He laughs again, high-pitched, his head thrown back, but his half-closed eyes still on the men.

‘Oh, boohoo,’ he sing-songs. ‘Why so sad and mournful? I see you do glance with fret on your faces. Do I switch topics of conversation too easily? Papers, papers, papers; what difference would they make? Dead is dead. You think some papers will make the sickness go away, give it sense? It is just false comfort you seek. You may as well wrap these vellums round your head and set them alight. It is a fantasy to think if you record the death or the man they are more sensible than the unrecorded death and the unknown man. Besides, identifying papers only function if they refer to some higher authority, and where is your authority? Where is it? I do not see it?’

He begins searching through the parchments on the table, scanning them, discarding them. Then he looks up at them. ‘I cannot find it,’ he says. ‘It is gone. We are alone.’

No one says anything, and he takes another drink.

‘If it is the bodies that set you against me,’ he says, ‘do not worry. They shall be removed. At your ease; the gravedigger is coming.’

William finally moves towards the door. ‘I am done with this,’ he says. ‘There is no normality here. This man is touched, and you are all mad if you stay here, as well.’

‘You are clearly troubled, coming apart in the heat,’ Ambrosio says to William. ‘Leave and find your peace, but mind what I said to you of women. They are all liars and come together they could generate a flurry of lies that could open the earth with its weight, dragging you into hell, and, still, any man would rather their lies than their absence.’

‘Where will you go?’ de Flunkl asks William, his voice breaking. ‘You have nowhere to go.’

William can see the boy is afraid. ‘The world is completely foreign to me, now,’ William says. ‘It makes no difference to me where I situate myself within it.’ He turns to Harold. ‘I am sorry. I am abandoning you, but it is my weakness, not your own. You are a good man. Will you come?’

‘You will not leave me for long,’ Harold says.

He is so calm and certain, still; has seen many fluctuations and yet remains himself. William envies the security of his strength.

William shakes his head at him, and then leaves, ascending into light, emerging and disappearing into a storm of sunshine that he then confiscates by hurling the door closed after him.

Once William is gone Ambrosio’s eyes search the room; he gets down on his knees, and looks under the sacks; and then in the cubbyholes and under the table.

‘Why are there no flies here any more?’ he says. ‘There were so many you couldn’t hear your breath; and now all is silent.’