Carl was sitting next to Season in her corner by the fruit shelves. They had been sharing the last of their dinner – a can of soya hamburger helper and a can of Green Giant spinach – while Vee had been singing Sally to sleep. Carl looked at Season with wide eyes, and he didn’t have to say anything at all. They both knew that it was only going to be a matter of time before the mob broke in, and when they did, there wouldn’t be any mercy for any of them. It was no good pretending that what had happened to Granger Hughes wouldn’t happen again.

‘Do you think it’s possible to – make things easier?’ asked Season, in a high, dry voice she scarcely recognised as her own.

‘In what way?’ asked Carl.

‘Well, for Sally. To make it painless.’

Carl pulled at the skin of his cheeks as if it were tired pink elastic. ‘I guess Mike Bull has a whole lot of pharmaceuticals we could use. Aspirin, something like that. But that would take time.’

There was a crash of reinforced glass as the mob outside began to hurl themselves at the supermarket doors with hammers and tyre-irons.

‘You don’t want to do it too soon,’ said Carl. ‘And on the other hand, you certainly don’t want to do it too late.’

‘She’s so pretty,’ said Season, looking across at Sally’s fine blonde hair, her eyes filled with tears. ‘I couldn’t bear it if they hurt her.’

Vee could hear what they were saying, but she continued to rock Sally in her arms, smoothing her forehead to calm her down, and singing to her.

‘Roon, roon, rosie,

Cuppie, cuppie, shell.

The dog’s away to Hamilton,

To buy a new bell;

If you don’t take it.

I’ll take it to myself.

Roon, roon, rosie,

Cuppie, cuppie, shell.’

Her voice was drowned by a tumult of shrieking and banging. Carl laid aside his uneaten food, and said, ‘Mike’s going to need some help. For God’s sake, look, there must be a thousand of them out there.’

The hammering grew louder and even more determined. One of the chromed steel bars that Tony had slid through the door-handles to keep the mobs from breaking in was actually bending now, and the door was half-torn off its hinges. The reinforced glass had held together, even though it had been crushed into a wired-together slush; but now the sheer weight of hysterical people outside of the supermarket was beginning to tell. One blood-smeared hand appeared through the opaque glass like the hand that had reached out of the lake for Excalibur, disembodied, groping blindly, unable to pull itself back because of all the furious people behind.