Malik was really laughing, his voice loud in the cramped space under the tree. Ella pictured the army men laughing; they must have sounded like this. She was hurt at first: she thought Malik was laughing at her. Slowly, though, she melted and then joined in, her own high little voice cutting through his great roar.

‘Oh, Ella,’ he said at last. ‘I haven’t laughed this much since … well, since those nights with the lads. You’re right. Everyone I meet does seem to come to a bad end, don’t they? Dr Catell and the kids in his surgery, Susannah and Andy. Tyler … Waggers and Mike and Brian and Tomasz and Roy. They were tough. They held out for a long, long time. Fighting the illness. Trying different drugs and different plants, anything they could think of to keep it away. Nothing worked, or at least nothing did anything more than slow it down. They couldn’t shoot it or trap it, or sneak up on it and stab it with a hunting knife. Weak or strong, short or tall or fat or thin, it got you in the end, if you were old enough.

‘Mike was the first to go. As the days passed, he talked less and less, and when he did talk it didn’t always make sense. And then one night he went berserk, kicked the fire all over the yard, cut poor Roy who couldn’t get out of the way, all the time ranting about something none of us could understand. Next night he was very quiet and just before we turned in for bed he took Tomasz aside for a long, intense chat. And Tomasz nodded and the two of them left the farmyard and went out into the fields, and later we heard a single shot. And Mike never came back.

‘I knew what had happened. Military-style. One clean shot to the back of the head. You’d think they wouldn’t laugh so much after that, but if anything they just laughed more. Brian had even made a joke about it as Tomasz and Mike had left. Whispered, “He’s just going outside and may be some time.”’

‘I don’t get it,’ said Ella.

‘Oh, it’s a famous saying,’ said Malik. ‘From Captain Scott’s expedition to the Antarctic, where they all died. They were stuck in a tent in the snow, freezing cold and the food was running out, and one of them, Captain Oates, who was wounded, sacrificed himself, said, “I’m just going outside and may be some time.” Walked out of the tent and was never seen again. It became their catchphrase after that, the lads. Whenever their time was up, one of them would say it and the others would know.