I’m standing there, and without any warning I start sobbing for the poor cat, still alive, curled up in the box, then I hear a noise behind me and I swing round just in time to see a shape dart behind an upturned fishing boat that’s been dragged up on to the shingle.

I should, of course, be more cautious, but I reckon that if someone is trying to avoid being seen by me, then they’re probably not a threat.

“Hello?” I call, softly. “Who’s there?”

No reply. I walk over to the boat, and look around the side. Crouched down, facing away from me, is a boy in a blue satin-y bomber jacket. This was the kid they were calling Chow. He doesn’t turn round. Instead he says, “I didn’t mean to. Honest. They made me do it. Macca and them.”

I’m looking down at him and I realise that this kid is the owner of the girl’s voice I had heard.

Slowly, he emerges from his crouched position and stands up to face me. His eyes are red and wet, and he’s still half-cowering away from me, like he expects me to hit him or something.

“Are you the one they were calling Chow?” I ask. He nods: a short bob of the head.

That’s when I know.

There were plenty of other clues I could have picked up on: the darker skin colour, the high voice, but it was the short nod of his head that was so familiar to me. At this point, it would have been really dramatic if I had fainted on the sand, or something. You know – rushed up to him and given him a big hug and said, “Daddy! My Daddy!” like the girl at the end of The Railway Children, but that would have been completely weird – apart from the fact that it is simply not how I felt. I read once in the newspaper about a lady who was in a boating accident with her husband, and at the moment she realised that he was dead, she was trying not to drown, and she became super-calm and started planning his funeral. I suppose I felt a bit like that, but at the same time the next words I speak are pretty much whispered.

“Are you … Pye Chaudhury?” I ask.

“How do you know that?”