There was only one person who didn’t make him feel ashamed. Ella. She’d accepted him for what he was. And what made him lie awake at night staring into the blackness, his guts sour with worry, was the thought that he had no idea what had happened to her. Whether she was all right.

When they’d first brought him to Windsor, and he was lying there, sick and puked out, too feeble to even move, he wondered if they’d brought her here to the castle, and he wondered what he’d do if she came looking for him. He’d wanted to hide from her. Decided that she’d be better off with him out of her life. He’d only make things miserable for her. He was bad luck. She’d said it herself.

She didn’t need to be saddled with a dog’s dinner like him.

But at the same time he hadn’t wanted her to see him dead. And he’d known that if he wanted to survive he had to get well, to eat more, to look after himself. So when the kids brought in buckets of slops he’d made sure he was first to the trough, kicking back the other vermin down there, searching through for the best bits.

And this will to survive had remained strong at Maidenhead, where they’d been penned up outside. He’d killed another father soon after he’d arrived. The diseased old pus-bag had been top dog there before the newcomers from Windsor had been herded in. He’d wanted to fight Malik when he shoved to the front to get the best scraps. Malik had waited until he was sure no kids were around and strangled him like the other one, squeezing the life out of him with his bare hands. No one argued with him after that. The adults left him alone.

He could sense what they were feeling, as if he could soak up their thoughts and emotions through his pores, getting a weak pulse from their dull minds. They were hungry and confused and angry, in a sullen, sulky, depressed kind of way. And he was depressed from being among them for so long like this. He was used to hunting them, stamping them out; that’s all he’d ever thought of. Lashing out against the world that had made him what he was. He couldn’t kill all these ones, though – the kids would notice that something was wrong. Being with them, soaking up their pathetic, tiny, animal thoughts, he’d wondered if he’d been right. He didn’t belong among children, but he didn’t belong among adults either.

And now here he was. A pig. About to be taken to the slaughterhouse. Already the cage was being opened. A kid was poking through the bars at the back with a spear to shift them all out of there. It was starting.