Now it was light. There was a tang of salt in the air and the cry of seagulls. Sunlight beat down strongly onto a white-painted wooden deck. Ropes strained, and white sails fluttered in the wind, bellying outwards. Behind them a wake rippled across the calm ocean, blue, with darker greenish waves lapping gently. A dark shadow drifted nearby. A dolphin perhaps.

They were on a boat. All around them the sky was clear, and the edges of the sea seemed to merge with the sky.

‘This is the boat. The Wanderer. They’re here.’ Tom ran from Jack, stumbling towards the stern.

His mother was steering, a look of calm concentration on her face. His father was poring over a map.

‘What do you think he’s doing right now?’ said his mother. She scratched the side of her nose in that way that she had. She was sunburnt and smiling and her hair was noticeably lighter. She wore a black-and-white striped T-shirt, and white shorts that were now looking a bit grubby and frayed. A bottle of water was close to hand.

His father looked up and smiled. ‘He’s probably just coming out of lessons. The bell’s ringing, he’s running out for break before lunch time.’

‘Do you think he’s happy?’ She swigged her water.

‘I hope so, my darling. We’ll be seeing him soon. We’re over halfway now.’

Tom realised with a sudden lurch of love that they were talking about him.

He reached out to touch her shoulder, but he found he could not make contact.

Jack was standing by him.

‘You cannot touch them. You cannot change things.

You cannot warn them.’

Warn them.

Tom turned back to watching them. Perhaps it was enough just to be here, to see them.

He thought about the future. He would come here again and again. Perhaps he could come here every day, and watch them, and memorise the patterns of freckles on their faces, the colours in their irises. Perhaps he could stay here always, just watching them, listening to them talking to each other over and over again, until he knew their final moments by heart.

His father reached out to stroke a hair away from his mother’s face.

‘Fighting a losing battle there,’ joked his mother.

Tom remembered what he had been doing on the day they had died. It was as clear in his mind as if it had happened an hour ago. It had been a history lesson, the year before he’d gone to Downshire College, at his boarding prep school. They’d been studying the Crusades. Richard the Lionheart.

The school secretary had come to get him to bring him to the headmaster’s study. He remembered she’d been fiddling with her glasses round her neck and that she’d been particularly hushed.