At the manor, I found David in a room on the first floor. I called for him and he answered, so I followed his voice through the dark rooms and up the creaking stairs and then down a black corridor toward a little flickering light. He was at the window, lighting a cigarette from a candle.

“Every time you do that, a sailor dies. But I suppose it doesn’t matter now.” David turned to me. “Will it be very violent, the end of the world? The dead bursting out of their graves and so on.”

“Possibly,” I said.

“Then I am glad you’re here.” The room was blue and the candle burned with an almost white flame. It did not seem end-of-the-worldish, but there was something old about it, as though the moment was not as freshly minted as others I had known. “Do we know when it is going to end exactly?”

“No.”

“So it could be any moment?”

“Yes.”

“Well then,” he said.

“Well then what?”

“Well then, I should probably tell you something.”

David was a liar, a thief, and in considerable trouble. It made me like him, when before I had not been sure. I liked stealing too. I liked things that were stolen. That morning, the last of my money had got me a half bottle of rum and two liters of supermarket brand Coke. I also had a crumb of hash, which we smoked out in the rose garden sitting on the stone bench where Mortimer had died, not that we knew it at the time. The beds were a tangle of weeds and thorns, but peeping out from among them were roses, still unfurling from their buds. While we talked, I tore off their heads and shredded the petals between my fingers.

There had been some kind of school trip to Italy. He had borrowed a coat and gone out and met some people and decided not to go back. Or not decided, one thing just leading to another. Only the coat had had credit cards and quite a large amount of money in it. And he had spent the money, and used the card a couple of times, three times at most, while thinking about what to do. Then, when he had decided he ought to go back, say sorry, and promise to pay back the money, etc., it was too late and the police were looking for him.

“Whose was the coat?”

“A teacher’s.”

It wasn’t the whole of it, but I didn’t press. I wasn’t seeking a hold over him, at least not then.

We took the rum and Coke and went down to the lake, following the path round to the temple, where we inspected the plinth, which bore a stone head of Athena. Then, sitting cross-legged on the leaf-littered floor, we watched the moon slipping down into the water like a bather.

“Isn’t it supposed to become as blood?”