ And she turned to look as Ny picked up the wad of notes from where Elliot had left it lying in the dirt.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Lisa awoke feeling doubt: about who she was, about who she had always thought herself to be. She had come in search of her father and found herself instead. But a self who was still a stranger, full of contradictions, of responses she did not know herself well enough to predict. She was, at the same time, excited and frightened by this new self. The book of her life had quite suddenly opened up an unexpected chapter, leading her off on an eccentric spiral of delicious uncertainty.

The door opened and she saw that it was Grace, and was suddenly self-conscious, as if the older woman might have read her mind.

But Grace seemed not to notice. Her eyes were blank, a hunted look in the lines around them. Her movements were quick and nervous. Lisa smiled uneasily in an attempt to disperse her sudden sense of foreboding. ‘I was just going to get dressed.’

‘Get packed. You must leave quickly.’ Grace’s tone was cold and impersonal. Yet more confusion filled Lisa’s mind.

‘Why? Where are we going?’

‘I am going nowhere. You are going home.’

‘Home?’

‘I have booked your flight. But first you will need to sort out passport details at your embassy. Move.’

And she hurried out leaving Lisa feeling foolish and deflated. Gone were the revelations of the new Lisa, the unsuspected Lisa who had emerged so recently from the cocoon of her past. Suddenly she was the Lisa she’d always been. Young and naive and frightened. She glanced about her in the bedroom’s half-light, sunlight flickering around the edges of the shutters. Everything seemed alien now. All the intimacy between her and Grace dismissed by those few harshly spoken words. Get packed! You’re going home! The eyes that didn’t want to meet hers. Now, another piece of the old Lisa re-emerged. The stubborn Lisa. The petulant child who wanted to stamp her foot and scream, Won’t! Won’t do it! She started to dress hurriedly.

Grace wandered through the cool semi-darkness of the dining room, drumming her fingers along the length of the table. Through the French window, the sun spun soft patterns of light among the green tropical foliage, bright and optimistic, a visual echo of the chattering birdsong, the creak of the cicadas. A normal day, a never-ending cycle. Always the same. And yet, for her, nothing would ever be the same again. It seemed unfair, and unreal, that for her there should be such turmoil and change in the midst of such normalcy. It set her apart, somehow, from the world. She felt disembodied, a ghost haunting the familiar life she had known, but unable to touch it or be touched by it.

Nor could she understand why. Why she should risk everything, even her life, for this girl. Was it guilt? The thought almost brought a smile to her face. Conscience was for those who drew lines of moral distinction. She had never done that, would not know where those lines should be drawn. As Lisa’s naivety blinded her to her innocence, so Grace’s cynicism had never allowed her a sense of guilt. Of course, deep inside she knew the answer, but she shied away from letting it crystallize in her thoughts. That would be too painful.

She caught herself reflected in the glass of the French windows and saw an old face looking back at her, one she barely recognized. And yet it was an accurate reflection of the way she felt. She shivered, sensing cold sweat on her palms. Tears pricked her eyes and she wanted to weep. The layers of self-protection she had wrapped around herself across the years had somehow been stripped away, leaving her exposed and vulnerable. She heard the crunch of tyres on gravel as her chauffeur brought the car to the front of the house, and turned as she heard a footfall in the doorway behind her. Lisa stood framed against the hall, her face set and flushed with defiance.

‘I came to find my father,’ she said. ‘I am not leaving until I do.’ For a moment there was no sound, except for the squawking of birds in the garden. Lisa’s defiance faltered in the face of the naked hostility which hid the tears in Grace’s eyes.

‘Do you really believe he is still alive? After all this time?’ Lisa didn’t know what to say. ‘You said it yourself last night. He’s dead, Lisa! You must go home!’

Lisa shook her head. ‘I was wrong — just looking for reassurance. He’s not dead. I know it.’

‘What do you know?’ Grace’s voice was jagged with contempt. ‘You don’t know anything.’

