Page 1

PART I
ONE
1
The news doesn’t strike cleanly, like a guillotine’s blade. There’s no quick severing. Nothing so merciful.Thisnews is a slovenly traveller, dragging its feet, gradually revealing its horrors. And it announces itself first with violence – the urgent hammering of fists on Lucy Locke’s front door.
2
Lucy’s in the study, hunched over Daniel’s laptop. Breath whistles past her teeth as she frantically casts about. Onscreen is her husband’s company balance sheet. Spread across the desk is a mess of bank statements, invoices and scribbled notes. Around her feet, cardboard folders spill over with receipts.
She’s tempted to cram every scrap of paperwork into the fireplace and toss in a match, but that won’t help them.If there’s something here she’s overlooked, it’s vital she finds it.
Lucy’s wet hair leaks cold water down her spine. The study is unheated and the bath towel around her torso offers little comfort. In the hall, the barometer mercury is plunging. No storm has yet broken. But gunmetal clouds, rolling in from the Atlantic, are pregnant with threat.
This doesn’t feel like the end of the world. Not quite, not yet. In their nine years together, it isn’t the first crisis they’ve weathered. She’s saved him before. She knows she can save him again.
Lucy rocks back in the chair, tries to control her breathing. Glances around the grand old Georgian room.
On a side table stands a silver plastic photo frame, a relic from back when they were penniless. She’s bought Daniel plenty of others since, but he’s never replaced the original. In this house, items with little value gain it as they age: the scarred furniture, the chipped crockery, the art on the walls; all of it connects to a thousand different memories, priceless artefacts of the Locke family story.
The frame holds a photo of all four of them – Lucy and Daniel, Billie and Fin – taken six years ago on Penleith Beach. Fin’s in a sand-crusted Babygro. Billie sits cross-legged beside him, an elfin twelve-year-old in a neoprene shorty. Daniel – in faded board shorts and nothing else – crouches over a foil barbecue. Summer sun has caramelized his skin. His eyes aren’t on the steaks but the ocean, as if something out there has caught his attention.
Lucy, just into her thirties, wears the world’s most contented grin. Her denim cut-offs and tie-fronted bikini top reveal flesh as smooth and supple as a seal’s. Two belt-hoop stretchmarks on her abdomen are subtle evidence of hermotherhood. Above them, her breasts are a far more obvious sign.
She’s always teased Daniel about that, claiming they’re the reason he keeps this photo close. And yet in truth she loves the image too. She can’t remember who took it, but the photographer captured something of them Lucy has always felt, yet never managed to express.
When she realizes how tightly her jaw is clenched, she turns away. Too hard, suddenly, to contemplate her family.
Balanced on the desk is a stack of unopened post. Lucy begins to tear through it, alert for further shocks. The first three envelopes yield junk mail. The fourth is from an insurance company. She checks the date – flinches when she realizes how long it’s been sitting here. When she scans the policy document, the muscles of her abdomen pull tight.
Lucy’s gaze returns to the balance sheet, then the framed photograph where Daniel is looking out to sea. Only last night, in the darkness of their bedroom, she’d entwined herself around him and vowed they’d survive this. He’d muttered a reply, rolled on to his side. And Lucy, sensing his despondency, had felt her eyes fill with tears.
Beside that photo of their family is a time-battered Polaroid, creased and sun-faded. In it, eight-year-old Daniel, all elbows and knees, stands on the steps of Plymouth’s Glenthorne Hostel for Boys. Lucy recognizes his expression. He was wearing it the day they met: a startled-prey wariness more suited to an animal than a human; a heart-rending fusion of fear and hope and longing.
That day, she’d felt a powerful compulsion to put her arms around him.
Whenever Lucy sees this photo – the earliest image of her husband that exists – she feels exactly the same way.
On the steps beside Daniel stands Nick, broader and taller despite their similar age. Whereas Daniel squints at the camera, Nick glowers. His arm is thrown protectively around his smaller friend. Lucy knows more than most how it’s lingered there ever since.
Scowling, she rips open the remaining envelope. Realizes, too late, that the letter’s addressed to Billie. Tossing it down, Lucy re-checks the balance sheet. She makes a fist, thumping the desk so hard its drawer rattles in its frame.
And then she hears a response, echoing along the hall. But it isn’t another drawer rattling. It’s the front door. Someone is pounding upon it.
3
Lucy blinks. Tilts her head. A cold pearl of water rolls down her neck. The sound of hammering ends as abruptly as it began. All she hears now is the tick of the wall clock.
A commotion at the window draws her attention. She turns in time to see a herring gull land on the frame. The bird is so large that it struggles to balance, flapping its wings for stability. It peers in at her with one pale eye. Then it taps its beak against the glass.
Her great-aunt Iris, since succumbing to dementia, has grown darkly superstitious of seagulls – doesn’t like any part of them touching her house. Lucy glances away from this one to the clock. Just past two. Roughly an hour since high tide.
Did she imagine what she just heard? Nobody in this family uses the front door, nor anyone else who knowsthem well. Good friends and associates, in long-standing tradition, don’t even announce their arrival; they wander in through the kitchen, reach for the biscuit barrel, whatever makes them feel at home.
The hammering resumes. Four emphatic bangs. With a cry, the herring gull flaps off the ledge. Lucy stands, gripping the bath towel to her chest. She moves to the study door.
Looks out.