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"Here he is," the guide said.

The reporter turned. The man who had come out of the nearest hut was thin, and short, even for a Cambodian. He was probably around fifty but seemed ageless, his features cast as though they could never change, and the hair on his head was greying but still thick and hung to the collar of his yellow T shirt.

"This is Mr Khieu," the guide said, and turned to the man. In the jabber of speech that followed the reporter heard her own name, badly mispronounced as it was. The former Khmer Rouge, Khieu, bobbed his head, smiling, and gestured.

"He asks if we’d like to go inside," the guide said.

Nodding, the reporter stepped through the low doorway, pausing briefly to remove her shoes. The interior of the hut was dark and surprisingly cool. Khieu gestured again, at a cot set against the wall.

"Is this his house?" The reporter sat on the cot, and the guide followed suit.

"Yes. His and his family’s." The guide talked briefly to Khieu. "He says he sent his wife and kids to the town for the day. He doesn’t want them disturbing us, he says."

"Pity; I’d wanted to meet them." The families were about the only thing that had distinguished one former Khmer Rouge from another. They provided something on which to hang her story. "Could I ask him some questions, please?"

Half an hour later the reporter sat back, trying to hide her disappointment. The story she had heard was almost a carbon copy of the others she’d been told so far; she could even have answered her remaining questions herself, and not got a thing wrong on the essentials. "Isn’t there anything else he could tell us? I haven’t heard anything from him I haven’t already heard before."

The guide and the former Khmer Rouge man talked for a long time, the latter gesturing vehemently. At length the guide turned back to the woman. "He says..." he hesitated briefly. "He says he has a story from back when he was a soldier, during the Angkar rule, which he can tell. But he does not know whether he will be believed, and he doesn’t want to be laughed at."

The reporter shrugged mentally, but reached again for her recorder. "I’m not going to laugh at him," she said.

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That year the stench of the corpses rotting in the fields by the river had grown so strong that the boys used to tie their chequered scarves over their faces when they crossed them. The flies were like a blue-green carpet over the rotting corpses, scarcely bothering to rise when disturbed. The oldest bodies were already skeletons, and yet more were dumped daily, intellectuals from the cities, or malingerers and counter-revolutionaries from the villages who defied the word of the Angkar.

That summer Khieu was thirteen years old, and had already been a soldier for three years. He no longer remembered his parents or his home in a village on the other side of the Mekong. He knew his sister, of course, but then he saw her almost every day; she was already, at the age of ten, senior to him in rank, and rarely acknowledged that he existed.

One evening, the village committee declared that the fields by the river could no longer be used to dump the bodies of the enemies of the revolution. There was an old, ruined temple on the fringes of the forest, and the committee decided that henceforth this would be the dumping ground.

Some of the older Khmer Rouge cadre demurred. "That temple is the home of the old spirits," One-Eye Samnang had protested. "We must not anger them."

The head of the committee laughed. "Brother, there is no such thing as a spirit, and there is no better use for those old temples than this. You will see to it that tomorrow’s lot are put there."

"But, First Brother..." Samnang’s remaining eye was wide with fear. "The spirits of evil may walk the earth if we disturb the temple."

"Enough," the committee head snapped. "You will do what you have to do." His furious gaze roved over the gathering, and everyone fell silent, even Samnang.

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