The next morning both of the boys felt measurably better. After breakfast they climbed down the sandy dunes to the beach and went hunting in the shallow pools near the shoreline. By lunchtime they each carried a seething bucket of captured crabs. Conor’s interest in the creatures was almost scientific. He watched them scrabble and scrape at the sides of the bucket, climbing over one another to get to the top.

Katherine made them leave the buckets outside while they had lunch. When they had finished eating Richard proposed that they reintroduce the crabs to their natural habitat. By now the tide had come in, so they stood on a small bluff overlooking the water and competed to see who could throw a crab the farthest. Finally they began hurling the crabs against the rocks that protruded from the sandy soil near the house, judging the results in terms of splatter and limb-loss.

When they got bored of this they began a circuit of the island. They paused at a walled orchard to steal some apples, which they threw at cattle until a man on a bicycle shouted at them to stop.

‘I should show you the secret beach,’ Richard said.

The secret beach was a small windswept cove on the western side of the island. When the boys reached it, crossing as they went the damp, compacted sand of the sheltered dunes, they found that some people were already there: a couple with their two small children.

‘It’s no good if there’s someone here,’ Richard complained.

But Conor was happy they had run across some other people. All afternoon they had been alone, and to Conor the island was beginning to seem desolate, abandoned.

By now the boys’ mood was feverish, hysterical. They had been tackling each other as they ran to the secret beach, giggling uncontrollably and shouting obscenities into the breeze that was gusting in off the coast. Now Richard stood on the bluff that overlooked the cove and frowned as he caught his breath.

Conor saw that finding strangers at the cove had altered Richard’s mood. A part of him was aware of the fragility of Richard’s comfort. He had sensed a faint hostility in some of the things Richard had said as they traversed the island (‘How could you never have caught a crab before? That’s, like, so basic’). He was never sure, afterward, why he did what he did next.

What he did next was to scramble up on to the bluff beside Richard and wave madly at the people on the beach.

‘Hey!’ he shouted, giggling. ‘Hey, get the fuck off our beach!’

The people on the beach turned to look at the two boys. Conor slapped Richard on the shoulder and started to run. He was still laughing as he ran along the edge of the bluff. He was still laughing as he looked back and saw Richard lunge after him, jumping across a gap in the bluff and landing heavily and awkwardly on the hillock on the other side. He was still laughing when he saw Richard tumble and fall.