‘Thousands and thousands of years old.’ Nefyn looked around. ‘From another time, another place.’ She gazed up at them. ‘This place used to be someone’s home. Someone’s shelter.’ She walked towards him, rested the side of her face on his chest so she could listen to his heart. ‘My mother brought me here as a child. She’d make me listen. And I could hear them. All the people who had lived here. Died here. They never disappeared.’

Hamza smiled. The dark trees breathing around them.

‘Everything changes, but their lives became rooted here. Became part of this place. Untouchable.’ Nefyn looked up at him. ‘Even if places, countries are hard to see, even if they seem to disappear in front of your eyes, they’re still there. I just wanted you to know that,’ she whispered. ‘I wanted you to feel that.’

Hamza looked at her, his eyes filling. He wrapped his arms around her and they stood in the submerged forest, listening, until the tide finally started to turn.

The Captain was unable to sleep, switched on the bedside lamp in his quarters. He made himself some coffee and headed to his office, nodding here and there to the soldiers on duty. It wasn’t his meeting with the Lieutenant Colonel that was playing on his mind per se, but a niggling memory of their last dealings with Owens. He was sure he had heard the Lieutenant Colonel say to him that his record was exemplary. They were duty-bound to investigate any case of suicide within the army and when he pulled up his paperwork, the memory and the evidence just did not tally. He unlocked the door of his office, clicked on his table lamp and waited for the bulb to illuminate the gloom.

He may have misheard, of course – these things were not impossible – but there was something in the rather erratic behaviour of the Lieutenant Colonel recently that unsettled him. He knew that they had had a meeting not long before Owens walked into the sea. A meeting that the Captain hadn’t been party to. He pulled up Owens’s record once again. It wouldn’t be hard for him to look into the incidents he found there, but he risked offending the Lieutenant Colonel if he caught wind of it. After all, filing a complaint against a senior officer could tarnish your own record even if it transpired that the complaint was justified. He threw down the record once again and sat back in his chair.

There was something about Owens. It was impossible to generalize, or to know what state of mind anyone was in, but he just didn’t strike the Captain as someone who would do that. He was a survivor, an opportunist. And most opportunists would try to find a way. He was resourceful, clever, and had had the audacity to challenge his superiors. This was unusual, and showed a remarkable sense of self-worth.