‘Shall I go on?’ she asks.

He nods. Smiles. It’s as if they’re on a marathon, though his pulse has quietened.

‘When Jacob got to the village,’ Martha continues, ‘Rika was in the guesthouse. I don’t remember how she got there. She’d been there for a while, inside the house, scrabbling through Aaron’s pack, making noises that weren’t words, grunting like an animal. She took off all her clothes and pulled on his. The shirt he’d worn the day before, a pair of shorts that slipped down low over her hips. She made a knot at the waist. He’d been lean when he was young – you’ve seen the photos – and in memory he’s still a size that could exchange clothes with Rika. But afterwards, when we looked back through the photos, we could see how large he’d grown. When we lined them up, six months by six months, there it was, that deadly layer of fat under the skin. You know the diagnosis; well, it was only a supposition as there wasn’t an autopsy. A silent heart attack, the result of undiagnosed diabetes.’

‘Is that what you think?’

‘Yes, I suppose it is. Don’t you?’

He shrugs, and his face creases with the impossibility of knowing. Somehow, today, the diagnosis seems less important. ‘What happened out on the reef?’ he asks. ‘Did Jacob say?’

‘Yes. Of course. The men, who’d been on the canoe, told him. They’d been fishing, and Aaron had been swimming off the edge of the reef. There were strange currents along that drop, but the tide wasn’t turning and none of the others felt a tug that could pull a man down. There was nothing exceptional about any of it until they saw that Aaron wasn’t rising from a dive. He was folded over, suspended beneath them. They moved fast, as they would, pulling him up, lifting him into the canoe, a dead weight, though Aaron was gasping, moving, a twitch, nothing more, a last gasp for breath before his spirit fell out through his arse. His eyes rolled back, then centred themselves, stared ahead. Blank, open. Dead.’

‘That’s pretty much what Leonard says. Except for the bit about the spirit falling out of his arse. Where does that come from?

‘I don’t know. Jacob, I suppose.’

‘Is that who Leonard would have got the story from?’

‘Or from me. I don’t know. I don’t remember. It sort of came to be the official story.’

‘Do you think it happened like that?’

‘I’ve always supposed so. Something like that. There wasn’t a mark, or a sea snake, nothing anyone saw. They wouldn’t have killed him.’

Jericho gives a shocked sort of a laugh. ‘I wasn’t thinking that,’ he said. ‘It’s just that it’s so neat. So precise.’

‘Maybe Wilkie will know. One of the younger men who were out there that day.’

‘Wilkie says it was an accident, that’s all. He was full of apology this afternoon, as if somehow it was the village’s fault. Says it was the old people. They didn’t understand.’