‘I was alone,’ said Malik. ‘I knew that much. And I wasn’t well again. I don’t know if it was from swimming in the cold water, or the stress of losing Roy, but I could feel it coming back. I lost a few days. Couldn’t remember anything after. Still can’t. Just odd, weird flashes. Horrible things. And when I got my senses back I was lying curled up on the floor in the room of the farmhouse where Roy had been sleeping and there was this sort of weird shrine thing there. I must’ve built it. Wasn’t anybody else around. There were all these candles, and some little action figures, army types, God knows where I got them from. And Roy’s gun, in pieces, all broken up and arranged in a pattern. Some dead birds and animals bones tied together. Bowls of beer and whisky, petrol. Some odd random words in what looked like red paint. Feathers and fur and food. And right in the middle, sitting there grinning at me, was Roy’s head. I had a nasty flashback. Of cutting it off with one of the butcher’s knives we’d used on the pig. Dragging the rest of his body out into the field for the dogs.

‘Why I’d done all this I had no idea, no memory of it at all. It looked sick. Evil. I set fire to it all. Nearly burned the whole house down, except it started raining and that put it out. Didn’t want to go back in there, but the next day some grown-ups got into the yard while I was resetting the traps and I had to put them down, and I was so cross I whacked all their heads off and without really thinking I took them into the house and upstairs and put them next to the burnt remains of Roy’s head. And since then, well …’

‘I saw it,’ said Ella.

‘Yeah,’ said Malik. ‘I know. I could tell by the way you looked at me back there. It was a crazy thing at first, a fever thing, and then it became a sort of, I don’t know, like a compulsion. I had to do it. Felt like it gave me some control over the world. Got so that every time I killed a grown-up I’d cut off their head and put it in the farmhouse. It’s mad, I know. But then I am mad.’

‘Why do you kill so many of them?’ Ella asked.

‘It’s my job. I’m the hunter and they’re the hunted.’

‘Really? Is that all?’