“Well, he didn’t last long,” observed Isla.

The small party watched him with consternation, waving his arms and shouting, charging down the hill to the men putting away the gangway. “Waaaiiittt!” he yelled.

“I hate this job,” said Fintan despondently.

“Me also,” said Gaspard, pulling out a cigarette and lighting it, somewhat miraculously, in the full force of the oncoming wind.

“ I FORGOT MY dog!” Konstantin panted to the tall, kindly captain of the ferry, who had been very unimpressed with both of the men coming to work on Mure; he took as keen an interest as everyone else in the success or failure of the Rock.

“Did you now,” said the man. Grudgingly he opened the rope that blocked off the gangway and Konstantin, slightly fuzzily, ran into the hold, where Bjårk was filling his traveling box a little snugly.

“Bjårk! I am so sorry. I am a terrible, terrible man,” he said. “Well, so everyone else says. I was probably just having a bad day,” he added, kneeling down.

Bjårk, as it happened, was happily in the process of forgiving him, as he wanted out and, ideally, a snack, and then perhaps another snack. Indeed, Konstantin felt in his pocket and found a packet of crisps that had been on the bar and that he’d completely forgotten was in there. He opened them up, sniffed them—they were a flavor he was not familiar with—and passed them all on to Bjårk, who didn’t care either way.

The captain had come down to the hold and was staring at him.

“You give crisps to your dog?” he said incredulously. “The dog you didn’t even remember you had?”

He shook his head and felt sorry for Fintan. Konstantin returned a haughty stare. He was used to everyone being nice to him and fussing over him. Being cross with him wasn’t really done, unless of course it was his father.

Instead he hauled Bjårk, who didn’t want to leave the huge raft of fascinating smells coming from all over the boat, down the gangplank with every ounce of dignity he could muster, which, given he was half drunk, splashed with water, and heaving a large, hairy beast whose muzzle was covered in crisp crumbs, wasn’t much.

FINTAN AND ISLA stood watching them approach. Gaspard was delighted and waved cheerfully.

“Hey! Monsieur Chien,” he shouted cheerfully. Bjårk wagged his tail in return.

“Okay. Now we can go,” said Konstantin stiffly, arriving back and slightly peeved that nobody was making a move to carry his ancient leather suitcase for him.

“But . . . but . . .” Fintan started to stutter.

As he did so, the dog walked up to him and licked his palm. Bjårk smelled, inexplicably, of shrimp cocktail. His tongue dangled cheerfully.

“We don’t have room for a dog!”

Isla gave him a side-eye. Colton’s two dogs, ridiculously expen sive deerhounds, lived around the place perfectly happily, and everyone quite liked having them around, even though they were trained to tear you limb from limb on hearing a key word that Colton appeared to have taken with him to the grave and Fintan was terrified of saying by accident one day.