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The Sergeant took his time responding to Jed Kershaw’s question. What the fuck, indeed . ‘Well, apparently, five guys from the hills, Jed. And for no reason at all that I can get them to acknowledge.’

‘Assholes!’

‘Yes. And amateurs, too.’

‘So what are we talking about? Money? Girls? Boys? What?’

‘They won’t say. Or maybe there isn’t anything. Maybe this is next.’

‘What “next”? What do you mean, “this is next”?’

‘Maybe this is what happens after a certain point, Jed. With an island that doesn’t know if it’s coming or going. Maybe people just start getting together and killing one another.’

Kershaw stared at him. ‘Fuck, Lester.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Fuck, Lester, that is a nihilistic fucking notion.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You’re saying maybe they just, what, they got together in the backwoods somewhere and decided to do a murder? Get in the car, go somewhere, spray the place with bullets, because, hey, what the hell, it’s the end of the world?’

‘It’s just a possibility.’

‘So, what, we’ve gone from leaving parties to… what? Everybody goes nuts and starts killing everybody like it’s the fucking nutbar apocalypse?’

‘I don’t say it’s likely, sir.’

‘You’re saying “sir” a great deal, Lester. I recognise professional sir-ing when I hear it. Do you have some British psychological-trauma profile which says this is going to happen?’

‘No, sir, not that I’m aware of.’

‘Then Jesus, Lester! Do not scare me like that. Jesus.’ He looked up. ‘The next words out of your mouth better not include “sir”, Lester.’

‘All right, Mr Kershaw, I shall bear that in mind.’

‘Jed.’

‘Jed. Yes, sir.’

Kershaw glowered, then grinned. ‘You are fucking with me just now, Lester, in a manner you no doubt believe is comradely joshing.’

‘If you say so, Jed.’

‘I do, Lester.’

And after that they talked, but nothing more was actually said. The Sergeant excused himself before Jed Kershaw had to find an excuse to get away, and Kershaw looked gratefully after him as he went downstairs. In the street, the Sergeant glanced around for the boy but could not see him. He felt a little sad, but stiffened his spine and reminded himself that they were doing something hunnerten pro cent ZOMG later, and that this was apparently good. In any case, the boy had other aspects to his life that were his own.

He looked around once more and got into his car.

The town of Beauville was surprisingly beautiful as he drove back to Brighton House, like a strong-jawed choir mistress allowing the day to see her softer side. The hard, industrial region of Mancreu was away on the south coast, the ferroconcrete slab housing of the 70s chemical men who had come to refine and combine and produce plastics.

But here in the north, Beauville looked alive and even bustling. Along the harbour front, a few of the very oldest buildings still remained, low-ceilinged and achingly pretty, smelling of three hundred years of tobacco and drink, and traced with cracks from earthquakes and battering gales. In a ring around them loomed gawky colonial townhouses and stores; wooden crossbeams taken from ships bore witness to the ongoing settlement by mariners and merchants. The outer circle was a kind of loose net of tracks, farms, warehouses and fisher huts, slowly giving way to the back country. Mancreu was a fisher island first, a tenuous farmland second, and everything revolved around the town where produce could be bought and sold. A small number of people lived out on the mountainsides, herders and weavers for the most part, and a very few bandits who were mostly bandits by inheritance rather than vocation. The Sergeant peered out that way now, thinking of the men who had killed Shola, wondering if they were from some such raggedy clan. He had thought those men had been among the first to Leave, taking their twentieth-century bolt-action rifles and their few belongings and heading off for some other place where they could quietly waste away. But then, this crew had carried proper weapons. Militia guns, not shepherd’s companions.

A real policeman, he thought, would follow those guns somehow, track them backwards. Or he might draw inferences from their make and model, from their presence at all. How unlikely was it that that gear was in private hands on the island? Not very. North Africa and Yemen both overflowed with Kalashnikovs. So did large parts of South-East Asia. Mancreu was surrounded by a ring of cheap, durable guns. Surrounded, but at a distance, and something of the British ethos regarding firearms had prevailed here for a long while. He had been right a moment ago: Mancreu bandits carried guns which would not have been out of place at Gallipoli or Ypres, and used them largely for shooting glass bottles and sheep belonging to other people, and only very occasionally for a stick-up. Certainly, they did not spree.

Things did not fit. He was keeping count of them in his mind, but they were all so hazy, so very tenuous. He might be being foolish. After all, Shola had been his friend. He very much wanted the death to mean something. And the boy needed it to mean something, needed this bleak introduction to messy, ketchup mortality to be more than just the consequence of a jostling in the marketplace. It dawned on him that he needed to do something else for a few hours. He could knock his head against what had happened until he bled, and he would still not understand it. He would miss the truth if it was offered to him because he was starting to have ideas about what it should look like and he would ignore anything which looked different. He had to step back.

And then, too, the rest of Mancreu’s perpetual crisis had not ground to a halt merely because Shola had died. It felt that way, or it felt that it should be that way, but he had lost enough friends to know better. The silence you feel belongs to you. To everyone else, it’s just another day.

He went home by way of the hospital. The other survivors of the shooting knew no more than he did, and he found himself apologising. They told him not to, and he returned to Brighton House pensive and took refuge for a while in the coarse yellowy pages of his book.

The boy arrived at a quarter after the hour bearing a huge sack almost as high as himself, and demanded that they go out onto the terrace facing the sea. The sack shortly resolved itself into a paper bag full of further paper bags, white and ribbed with wire. These, being unfurled, became cylinders nearly five feet in height and two across.

‘Thai lanterns!’ the boy said. ‘Hunnerten pro cent! In many places a bit illegal because of fires. But here, not. Also we send them out there.’ He pointed to the blue water beyond the terrace wall. The wind was blowing over the house and out to the horizon, and the distinction between sea and sky was indistinct.

‘Send them?’ the Sergeant said, and then wondered a little nervously why his first question had not been about the fires.

For answer, the boy produced a stretch of grubby cloth and bundled it up into a ball the size of his fist. He stuffed the rag into a cradle beneath the lantern. ‘Hold! We must inflate.’

The Sergeant held the lantern at top and bottom, beginning to understand, and the boy ignited the ball. Hot air billowed up, and the paper crinkled and swelled.

‘Wait until it really wants to go,’ the boy said.

They waited, and presently the lantern rose in their hands until the boy was on tiptoe. ‘Now!’ he said.

The lantern lifted slowly, turning from the last brush of their fingers and wobbling as a light breeze buffeted it towards the house. The Sergeant winced. Then it went higher and suddenly seemed to get the idea, floating proudly away over the dark, oily sea beneath the cliff. After a moment more its reflection was visible in the water, a twin glow hanging in another sky.