The landlord hung back, giving me a dubious look. His face was a little pinched seeming in the moonlight. He turned up his collar like it was suddenly dead cold out there. 'Sure you're ready for this?'

'Yeah. Why not?'

'It's not for the faint-hearted, what's caught up under that pipe.'

'I'm not faint-hearted,' I said, looking down the beach at the lobsterman. 'I've seen everything there is to see.'

We walked for a while in silence, only the sound of the waves breaking on the beach, and the tinkle of a halyard on a boat moored somewhere out in the sea. The smell hit me first. Even before I saw the lobsterman hesitate at the pipe, looking down on the other side, before I saw him shaking his head and leaning over to spit out something in the sand, I knew it was going to be one of those stomach-turners. One of those times I'd regret the last pint. I took a breath and swallowed, tapping my pockets as I got nearer, hoping I'd find a stray bit of chewy or something to take the taste away.

'Worse is it?' said the landlord, approaching the lobsterman. 'Got worse?'

'Aye — there's more. More than there was last week.'

I held my T-shirt up to my nose and peered down on the other side of the pipe. Dark shapes bobbed and buffeted in a yellowish foam. Meat. Decaying chunks of flesh — impossible to tell in the slime where one piece ended and the next began. The breaking waves forced them into the crevice under the pipe, tangled them in ribbons of tasselweed. Decomposition gas fizzed from under the raised flaps of skin, sending bubbles to the surface.

'What the fuck's this?'

'Pig meat,' said the lobsterman. 'Dead pigs. Killt in one of them rituals on Pig Island and been washed off the island.'