The white fibreglass boat was a dot beside the huge hulks on the beach, but they crept as close as possible to each vast blue shape, peering up for identifying marks.

Finally Casey pointed, with relief. ‘There she is.’

Ed turned to see a familiar broad blue hull slumped in the distance. The Tephi. Her name was painted over in a splodge of black, but her shape was instantly recognisable from the photographs they had seen. The distinctive red stripe ran all the way around her, and her forest-green keel had buried itself in the mud.

They bobbed closer.

As she travelled the oceans, the Tephi would have been piled high with a Rubik’s cube of containers. Now she lay empty, slumped sideways. Beside her lay another huge shape, the Beauvallet: Casey could just make out the letters on this ship’s prow. From her shape, the Beauvallet must have once been a cruise ship. Casey imagined her in her heyday, holiday-jolly, skimming joyfully across the waves.

The Beauvallet had been hacked away in sections, bit by bit. Her bow, high up the beach, looked almost normal, but a hundred feet back the ship had been sliced cleanly from deck to mud. Patches of rust spattered the remaining hull, like a terrible plague.

The fishing boat sidled closer to the two beached ships. Compared with the other wrecks along the Bhatiari coastline, the Tephi looked new and intact. She had come to a halt in the silt, listing heavily to port.

‘She looks like she might go over altogether,’ Ed warned. ‘Incredibly dangerous for the workers.’

Casey was studying her map, trying to work out exactly where they were. She pointed towards the mudflats, hoping the boy would take them closer to the shore. But the shipyard’s workers had seen them already, and were peering down at the little boat from the height of the Tephi’s bridge. The boy flinched away.

Behind the Tephi, the coastline rose up to straggly grass that disappeared beneath some trees. Beyond the trees, Casey guessed it was only a few hundred feet to the coast highway. In the shipyard, two huge barns faced the coast. There were no signs giving away the name of the shipyard. Behind the barns was a long, low building, with no distinguishing features. It was built of grey bricks, solid, with a blue corrugated-iron roof.

‘Could that . . .?’ Trying to see better, Casey stood up in the little boat, almost tipping it over. Beside her, the boy was cringing down in the boat, trying to hide his face from the workers.

‘Casey, come on,’ said Ed. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

‘But . . .’

‘It’s not fair, Casey.’

Ed signalled to the relieved boy, and the little fishing boat turned swiftly, chugging away, north towards the Sandwip pier.

‘Ed . . . I need to . . .’

‘What exactly are you going to be able to see from here anyway?’