Four hours later, Kat had been fixed up as well as the staff at the hospital could manage. It was better equipped than I'd imagined it would be, helped no doubt by a liberal application of Adam's money. I'd tried to pay the bill myself, but he wouldn't hear of it.

"We'll talk about it later. Right now, you just need to look after Kat."

I couldn't let him fork out that much money, especially as he wasn't working at the moment. But he was right. We'd deal with that afterwards. Kat's wellbeing took precedence.

Dr. Dawoud had proven to be kind and compassionate, and he'd gently cleaned her wounds up and stitched the worst of them. An X-ray showed she had a fracture in her arm, so she was sporting a white cast. The pale plaster made the rainbow of bruises she wore all the more vivid. Purple, green, yellow, black... An impressionist painting of pain.

But most of all, she was worried about her vision. Dr. Dawoud had managed to open her eyelids briefly and found scratches on her corneas. Now she had a gauze patch taped over each eye, and he'd told her to leave them in place until he reassessed the damage in a few days.

"It must have happened when they pushed my face into the dirt," she sobbed. "I was trying to get away. I couldn't breathe."

How dare they treat her like that? Red hot fury pulsed through my veins once more. A perforated eardrum and a further constellation of angry red cigarette burns on Kat's back rounded out her list of injuries, and if the police captain had been standing in front of me at that moment, I'd have taken a leaf out of Katie Biggs's book.

It wasn't until we got back to the hotel that we found out the full story of what had happened. Once Kat was settled on the sofa with a cup of tea and pastries Adam had ordered from room service, she began to talk.

"Mo and I went diving. You remember I said we were going to?"

I nodded, then remembered Kat couldn't see me. "Yes."

"It was a great day for it. The sunlight lit up the coral, and there were half a dozen milkfish hanging around. No current, no sediment stirred up, visibility was great. We'd been down for forty minutes, and we were hovering by the reef wall for our three-minute safety stop when I spotted a plastic bag snagged on the coral."

"The rubbish really spoils things, doesn't it?"

"Exactly. So I pointed it out to Mo, and we decided to take it back with us and put it in the bin. There was something in it, but underwater, it's hard to tell the weight of things. It was only once we heaved it out of the sea between us that we realised how heavy it was."

"So what was in it? Surely you opened it?"

Of course she did. Kat was as nosey as me.

She shuddered, and even through her bruises, she looked slightly green.

"It was a head."

"A head? Like an actual head?" Adam asked, incredulous.

"Yeah, an actual head. It must have been down there a while because the skin was all loose and the eyes were gone. And the smell! I threw up twice."

"So what did you do?" I asked.

"Went to the police, of course. Mo didn't want to, but what else could we do? Throw it back in again? Some poor girl had been murdered."

"You knew it was a girl?"

"Not from the face. That was all messed up. But she had long hair and dangly earrings with little coloured beads on them. Men don't normally have those."

"It wasn't Irina, was it?"

"No. Irina had curly blonde hair. This was black and straight."

"What about the other missing girl? The waitress? She was Indonesian."

"I didn't know her, but I suppose it could have been."

"What happened when you went to the police?" Adam asked.

"We left the head in the truck and headed inside to speak to the guy behind the desk. After we explained what had happened, the captain himself came out with a bunch of other officers. That guy's creepy as hell. He only had to look at me to make me nervous, but it was a bit late to back out by that point."

Creepy was an understatement.

"He was horrid to me too. When I yelled at him, I thought he'd squash me like a bug."

"You yelled at him? You?"

"Yeah, well, he'd kidnapped you."

Kat turned to Adam. "Is that true? Did Callie yell?"

"Callie did."

Was it my imagination, or did he sound a tiny bit proud of me?

"Wow. You've really changed in the past few weeks," Kat told me.

Yes, I had. I knew I had. Partly due to Adam, but also from within. Without Bryce around, I was finding a strength inside me that I never knew I had.

"So what happened with the captain?" Adam brought us back on topic.

"We all went out to the truck, and the head was in the back next to the diving stuff. The captain took one look at it and screamed at his minions to arrest us."

"Arrest you? Why?" I asked.

"Since we had the head, he said it was obvious we'd murdered the girl. And when we wouldn't admit it, he tried to make us."

"The police just started beating you?"

"First they split us up. Then yeah, pretty much. Beating, burning, electric shocks." Her voice was flat and detached, as if she was talking about somebody else. "Part of me wanted to say I had done it, to sign their damn confessions just to make it stop."

"But you didn't?"

"How did I know it wouldn't get worse if I did? They accused me of everything under the sun. As well as the murder, they tried to say we were running a people-smuggling ring, taking people into Israel. And they must have been to my apartment because they rattled a bottle of my cystitis pills at me and accused me of being a drug dealer."

Kat didn't know about the state of the place yet, and I decided to wait before telling her. That would only be another straw on the camel's back.

