One empty shelf was dusted with bread crumbs. Kane had clearly missed the bread itself. He picked up crackers, dry pasta, tins of tomatoes and beans. A few vegetables wilted in plastic crates: stunted bell peppers and cucumbers with dusty soil clinging to them. He decided to skip the vegetables. A chest freezer contained some hand-labeled packages of meat. At the back was a section devoted to car maintenance: oil, hand tools, reconditioned taillights.

Kane took his groceries to the till. Yellowing copies of the Daily Mail and the Telegraph remained on the counter, ten days old. The man rang everything up and gave him his change, then watched him studying the unfamiliar coins in his hand.

“We get bread on Tuesdays and Thursdays, meat on Fridays. You’ll have to keep an eye out if you want fresh vegetables.”

“I will,” Kane said. “Thank you.”

Kane stepped into his bungalow, across the scattering of ash. Could he stay here? He didn’t want to waste time looking for other accommodation, which was likely to be a room in someone else’s house anyway, with all the insecurity that brought.

Connor. He thought of the boy here, injured, the previous night. Young, vulnerable. Tried to read beneath the injuries to the character, still couldn’t see it.

Kane checked that the door was shut, drew the blind, then arranged Rory’s hoard across the kitchen table. He looked at the Polaroids. Kids posing, laughing, sometimes oblivious to the camera, it seemed. There were nine different children in total, but three dominated: Connor, Petra, and another girl, blond, with braces on her teeth. Kane recognized the beach at English Bay behind them. Some, more worrying, were interior shots, a bedroom, Connor with his arm around Petra. There was information here, Kane felt. Rory had caught something. Kane sifted the pictures Rory had torn from the island’s local newspaper, then turned to the exercise book and its drawings of some imagined horror. Its expressions of a troubled mind. Then he hid them in a wardrobe in what had been the parental bedroom.