Candice was most definitely channelling Fluffy, without the slightest hint of Blonde.

“What it is, Mike, is we talk you through it, and I type it up as we go, so I might stop and start you several times. We then read it through a few times, and you’d be surprised what can pop out of the back of your mind”

“Why didn’t the Malaysians do this?”

“Having read the paperwork, I suspect it was due to a lack of any shits available for giving. Hang on: Lexie, am I down to do Fluffy or Fang?”

“Fluffy, I believe”

Candice smiled once again.

“I’ll keep the claws in, then. Oh, Mike: if Diane falls asleep, she isn’t actually out of it. She just has a very good free-association thing. She’ll be listening, unless you hear her snoring”

She was doing brilliantly, pulling him from despair to occasional chuckles, and I did indeed end up sitting right back in my chair as he talked us through the letter campaign from Australia, just to get his mother in law to engage, the offers to pay for a flight down from her home to Singapore, the emotional blackmail of the funeral and the angry phone calls that followed, finally coming to a pause with the demand to ‘return’ his son to his Malaysian family.

There had to be something there.

Candice had typed it into her laptop, and was working her way through it with occasional question from Lexie, and little things began to flesh out, mostly irrelevant, such as the fact that the airline rep at Changi had been a Malay rather than Chinese, and which shop Ishmael had gone to in order to buy mints, and, FUCK.

The phone. ‘Either dropped in a river or smashed properly’, Rob had said. I sat up straight.

“Mike?”

“Yes?”

“That conversation with your wife, the angry one”

“What? All dominance games and who gets to the front of the honoured relative queue?”

“The bit about her previous marriage?”

“They wouldn’t accept it”

“And your marriage?”

“Same thing”

“No. There was something else you said, about wives”

It was so very nearly there, and then the word “Cousin” came from me of its own accord. His face clouded.

“Fucking right! They even suggested she marry again, probably about fucking dowries and shit, and---”

“Suleiman. Cousin. Has a fishing business. Where did she say it was?”

Gary opened and closed his mouth a few times, before settling on “Melaka. On the west coast opposite Sumatra. I’m going to drop out for a minute and make some calls. Bobby? You doing the same?”

“Later, Gary. I’ll do them with Mike, okay?”

Gary’s face disappeared, and for the first time since I had met him, I saw what could almost be hope in Mike’s eyes.

“I see what Candice meant, Diane”

“Yeah. I’m just a bit weird. Would you mind, really mind, if we went through it a few more times?”

There was nothing else there, though, so we said our farewells and closed down the call before my team settled down to the traditional unpaid overtime of putting some structure onto the bones I had just dug up.

No. Not those words, Sutton. I knew exactly what sort of calls those men would be starting, so I simply pulled up the maps app and compared geography with the history I had just been given. Search function… ‘fishing fisheries fisherman’ and how the hell was that name spelled in Malaysia? Look up some places with a guess and, yes, ‘Suleiman’?

Nothing so easy, but Alex rang three days later.

“You three got passports, Di?”

“I have, don’t know about the others”

“Could you ask?”

I did so, getting two nods, and gave him the answer.

“Why, Alex?”

“At the moment, it’s need to know. And we need to know more at this end. I’ll be back in touch when, if we do”

Click, and gone.

We got nothing more from our file-scraping, so we closed the folders, locked them away, and got back to builder fraud and another historic missing person case, such fun, and ten days later we had Alex back on line, this time on a video call, just we three women, Sammy and the Super. Alex seemed unable to sit still.

“Diane, thank you. We have made… You are not cleared to know how we sourced this information, so please don’t ask. The first thing we found was financial, an attempt to use Mrs Rahman’s card for a contactless purchase that triggered a PIN request. That attempt was made eighteen months after she was last spoken to”

Lexie asked “Where?”, and Alex waved a calming hand, which was odd coming from someone so twitchy.

“In a few, Lexie. I’ll get to that. Now this…”

A photo appeared, a Malay man in a scruffy T-shirt and board shorts, standing on a dock talking to someone with his back to us.

