59.

Caleb had messaged Amelia Langdon’s address. My recharged phone said it was about five kilometres away. Once she and I had washed, changed and eaten – Xander had thought to liberate a bag of bread rolls and sliced cheese from the hotel’s breakfast buffet before he jumped ship – we headed out to flag down a motorcycle taxi. I had some of Xander’s dollars safely stowed in the bottom of my backpack. The first bloke we asked wasn’t interested, but the second – an old guy with a greasy Lakers cap and remarkably white teeth – I wondered if they were real – took the offer seriously: $200 to borrow his bike.

‘Montrez-moi l’argent,’ he said with a smile.

‘Go on then,’ Amelia said to me. ‘Show him.’

I dug out some of the cash.

Temptation played across his face.

‘Plus one hundred deposit,’ I said to Amelia. ‘Tell him it’s just for a day. We’ll return the bike to him outside the People’s Palace at 3 p.m. tomorrow.’

Amelia relayed all this, but the guy seemed to be weighing up whether or not we were serious, so I added an extra $100 and said, ‘Monsieur, please.’

The bike was a wreck: for $400 he could probably buy a better one. This sunk in. With a shrug he handed me the key.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Merci beaucoup,’ and I jumped on the saddle before he could change his mind. Amelia climbed up behind me. We left the bike’s owner in a puff of exhaust, rattling off down the broad road. This bike was heavier than the ones we’d ridden through the bush, but it worked, and let’s face it, I’d had practice. Negotiating the traffic on potholed tarmac was still a lot easier than keeping upright along that snaking dirt path. I’d checked the map on my phone before setting off, and had memorised where the police station, market and our old hotel were in relation to Langdon’s place and our hideout flat. I made for the market first, the one where we’d seen the amazing Sapeur guy all dressed up in his three-piece suit, and not because I wanted fake Nikes, sunflower seeds or a set of goat hoofs, though I was pleased to see those stalls still there. No, what I wanted was a couple of helmets, and the woman whose life’s work appeared to be selling the most battered of biking lids possible was still at it beneath her pink-and-yellow parasol. She seemed unsurprised to see us, as if white teenagers showed up regularly to buy her recycled helmets. Although her stall was well stocked, not many of her helmets had visors. We found Amelia one that fitted. I had to make do with one that was too big. But that had its advantages. As we threaded our way back through the market on the bike, picking up speed en route to Langdon’s place, the breeze worked its way into the helmet and cooled my face.

I found my way there easily enough, though ‘there’ was pretty unrevealing. Langdon’s house was in a side street off a clogged main road. In this little backwater the buildings were set behind gates. My heart sank on our first pass, as I couldn’t see a anything useful through the metal railings, but coming back down the street slowly on the side nearer the shuttered house I spotted a familiar black SUV tucked in a parking slot behind the railings. Amelia saw it too. She headbutted the back of my helmet, nodding in the direction of the big car. We rolled on past, and I pulled the bike in behind a scabby-barked tree further down the street.

‘Pretend we’ve got a problem with it,’ I said to Amelia, kneeling down beside the bike myself.

‘But it works fine.’

‘That’s why I said “pretend”.’

I wanted to take stock, see if there was anywhere we could hole up and watch Langdon’s house to monitor who came and went. But aside from this tree there was little cover. We could fake-tinker with the bike for a bit, but do it for too long and we might arouse suspicion. My head was heating up within the helmet, which smelled of someone else’s sweat. How could we keep an eye on Langdon’s house without running the risk of being caught ourselves?

I’d asked that last question of myself silently, or at least I thought I had, but either I’d muttered it aloud or Amelia was thinking in time with me. ‘Easy solution,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘We should split up. There are no turnings off this street. It joins the main road at either end. Drop me off at the southern junction and take the bike to the northern one. We’ve got phones. If that truck leaves, one of us will see it, and if you move fast, we’ll be able to follow it. The bike will be much quicker than a truck through traffic.’

It seemed risky – what if I was too slow and we lost him? – but I couldn’t think of a better plan, so we did as Amelia suggested and positioned ourselves at either end of Langdon’s curved street. Amelia had an advertising hoarding to hunker down behind at the southern junction. To the north, where I was waiting, there was a mechanic’s. I parked the bike to one side of the forecourt behind a truck of threadbare tyres, and waited, and waited, and waited. The storm had long gone and now the sun came out. I sheltered in the shade cast by the truck’s cab. The shade moved. I went with it. In time it shrank to nothing on my side of the truck. I waited there sweating as the afternoon wore on towards evening. Just as the light was fading – and my hopes with it – my phone, which I’d had in my hand the whole time, burst into life.

‘This end! Now!’ Amelia said when I picked up.

I didn’t answer, just leaped on the bike and turned the key. The engine spluttered without catching. I yelled, ‘No way!’ so loudly a woman pushing a shopping trolley full of newspapers past the garage turned around. Not knowing what to do, I stuttered the bike forward three angry paces and turned the key fiercely again, hard enough to bend it. I doubt that in itself made any difference, but this time the tired old engine grumbled awake. I let out the clutch instantly, gunned the bike round the woman, missing her trolley by an inch, and fired straight through a gap in the rush-hour traffic, heading Amelia’s way. She was only a couple of hundred of metres up the road. I wove between two slower motorbikes, dipped around a cyclist and sped past a taxi on my way to pick her up. Catching sight of her running towards me on the verge, I cut towards her and hit the brakes. She swung herself up onto the seat hard before the bike had quite stopped, almost knocking me off. But I held it together and opened up the throttle so fiercely she had to clutch my chest to stop herself flying off the back of the bike as we accelerated away, weaving through the traffic again.

All that happened very quickly indeed, but I was still certain we’d lost the truck. A howl rose within me. It had been a stupid plan. Dad would have laughed at it. In that second, the fact of swerving and the smell of the traffic fumes and the sense of Amelia and I accelerating, on the edge of control, turned into a Mark-shaped warning, and just as I backed off Amelia shouted, ‘There!’ pointing frantically ahead of us, at Langdon’s SUV, cruising unhurriedly into the sunset.

Two heads were silhouetted in the cab. I couldn’t say for sure, but it seemed a fair bet we were tailing my uncle and his bandy-legged driver. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ I said to nobody in particular, and dropped back a car or two behind the truck. The job now was not to lose them.