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Villiers started. His voice broke. ‘If I’m wrong, they’re already dead.’
    De Villiers couldn’t think clearly. His instincts cried out for immediate action, not for waiting, but his training as a Special Forces soldier required him to do some careful planning before he made a move. It was difficult to keep an open mind on the issue when he had no idea where his daughter was. Or how she was coping. He knew he needed some sleep, but first he had to persuade Emma to take a flight to Indonesia and to stay there until he had found Zoë.
    â€˜Why?’ Emma kept asking.
    â€˜Because I have a job to do and I don’t want you to be in danger while I’m doing it.’
    â€˜This is my house and this is where I’m staying until you bring my daughter back.’
    She blames me for this, De Villiers thought, and she’s right to.
    He pleaded with her. ‘I’ll get her back, but I need you to be far away …’
    â€˜Why? Just tell me why I should go.’
    â€˜I’ve had trouble with these men before.’ She deserved to know the truth, but this was not the time to tell her.
    â€˜Who are they?’ Emma asked.
    De Villiers ignored the question. He had a fairly good idea, but he could not work out why.
    â€˜And you think it is they who have taken Zoë?’ Emma asked.
    â€˜I know they have taken Zoë. They’ve also taken Liesl Weber in Durban. They won’t hurt them, I’m sure.’
    â€˜How can you be so sure?’
    â€˜They want something very badly, and they want it from me. This is not about them, it’s about me. Do you understand now why I want you out of the way?’ he asked.
    Emma knew just enough about his past to be able to venture a guess. ‘You’re going to kill someone,’ she said.
    De Villiers thought about it. ‘If I have to, I will.’
    Emma didn’t waste time making her decision. ‘I’m not going,’ she said. ‘If you’re going to do something on your own, not working with the police, I had better be here to look after you when things go wrong.’
    â€˜But, Emma,’ De Villiers tried to argue, ‘what could go wrong? What?’
    Asking a question was an unpersuasive way to start an argument and she pounced immediately. ‘You could get hurt. You could be locked up. You could be shot.’ When she saw him shaking his head as she spoke, she added, ‘You said yourself that they are dangerous.’
    De Villiers descended into a series of denials, starting with, ‘I said they were dangerous to you, not me,’ but Emma would hear nothing further.
    In the end, they had the first serious fight of their marriage and lay in bed with their backs to each other.
    De Villiers lay still although he couldn’t sleep. He was certain that Emma wasn’t sleeping either. Her breathing was irregular and she lay too still. She was a restless sleeper at the best of times, lying now on this side, then on that, then turning over onto her stomach, and often bumping into him. Sometimes she kicked him hard enough to wake him up. But most of the time she held a foot against him, or had an arm across him, deliberately maintaining some form of physical contact as if she could possess him merely by a touch. She always lay close to him, even when she had her back to him.
    But now she lay away from him at the edge of her side of the bed.
    â€˜I’m not going,’ she said quite clearly in the middle of the night.
    De Villiers sighed and turned over. He put his hand on her shoulder. She was trembling and he realised that she was crying. He knew about his wife’s resilience. She was from a small Indonesian village that had seen more than its fair share of death and destruction. There, the enemy was not human, but a mountain that regularly spewed hot lava and ash into the air to chase the villagers living in its shadow from their homes and to kill the stragglers who