The late-afternoon sun shone through the silver birches lining the coastal route and cast a steady procession of hazy beams across the road. Alternate strips of light and shadow dappled the windscreen of the Cherokee, and Chris found himself squinting from the intermittent and distracting glare.

He pulled a pair of sunglasses out of the glove compartment and slipped them on.

‘Giving you a headache?’ asked Mark, sitting beside him in the passenger seat.

Mark Costas was a good diving instructor. He’d known Chris back when he’d trained him for a PADI certificate. Like the best of teachers, he easily inspired trust from his pupils, and that was mainly because of the calm, unflappable demeanour of the man. His darkly tanned face, framed with a lush black beard and topped with a Yankees baseball cap, was a picture of measured ease.

Along this part of the coastline there were a number of small villages perched on the seafront. Quite a few of them seemed to service small fishing vessels of one sort or another, and many of these were beach-launched, from trailers reversed into the water, and retrieved in the same way. Once upon a time most of the boats along this stretch of coast were part of an industry; now the vast majority were used for sports fishing.

On the right of the road it was becoming cluttered with the detritus of generations of nautical activity — abandoned, weatherworn wooden hulls riding high on grass-topped dunes shored up with wooden pallets, and an endless melange of crates and washed-up freight spillage garnished the roadside. They passed through a village that consisted of no more than an old boat yard, three houses, and a gas station-cum-diner, an isolated sign of habitation amidst a rolling montage of coastal wilderness.

‘It looks like something out of a Stephen King novel,’ said Mark in a rumbling, deep voice.

‘I know, beautiful isn’t it? I could live in a place like this.’