“This is Suleiman bin Said Husseiyin, cousin to Maryam. Has a fishing business, and you know where. Thing is, he has dual nationality, of a sort, Malaysian and Indonesian, and he lives here”

A satellite map showing a small village or town with lots of greenery around it.

“Please don’t laugh at the name, which is Titiakar. Don’t know if that’s one word or two. The card fraud attempt was in Pekanbaru, the regional capital. We… Calm down. We have called in favours with the Indonesians, and we wish to visit Husseiyin, along with their police. There are other issues involved I am not at liberty to discuss, but this is raising all sorts of discussions at a very high level. If you are willing, we’d like to fly you out there. It may be a false alarm, but both governments are looking to take advantage of the optics. Are you all game?”

Candice looked at me, and then Lexie, and asked the most obvious of questions. Another twitch from Alex.

“Two days’ time”

I rang Blake once we were free, telling him as much was allowed, and then started packing what I had in the way of jungle warfare kit, or at least lighter clothing, though I did make sure I packed my work boots and tactical vest, along with the obligatory baseball cap. The train took us to Reading, the Elizabeth Line took us to Heathrow, and god knows how many hours later, Singapore Airlines delivered us to their home base.

Around 36 hours later, I was starting to feel human again, and could face leaving my hotel room. That flight had been a bloody sight longer than my trip to Cuba.

We gathered for breakfast for the first time, three frazzled women and a drained-looking FCO man, and I was just digging into some fresh fruit salad when there was a call across the restaurant.

“Alex?”

“Gaz! Great to see you. Great to be able to see anything, to be honest—death warmed up, that’s me. Andy?”

“Parking the car. Di, Lexie, Candice? Nice to meet properly. Oh, over here!”

Three of us stood as two more men joined us, but it was Lexie who first went round the table to hug Michael Rhodes.

“The girls have told me so much about their Uncle Mike!”

He kissed the top of her head, which was a simple thing for him, as he was almost as big as Candice’s Barry.

“They have more than returned the favour, Lexie. Neil and me, we both owe you. I hope you know more about this than I do”

Gary pointed upstairs.

“We have a meeting room booked for after breakfast. One more to come, but we meet him at the airport. We have another flight, but a short one”

I was a lot hungrier than I had realised, but did my best to ease it, before we were in a meeting room that could have been anywhere in the world. Gary dove in.

“Andy has appraised these ladies of a few things, Mike, so I will be quick. We have identified the cousin. He lives on Sumatra. Eighteen months after you last spoke to your wife, someone tried to use her credit card in the Sumatran capital. Serous allegations have been made against this cousin, which would have an even more serious impact on Indonesia’s national reputation, which is fragile following what they did in East Timor and are alleged to be doing in New Guinea, so this is an opportunity for them to recoup some global favour. I actually think it is just performative, but if I am right, I don’t give a flying fuck how we got them on side. I have to keep schtumm on some of this. Bosses have called in immense piles of favours. Any questions?”

Lexie was first.

“Feeling a bit silly, but I packed my tactical vest and a police baseball cap. Was that stupid?”

Candice laughed just before I did, and it took a while before we could get the message across to Lexie that if she was silly, that made three of us, while Gary grinned”

“Perfect! There’ll be a camera crew”

Shit.

The man meeting us at Changi was Bobby Nguyen, who clung onto Mike even longer than Lexie had, and then we were boarding another airliner, as I promised my headache and body clock that this was only a hop. Ninety minutes later, and we were down and being led past the border control by a group of uniformed men, whose obvious leader stared hard at Mike before speaking.

“Michael Rhodes?”

“Yes”

One of the other uniforms said something, receiving a glare from his boss, and Mike asked what had been said.

“His attempt at humour, Mr Rhodes, in saying that you do not look Jewish. We will discuss that later. I am Captain Rahim. You will be under my care today. I am promising nothing, you understand, but I will require that you and these police officers stay behind my people. Do you police have badges or identifying garments?”