‘I... I don’t understand.’

‘No, you don’t!’

‘Mr Tuk said—’

‘Hah!’ Grace’s eyes blazed as she moved down the length of the table towards the trembling English girl. ‘Tuk used you like he uses everybody. He double-crossed your father when he went into Cambodia, tried to have him killed. And then you stumbled into his nasty little web, the perfect insurance against your father’s return, a hostage to vengeance. You thought I was your friend. You were my prisoner. Tuk gave you into my safe keeping to do with as I would until you were no longer required.’

The blood pulsed painfully at Lisa’s temples, confusion and disbelief crowding her mind. She wanted to run away from this, didn’t want to hear any more. But a vast weight seemed to bear down upon her, robbing her of any ability to move. Grace stood no more than a foot away from her now, her face twisted and ugly, her voice rising in pitch, almost to a scream. Flecks of spittle gathered at the corners of her mouth. ‘You thought the General raped you. Well, he paid for the privilege. Paid me. Paid dearly. And there would have been others. Dozens of them. Wealthy Thais willing to splash out for a girl like you.’

‘No!’ Lisa screamed. She desperately wanted to wake up, prayed for the nightmare to end. If she screamed loud enough—

The slap of Grace’s palm across her face nearly knocked her over — the same hand that had so tenderly held her in the dark the night before. But still she could hear herself screaming. And again the hand smacked the side of her head. This time she stumbled and half-fell across the table. A voice was still screaming, only it was no longer hers. It was Grace.

‘Get out! Go! Before it’s too late!’

A deep sob tore itself from Lisa’s chest, tears burning acid tracks down her cheeks. She lay across the table unable to move. Grace’s hands took her roughly by the shoulders, pulling her to her feet, as if she were no more than a rag doll. Through the tears Lisa saw the blurred and distorted features of Grace’s face only inches from hers. Hot breath hissed in her face. ‘Don’t you understand? He’s going to kill you!’

A girl appeared in the doorway, Lisa’s case in her hand. ‘The car is ready, La Mère Grace.’

Grace collected herself, brushing the tears away from her eyes. ‘Take the case out to the car.’ Her voice sounded abnormally controlled. The girl melted away into the hall. Lisa pulled herself free and took a step back. She was no longer weeping, but she shook uncontrollably. She stared at Grace with an intensity close to pain.

‘I hate you,’ she whispered, and she turned and ran into the hall. Grace heard her footsteps recede and then the slamming of the front door. Slowly she sank into a chair, staring vacantly into nothingness. She felt empty, sucked dry of blood and life. For a long moment her face was calm, without expression, before suddenly crumpling, and she wept as she had not done since she was a child. She did not hear the scurry of feet across the hall and the cry of her name. Only the shaking of her shoulders by urgent hands caused her to look up.

‘La Mère Grace, La Mère Grace. They are taking Miss Lisa!’

It took a moment for Grace to assimilate what the girl had said. With an effort she pulled herself out of the chair and ran through the hall, wiping the tears from her eyes. On the steps, heat and light rained down like blows. Her tear-blurred vision created the mirage of Tuk’s white Mercedes gliding on air towards the gate. But she heard the crunch of its tyres on the gravel, and saw Lisa’s panicked face pressed against the rear window, her mouth opened wide in a silent, terrified scream. And she knew it was no trick of the light.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

In the hours before they left, while they waited for darkness to fall, Elliot was aware of the boy watching him. Big saucer eyes that fixed themselves, unblinking, on Elliot’s hand as the Englishman absently fingered the tiny silver medallion that hung from his neck. McCue had stripped down his M16 and was cleaning it with an instinctive professionalism. They could hear Serey in the kitchen boiling up a pot of rice. Ny seemed lost in time and space, sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring at the wall beyond Elliot. The boy’s eyes flickered up to meet Elliot’s, and held his gaze for an inordinate length of time, staring with unselfconscious candour. Finally he turned away towards his sister and whispered something to her. The only indication that she had heard was a slow refocusing of her eyes on Elliot. ‘He want know what you wear round neck.’

