From the tower, he watched the eider ducks feed in the lagoon, preen and sleep on its banks. They were elegant, peaceable and so vulnerable. Each development, he believed, eroded their place on the island.

His anger at development burned in him as he sat on the bench and muttered the arguments – not so loud as to disturb the eiders below him – that he would use later against the intrusion of more strangers. The season for visitors would not start till Easter week; there was still a month before they came. The quiet was around him, and the rumble of the sea far behind him. He would fight because without him the island's calm was shorn of defence and he did not care whose march he blocked.

The note was on the floor just inside the outer door.

Malachy had been in the kitchen cooking sausages and chips. Without the TV's noise through the common wall – and his own was not switched on – it had been deathly quiet in flat thirteen with only the whir of the microwave and the bleep of its bell, but he had heard nothing, no footsteps padding along level three's walkway and no rustle of paper as it was inserted between the bottom of the door and the carpet. He had brought in the plate, with the sausages and chips, and put it on the table. As he had pulled out his chair he had seen the note.

He went to it and bent to pick it up; it was folded in half. His first thought was that it was from Dawn, a report on Mildred Johnson's progress… No, she would have knocked on the door. He lifted it, opened it. Once, handwriting was something he had known about. In the first days at Chicksands, years back, they had spent half a day learning the points to be recognized from handwriting: ill-educated writing, intelligent writing, disguised writing. The hand of this note had formed large, clumsy characters in ballpoint on a sheet from a notepad. The pressure of the point and the size of the letters told Malachy that a right-handed person had written with their left hand.