‘Anyway, these pirates worked out that if they snatch the beacons and wait around for a bit, the trawlers would come looking for them. It saved chasing the trawlers around.’

‘Clever,’ said Casey.

‘But not always lucky,’ said Ed. ‘A month or so after we started out here, one of the Chinese trawlers called us over the radio. Said that they had caught ten pirates, and would we come and take them off their hands? They thought we could pass them to the Seychelles or Kenya, where they have something approximating a justice system.’

‘There are worse places.’

‘We started heading towards the trawler. The fishermen were in a hurry though. Impatient. I think they thought we were holding them up, and wanted to get back to fishing. As we got nearer, the number of pirates in captivity fell . . . Ten. Nine. Eight. By the time we got there, they were all gone. The fishermen hadn’t quite finished cleaning down the decks. There was a lot of blood.’

He wasn’t looking at Casey as he spoke. He was looking at the horizon. The ship was heading east; the sun setting in an extravagantly pink farewell to the day.

‘That’s awful,’ said Casey. ‘Couldn’t you do anything?’

‘What could we do? Out here. This lot’ – he gestured towards the pirates – ‘were actually quite relieved to be caught by the British. The Russian navy caught some of the pirates a few weeks ago. They put them back in their little boat, two hundred miles from the shore, with no diesel and no food. They were laughing about it.’

‘That’s barbaric.’

‘You know, one in three pirates never make it back to Somalia from one of these trips,’ said Ed. ‘Two weeks ago, we found one of their little dhows. We pulled up alongside it, this huge ship and that tiny boat. They’d run out of water. Been dead for weeks.’

Casey shuddered.

‘Can you imagine how bad it must be, back in Somalia, for people to take those odds?’ said Ed. ‘The desperation.’

He fell into silence. Casey shifted on the pile of rope.

‘What will happen to this lot now?’ Casey asked. She waved at one of the pirates. ‘They seem pretty friendly now.’

The pirate waved back at her.

‘They’re almost certainly killers, this lot,’ said Ed. ‘You can be both, quite easily, it turns out. We’re taking them to the Seychelles.’

They sat in silence for a moment, with only the creaking of the huge ship. The deck was stained with oil, the heavy smell mixing uneasily with the sea air.

‘They’re not amateurs though,’ Ed grinned at her. ‘This lot had RPGs on board their dhow.’

Casey had seen rocket-propelled grenades being fired, long ago in Libya.

‘Did you know that, when you were zooming up to their little boat?’

‘No.’ He smiled briefly. ‘Better that way, really.’

Casey looked at him and thought that she might fall in love.