Elliot felt, between his thumb and forefinger, the contour of the small figure set in its circle of silver, familiar and comforting. McCue glanced up curiously from his gun parts. ‘It’s a St Christopher,’ Elliot said. ‘Patron Saint of travellers. My mother gave it to me on my sixteenth birthday.’ It came almost as a shock to McCue to think of Elliot as having a mother.

‘A charm?’ Ny asked.

‘I suppose you could call it that.’

‘And it work?’

‘Well, I’ve made it this far, so I suppose it must.’

Hau scanned his sister’s face passively as she offered him a brief explanation. The boy was silent, then, for a long while, his gaze drawn back again to the tiny figure, like needles to a magnet.

McCue said, ‘I think the kid would like it, Elliot.’ Elliot shook his head. McCue’s chuckle was sour and filled with irony. ‘I’d never have figured you for a superstitious bastard.’

‘Lots of things you’ve never figured, Billy.’

McCue’s smile never wavered. ‘We’ll need more than a good-luck charm to get us out of here in one piece. It’ll take a fucking miracle. How are you on miracles, Elliot?’ Serey came in with a pot of steaming rice and set it on the floor. McCue’s gaze settled on the sticky brown grains and his smile faded.

‘The last supper,’ he said.

Small campfires flickered in the dark, ravaged brown faces huddled around the flames, more for comfort than for warmth. Occasional troop carriers rattled down the broad boulevards. Jumpy sentries nervously fingered the triggers of automatic weapons, small heads in pudding-bowl helmets. Smoke rose all across the city like clouds of luminous mist. During the day, thousands of newly liberated Cambodians had drifted in from the south, in search of food, friends, relatives — the past. And now, an uneasy silence had settled on the city, like dust; fear and hunger and weariness afflicting both the liberators and the liberated.

Hau could still feel the burn of his mother’s lips on his cheek, the fingers that trembled on his shoulders as she told him to be careful. He had shrugged free of her embrace, embarrassed by her show of affection in the presence of the tall foreigners. He was no longer a child. He was a soldier, a man. As his sister had stepped forward to kiss him, he had taken a step back, maintaining a distance, and made a little solemn bow. And with a nod to the tall ones, he had turned and led them into the dark suburban night, Kalashnikov clutched tight to his chest.

He led them through a maze of empty streets that were as familiar to him as they were unfamiliar to them. He felt good knowing that they were so completely dependent upon him. He took long, loping strides, moving easily through the humid night air, glancing back from time to time to make sure they were still there. And each time he was struck anew, almost shocked, by Elliot’s height. To him he seemed huge; a round-eyed giant with strange, pale skin.

He had only the haziest recollection of the Americans who had once moved freely about the streets of Phnom Penh, and regretted that he had not been old enough to learn to speak their language. What little French he had known was gone for ever. He had felt jealous of his mother and sister, how they could speak to these men. He knew they had saved their lives, and he had been puzzled by his mother’s hostility towards them. Surely they were to be admired: tough, strong, seemingly invincible, like the soldiers in the American movies he had seen before his life had been torn up by the roots. He felt both proud and safe in their company, and he enjoyed the respect with which they treated him. They had saved his family from the Khmer Rouge. It was his duty to save them from the Vietnamese.

It took them nearly an hour, skirting the campfires around the fringes of the city centre, to reach the highway that would take them south-west towards the deep-water port of Kompong Som. They lay in wait for more than fifteen minutes watching a convoy of trucks heading out along the highway, before an unnatural silence fell upon the west of the city. The sky had clouded over, virtually obliterating the moon. You could very nearly touch the darkness. They crouched, huddled together, behind the wall of a derelict factory, creeper growing up all around them where it had broken through the cracked pavings. The only sounds the creaking of the cicadas and the whine of mosquitoes.

