57.

Hanging in – or on – was a Herculean task that day. The track was a snake writhing through the scrub, grass and patchy forest. It went on forever. Occasionally we’d come upon other travellers, all of them baffling in their own way. Here was a man pushing a wheelbarrow full of painted sticks. Hours later, two children alone, neither of them more than three years old. The next person we saw was an old lady arguing with a donkey. It didn’t apparently want to take another step. We came to another, smaller river at one point. This one was crossed by a bridge. Quite a broad bridge, in fact, designed to take proper traffic. Marcel paused mid-span for a water break. I shut my eyes and tilted my flask to the sky; the sun broke through the clouds and warmed my face.

‘Who would bother to build a big bridge like this when the track either side of it is barely wide enough for a motorbike?’ I said.

‘The Belgians,’ said Amelia. Seeing that I was none the wiser she went on. ‘They were big into infrastructure. Sixty years ago this little track was probably a decent dirt road. Since the Belgians pulled out and the trucks stopped running, the surrounding bush has been trying to reclaim it.’

Mother Nature had done a pretty good job of that. In places the track was no more than a wheel’s width, and occasionally it disappeared altogether. But finally it wound back into the village where we’d first picked up the bikes. I was exhausted, dead on my feet, barely had the energy to climb into Marcel’s truck. When I shut my eyes all I could see was the bike’s front wheel rolling ahead of me, and the constant juddering through the handlebars ran through my whole body long after I’d got off the bike. Marcel seemed unaffected. He put a piece of chewing gum in his mouth and fired up the pickup. I’m ashamed to say I fell straight to sleep. Amelia did too. I felt bad not keeping Marcel company for the last leg of the journey, but I couldn’t help it. The next thing I knew we’d arrived at the airport.

We said our goodbyes to Marcel. I’m not sure I could have found the words to thank him properly in English, let alone French, but I wanted to try, and I made a right mess of it by asking Amelia to say that we were grateful to him for doing way more than we’d paid him to do. She translated his response. ‘This was never about the money. He hopes you find your parents. And he believes in what we’re trying to do. It’s what Innocent would have wanted. Get the evidence out there, he says. Do whatever it takes.’

I offered Marcel my hand. He took it, his palm cool. ‘Bonne chance,’ he said.

Walking through the airport made me realise what a state Amelia and I were in; I was already filthy when we left the mine and hadn’t changed my clothes since then. Joseph, in his ironed jeans and bright white shirt, did a double-take when he saw us.

‘Long story,’ I said.

‘No excuse!’ he replied, leading us to the airport toilet block. ‘Nobody flies with me so … not clean!’

My spare T-shirt wasn’t much better than the one I was wearing, but I stripped to the waist at the sink and got the worst off myself at least. Amelia did better than me in the ladies. She emerged looking fresh-faced, tanned – she’d caught the sun – and her wet ponytail swung cheerfully from side to side as we made our way out to Joseph’s plane.

This time our arrival back in Kinshasa really did coincide with a proper storm. The sky filled with black clouds while we were still some way from the airport, a mean weather front closing in. Joseph pushed his aviators up onto his forehead and dropped the plane a thousand metres so fast my stomach jumped. ‘We can beat it,’ he said with a sideways smile, and began arguing with air traffic control. Raindrops big as marbles whacked against the cockpit glass loud enough to be audible over the propellers. The storm front was like a lid closing on the runway. Joseph murmured, ‘No problem, no problem,’ and smiled at us as we descended further, but there were pinpricks of sweat along his hairline. We flew the last kilometre at an altitude of about two hundred metres, crabbing sideways against a horrible crosswind. Being able to see what was going on made the whole thing doubly exciting. I could tell Amelia was worried though; she was gripping the sides of her seat.

‘Nearly there,’ I reassured her, with the runway a rain-warped streak of grey ahead. Joseph kicked the plane straight at the last second, and the wheels kissed the tarmac amazingly gently.

‘Easy, as I said,’ said Joseph casually, but his relief as we taxied off the apron was obvious.

Once Joseph had fast-tracked us through the airport to the taxi rank, Amelia dug out her phone again. Mine was dead, but she’d thought to keep hers switched off until we needed it. Now she turned it on and showed me the messages that had landed more or less as we did. Once again hope fluttered in my chest: might Mum or Dad have made contact? No, but Caleb had.

His message read: ‘Heads up – my dad’s on his way. Cx’

Despite everything, I couldn’t help flinching at that ‘Cx’. The fact that Caleb hadn’t said what had happened when Langdon came round worried me.

‘Message him back,’ I told Amelia. ‘Ask him how it went with his dad when he woke up. Also, ask for Langdon’s Kinshasa addresses – both home and work.’

‘Yessir,’ said Amelia.

‘Sorry, but –’

‘Don’t worry. In the circumstances, you’re forgiven.’

As she was writing her reply another message landed, this one from Xander. ‘Holed up here,’ it read, followed by a link to an Airbnb. Amelia messaged him that we were on our way. I hoped he’d got to the apartment unnoticed. It seemed to be near to the Gare Centrale, so I asked the taxi driver we hailed at the airport rank to drop us there. I wanted to scope out this new place, or at least look at it from a distance and make sure nobody was watching, before going in.