Not, sadly, because he instantly forgave me, but because although the phone rang straight away, it went on ringing and ringing and ringing, all the way to his ridiculous ‘Langdon Courtney, speak to me!’ voicemail greeting. I didn’t have it in me to leave a message confessing to what I’d done there and then. I learned long ago that bad news is always best delivered directly. He’d see I’d tried to contact him anyway, and would no doubt call me back.

‘No answer,’ I said pointlessly, once I’d hung up.

Amelia had an eye pressed to one of the holes. Her, ‘Don’t worry, you can try him again later,’ sounded weird, and I hoped that was because her mouth was up against the metal of the container, rather than because she was panicking. I felt horribly responsible in that moment, and looked to Marcel. But he’d simply sat down with his elbows on his knees and his head bowed, apparently prepared to wait it out. He looked so resigned, suffering patiently, but I couldn’t do the same.

‘What can you see?’ I asked Amelia, and peered through a hole near hers.

‘Not much,’ she muttered.

She wasn’t wrong. Along that side of the container the pinhole view outside was of nothing at all, or at least just the griddled flank of another metal box about two feet away. Why was she staring at that? I knew better than to ask. We all cope with stress in different ways, and if Amelia wanted to focus on the box next door, so be it. I wasn’t about to do the same though, and instead worked my way round the container, reaching and stooping and even lying down to see whatever I could out of all the various holes. It turned out, unsurprisingly, that we were hemmed in on both sides by the neighbouring containers and the holes all showed close-up nothingness. Fewer had been drilled through the front door, and all that I could glimpse through them was a section of the dusty track we’d been marched down, flanked by a boring section of the perimeter fence. I waited a while, but nothing moved along it. The holes in the rear of the container were a little more promising. Two to the right were obscured by scrubby bushes, but the ones on the left showed a wedge of sky above a slice of prefab hut with its door hanging open, and some grey scree beyond it, sloping away in the direction of the open-cast mine. I couldn’t see any of the mine itself, but trucks crossed that slope from time to time, and I didn’t have to wait long before two guys in hard hats ambled up it and into the hut.