Hau could feel the heat from the bodies of the two men, could smell their sweat, see it glistening on their faces. He wished he was going with them, that he did not have to go back. After all, what was there to go back to? But he had a sense of duty, too, towards his mother and sister. He was the man. It was up to him to look after them. He felt the hand of the American slip into his and grasp it firmly. ‘Thanks, kid.’ And for some unaccountable reason Hau felt tears well in his eyes and he was glad it was dark. His sense of safety was slipping away, and he felt less like the man and soldier he wanted to be, and more like the small boy he was.

The taller of the two soldiers, the one his mother had called English — a concept of which Hau had no grasp — pressed something small and hard into his hand. He looked down to see the tiny figure of St Christopher, bowed by the load on its back, and looked up quickly to find the Englishman’s eyes hidden in shadow. He clutched it tightly in his hand and felt strangely moved. The big man ruffled his hair and both men moved out from the cover of the wall and off into the night, silent shadows quickly swallowed by the dark.

A voice called out somewhere away to the right, a high-pitched voice, nasal and shrill. An engine roared loudly in the dark, and lights flooded the road beyond the wall. Hau pressed his back against the brick, and heard the clatter of hard soles on tarmac. Almost immediately the night erupted in a blaze of fire and noise. Giants in silhouette flickered across the factory’s flaking wall, crouched and running. The whine of mosquitoes was replaced by the whine of bullets pinging off concrete surfaces. To Hau, pressed in sudden terror against the brick, the shadows on the factory wall seemed to grow massively in size, huge dark spirits advancing through the night towards him. He watched, transfixed in horror, as their definition melted at the last, diverging and vanishing. The footsteps ran clattering off to the left and right. The harsh rattle of automatic fire fibrillated in the still night air: five, six, seven bursts that seemed to come from all around, echoing back off the factory wall. Above the roar Hau thought he heard the grunt of a human voice, the thud of a body on tarmac.

Then the shooting stopped, as suddenly as it had begun, the chatter of guns replaced by a chatter of frightened, excited voices, before silence returned. The only sound was the erratic splutter of an idling engine.

Hau felt his heart beating in his throat, heard the roar of blood in his ears. His knuckles burned white as he clutched his Kalashnikov in fear. He took a deep breath and ran silently along the length of the wall, bent double, stopping just short of a breach in the brickwork. His breath came in short trembling bursts, and for a moment he could not move. He relaxed his grip on the AK-47 and realized that he was still clutching the St Christopher, its fine silver chain dangling from between his fingers. Carefully he laid his weapon on the ground and slipped the chain around his neck. The bowed figure seemed to burn against his chest. Creeping forward, then, on his knees, he peered cautiously through the shattered brickwork.

The road lay bathed in the sulphurous light of a jeep’s headlamps. Beyond their haloes of brightness, dark figures moved stealthily among the shadows of the darker buildings rising behind. Far away, to his right, Hau saw another figure crouched behind the skeleton of a rusted saloon car that lay at an odd angle, half on the road, half on the pavement, caught in the full glare of the headlamps. The figure was tense and motionless, and Hau realized that the other figures moving beyond the lights were slowly but surely encircling it.

Closer, sprawled awkwardly across the camber of the road, a man lay face-down in the gutter, a pool of blood spreading through the dusty, broken surface. His automatic rifle lay near the faded centre line, casting a long shadow across the ground, reaching out towards his lifeless hand.

With a shock like a fist in the gut, Hau recognized the Englishman. His hand rose instinctively to the medallion that hung around his neck, and he was overwhelmed by guilt. But it was anger that fuelled his sudden, foolish bravery as he snatched the Kalashnikov, stepping out from the cover of the wall and swinging it wildly in the direction of the jeep across the street. Bullets spat from its muzzle in quick succession, hot metal burning his hands, smoke and the acrid stink of cordite flashing up into his face. The front grille of the jeep seemed to dissolve under the sustained burst of fire, bullets ploughing through glass and engine cowling and rubber. Shattered headlamps extinguished the glare, and dark fell across the street like blindness.

