Otto quickly shoved McFarlane’s own socks into his mouth and sealed his lips with duct tape. He then forced McFarlane onto his front and used duct tape to bind his wrists behind him. Using the tape again, he fixed a rock to the end of a long strand of fishing wire and after a few tries managed to throw the rock through the crook of a tree limb high over the fire. Tying the fishing wire to the thick rope, he then threaded the rope up through the tree limb. One end of this rope he tied around McFarlane’s ankles. With Siggy’s help, he took hold of the other end and hoisted McFarlane up. As he did so, Bennet and Goldwin used a couple of long branches to keep McFarlane out of the fire, so they could get him above it without burning him. There he hung, upside down, some way above the reaching flames, that pale little body wriggling, his face getting redder and redder.

“Jesus, get him up a bit,” Finn said. “I can smell his hair burning.”

“He can fucking burn,” Otto said.

“Get him up,” Bennet ordered, and Otto reluctantly hoisted him up a couple more feet.

“I thought he had a two-foot-long pecker.” Siggy seemed disappointed. “That’s just a little maggot of a thing. Can’t hardly see it.”

“How’s he going to confess like that?” Bennet said.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Finn called out, “he’s going to choke up there.”

Magnus suddenly let out a cry, which might have been extreme pain or pleasure, and raised both his hands as if in supplication, one still clutching the rifle. With a yearning wonder, he stared up at that man suspended in the ghoulishly illuminated canopy of branches.

“Keep your hands off the goddamn barrel,” Otto shouted, “and don’t put the butt down in the fucking dirt.”

Obediently Magnus set the rifle across his shoulders, hooking his arms around it. This done, he released himself again to that strange ecstasy focused on McFarlane, who had begun to wiggle wildly like a hooked fish.

“Get him down,” Bennet said.

Bennet and Goldwin used the branches again to keep him out of the fire as Siggy and Otto lowered him.

When he was on the ground, Otto tore the tape off and took the socks out of his mouth. He cradled McFarlane’s head. “Now you tell ’em what all you done or you’re going back up and I’ll bake your goddam head like a tater.”

McFarlane gulped the air, spit foaming between his teeth.

“He don’t understand,” Finn shouted. “He’s just an eejit. Look at him.”

“Mamma mia.” Sal had put his hands together as in prayer, tapping them against his own lips. He was pacing about like someone desperate to go to the bathroom. “Basta, basta, basta. Enough. È un bambino. È solo un bambino. Guarda!”