Taylor had run the names of all men on the island against the sexual offenders register and international databases of pedophiles, but none came up. Kane had checked through general records of crime on Ascension, just in case anything stood out. There were drunk-driving offenses, a fight on the UK base, the theft of some potatoes, but nothing more. The island’s policing and justice system was a colonial hand-me-down: British, faded by time and the sun and limited, enclosed means. For most of its occupied life, Ascension had been technically classed as a ship. This had been the only way the Royal Navy could think of to ensure discipline, and meant the captain’s orders were law. While the situation was more civilian now, it retained eccentricities, with ad hoc plans to improvise court trials in emergencies. Kane had a sense that these remained untested.

One anecdote from a history of the island lodged inside his mind like a tune he couldn’t shake. A cook in the Royal Marines, stationed on Ascension for two years, had eventually had a fit and was placed in the island’s hospital but ran out onto the sharp rocks barefoot, cutting his legs and feet to ribbons. Found covered in blood in what the records described as a state of acute mania, he had to be forced into the police station for his own safety. Kane felt a thread among the accounts of island life: of breaking points, men and women who stopped resisting the surroundings, and the environment had torn them to shreds.

When you get there, take a breath, he told himself. Don’t rush. Fight the instinct to dive in and start investigating. Settle, blend, penetrate. Six months was a long time on an island of eight hundred people—there would be those who’d liked Rory and those who didn’t. People who wanted something from him, people he wanted something out of. People who might have known his state of mind. Something made Kane feel he could find out what happened that night, if only because he was starting in that unique position of a spy: an outsider with privileged insight.

The loudspeaker woke him from that fantasy.

Would passengers for Flight 301 to Saint Helena make their way to the boarding gate, where boarding has commenced . . .

He got to his feet and lifted his luggage, which seemed inadequate. There was something about the journey, with its syncopated hopping to ever more remote and uninhabitable pieces of land, that felt at once disorientating and like you were being fired with great precision toward a target.

The passengers on the Saint Helena flight were mostly Saints, their deep skin tones betraying ancestry suffused with intersecting bloodlines: European administrators, Chinese workers, slaves from Madagascar. Kane got his first hearing of the accent, which was a historical repository in itself, sliding between Cockney, Australian, and Irish by way of West Africa.