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willing to pursue it. Sal was looking at me expectantly,
     and I told him what I’d learned from Finney and of Collins’s unsatisfactory response. He shook his head in irritation.
    “I can’t believe no one’s prepared just to get on a plane to Cambodia and go and see what Darling has to say for himself,”
     I complained. “Everyone seems to be content to cross their fingers and wait for her to turn up.”
    “So go,” Sal said.
    I stared at him.
    “Stop whining and go to Cambodia,” he repeated.

Chapter Three
    Route Five, Pursat, Cambodia
    T HE jungle is livid, the air solid with moisture from the monsoon rain. I feel as though I am breathing steam. Our Toyota Land
     Cruiser kicks up the yellow dust, and it falls limply back to the ground. My knowledge of this country’s history imposes an
     air of menace. When I stop the car to pee, I don’t wander off into the undergrowth because it is strewn with land mines. I
     have no intention of getting blown up with my knickers down.
    For hours we’ve been driving on a road that is one vast pothole. We set out later than we intended and then lost an hour changing
     a tire, an operation that took all three of us: Dave, our local driver, and myself. Dave, my cameraman, is the perfect traveling
     companion. He never gets ruffled, never notices discomfort, takes everything in through cinematic eyes. We listen to Dave’s
     choice of audiobook, Herodotus’s history of the Persian wars.
    “Have you been to this part of the world before?” Dave asks me. Dave is prematurely gray, bespectacled, with a small goatee.
     He has worked all over the world, but recently my missing persons series has taken us to rather less exotic locations, like
     Salford and Middlesborough.
    I shake my head, pull a face. “Nope.”
    “It’s not your kind of thing, is it?” Dave ventures. “Something that takes you away from your kids.”
    For a moment I consider telling Dave to keep his nose out of my personal life, but I know I’m overreacting. He’s right. Every
     time I go away, I have to steel myself.
    “Earning us a living means I have to go away sometimes,” I say eventually. “I just like to keep it quick.”
    My itinerary doesn’t allow for much slippage. Hannah and William are waiting for me in London, and every day the invisible
     elastic band between us seems to stretch tighter. The twins are not impressed by professional ambition, particularly in their
     mother. And to them a week feels like a year, a month like a lifetime.
    All this means that, unlike Melanie and Sal, I won’t make a career out of trouble spots. I gaze out the window at this land
     formed by monsoon and heat, with the history of genocide hanging over it like a cloud. Despite all that I have read, when
     we pass close to villages I am still shocked by the number of people, adults and children, who are missing limbs. It is a
     landscape that has existed all my life, and that I have never before seen, and that I would not have seen now if it were not
     for Melanie, who is now my work, my “story.” How much of the world is that “other” place, the unknown, strange, threatening,
     or exotic, heavenly or hellish? Melanie had seen it all, bumping across roads like this one, seeing worlds from the window
     that a tourist would never see, sharing terrain with the people who work the land and on occasion with the soldiers who come
     to protect or plunder.
    In between the fighting and the famines there must have been hours of companionship on the road, and beautiful vistas, and
     the joy of unexpected friendship from strangers. And for the first time, I think of her in a different way. For the first
     time, I don’t ask myself why on earth she chose this life. For the first time, instead, I think what an immensely rich life
     she chose.
    “Does Maeve know what you’re up to?”
    “I sent her an e-mail the day we left, so she knows I’m in Cambodia,” I said slowly, “and she knows I’m following up on a