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finger, he slowly traced around the pink triangle on the cover.
    Didier felt relief flood over him. So that’s why they’d come! He opened his mouth to speak, but snapped it shut when he saw what Officer Komet held in his other hand. It was a framed photograph of himself and Nou, which he kept on the bedside table.
    Ratratarn let the pamphlet fall to the floor. Taking the photo from Komet, Didier watched him trace the same shape, a triangle, onto Nou’s forehead and cheeks.
    ‘Was this man one of the friends you were with this evening, Mister Good?’
    ‘Yes,’ Didier whispered hoarsely. The sense of dread returned.
    The lieutenant colonel placed the picture on the coffee table and nodded to Komet. ‘Check the back of the house, kitchen, garden, everywhere,’ he said.
    The junior officer bowed and walked out of the room. After a moment, Didier heard the back door bang shut.
    ‘Khun Sanga Siamprakorn, native of Chiang Mai, age twenty-four. Worked for several years in Loh Kroh.’ Ratratarn spoke as if reading from invisible notes. He paused and cocked his head. ‘You don’t think he was a bit young for you?’
    There was a razor-thin smile on his face as his hand moved to the holster above his hip.
    Didier understood. He gazed at Nou’s photograph, feeling numb, almost calm. His thoughts were so far away, he didn’t register that Ratratarn had spoken again.
    ‘I said, walk towards the door.’
    Didier faced the policeman and looked at him hard. ‘I want you to realise,’ he said in English, ‘I know what’s going on here.’ And because he didn’t want the last face he saw to be that of his executioner, he glanced back at the photo of Nou, and one of Jayne on the wall beyond it.
    He whispered as he walked towards the door. ‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…’ He stopped and reached for the handle. ‘…I will fear no evil.’ The door opened and he passed through it. ‘For though art with me. Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.’
    Why should those words come back to him now? It had been years since he’d set foot in a church.
    ‘Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me...’ Was that a trigger being cocked, or the squeaking of the hinge? ‘…All the days of my life.’
    He crossed the balcony, paused at the top of the stairs and inhaled deeply. The night air smelled of jasmine, overripe mangoes, wet earth and a subtle note of human sweat. It was a scent he’d come to think of as Thailand.
    ‘And I will dwell in the house of the Lord…’
    He stepped forward to take the first stair.
    ‘…forever—’
    His foot never reached the ground.

J ayne woke up frowning. She was baffled both by Didier’s behaviour the night before and her reaction to it. What had possessed him to try and seduce her? And why, when it was what she’d always wanted, had it left her feeling so uneasy?
    It was all mixed up in her head with Nou’s talk of marriage and babies. Jayne had left Australia because she baulked at getting on the marriage-mortgage-multiply treadmill, but five years on it worried her that she no longer had the choice. Perhaps she should consider a marriage of convenience with Didier since the normal route to parenthood seemed unlikely.
    But was that what she really wanted? Despite Didier’s suggestion that this could be ‘the start of something else’, Jayne didn’t believe he could turn for her. It was unfair for him even to imply it. And she didn’t think she could accommodate his needs, let alone his relationship with Nou: a ménage à trois in which she was the only party not having sex held no appeal at all. Perhaps her desires were more conventional than she wanted to admit.
    She splashed cold water on her face and looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair was a mess of rained-on curls, exposing her forehead where the first, faint lines of ageing had started to appear. Purple crescents beneath her eyes made them look more yellow than amber. And due to lack of