Michael had been curious of late – Luke told this to anyone who would listen, clutching at them, gathering them around him, needing them to bear witness. His stream of justification, of confession, was punctuated by guttural sobs. His little brother wanted to know about kissing and touching, he said, what goes where and who does what. Luke had thought it funny, easier, to send the boy off for a practical demonstration rather than explain it to him himself. There was a promise waiting at the Sisters’ Stones – four girls, naked, willing – a red-lipped Viola had said it would be so.

Luke described in tender detail, if only to injure himself, how he had swapped boots with his brother and lifted onto Michael’s broadening shoulders the oily weight of his oversized wax jacket. On the boy’s vulnerable head he had positioned a pair of spiralling goat horns. All will be fine, was Luke’s assurance to Michael, at the last. In the pitch black, Luke had told him, those girls won’t know the difference.

And they hadn’t.

When they stood on the stage that morning in the Counting House and confessed to the gallery what their intention had been – to kill Luke – they believed that’s what they had done. There was no missing coda to their story to be offered once the women’s testimony was over – we meant to kill Luke but… They were sure that the body of the elder Signal boy lay there, still and bloodied, in the mud beyond the stones; they had reconciled themselves to that sin – that specific sin. The taking of this boy’s life was different from the taking of another’s – it was less. The sacrifice of Luke was a fair exchange for a greater good.

The girls had been under the spell of odious men certainly, so much so that they had adopted their behaviours, their means. They had put their trust in force and the inflicting of damage. They believed they could control a person’s fate.

When the elder Signal boy arrived on the harbourside, the girls might have thought him a true ghost, or else he was the brief apparition of relief. Had they managed to bring about long-needed justice and escape a black mark against their own names? Hallelujah! He is risen!

This relief could only have been fleeting. They understood the violence they had exacted, how irreversible it was, even if they hadn’t – as Saul had, as I had, in the unforgiving light of day – gone to the trouble of looking beyond the boots and the jacket, pulling aside the ferns and seeing that skull, that throat, looking into the open eyes of the boy who lay beneath.

Michael: inquisitive, eager, my best student, cruelly sacrificed for the sins of those who went before him.