Hau was only vaguely aware of the chatter of McCue’s M16, away to his right, and the startled shouts of the Vietnamese. He stumbled through the dark, almost tripping over the prostrate figure of Elliot. Don’t be dead, he whispered to himself again and again. But Elliot’s body seemed lifeless and leaden as he tried to turn it over. Don’t be dead, don’t be dead, don’t be dead! A hand pulled him roughly aside and, briefly, he felt McCue’s sour, rasping breath on his face. Automatic fire seemed to rattle all around them, punctuated by shrill Vietnamese voices and the sound of running feet. A radio crackled somewhere nearby. But in the darkness there was confusion, and in confusion, safety.

McCue grunted as he strained to lift the dead weight of Elliot on to his shoulder. Hau saw the faintest grim outline of his face, and as the American made for the hole in the wall, Hau scampered across the road to retrieve Elliot’s M16. A burst of fire whispered past his face, bullets splintering the brick behind him. Something sharp caught his forehead, just above the right brow, slicing like a razor across the bone. He hardly felt it, but was blinded almost immediately by the blood that ran into his eye. He slung the Kalashnikov across his shoulder and raised the M16, emptying its magazine in wide sweeping arcs of fire across the street. He heard a man scream above the roar of the weapon, before the mechanism jammed on an empty chamber, and he turned and sprinted for the wall, throwing himself through the gap after McCue. Behind him, AK-47s chattered in the dark, but carried no threat now as he ran breathless down the narrow canyons, between towering derelict buildings.

Beyond the far wall that marked the boundary of the former factory, a tiny street led steeply down between old apartment blocks, opening up at the foot into what had once been a small park, now overgrown and threatening to swallow up the streets around it. He stopped to listen. There were no sounds of pursuit. The air was filled with the sweet scent of jasmine blossom, and somewhere far away he heard the distant roar of an engine. A break in the thick cloud overhead opened up on an unexpected glimpse of the moon, and a ghostly light washed the park. McCue was kneeling by a tree, head bowed, gasping for breath that caught in his throat. It was a dry, hacking sound. With a brief backward glance, Hau ran across to join him.

Elliot lay on his back, his chest and arm soaked darkly in blood. His face was chalk pale in the moonlight, and Hau thought he recognized death in its waxen pallor. He placed the tips of his fingers on the Englishman’s neck, just below the line of the jaw, and felt the faintest pulse. McCue turned, his face a mask of blood, and for a horrified second Hau wasn’t sure whether it was his or Elliot’s. Perhaps McCue saw the horror in the young eyes, for he ran the back of his hand across his face to smear the blood away. He looked at it for a moment, then back at the boy, and was surprised to see his face wet with silent tears.

The two women sat huddled in the dark, embracing their unspoken fear. Time was marked only by the sporadic appearances of the moon as it tracked its way across the south-east Asian sky behind thick layers of broken cloud. It was hard to say how long Hau had been gone. Each minute seemed as eternal as the night itself.

At first, Ny heard nothing, but she felt Serey’s grip tighten around her arm and tensed. Then sudden fear gripped them both as the front door crashed open and heavy footsteps staggered up the hall. A gross, misshapen shadow loomed in the doorway. For a moment it stood quite still before lurching forward and falling to the floor, unfolding and dividing as it did so, into two. One half hit the floor with a sickening thud. The other remained crouched, heaving and issuing a sound like the bark of torn bellows. A smaller figure appeared in the door behind them. Serey let out a gasp and rushed to pull the boy to her breast. There was no drawing away this time, no standing on masculine dignity. It was a child’s sobs that she felt tearing at the young chest.

‘What happened?’ Ny stood in uncertain isolation in the centre of the room.

