It was, as Le Perré had said, the sense of unease which was worst. Matthew had walked out occasionally, on an ormering tide, and been conscious of the strangeness, the altogether alien quality, of the...

Billy was gasping for breath when he came up with him, and had been sobbing; his face was stained with dirt and the tracks of tears. He looked at Matthew, full of guilt and trust....

There was cloud in the middle of the day, but in the afternoon the sun came out again, stronger than before. The home islands of the bailiwick were hazy hills behind them, Alderney a shimmering...

While the sun shone briefly in the late afternoon, Billy managed to get a fire going. They found plenty of wood and built up quite a blaze. It would attract attention, Matthew said, if there...

When he first saw the ship, he did not believe it. A mirage, he thought confusedly – but surely mirages required hot dry air, and brightness? Or an hallucination … Only the stern and twenty...

It was steel and nylon and hung from the bulwark, forward of the stern on the starboard side. It reached the ground, and more – the extra lay in a tangled untidy heap on the...

‘You’ve been here all the time, then? By yourself?’ ‘They all went,’ Skiopos said. ‘I told them they were crazy, but they went. I told them, anything that dries up the Channel, that makes a...

Billy, when Skiopos had finished, had a comical but a clean look. The shirt and trousers were much too big for him, the latter being kept up by a pair of gaudy blue and gold...

He gave ice cream and a bar of chocolate to Billy, lit a cigarette for Matthew and a small cigar for himself. He sat with them and talked. Matthew listened to him, wondering whether he...

‘What about wireless?’ ‘Radio? Aw, that’s dead.’ ‘You can’t fix it?’ Skiopos shrugged. ‘I don’t know too much about radio.’ ‘If you could get it going – there might be stations broadcasting from somewhere that...