“Yeah, he—what do you say? He deserted from the army, and they sent police to us at our home, so.” She finishes the beer, swirling the last drop in a circle in the bottom of her glass. “We needed to have a holiday, and we came here until it was all clear. I thought they would get bored of watching our house with everything else that is going on, you know? And then, it’s nice here, it was fine, but the customs man wouldn’t let us have a permit and then there was no party! We waited for the party, and it was very dull here. Meaning no offense.”

Dull here. What irony.

“So we were calling … fy faen, when was it? It was yesterday. We were calling home, but there was no phone connection at the postal office, and our mobiles didn’t work.”

“The tower’s down,” I say, that same image forming in my mind, the metal tumbled, heaped on the dig site.

“The mobile tower is where we camped first, in the—what do you call it?—barrow? Is that the word in English?”

“It is,” I answer as understanding dawns. They’d been hiding at the dig site. No wonder I hadn’t noticed them for a few days. I cannot imagine spending a night there, but to each their own.

“We saw the customs man looking around…” Marit nods warily in PC Brian’s direction. “So we moved, and when we were coming down, I saw that boat leaving for the other island. That’s when I got the first bad feeling. Thinking something was wrong.”

She puts down her beer with a thud.

Ian raises his eyebrows, I nod, and he refills it for her.

“Why just the children and not everybody?” she asks.

It’s a fair question. “I suppose it’s because they’re too young to be able to rationally consent.”

She frowns, nods, looks around. “Some of these people are too old to rationally consent.”

Liz starts another song on her fiddle, this one slower, more plaintive. A cloud passes over the sun.

I pull my coat tighter around me. “Some are ready, though. They’ve lived through a lot of days like this one, and now they want to be the one to go.”

I was ready. When it comes to it, what other choice is there but acceptance?

Matty’s crossing the garden with a plastic cup of red wine for Elsie.

He was just at the bar, and I missed him. I wonder if he looked at me. I’m like a teenager at a dance. I have to stop; it’s over now.

“Line them up, then,” Marit snaps, startling me back into the conversation. “Get your volunteers and, you know, do it. This is barbaric.”

I raise an eyebrow. “That’s what the Romans thought.”

“The Romans were right.”