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‘Daniel tookFin?’ Noemie asks. ‘When the fuck didthathappen?’
Miss Clay winces as if she’s been slapped. ‘Mid-morning, as I said. Around eleven. He signed the register. There was nothing’ – her larynx slides up and down – ‘untoward.’
Lucy sways on her feet. She exhales explosively, sucksdown a lungful of air.Where did you go, Daniel? What could have happened to make you take Fin out of school? Why didn’t you let me know?
In her ear, the voicemail assistant is still chattering. She kills the connection. When the keypad appears, she dials 999. Her breath is coming harder now.
Daddy, no—
She thinks of the waves smashing the rocks beyond Mortis Point; the escalating violence of the sea. She recalls the trio of herring gulls flying over her house, and what her aunt used to say about those birds travelling in threes – a warning of death soon to come.
The old Daniel left and a new Daniel took his place.
On the phone she sees a message:CALLING. But it takes an age to connect.
How foolish of her to live here, on the periphery where land meets sea, where mobile reception is poor and you can’t summon help the very instant you need it. Why did she ever return to a place with so much cold water, where fathers and sons can disappear with such ease?
Another voice, now: ‘Which emergency service do you require?’
Lucy asks for them all.
I know it’s frightening, this swift descent into chaos. Like standing on the deck of a yacht that’s starting to break up. Everything is in motion. Nothing is solid. Suddenly, there’s no sanctuary from the deep.
Taking Fin – undoubtedly – is the part you’ll find hardest to grasp. But this is a tragedy written entirely for your benefit. Without Fin, it couldn’t exist.
You remember that philosopher you used to talk about? Not Plato, but his student, Aristotle? How he believed tragedy was the most valuable of the dramatic arts? I know you think I never listened, but I did.
Tragedy makes us feel pity and fear. And through the experience we are healed. Aristotle even had a word for it, didn’t he? Katharsis.
The longer I thought about it, the more it made sense. These last few weeks, I started to consider something else: How much purer the experience if the tragedy were real?
Everything that happens from this point is deliberate. But it’s more than just a severing, Lucy. It’s a purification. A renewal.
We both know you need it.
FIVE
1
DI Abraham Rose travels to Skentel beneath a sky preparing to release a monstrosity. The journey from Barnstaple usually takes forty minutes. With DS Cooper driving a pool car under blue lights, they make it in less than half that.
Strange, but blasting through traffic with siren wailing, Abraham feels a moment of peace. He knows it won’t last. Still, for a few minutes yet he can find sanctuary inside the chaos and welcome the opportunity to be tested. He’ll fall short of expectations. Everyone falls short. But falling short is not the point.
Westwards, a black wall is moving in from the Atlantic, so stark and implacable that the words of the Saviour describing the End Times ring in his head:And there will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and on the earth distress of nations in perplexity because of the roaring of the sea and the waves, people fainting with fear and with foreboding of what is coming on the world. For the powers of the heavens will be shaken.
Abraham is used to seeing portents in the world around him. Rarely do they offer much succour. As he studies the approaching weather front, he imagines a host of black stallions charging towards him, and thinks of another passage in Luke’s Gospel:People were eating, drinking, marrying and being given in marriage up to the day Noah entered the ark. Then the flood came and destroyed them all.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Cooper says. ‘Will you look at that shelf cloud?’
Abraham flinches at the blasphemy. In his thirty-year career, he’s never reconciled himself to his fellow officers’ faithlessness. One would have thought, surrounded by crime and misery, they’d have far greater reverence for the Word.
One would have thought.
‘Shelf cloud?’ He ducks his head for a better look. ‘What’s that?’
Cooper wrenches the steering wheel. They overtake an articulated lorry carrying farming equipment and swerve back into their lane.
‘A type of arcus cloud,’ the DS says, changing up a gear. ‘You get a shelf cloud like that along the gust front of a major weather system. What you’re seeing is the cool air sliding under the—JESUS!’