Granger shook his head. ‘You may not be able to believe it now, but if you seat yourselves on die ground, I shall pass amongst you and you will see for yourselves how much is here.’

‘For chrissake,’ said the man in the orange shirt.

‘Yes!’ said Granger. ‘For Christ’s sake!’

He walked towards them with his wire basket on his arm. Season, watching him through the supermarket window, was holding her breath so tight that her heart was beating in long, slow bumps. She could hear Mike Bull behind her breathe, ‘Oh, my God.’

Granger reached into his basket and took out one of the packets of Kellogg’s crispbread, offering it to the man in the orange shirt. The gesture was so affectionate, and had such generous innocence, that Season had to close her eyes. However messed up Granger might have been – however eccentric and Californian his church – he was now offering food to the hungry in the sincere belief that God would help him to satisfy them.

The man in the orange shirt, unbelievably, actually took the crispbread and stared down at it as if he couldn’t quite understand what it was. But then he hurled it away from him, and turned on Granger with a screech of frustrated rage that Season could hear clearly, even inside the barricaded market. The man grabbed hold of Granger’s kaftan and ripped the back of it, exposing Granger’s naked back, and his blue shorts.

The crowd surged across the road as if they were runners in a marathon. The noise they made was hair-raising – a peculiar kind of ululating warble, as primitive and frightening as Zulus, or Apaches. They gathered around Granger in a furious, tearing mob, and for a moment he disappeared completely.

Tony, grey-faced, said, ‘They’re killing him. Right in front of our eyes. They’re killing him, Mike!’

Season couldn’t say anything. None of them had really expected Granger to go out there and pacify five hundred starving people, but for a few heady minutes they had all wondered, just wondered, if miracles could happen for real. Season held Sally close, and when Sally asked her, ‘What’s happening. Mommy? Where’s Mr Hughes gone?’ Season tried to soothe her and stroke her, and say, ‘No place, honey. Maybe to heaven.’

But Granger wasn’t in heaven yet. Granger was still in hell. There was a sudden struggling in the crowd, a sudden desperate fighting and wrenching and screaming. And it was then that something came pushing and tearing its way through the howling crowds of people, arid collided with the windows of the supermarket with such force that they rattled and reverberated. Something that smeared red all over the glass with the feverish abandon of an action painter, trying to finish a masterpiece against the clock.

Season looked. Just once. And then she couldn’t open her eyes again, not for whole eons of agonised time.