‘It’s my fault,’ Hau sobbed. ‘All my fault.’

‘No.’ Serey tightened her grip on him, but he pulled away.

‘I took his luck. He gave me his luck and they killed him,’ he wailed.

‘For fuck’s sake, someone get the fire going! I can’t see a goddam thing!’ McCue was ripping the blood-soaked clothing from Elliot’s chest.

The first flames sent their shadows dancing around the walls. Elliot’s white skin was touched with blue. The bullet had torn through his chest just below the left shoulder, miraculously missing bone, and coming out cleanly through his armpit. But that had left a mess of torn muscle and flesh. McCue shook his head.

‘He’s lost too much blood. And a wound like this won’t stay clean for long.’ He slumped back against the wall and took out a crushed pack of cigarettes with shaking hands.

‘What you going do?’ Ny asked, her eyes burning with fear and concern.

‘Nothing.’

Serey said, ‘We must dress the wound.’

‘No point, lady! He’s a dead man.’

‘He will be if you don’ do nothing!’ Ny’s voice rose in pitch.

‘For fuck’s sake!’ McCue threw his cigarettes on the floor. ‘He’s going to die! Sometimes you just have to accept it! He would. He knows.’ He pulled himself up on to his knees and drew out his pistol. There was something close to hysteria in his voice as he pressed the barrel against Elliot’s temple. ‘He’d do it. I mean, you saw him. He didn’t give a shit, why should I?’ He tensed, his face a mask, as he squeezed on the trigger with a trembling finger.

Hau’s confusion and consternation propelled him towards the figure kneeling as if in prayer, but Ny held his arm. ‘Your friend had...’ she searched desperately in her memory for the word ‘... cancer.’ It seemed strange on her tongue, innocuous, just a word. Yet the effect on McCue was electrifying. He turned wild eyes on her.

‘What kind of shit is that?’

She nodded towards Elliot. ‘He tell me. Mistah Slattery come here to die. He had something bad inside him. Growing. A sickness.’ She fought to recall Elliot’s words, words spoken on a dark night on the Great Lake that might now save his life. ‘He going to die anyway, even if no one shoot him.’

The fire in McCue’s eyes seemed suddenly extinguished, his finger relaxed on the trigger and he allowed his hand to drop, the pistol trailing loosely at his side. But he remained kneeling, limp and exhausted, like a man whose prayers for release have not been answered, and whose faith in God is shaken.

Hau unclipped the chain at his neck and knelt beside McCue, leaning forward across the prone figure of Elliot to return the St Christopher to its rightful place. He looked up at his mother.

‘If I give him back his luck, maybe he won’t die.’

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Sarit hovered nervously near the arrivals door. Half a dozen cigarette ends lay about his feet, his crumpled white suit grey from the ash of countless others. He dabbed with a grubby yellow handkerchief at the sweat running down his brown face, gathering in the wrinkles and dripping from the ends of his meagre moustache. The evening flight was half an hour late, and his agitation had been increased five minutes earlier by the arrival of two uniformed police officers who stood now smoking and chatting idly by the door

When at length he spotted the face he had been waiting for among the passengers off the London flight, it was with a mixture of relief and trepidation.

‘Mistah Blaih. So pleased to see you again.’ He smiled effusively and shook the big Scotsman’s hand. ‘I got car waiting.’ And he steered the conspicuously European face quickly out to the taxi rank, and the anonymity of the night.

‘Sorry if you’ve been waiting long, Sarit. The bloody flight was late, then there was all that palaver coming through customs. You got the gear?’

‘Oh, yes. Best there is.’ Sarit opened the door of the taxi. ‘Where to?’ He slipped in beside Blair.

‘Just take us into the city. We’ll drive about for a bit.’

Sarit gave clipped instructions to the driver.

‘What about the girl? What did you find out?’

Sarit mopped his face and sat back. ‘Difficult, Mistah Blaih, very difficult. Bangkok dangerous place since Tuk running things.’

