‘Shut up!’ he shouts into Jack’s ear. He punches him round the head, white-hot anger surging through his body, mind as pitch black as the sea. He feels the bones of Jack’s head under his fists and smashes into them again and again, imagines grinding them to a pulp. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.

Jack says something. Perhaps he says ‘Stop.’ Jack’s body writhes like a fish, his hands against his head. But Arthur keeps punching and punching. Shutting up the jeering, leering, grinning mouth.

He stops. The writhing and jerking have ceased. Jack has fallen away from him. The cold night air and a chill fear shiver through him.

‘Jack?’ he says but there’s no answer. His hand throbs. There’s a groan from the other end of the boat. He breathes out, reaches forward to touch Jack’s body. He prods it, half imagining that it might spring up. But it doesn’t move. The churn in his gut tells him Jack is dead but it doesn’t seem possible. They were just talking.

‘Peter?’

It is the voice again, the one they thought was Verity but now he thinks he has gone mad and there is no voice. His mind feels very slow and heavy. Think. Think. He must get away from here. Get the boat to safety. But he’s being stupid. The boat is leaking. The body is weighing it down. He realises with a rush of deliverance what he has to do. He heaves Jack’s body over the side of the boat and hears the splash as it goes under the water. He waits seconds, minutes, he counts in his head to sixty, one hundred. He tries to move the half-submerged boat with the oar but the motion makes it worse and veers him alarmingly low to the water. If he stays on the boat, he will sink with it.

The water is so cold it stops up his throat. Somewhere he remembers that he has only minutes before his body will seize up. How many? He drags his arms and legs forward, one, two, one, two, counting in his head to keep going, the rhythm of it. He doesn’t know if he is swimming towards anything he can hold onto, or back, to the sea and certain death. His hand brushes something hard and he hears a scream. He imagines Jack is pulling him down into the dark. How long can he swim? Salt in his mouth and eyes. The Drowned Man. How long? He will drown and no one will ever know what he has done.

‘Who’s there?’ It’s a voice, a human voice. He must be hearing things, because it sounds like Verity. He is hearing things. It can’t be real.

‘Jack?’ says the voice and then he knows it is her.

Jack is dead because he has killed him. It is his, Arthur’s, fingers which touch hers.

*