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minute, until the surface of the water was still.
    From my upstairs window, I watched it happen. The boy stood and watched it from the edge of the pond. The bird floated, sinking slowly as the mat of feathers and gristle became waterlogged...
    But then, before it sank completely from sight, there was a sudden, sinewy swirling in the pond.
    A whirlpool... no, a kind of black hole appeared and gaped and sucked and... and the pigeon was gone. The pond, or something greedy and muscular from deep inside it, swallowed the remains of the bird.
    The boy had gone too. When I drew my heavy eyes from the moon in the water to the place where he’d been standing, there was nothing. No boy, no shadow, only a few grey feathers which had fallen from his hands.
    I blinked and stared. I must have been dreaming. As sudden and as sweet as morphine, once more the deathliness of sleep was on me. The weight of my limbs and my head was almost too much to support.
    I crossed back to the bed and fell onto it.

Chapter Five
     
     
    T HE BOY WAS still scratching at the blebs on his hands and wrists a few days later. He had a swipe of white blisters across his face too. I knew where and when he’d got the nettle stings, but he’d fended off his mother’s questions by telling her he’d been looking for birds’ nests in the garden; he said he thought there was a flycatcher starting to build on the brick wall of the derelict greenhouse, and he’d been pushing through the undergrowth to get a closer look. The boy and I were in his room in the tower. We’d started, rather shyly and hesitantly at first, to do some of the ‘home tutoring’ that ostensibly I’d been hired to do. He fidgeted and itched, and he read aloud to me from Lord of the Flies, a text he’d been studying at school before he’d persuaded his mother to take him away.
    He read beautifully. Odd, because he was still very curt, off-hand, when I tried to engage him in conversation about himself and his home, his family, school and so on. When I asked him to suggest some of the themes of the book, he looked at me as though I was the most predictable and boring of all the teachers he’d ever had, stifled a yawn and started to drawl contemptuously, ‘War, survival, isolation, the loss of innocence, death...’ a list he’d had to learn at school and trot out for homework or exams. I managed to stop him with my own loud theatrical yawn. And then, when I asked him to choose a passage in the book, a crisis which illustrated one of these themes, he turned straightaway to a well-thumbed page and read slowly, relishing the brilliant clarity of the words... the death of Piggy, the fat little boy hit by an enormous boulder, his body falling and falling through space and smashing onto the rocks below...
    He itched at his wrists. The blebs were tiny white blisters on the purpling of his veins. Beside him, on the rumpled bed where he was sprawling, the orange cat sprawled too. It lay flat on its back, ridiculously asleep: legs splayed, eyes tightly closed, head thrown back, its breath whistling through bared fangs. I watched the boy and listened to his reading: he and the killer-cat side by side, accomplices in the capture, defenestration and death of the gentle pigeon.
    He finished reading. In my mind’s eye, Piggy lay broken on the rocks, until a wave rolled over him and the sea sucked his body away.
    Now, a cool breeze blew through the open windows of the tower. The squadrons of aircraft clattered together, and for the first time in the few days I’d been at Chalke House, Lawrence volunteered to speak to me. If only to divert me from the book – a book he’d done to death in a classroom he’d hated, with boys he’d hated, with a teacher he’d hated – he glanced up to the ceiling and said, ‘That’s a Phantom, the green one, the fighter with the RAF roundel... it’s what my Dad flies, out of Coningsby.’
    Of all the hundred planes hanging from the rafters, I could only have