Blair found his wallet and slipped out a few notes. ‘Course it is, Sarit. Better, though, to eat half a loaf in fear than have no bread at all, eh?’

Sarit spread thin lips across nicotine-stained teeth, in what he imagined was a smile. ‘Sure, Mistah Blaih, sure.’ He took the notes and rubbed them gently between his fingers, as if he thought they might be printed on rice paper and crumble before he could spend them.

‘So?’

‘They say he tried to have Mistah Elliot killed. But nobody know if he succeed.’ Blair felt the skin stretch tightly across his face, but he held his anger somewhere deep inside.

‘And his daughter?’

‘Don’t know who she is, but he got some white girl. La Mère Grace selling her for big bucks. You know, rich European like Thai girl. Rich Thai like white girl.’

The acid of his anger burned now in Blair’s gut. ‘What did you get me?’

Sarit drew out a cloth-wrapped bundle from under his jacket. ‘Colt point four-five, Mistah Blaih. M-nineteen, eleven A-1.’

Blair unwrapped the automatic pistol and weighed it in his hand. It came in at just over a kilo, and had an effective range of about fifty metres. Loading from a seven-round box magazine, it had considerable stopping power. ‘Ammo?’

Sarit produced two magazines from each pocket. ‘I don’t mind telling you, Mistah Blaih, I was pretty damn nervous waiting around airport with this stuff on me.’ He paused for an apprehensive moment. Then, ‘What you planning, Mistah Blaih?’

‘Don’t know yet, Sarit.’ He snapped a magazine into place and flipped the forward safety catch off, then on again. He nodded towards the driver. ‘This guy to be trusted?’

‘Sure, Mistah Blaih. He like eat frighten half-loaf, too.’

Blair grinned. ‘You’re a greedy bastard, Sarit.’ He paused. ‘I might need you later. Tell him to drop me at the end of Sukhumvit Road.’

Tuk’s villa lay in darkness behind its high walls. A single light twinkled through the leaves that fluttered in the hot night breeze. The gates were locked. Blair pressed the buzzer and waited. A female voice crackled across the intercom. ‘Yes?’

‘Tell Mr Tuk that Sam Blair is here to see him.’

‘You wait.’

Blair glanced at his watch. Almost eleven-twenty. The curfew would be in force in a little over forty minutes. He ran a hand quickly over the bulge beneath his jacket, an instinctive act of reassurance. A high-pitched electronic whine preceded a dull clunk, and the gates swung open.

A girl in a yellow dress opened the door to him and he stepped into the large, air-conditioned entrance hall. The hard glare of electric light reflecting off cold tiles momentarily hurt his eyes.

‘This way, please.’ She led him into Tuk’s study, where the light was gentler, lying in soft pools beneath occasional lamps. Tuk rose from behind his desk, looking fresh and cool in a neatly pressed white shirt. But his smile could not disguise his tension. He held out his hand.

‘Mr Blair. What brings you to Bangkok?’

Blair made no attempt to take the proffered hand. He waited until the girl had closed the doors behind him. ‘I’ve been hearing stories, Tuk.’

Tuk’s hand hung uncertainly in mid-air for some moments before he let it fall to his side. ‘One always does.’ He sank back into his leather swivel chair.

‘About how you tried to have Elliot killed on the Cambodian border.’ Blair walked into the centre of the room, keeping his eyes on Tuk.

‘I have many enemies, Mr Blair. It is inevitable, a man in my position. People will always try to discredit one.’

‘It’s not true, then?’

‘Mr Elliot crossed the border safely into Cambodia. What has become of him since, I have no idea.’

‘And his daughter?’

‘His daughter?’ Tuk frowned, a look of implausible consternation creasing his brow. Then enlightenment, equally implausible, flickered across his dark eyes. ‘Ah, yes, you mentioned her when we spoke.’

