‘If they haven’t seen us by now,’ Rozalia murmured, as if reading my thoughts, ‘they never will.’

‘I wonder how the others are doing,’ said Yuichi. But no one answered him.

Rano Kau itself soon slipped to rearwards, and sooner than I’d anticipated Rozalia began to guide the dinghy in towards the rocky cove and the wrecked trawler. I saw it from the sea for the first time, its upper deck leaning towards us, streaked and pitted with rust.

Up above on the headland lay the coast road where Rozalia had been arrested. Should another patrol have chosen that moment to drive by, they would have had little difficulty in seeing us. That was unavoidable, and so we had to work fast.

Rozalia cut the engine a few metres from the water’s edge, jumping out and into the shallow water, taking hold of a short rope attached to the prow of the dinghy in order to pull it farther up the beach.

‘Give me a hand,’ she yelled. ‘We’re going to need to get this thing out of sight.’

Soon we were all splashing about, hauling on the rope until the dinghy slid up and on to the sand. We decided to hide it directly behind the wreck itself, on the seaward site, where it couldn’t be seen from land. I kept glancing towards the coast road, expecting to see approaching headlights, but there was nothing.

‘Okay,’ said Oskar, checking his rifle before snapping it shut and nodding to the rent in the trawler’s hull. ‘Let’s go see what’s in there.’

We followed in his wake, our feet leaving shallow impressions in the sand.

The bottom of the hull had been torn nearly in half, and gaped like a set of open jaws. I wondered under what circumstances the ship had gained such a deep and mortal wound, and if it had had anything to do with whatever cataclysm swept away the island’s original inhabitants. The tear was easily wide and tall enough to walk right inside, just as Rozalia had said.

I ducked down slightly as I followed Oskar into the dim interior of the beached craft and saw grey tarpaulins hanging from a cord strung from one end of the wreck to the other, like a washing line. Oskar tugged at a tarpaulin, and it fell onto the sand, revealing a tiny transfer stage.