‘He’s in the barn, Mikey,’ Donovan says. ‘He’s a good kid. Pretty scared, as he should be.’

‘I can’t do this,’ I tell him.

‘We need you, Mikey,’ Melissa says. ‘He has to be moved on.’

‘Otherwise it’s just a matter of time,’ Donovan adds.

I shake my head. This has nothing to do with me and to get involved in it is both dangerous to me in the present and to the reputation I have spent a lifetime securing. It’s a non-starter, a violation of every value my whole career instilled in me. But slowly other things, only partially repressed, come into play and not least the simple fact that life itself doesn’t always observe the rules by which you’d like your existence to be governed. So it took my wife at the very moment when we were supposed to share our lives most closely and steeped my remaining days in loneliness. It broke all the promises that we once made to those who helped us and who we left behind. It took my father’s lifelong strength and singularity of vision – his rock of ages – and robbed him of himself. And so slowly a seed of doubt is sown and I start to wonder what my existence would be if even once I stepped outside the confines of a life I had predestined by making it subservient to a particular code and an unbending and fixed set of contexts that, if I’m honest, were sometimes at variance with who I really am. Wonder whether I could live a life untainted by fear. In those confused moments, with Donovan and Melissa looking at me, I think too of the old man, his whole life given to struggle and consumed by weariness, who remembers seeing lions come down to the beach at dusk and how that memory sustains him. But though I search I can’t find a guiding image to hold fast to in the moment when I need it most, and that feels like an irreversible loss.

As I stand under the intense scrutiny of Donovan and Melissa, I feel suddenly at the very edge of worlds, with both the hope and danger that this brings; I see too the young man we interrogated in the prison, the photograph of his family who probably never saw him again. I remember the way he looked at me out of the bruised and discoloured flesh of his face. And then I think about who is hiding in the barn, a man unclothed who knows too much and who will come to understand the danger that knowledge brings. The knowledge of good and evil. I almost envy him that certainty, that unclouded and untrammelled clarity. But not what is waiting for him down the line. I know we don’t forgive such as him. But for a few seconds it feels as if it is my soul that is still in limbo, and my voice one of those that Donovan heard on the wires, and when eventually I speak it sounds strangely ethereal, travelling far from myself into an unfathomable distance.