I read it all to my father, who sat with his elbows on the table and fists rammed comically into his cheeks. He listened without comment, and waited until he was sure I had finished.

‘Banditti,’ he repeated. ‘Exactly his thing. He’ll be among them…not the same name, of course, something else he’s adopted. We go from island to island, some’ll be loyal to them, loyal to him, but some’ll talk. As we go, we narrow it down, I think.’

‘Father,’ I ventured, ‘perhaps you need to have an eye to other possibilities. Perhaps the ship just sank and nobody is culpable. Or there are brigands of whatever kind there, but the man you seek is not among them. Or he is, and the situation is so dangerous that we can do nothing but observe and leave.’

‘Yes,’ he hurried to agree, ‘yes. Any of those, but…I am interested: the doctor must be aware of our aims?’

He had changed the subject as though he never even heard the contrary possibilities. ‘Yes,’ I sighed. ‘I have spoken to him, in broad terms. That is why he’s given you those newspapers, I suppose.’

He extended a hand towards me, sounding for the depth of my scepticism. It was a thing he did in lieu of looking into my eyes. I took the outstretched fingers and held them, poor foolish man.

‘Sweet girl, why did you agree to come?’

I’d thought it through many times. I’d come up with arguments for curious outsiders. But I hadn’t yet answered him directly.

‘Oh, the views, I suppose. Sea air. Thought I’d try my hand at scrimshaw.’

He smiled.

‘I’m here to look after you.’ I said it as neutrally as I could. It was hard to say because it implied, directly, that he was incapable of looking after himself. But he didn’t fly into a rage, as perhaps he might have if he’d been much further into the day’s drinking. In fact, his face barely changed at all.

‘Do you feel you owe me anything?’

‘No.’

No, there is nothing owed to a father who had stumbled and thrashed his way from one calamity to the next ever since I could remember. ‘No, Father, I don’t. I hope that doesn’t sound disrespectful to you.’

I had learnt as a small child that powerful feelings—love, gratitude, pain—could pass between us unspoken, despite his blindness, or perhaps because of it. Some mysterious conduit remained. There was wounded pride in his eyes.

‘If the time comes that you must look after yourself,’ he said, ‘you should do so.’

I could not know to what he referred. But he turned himself slightly so that he no longer faced me. His brow was inclined to the late sun coming in through the window now, as though he could see it as much as feel it, and it offered him solace.