"They'd drag me into an interrogation room every couple of hours," she continued. "Mostly they used force, but sometimes they'd try other tactics."

"Like what?"

She stared blankly at the wall over my left shoulder. "One time, they shackled me to a chair, and then they brought the head in and dumped it on the table in front of me. Luckily, I didn't have anything left in me to chuck up."

"Oh my gosh."

"And another time, one of the men, he pulled down his fly and threatened to...he threatened to..."

She dissolved into tears, and I hugged her as best I could.

"He didn't, did he?"

"No," she sobbed. "He told me he'd be back later to finish the job, and he would've come soon, I think, if you hadn't arrived. I lost track of time. I didn't even know whether it was day or night. How long have I been gone?"

"Three and a bit days."

"It felt like three and a bit years."

"I'm so sorry we didn't find you sooner."

"How could you have? They wouldn't let me call anyone, and we didn't think to tell you we were going there. If they'd killed me, nobody would ever have known."

"What about Mo?" I asked quietly.

"I don't know." Her voice cracked. "I only saw him once after they separated us. Two of them were dragging him down the corridor, and he was unconscious. At least, I hope he was only unconscious." More tears came. "It's all my fault. He said we shouldn't tell the police, but I insisted. Never in a million years did I think they'd do something like this."

If I hadn't seen Kat with my own eyes, I'd never have believed it either. The police here were barbaric. This was a secret they hid from the glossy holiday brochures and the fancy websites. The dark side of Fidda Hilal was shaded from view, obscured by year-round sunshine and that sparkling sea. The town should come with a health warning.

"So, what now?" Adam voiced what we were all thinking.

"We need to help Mo," Kat said, determination overriding the quake in her voice.

"The captain ordered us to leave town by tomorrow," I reminded her. "Do you think he was serious about throwing us in jail if we don't go?"

"Yes, undoubtedly. For a few hours, I was sharing a cell with a young boy. He couldn't have been older than fourteen. He said Captain Ibrahim is as corrupt as they come and he gets off on violence. The boy reckoned he'd have taken a payoff from someone to cover up the girl's murder."

"Just when we thought it couldn't get any worse," Adam groaned. "Now we've got a corrupt police captain who might be working hand in hand with the real murderer."

Suddenly I didn't want to have an adventure any more. I wished I could turn back time and find myself sitting in my little flat with a box of tissues, eating too much chocolate and watching Friends reruns.

There was a ping from Adam's phone, and he pulled it out of his pocket.

"It's an email from Melati's father. He wants us to call him."

It was the saddest conversation I'd ever heard in my life. Adam did the hard bit and explained what we suspected.

Melati's father sounded resigned rather than angry. Stoic.

"I know my daughter is dead. If she were alive, she would have called me. Not a week went by without us speaking. Besides, I feel it in my soul. Her light is gone."

"I'm so sorry," I whispered.

His voice came back out of Adam's phone speaker. "I only want justice for my daughter. If the remains are hers, she deserves a proper burial. And this Captain Ibrahim, he must pay. I'll contact the Indonesian Embassy immediately."

"Thank you," Adam said. "We'll keep in touch."

"It is I who should be thanking you. Good luck over there."

As soon as he hung up, a lightbulb pinged in my head. "The embassy! Why didn't we think of that? Where is it?"

"The British Embassy will be in Cairo, same as the US Embassy," Adam said.

"We should call them, see if they can help. Or even go there—if we went in person, they'd have to do something, wouldn't they?"

"Cairo's hours away," Kat said. "Nine hours by bus, and even if we flew, we'd have to drive to Sharm el-Sheikh first. If Mo's still alive, he won't be by the time we go to Cairo and back."

"Let's try calling them first," Adam suggested. "It would be best if you or Kat do it because you're British citizens. Can you manage that?"

"I'll have to," I said.

We found the number on the internet, and the lady who answered seemed suitably horrified when I described our ordeal.

"I'm sure we can do something," she said. "That really shouldn't have happened."

No kidding.

"So can you send someone? An ambassador? We need help. They're still holding my friend's boyfriend at the prison."

"Is he a British national?"

"No, he's Egyptian."

"I'm afraid we can't assist with that. It's a local matter. But I can certainly have someone call and take a report from Katerina. We may be able to persuade the government to pay compensation."

"Is that all? Can't you arrest Captain Ibrahim?"

She let out a small chuckle. "This is Egypt. Things don't work like that around here."

I barely managed to refrain from throwing the phone across the room, and as soon as I hung up, Kat tried to jump to her feet, then thought better of it and sank back onto the sofa again.

"Compensation? Compensation? How can they talk about money when Mo's life is at stake? I'm definitely voting for someone else in the next election."

Now wasn't the time to explain to Kat that diplomats didn't get elected.

"We need to try something else."

"Too damn right we do. But what?"