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him out and his head felt a little dizzy. Jenna came to sit beside him. She beat her tail against the wooden seat and licked his face. Zaki pushed her nose away and rested his head against the dog’s warm fur. It was a relief to do nothing while the others handed the bags and gear down to Grandad, who stowed everything in an orderly pile on the floor of the launch.
    Zaki gazed vacantly at the other local boats on the surrounding moorings. He knew most of the boats; these were town moorings, which seldom changed hands, often staying in families from one generation to the next. The remains of a white, plastic rubbish bag, trapped by the wind against the stern rail of a neighbouring yacht, caught his eye. The tattered edges of the bag flapped in the wind. As he watched, a small, dark hole appeared in the centre of the flailing plastic; more an absence than a presence of anything, a still, black point about which the white plastic fluttered. Something was happening around the hole, the stillness was spreading outwards, reordering the whiteness of the plastic, giving new definition to the edges of the hole. Then the hole blinked and became an eye; an eye that was regarding him with sharp attention. The shock of the transformation made Zaki catch his breath and he felt the dog beside him stiffen. Zaki glanced round to see if anyone else was watching this metamorphosis, but when he looked back, the plastic bag had gone and, instead, a large, white gull balanced on the stern rail, its eye still fixed on him. Jenna erupted in an outburst of furious barking. The gull opened its wings and, with a few powerful beats, climbed into the evening sky.
    ‘Quiet!’ growled Grandad.
    The barking stopped but occasional tremors continued to run through the dog’s body.
    ‘What set her off?’ asked Grandad.
    ‘Didn’t you see?’ began Zaki. ‘There was a bag and then it turned into . . .’ He trailed off, realising the ridiculous impossibility of what he was about to say.
    ‘You’re lookin’ terribly queasy,’ said Grandad, his face serious, ‘we best be getting you home.’
    A single chandlery and half a dozen small, ramshackle, wooden sheds, their slipways reaching down to the water’s edge, were all that remained of Salcombe’s once busy marine industry, most of the buildings on the waterfront having long since been converted to boutiques or pulled down to make way for holiday apartments. The faded sign on Grandad’s shed said simply ‘Isaac Luxton – Boatbuilder’, although most of the work now was in maintenance and restoration.
    There was just enough water left in the channel for Grandad to bring the launch to the foot of the slipway, where the holiday gear was unloaded, carried through the shed and piled into the back of Grandad’s battered Volvo estate for the drive to Kingsbridge.
    Once settled in the back seat of the car with Michael and the dog, Zaki propped his head against a sail bag and slept all the way home.

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    Chapter 5
    ‘Not much we can do for a cracked collarbone, I’m afraid,’ said the young duty doctor as she showed Zaki the X-ray with its ghostly image of his chest, shoulder and upper arm.
    ‘There – you can see the crack. It’s pretty insignificant.’
    Zaki could see a very fine, dark line, like a hair, running in from the edge of the bone.
    ‘Nothing’s out of place, so it should heal up OK.’ She turned to Zaki’s father. ‘But no sport for a few weeks. He needs to be careful he doesn’t bash it again.’ And to Zaki, ‘We can’t put your shoulder in plaster, so it’s up to you to look after it.’
    Zaki nodded. He was still studying the X-ray. He could see the left half of his chest with its curving ribs, the shoulder joint and the big bone at the top of his arm. He thought of the child’s bones in the sand, on the floor of the cave. Once the flesh had rotted, there had been nothing to hold the bones together, to keep the arm attached to the body. How long had that