Ben looked up from his phone and nodded.

'They say you travel to Udok tomorrow.'

'That's right,' Ben acknowledged. 'I'm Ben, by the way.'

'My name is Fatima. Udok is my village.'

Ben nodded, then watched as Fatima continued to mop the floor. Occasionally her eyes would flicker up to the door, and she would take a breath as if to say something, before thinking better of it. 'Do your family still live there?' Ben asked, more to persuade her to talk than anything else. 'In Udok, I mean.'

Immediately her eyes filled with tears as she nodded her head. 'Mr Ben,' she whispered, her voice low, 'I do not hear from them for many weeks. Each month I send them money, but I hear nothing. No letter, nothing.' Her voice became quieter, and she glanced once more at the door. 'I do not think the money reach them. My father work in the mine, but it is not enough.'

Ben smiled sympathetically, but he didn't know what to say. Suddenly the girl approached him with another conspiratorial glance at the door.

'Mr Ben,' she continued urgently, 'you do something for me. You find my sister, give her this.' She pulled something out of her pocket and pressed it into Ben's hand. He looked down to see a crumpled twohundred- franc note. Twenty-five pence. And wrapped in the dog-eared note there was a small, roughly hewn piece of wood with a crude symbol etched into it, rather like an eye. Ben looked back up at Fatima, who was staring at him, the tears still brimming in her own wide, dark eyes.

Ben secreted the money and the wooden token away. 'How will I know your sister?' he asked.

'Her name is Halima,' Fatima said. 'She speak English very well, better than me. Ask in the village. They will know her.'

Ben nodded. 'I'll do what I can. When did you last go home?' he asked her gently.

Fatima looked down at the floor. 'It is not possible. If I leave to go home, then I lose this job. And then…' She left it hanging. There was a short silence before she continued. 'Mr Ben,' she said, her voice barely more than a whisper, 'it is many months since I am in Udok. When I left, it was very poor. Malaria a big problem. But now, I hear things.'

'What sort of things?'

'Bad things. The people here, they do not want me to know, but they cannot keep everything secret. People talk. It is the mine. It is, how do you say, maudit.'

Ben looked blankly at her. It was not a word he knew.

'The ancestors,' Fatima insisted. 'They say they have been-'

But suddenly Ben stopped the flow of her conversation by silently placing a hand on her arm; over her shoulder he had noticed someone standing quietly by the open door.

It was Kruger.

How long he had been there Ben couldn't tell, so intently had he been listening to Fatima; but for a moment all vestiges of that oily smile of his had been wiped from his face. As their eyes met, he started grinning once more, then strode purposefully towards them and pulled Fatima away by a rough tug on her shoulder. 'Excuse me, Ben,' he said with what came across as a strained politeness, then turned and started to admonish Fatima in that African dialect Ben could not understand. It wasn't necessary to know what the words meant, though: the harshness of his voice spoke volumes. When she was finally dismissed, Fatima scurried around collecting her cleaning things, then left without a word. 'She wasn't worrying you, I hope, eh, Ben?' Kruger asked, having lapsed back into his booming Afrikaans accent. He seemed a different person to the man who had been so abrupt with Fatima.

Ben shook his head.

'Good, I'm glad. Come with me.' They walked out of the room and Kruger led him along the corridor. 'You know what girls can be like, eh? Full of silly gossip. Especially girls like her – villagers. They don't know any better, eh?'

'Has my dad finished?' Ben tried to change the subject.

'Nearly finished, Ben. But there's been a change of plan. You'll be travelling to Udok later on today.'

'Today?' Ben was confused. 'I thought we were going tomorrow.'

'Like I say, a change of plan,' Kruger replied evasively. 'The plane has to fly this afternoon. Abele has been sent to collect your things from the hotel. He has' – Kruger smiled faintly to himself – 'volunteered to accompany you to the village.' They stopped outside an office in which three men were tapping away at old computers with boxy grey monitors. 'Wait here, Ben. Your dad will be along in a minute.' He walked off, leaving Ben loitering in the corridor.

Volunteered? Ben didn't like the way Kruger had said that. And it didn't make sense either. What was it Abele had said in the car just earlier that morning? 'I would not travel to Udok if it were up to me.'

Ben felt into his pocket and wrapped his fingers round the crumpled note and the small wooden token Fatima had given him. He was beginning to think he might be of the same opinion…

Hundreds of miles away, a bat shrieked. It was a weak, pitiful sound.

The cave in which it lived was cool and perfectly dark, the water beneath it still and black. No light had found its way in here for millennia; no humans had tracked its existence, although lately they had come close. The bat was one of many thousands populating this hidden refuge; but in recent weeks their numbers had been declining.

Of late, the flight path of the bat had been erratic, and had become increasingly so in the past twentyfour hours. Occasionally its wing had scraped on the rough rock, causing it to shriek again, its panicked voice becoming lost in the echoing hubbub of the bats around him. Now and then it had flown blindly into one of its companions, causing a flurry of aggression from which it would fly away, knowing it could only come out worse.

Now, though, it lay on the floor. Its tiny abdomen made uneven attempts to breathe; its wings were spread on either side, occasionally twitching.

The bat gave one more call, though this would have been hardly audible even if it had not been drowned out by the cacophony of the colony. Then it twitched for a final time, before lying perfectly noiseless. Perfectly still.

And perfectly dead.

'Kruger said we were leaving this afternoon.'

It had taken Ben's dad about ten minutes to rejoin him, during which time he had hung around outside the office pondering the conversation he had had with Fatima. She had been cut off short, but clearly had wanted to tell him something. The look of fear on her face when Kruger had dismissed her suggested she would be unlikely to try again, though.

'It's Mr Kruger to you, Ben,' his dad said sternly.

'You wouldn't say that if you saw the way he just spoke to a cleaning lady I was talking to.' Ben knew he was answering back, but he calculated that he'd get away with it.

'There are cultural differences here, Ben. It's not up to us to start judging the way people treat their staff. I'm sure the woman is glad just to have a job.'

'But don't you think it's a bit weird, us being packed off to Udok so quickly?'

'Of course not. A change of plan, that's all. I'm here on business, after all,' Russell said rather officiously. 'I need to be flexible for my clients.'

Ben replied with an unconvinced stare.

'Look, Ben,' his father continued, 'I know you were shaken up by what we saw earlier – the dead body and all. So was I. But we're in good hands. Mr Kruger is a very well-respected businessman and has a lot of influence in these parts. And Abele might be a bit gruff, but he seems… extremely competent.'

'But-'

'Ben! We are these people's guests. Come on, Abele is meeting us in reception and taking us to a local airfield.'

Sure enough, Abele was already there, surrounded by their luggage. He had no smile for them as they walked back into the reception; indeed he looked distinctly surly. Ben's dad approached with his arms spread out in a gesture of friendliness. 'Abele!' he said breezily. 'I understand you are accompanying us.'