Next address. More letters. A dog growling behind the door. She shook her head as she heard the dog rip into the mail. Not her problem. She moved on. In the next flat a baby was crying, and over the child’s distress a couple argued. Obscenities flew back and forth. What love there ever was drained away by poverty and circumstance. Silva didn’t care. She drifted up the street and the day drifted with her. Just like every day. Work the round, deliver the mail, end the shift. In the evenings she retreated to the little boat she called home. It sat on a berth at the end of a pontoon in a rundown marina where nobody bothered her. She could cook herself a meal and try to sleep. Wake the next morning. Do it all over again. Day after day. Week after week. Month after month. She took all the overtime she could and enjoyed the fact the job involved walking everywhere. She relished the constant movement, finally understanding Itchy’s affliction: if you kept moving you didn’t have to think. You lived for each step, each swing of the arm, each twitch of the head. Seventeen strides to the front door. Push the flap, shove in the letters, walk away. Twenty-five strides to the next house. Push the flap, shove in the letters, walk away. Walk, push, shove. Each bag of mail represented ten thousand steps. Ten thousand little segments of time when she wasn’t still, wasn’t thinking.

Monday to Saturday she worked, but Sunday she was forced to take off, so on that day she ran. Wind or rain, she ran. Often she pounded the same streets she’d been walking the day before, but sometimes she took her motorbike out onto the moor and ran up there. From the vantage point of a rocky tor, she could see the city of Plymouth sprawled below, the ocean beyond. Warships lay anchored in the sheltered waters of the Sound or moored up alongside in the dockyards. This was the largest naval base in Western Europe. Nuclear submarines came here to be repaired and refuelled, and there was a huge armament facility on the far side of the river. The military had been inexorably bound up with the place for centuries, and conflict had shaped the city. She’d wandered here after prison, searching for a cheap place to moor her boat for a few nights while she was visiting Itchy, and ended up staying. Out here in the far west she was as anonymous and unloved as the city was, but like the city she bore the scars of war deep inside.

The Afghan boy, yes, but the others too.