The distance was not great. He gauged it at half a pistol shot, probably less, and a man who knew how to swim might be tempted to try it. That man would not arrive. An entire ocean pushed its wild green arm between the islands. Ten strokes out and you’d look up with a gasp to find yourself somewhere else entirely. Human strength would mean nothing out there. Even in a boat it was hard to see how you’d do it. Not, he thought, in a straight line.

He walked away from the sea, sat in the sand between tall spikes of dune grass. All day, scrambling around the island, he had waited for himself to come right but he hadn’t. Not right as rain, not the old Calley. There was the sense of a misstep. The sense of being given the kind of lesson he would not recover from.

He picked a piece of grass, picked another, started winding them together. I’ll make a rope, he thought, but what would he do with it? There was no one to take the other end. There was not even a tree he could hang himself from. That little pine tree, you’d have to be a midget to hang yourself from that.

Anyway.

The point is.

What I’m saying.

He spoke to Medina. It had taken hours to find the right voice and he had settled on something that drew on their better times together, like when Medina brought him the soup those clowns in Wales brewed instead of tea. Or that night after they found the tattooed sailor and thought they were closing in on Lacroix. Or sitting on the harbour wall at Mull. Or eating mussels, last night.

What’s your name?

Andrew.

And when Medina repeated it he got it a bit wrong, said Andrew with an s. Andrews. That didn’t matter though. He didn’t mind. It was funny because Medina didn’t make mistakes as a rule, could speak the king’s better than a lot of men Calley had served with. So it hadn’t mattered, he didn’t mind. And that was what he’d been trying to say, how much he hadn’t minded things and hadn’t even minded that thing with the flowers, not really, and if you’d stopped at two, well, you dozy cunt, we’d be sitting here on the beach together having a chinwag.

He tossed the grass away, his little rope. The shadows were long now. On the water the light was a slowly deepening gold. An hour of light left; half an hour of good light, of useful light.