The grave of the Englishman was as far from the cove, the house, the settlement, as such a small island would allow. They walked, the three of them, less than a mile across the place’s humped stone back. The woman, head covered, her jacket a sailor’s jacket, walked at the front. Then came Medina, then Calley carrying a peat spade on his shoulder like a musket. They walked from sea to sea, then out on to a promontory, the island’s last extension. A short-legged horse—a thing still as the land it stood on—watched them come. The mind of an animal up here. The mind of a person. How much sky can one life bear?

“Here,” said the woman, pointing to what they were all already looking at, the shallow heaping of stones between her boot caps and the cliff-edge.

“You’d think,” said Calley, “they would just have heaved him over the edge. Still, lucky for us I suppose.”

The woman lingered long enough to see him lifting away the first stones, to see him stare at Medina until Medina joined him. Take a stone, lift it, set it down. Take another. Then she left them.

“Adios,” said Calley. “Hasta la vista!”

Under the stones were squares of peat, then smaller pieces the size of your fist, then smaller still, a black rubble mixed with roots and pebbles. It was not a deep grave, nor did they need the spade. Calley knelt one side, Medina the other. The wind tousled their hair, played with the hems of their coats. They came to a layer of stone again and underneath it a sheet of canvas, something spared from a sail, brown with tallow. Calley took off his coat, lay on his belly and stretched down. When he tugged free a corner of the canvas they saw a man’s black hair. He tugged again and they had the whole head. The weight of the stones had done something to the shape of his face, and the peat or the tallow or both had begun to colour his skin, but he was not, it seemed, much altered by his stay in the ground and would, presumably, be recognised by those who had known him in life. The wound to the neck had been bandaged with the man’s stock, the linen still white in places though most of it brown-red like iron in a rock.

“It’s him,” said Medina.

Calley looked across the grave. “You what?”

“It’s him. The man I saw in the painting at the house. The man responsible for the massacre. In the ground. Finished.”

“It doesn’t look anything like him,” said Calley.

“No. It’s him. I will swear it.”

“Fuck off,” said Calley. “Look at him.”

“I have looked.”

“Look at him again. I’ve seen the man. Remember? I’ve seen him. This is not even close.”

Medina shrugged. “I disagree.”