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One corner of the room houses a tea and coffee station. There’s a kettle, a mug tree, a box filled with supplies. Abraham lifts the kettle from its base and shakes it. Empty.
‘My job – officially – is to find out what happened on that yacht. And the fates of the two you took with you. You might imagine it an impossible task, what with theLazySusanat the bottom of the ocean.’ He returns the kettle to its base. ‘But the thing is, Daniel, she isn’t.’
No response from the man on the bed. No flicker of awareness behind his eyes. Abraham glances at the vital-signs monitor. Then he returns his attention to the bed.
‘Maybe you made that distress call just a tad too early. Or maybe you didn’t realize that the coastguard can pinpoint a VHF broadcast even if you don’t report your position. Another ten minutes and that yachtwouldhave been on the bottom. But those lifeboat volunteers – they’re a resourceful bunch. They found her just in time.’
Slowly, deliberately, Abraham approaches the bed. ‘I took a look around. You did a pretty good job of scuttling her – smashed off the seacocks completely. Fortunately, the lifeboat team screwed in a couple of marine plugs, rigged up a salvage pump and towed her back to Skentel.’
The hum of the Bair Hugger’s pump is the only sound. Abraham conjures a memory: theLazy Susan’s drenched cabin; the red polyurethane TruPlugs wedged into the hull. It’s a forensic examiner’s nightmare: an entire crime scene flushed through with seawater. But hecanprove, at least, that the damage was deliberate.
‘I told you I’m a police officer,’ Abraham says. ‘And I’ll bet you’ve made a long list of assumptions about me as a result. What you don’t know, Daniel, is that I care very little, these days, for the proper application of the law.’
God, I praise you for your compassionate heart. Give me the relentlessness of the good shepherd who goes after wandering sheep and never gives up.
He leans over the bed until only a few inches separate them. ‘I follow what you might call a higher authority.’
Watching Daniel Locke’s face, Abraham asks himself ifit’s still true.Doeshe still follow that higher authority? Or have the last pillars of his faith finally collapsed? When this foul and filthy disease claims him, is there really anything waiting except worms and cold earth?
He waits, holding his breath.
Daniel Locke opens his eyes.
FOURTEEN
1
Lucy Locke spends her first three hours at the hospital on the ambulance gurney that brought her. Gone are the clothes she was wearing on Jake’s boat. Nobody can tell her what happened to them. Nor what happened to her children. Nor anything much at all.
She shivers, naked, under two grey blankets. Other than her wedding band, all she has left is Snig. It’s cold and wet and torn, robbed by seawater of her boy’s scent.
The emergency department rings with the sounds of squealing doors, trilling phones, beeping monitors, people talking, people shouting, people weeping. For a while Lucy plugs her ears with her fingers, but then all she hears is the ocean, and that is infinitely worse. Each thought is a spike inside her head, a sliver of broken glass.
When a passing nurse drops a medical gown on to the gurney, Lucy struggles up. The blankets provide scant privacy as she dresses. Teeth clenched against the pain in her side, she ties Snig around her arm and steps on to thefloor. The emergency room tilts. Sound distorts, deepening to a bass thump. The faces of patients and hospital staff liquefy. She staggers, thinks she’s going down. Grabs the gurney and straightens.
Daniel.
He’s here. In this hospital.
She has to find him.
2
Lucy moves, glacier-slow, through people operating in fast-forward. They zip past in all directions, leaving tracers in their wake. Sound that slowed to a bass thump now climbs to a tinny screech. She has to concentrate so hard to stay upright that the chaos in her head recedes. All her focus is on balance, on breathing, on distilling meaning from the swirl of clashing colours.
No one pays her any attention. No one tries to interfere. Somehow, she finds the reception area and joins a queue of miserable people seeking treatment. She hopes Daniel didn’t have to face this. That he had more luck getting help.
Daniel.
Thinking of him is a mistake. Because then she thinks of Billie and Fin and the ocean; and waves tall as houses and the cold, the deadly cold.
Her mouth falls open. She turns her mind back to the simpler tasks of breathing and balancing. And then, somehow, she’s at the front of the queue, straining her eyes to resolve the shape that sits before her.
Breathe, she tells herself.
Slow in, slow out.
The shape is a woman. Grey hair and cardigan, lips a thin line.