I pulled out my vest and cap.

“Excellent. Please don them. The rest of you take these tabards”

Yellow, reading ‘POLIS’. Once we were all ready, Rahim led us down a little maze of corridors until we arrived at an exit to the tarmac, where there were three large helicopters and around twenty soldiers. Lexie whispered, “Should have brought my helmet”, just as Rahim opened the door and called out what was obviously an order, the armed men scrambling into ranks. He continued in his language, and I caught a few side-eyes from the soldiers, before they all did a right-face and trotted off to emplane or board or mount, whatever the term was.

I turned to Gary with an attempt at a joke, saying we were overfamiliar with helicopters, but that stuck in my throat as three dog handlers followed the squaddies onto two of the choppers.

Fuck. I still remembered those comments from the Cooper case, about digging up gardens. I was going to feel nauseous anyway, but that thought wasn’t helping. In this heat…

Board. Helmets on, with mikes attached. Strap in. Then that well-remembered delight of being in a very loud tin box, moving in odd ways. Gary elbowed me, to show me his phone, where he had typed a quick message.

“Allegation against cousin is slavery. Indonesia accused of that in N Guinea. That was our lever. Watch what say pls”

We hammered away under a brassy blue sky until I could see water off to our right, paddy fields and masses of dense foliage below, and the craft dipped down low, almost level with the forest canopy, before rearing up and then settling onto the ground. As the engines wound down, Rahim’s voice came from my headset.

“All wait here. We are securing a perimeter”

Fifteen minutes later, and our cabin door slid open, a couple of soldiers waving us forward. The heat was like a wet slap in the face, and I could hear the whine of insects all round me. We were in a clear area surrounded by trees, not a clue about where to go, so I settled my cap in place, already sweating under my claimed wicking top and vest, and followed the men forward through the trees until we came to a sprawling single-storey building, partly thatched with palm leaves, partly tin-roofed. There were six men by the front door, all of them kneeling with their hands behind their heads as soldiers didn’t quite point their rifles at them. Rahim waved me over to one of the men.

“Suleiman Husseiyin. These are British police officers. They want to talk to you”

The kneeling man, who was definitely the one in the dock photo, snarled something in the local language, and Rahim shook his head.

“You speak English. These people speak English. You. Will. Be. Polite. Do you understand? They may have to go away for a few minutes before you speak to them again”

We’re definitely not in bloody Kansas now, Toto.

“Mr Husseiyin, we are here to enquire about an Australian national. Mrs Maryam Rhodes. Do you know anything about her?”

“Who is Maryam Rhodes?”

“Your cousin. Last heard of at a funeral that you both attended”

“I know of no such person”

Mike was starting to pace, and called across, “Maryam binti Rahman Rhodes! My wife!”

Husseiyin replied, “You’re the Yihud, then?” and spat on the ground, as my hand clenched, missing the feel of a nice, friendly asp or pepper spray. I wasn’t actually fussed, as a taser would have been just as welcome or, indeed, any suitably blunt and impactful implement, so I repeated silently the old mantra of not leaving visible damage on one’s detainee.

Rahim sighed.

“Ah. Our guests should take a walk, I think. Perhaps observe my men as they search. Now. Please”

His meaning was plain, as was the long stick one of his soldiers passed him, but I didn’t care. He was probably better with implements than I would have been, and might have a better appreciation of when to stop using them.

Policemen and soldiers were poking everywhere in the building while the dog handlers were quartering the ground as I almost prayed for a nil result. The camera crew lurked, but most definitely well away from whatever was happening to dear Cousin Suleiman.

I stayed with Mike and Bobby, the others moving through rooms in the house, as a dog handler did his thing just to our right. It was almost comical, in the end, as the dog simply stopped dead, the lead jerking the handler’s arm. The hound was rigid, staring at a patch of ground, and that was when I lost all hope of a happy ending. How deep could the grave be?