‘You’ve seen her, then?’

‘No. I told you on the phone.’

‘That’s strange, Tuk. Because I’ve been hearing other stories. About a white girl fetching big money. White pussy’s a valuable commodity among wealthy Thai businessmen, I understand.’

‘Of course. It is the way of the world. We both know this.’

‘So you know about it?’

‘One hears stories, of course, just as you do. But I have no personal knowledge.’

‘Do you mind if I have a drink?’

‘Please, help yourself.’

Blair crossed to the drinks table and poured himself a large whisky. ‘You know I spent some time in Angola?’

‘It is common knowledge. But, I don’t...’

Blair waved his hand and Tuk stopped short. ‘Some people think I’m a nice guy, Tuk. I think I’m a nice guy.’ He sipped at his whisky. ‘What do you think?’

Tuk felt a tiny trickle of cold sweat run down the back of his neck. ‘I think you’re a nice guy, Mr Blair.’

‘Of course you do. Trouble is, sometimes people who think you’re nice think you’re soft, too.’

‘I don’t think you’re soft.’ Tuk was irritated by having to play this childish role. But fear held him glued to the script.

‘Good. I’m glad.’ He took another sip of his whisky. ‘Good stuff this.’

‘Best Scotch.’

‘Makes me think of home.’ Tuk smiled nervously. ‘See, there was this laddie in Angola. He thought I was soft. His first mistake. He was taking money from the other side, feeding them our position. Second mistake. I cut his dick off and stuffed it down his throat.’ Blair drained his glass and replaced it carefully on the table. ‘Sometimes I’m not such a nice guy.’

Tuk reached suddenly for the top drawer of his desk. Blair was there in two strides, grabbed his arm and slammed the drawer shut on his hand. Tuk screamed and tried to pull away, but Blair held him firm. His voice was almost a whisper. ‘See what I mean?’

‘You’ve broken my wrist!’ Tuk squealed.

‘What a pity. That’ll put you out of action for a while.’

Tuk flashed him a venomous look. Blair opened the drawer and lifted out a small pearl-handled revolver. The distant rasp of the buzzer on the gate failed to register, even in his subconscious. ‘Very pretty. A real girl’s gun.’ He slipped it into his pocket, and was about to shut the drawer when his eye caught the familiar gold crest, on dark blue, of a British passport.

‘Well, well, well.’ He lifted it out. ‘Dieu et mon droit.’ He let go of Tuk’s arm and walked back around the desk to face him. Tuk doubled forward, clutching his wrist. ‘So Lisa never called on you? Odd that you should have her passport, then, isn’t it?’ Tuk turned frightened eyes in his direction. Blair seemed calm, almost benign, as he drew the Colt.45 out from the belt beneath his jacket and levelled it at Tuk’s head. ‘I’ll give you ten seconds to tell me where she is.’

The door opening took Blair by surprise, and brought Tuk a flicker of hope. Blair took a step back and glanced towards the door, without removing Tuk from his sights. A small, beautiful, Eurasian woman, all in white, stood framed in the doorway. If she was surprised at what she saw, she gave no sign of it. There was a vacant quality about her eyes. ‘Grace!’ Her name slipped involuntarily from Tuk’s lips.

‘Don’t fucking move, lady!’ Blair shouted at her.

Tuk took courage from the interruption. ‘Don’t be stupid, Blair! If you harm me you’ll never find her!’ He glanced triumphantly at Grace, and felt his bravado ebb before the cold, dead stare she returned.

‘You are looking for Lisa?’ Her voice carried the same detachment as her eyes.

Blair glanced warily from one to the other. ‘You know where she is?’

‘I’ll take you.’

‘No!’ Tuk screamed.

‘But we may already be too late. He is having her killed tonight.’

Blair tensed. A shudder ran through him and his eyes glazed as he turned them back on Tuk. ‘Goodbye, Tuk,’ he said.

Chapter Thirty-Nine