This seemed to me to be an oblique challenge. I wished I had my notes with me, but, as I began to reflect, certain hints, certain omissions began to reveal themselves.

'Think, Kay, think hard. What've I forgotten? Now you know the whole story and can look back, what seems significant?'

I thought for a while before I came across something. A completely innocuous remark early on, the sort of casual parenthesis that at the time seems quite unremarkable.

I looked at him closely. 'You said at one stage that you had seen Sieverance before. Before you met him that day in the Ayuntamiento.'

He frowned and looked up at the ceiling. 'No I didn't. I said I wondered if we had met before. He reminded me of someone.'

'Who?'

'It's a long story. It happened a good while before I met Delphine. I don't know if it has any bearing on all this.'

'Why don't I be the judge of that?'

'All right.' He looked at me shrewdly, and then signalled to the waiter to renew our coffees. I ordered a glass of port for myself. When in Rome…

'You remember when I visited my mother in San Teodoro… I hadn't seen her for some time, not since my last visit, which had been, I think, in February 1902. I went to her because I was worried about what was happening in the southern provinces, in South Luzon. The war was still going on. After Balangiga the fighting-'

'What's Balangiga?'

'It's a place. Forty-eight American soldiers were massacred there, on the island of Samar, by insurrectos. General Smith issued an order that all Filipinos capable of carrying arms who did not surrender were to be shot.' Carriscant gave a tired smile. 'General Smith worked on the assumption that any male over the age of ten was capable of carrying arms.' He spread his hands. 'It all got out of control. People assumed once Aguinaldo had been captured the war was virtually over. Not at all. The early months of 1902 were a bad time, the worst in some ways. Not for us in Manila, of course, but in South Luzon – in Cavite, Batangas, Tabayas -there was a lot of fighting. There was a fine insurrecto general there, Esteban Elpidio-'

'Pantaleon's uncle.'

'Yes. There was a punitive expedition sent out, led by a young general, Franklin Bell. People were concentrated in military zones, all food outside these zones was destroyed. Whenever an American soldier was killed a Filipino prisoner was chosen by lot and executed. When they finally caught Elpidio in April the war was effectively over, but in February there were still many problems…'

So Carriscant told me about the trip he made south to visit his mother. He had gone in his carriage with supplies of food, driven by Constancio. The journey down to Los Banos on Laguna de Bay was quiet. When they turned inland to San Teodoro they entered one of the areas under military control where the curfew was enforced. They reached the village before nightfall and Carriscant was safely in his mother's house by the time the curfew fell at 8.

The next morning however none of the household servants arrived and his mother, alarmed, asked him to return to the village to investigate. She was particularly concerned because her major-domo, Flaviano, was infallible. And if he had been ill his son, Ortega, would have come to the house with the news.

San Teodoro was completely deserted when Carriscant arrived there with Constancio. Cooking fires had been lit for breakfast and two or three market stalls had been set out beneath the old acacia tree in the square, but apart from hens and nosing pie dogs, there was no sign of the inhabitants.

Then they found an old lady hiding behind the wooden church. She told them that the Americanos had come at first light and had herded together everyone in the village – men, women and children-and had taken them up the track towards the river, the road to Santa Rosa.

Carriscant left Constancio with her and set off up the track. He knew that it crossed a small creek that flowed into the Laguna. He had been walking for ten minutes when he heard the first shot. Then two more. Then there was a pause of a few seconds before there was another shot. He left the track and circled through the undergrowth towards the direction of the noise. On the way he counted another five reports. Nine in all.

He came to a break in the trees, at the edge of the clearing where the track crossed the wooden bridge over the small river. Here, huddled together, were thirteen men and young boys guarded by several dozen American soldiers, big men, bearded, in their stained blue shirts and their dented wide-brimmed hats. Some way off, on the bridge were three other American soldiers. Below the bridge the river widened into a dammed pool and around this were gathered the female members of the village, a few very old men, and the children below the age of ten. In the pool nine bodies floated at the lip of the dam.

From his vantage point in the trees above the clearing Carriscant watched as one by one the men and boys were led out on to the bridge. The officer levelled his pistol at the prisoner's head and called in a clear voice 'Remember Balangiga!' and shot him. The body was then heaved over the parapet by the other two men and was carried gently down the stream to join the others bobbing at the edge of the dam, budged together by the sluggish current, like soft logs.

The atmosphere was strangely calm. The sun shone in a milky, hazy sky and the calls of the birds were silenced by the noise of the guns. There was a faint moaning from the group gathered by the pool and some of the littlest children were crying. But the men and boys waited silently to be selected, their heads bowed, saying nothing. While the officer reloaded his pistol, the other two men took over. And always there was the same cry, 'Remember Balangiga!', before the sound of the gun going off. This went on until all the men and boys had been shot, then the Americans shouldered their rifles and packs and marched off down the road to Santa Rosa. Both Flaviano and Ortega had been among the victims. Carriscant learned later that the column had been shot at the previous night while it was bivouacking about a mile from San Teodoro and two men had been killed and four wounded. The assault on the villagers was their act of reprisal. Twenty-two men and boys had been killed.

Carriscant related all this to me in an even, unemotional voice. We sat there in silence after he had finished as I tried to take in the implications of all this.

'Do you think,' I asked him, 'that the officer was Sieverance?'

'I don't know. Certainly Sieverance reminded me of him. That officer was bearded, but fair like Sieverance. Something about his posture too. I couldn't be sure. I asked Delphine if Sieverance had ever served in Batangas but she said she had no idea.' He shrugged. 'There was a likeness, but I was quite far away, forty, fifty yards.'

'Was it Sieverance's unit? Do you know the name of the unit?'

'No.'

'Did you report it?'

Carriscant screwed up his face. 'You've got to understand that fifty-four thousand people died in Batangas in those months. Killed or died from disease, starvation, cholera. My mother wrote to protest to General Bell, but received no reply. Such incidents were commonplace.' He paused, then said carefully, 'The only person I told was Pantaleon.'

'Why?'

'I had to tell someone.'

'Some American officers were tried for atrocities.'

'And General Smith was even cashiered. Unfortunately I had no names, no information. And the San Teodoro massacre was small beer. In Batangas one group of thirteen hundred prisoners was systematically killed over six days after digging their own graves. It was a nasty little war.' He sighed. 'In some ways it's as well that the world has forgotten it.'

We looked at each other, his face gave nothing away: his features were set, his eyes tired, as if the telling of his story had exhausted him.