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The Sergeant nodded. ‘Well, then. Which one?’ And please, let it not be the missing fish. That would tie him to Pechorin. Loosely, yes, but he did not want Arno getting interested in his dealings with the Ukrainians. Not at all.

The Italian spread his hands. ‘You ask, quite often, about a boy. About where he comes from and who he is. Yet often this person is seen with you. Why do you not just ask the question direct?’

The Sergeant stared at him. ‘I… Oh. Well. You know the island is to be destroyed, and the people resettled elsewhere?’

Arno nodded. Of course he did.

‘Have you got kids?’

‘No. I hope I still have time.’

Yes. That exactly.

‘And have you ever seen an evacuation?’ He had. He’d seen that African disaster which had produced Dirac’s moment of madness.

‘Yes,’ Arno said.

‘Well, this lad is special. He’s very bright and he’s got a, what would you call it, a good way about him. We’re friends. I don’t know if he has any family. Any parents. I thought…’ He trailed off. Telling people was getting to be a habit. If he told anyone else, he would have to tell the boy before he learned about it as gossip. He should tell the boy anyway. That much was getting painfully obvious. ‘I thought… if he was an orphan, you know, all that… I thought I might adopt him. I don’t have a family, and it might work well for both of us. He’s too smart for the system. Too good. They’d break him in half to make him fit in the boxes. I can’t just let him—’ He felt a catch in his throat, rode over it. ‘I can’t let it all go bad for him, in some bloody resettlement camp somewhere.’

‘So you ask about him—’

‘Because if he has parents he loves, I don’t want to embarrass him. Embarrass either of us.’ I don’t want to be rejected.

It hung in the air between them, a palpable truth, and frankly truer and more important to him than the Tigerman mess or any of the rest of it.

Arno’s face was moved, and even a little impressed. There was an inclination in his upper body which suggested his instinct was to wrap the Sergeant in a broad, Mediterranean embrace. He contented himself with a nod of respect.

God, the Sergeant thought, a little awed. You got right to it, didn’t you? You got the core of me so fast you missed the bit you were interested in.

It seemed he had. The dangerous intensity was, if not entirely gone, massively in abeyance.

‘Sergeant,’ Arno said, holding the door. He nodded gravely, one un-father to another.

THERE WAS A bad feeling in the street, like the hush after someone says something appallingly stupid but just before the first bottle gets broken. The Sergeant walked through Beauville as if it was a place he didn’t know and he had stepped off the plane into a siege or an insurrection. For the first time, his uniform felt less like a public service than a target for a sniper. The NatProMan soldiers could feel it too, and they hunched a little as they worked to clear the rubble of the refrigeration plant. That it had contained mostly murderers was beside the point. They had been islanders, and the marines guarding them had been saved, which made a stark distinction about the value of life.

Hearts and minds, bollocks. It was amazing how often that expression was used to describe what was already gone and could not now be clawed back. Although in fairness no one had ever cared much about what the Mancreux thought. They were small and they had no natural resources, no pressure groups. Their only important export was the Discharge Clouds, which was why everyone was here.

And the Fleet.

He didn’t want to think about the Fleet, but the choice had been taken away from him. You could ignore something which was quiet and distant. You couldn’t keep that up when it was bombing you.

‘Hey, I know you!’

The voice was high and robust, an Australian woman which meant a journalist. And yes, she knew him, from Mali and Iraq. But perhaps she would lose interest if he didn’t seem to hear.

‘Lester! Lester! What is it – Harris? Morris? You can turn around, Lester, I’m just gonna follow you up the street.’

He turned, and there she was: small and blonde and with too many teeth in the lower set, so that her smile looked a bit too much like a ferret.

She stuck out her hand for him to shake, and it was almost as weathered and leathery as his own.

‘Kathy Hasp,’ she reminded him.

‘BBC,’ he replied. She shook her head.

‘Not any more. They closed my office. So now it’s the Post .’ Which Post she didn’t say. Washington? Bangkok? Huffington? Or something else he hadn’t heard of, something that anyone who was anyone would know? ‘So what’s really going on, Lester? You’re a straight shooter.’

‘Your guess is as good as mine. I was having dinner, someone blew up a building.’

‘But a building full of your prisoners, right?’

Not such a chance meeting, after all.

He nodded. ‘Yes. My investigation. It’s been rather swallowed up now.’

‘And how’s that feel?’

‘It’s a relief. I had a murder case. This has gone political. I don’t do political.’

‘Thought you were the Consul. All promoted and wearing a suit.’

‘It’s pro forma. I have a watching brief. Britain has withdrawn from Mancreu.’ Belatedly, he remembered that he wasn’t supposed to say anything. ‘I have a prepared statement.’

She shrugged. ‘Nah, I know what it says. Just wanted to catch up. If you find you’ve got anything you want to say, you know me, right? Fair shake.’ True. She’d been straight with her sources before, mostly.

‘I’ll keep that in mind.’

She grinned. ‘You do that.’

He glanced over at the horizon. He had plenty of opinions about that, for example. About what went on there. It wasn’t his place to have them, but they were there, if he cared to get them out and have a look.

Hasp followed his eyes. ‘You ever ask yourself how this place would work if that lot weren’t out there?’

‘No,’ he muttered.

‘Right old carnival of the bastards, though, isn’t it?’

‘It’s unaligned shipping. You’d have to speak to the Portmaster.’

‘The way I see it, either they’re keeping this place alive or they’re keeping it under the hammer. Should have been sorted out years ago, but somehow it just never quite happens, does it?’

‘No doubt the world community will reach a decision at the appropriate time.’

‘Yeah, I bet they will. Right about now, is what I hear. Now that Dr Inoue’s team are saying it’s gonna be the Big One. Except I also hear she says boiling the place away won’t help.’

‘Dr Inoue is very highly qualified. I’m sure her opinions will be given due weight.’ He was sergeanting now, stone-faced and literal. He could do this all day. Yes, sir. No, sir. ‘The mission will achieve the assigned objective.’ And never mind that the assigned objective is asinine, or that we’ll just have to retreat the day after. He could hear Africa telling him to turn around and walk away, but he didn’t. Something in him needed to hear the lies in his mouth rather than in his head. He knew what the Fleet was. Everyone knew. He just chose not to.

Shola and his killers and the missile; the heroin and Pechorin; the quad bikers and the dog. It all wrapped somehow into the Fleet, maybe more than once. The photograph in the cave, the new guns, and Bad Jack. Round and around and around it went, and he chose not to look too closely because if he did he must, inevitably, see things which were invisible.

I say I’m the police, but I choose not to see because that’s my real job. To look the other way, because it’s expedient. Except that killing Shola isn’t a matter of national security, is it? It’s just a crime like any other, and they can do it because everyone looks the other way. And they can kill the witnesses in my custody, too, because apparently I don’t care . Because a sergeant in the British Army, and a Brevet-Consul, couldn’t be allowed to see what’s under his nose and make a stink. That blindness was the whole point of the island.