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Back at home she sits at the breakfast bar, carefully binding her wound. Cutting herself on the bifold door was careless, but she won’t waste energy worrying about it. Better to focus on what comes next.
Closing her first-aid kit, she grabs a notepad.
People reap what they sow.
Angrily, Lucy bats away her tears. She knows that email didn’t come from Daniel. Just like she knows her children aren’t dead. On the ride down to Skentel, she’d convinced herself she’d find them at Nick’s. She needs to recover fast. Force herself to reset.
Picking up a pen, Lucy starts to write down names: people she knows in Skentel, people who know Daniel. She adds everyone she saw at tonight’s vigil; everyone who attended Billie’s party. But the longer the list grows, the more hopeless she feels. She can think of no logical methodof prioritizing the names. Every single inclusion feels absurd. No one in her close or extended circle is capable of stealing her children. And yet that answer doesn’t fly. Because it doesn’t save Billie and Fin.
She looks at the last name she wrote: Beth McKaylin, the lifeboat volunteer. Five weeks ago, at Headlands School, McKaylin’s son took a dislike to Fin. The bullying started soon after. For a seven-year-old, Eliot McKaylin was unusually creative. One morning, Fin went to school and found that nobody in Magenta Class would talk to him. Worse, it seemed they couldn’t evenseehim.
Lucy contacted Marjorie Knox, the head teacher. The woman reacted as if to a personal criticism. Days later, when Fin pushed Eliot over in the playground, Knox shrieked that it was no wonder the other children avoided him.
Changing tack, Lucy approached Beth McKaylin. Afterwards, she discovered where Eliot got his mean streak. Within hours of their confrontation, Beth was orchestrating her own campaign. This one targeted Lucy, although it wasn’t as successful as her son’s.
Or was it?
Ridiculous to think that an escalating playground feud led to yesterday’s events. Butsomethinglies at the heart of this nightmare. McKaylin’s a lifeboat veteran with plenty of knowledge of the sea. And her Penny Moon campsite, outside tourist season, is home to a population of itinerants who’ve caused numerous problems in the past. Might she have recruited one of them, just like her son recruited his classmates?
Lucy looks at the other names she’s written down: ex-partners and lifelong friends such as Jake and NoemieFarrell, more recent friends like Bee Tavistock. It feels like a betrayal, this; the worst kind of faithlessness.
She sees Matt Guinness’s name, thinks of his dirty hair and scrupulously clean nails. Friday lunchtime, Matt had greeted her on the quay, delighted to share the bad news. This morning, at the bottom of Smuggler’s Tumble, he’d approached her in the car park: ‘We’ll find them kids, Luce, if it’s any comfort. Whether it’s today or next week, I just know they’ll wash up.’
Her eyes move to Wayland Rawlings, proprietor of the hobby shop on the quay. Rawlings is Skentel’s resident eccentric, a pocket-book philosopher and long-term attendee of Lucy’s midweek art class at the Drift Net. One night last year, he’d propositioned her as she locked up. A gentle rebuff had knocked their relationship back on track.
Lucy puts down her pen, knuckling away her fatigue. No need, of course, to limit her list of suspects to the recent past. She’s lived in Skentel most of her life, but she spent a long time away, starting with her year in London and ending with what happened in Portugal.
One person shecan’tadd to her list is Billie’s biological father, because rightly or wrongly she doesn’t know who he is. She’d wanted none of the candidate fathers as a permanent fixture in her life. Looking back, she can’t even recall their names.
She does remember Lucian Terrell, the student who visited her in hospital after Billie’s birth. She’d been awed by Lucian when she first met him. Despite a lack of attraction, she’d even slept with him once or twice – her oldest demon reacting to a few bones of praise thrown her way. Following Billie’s birth, and before she left London for good, Lucian came into her life once again.
Perhaps she should have stayed, because her next relationship was with Zacarías Echevarria in Spain.
Lucy arrived with Billie at the Alto Paraíso commune purely by chance. After her car overheated in Almería’s Tabernas Desert, two women stopped to offer assistance. When they couldn’t fix Lucy’s vehicle at the roadside, they towed her to the off-grid community where they lived.
Zacarías emerged from a trailer to greet them. Before Lucy knew it, afternoon had turned into evening, and a night’s stay had turned into permanent residence.
Alto Paraíso wasn’t a religious commune; she’d have had no patience for that. It was simply a respite from the world, a place focused on hard work, cooperation and humanist living. For the first time since leaving her great-aunt’s house in Skentel, Lucy felt like she’d found home.
Zacarías was the glue that held the community together. An hour alone with him felt like a session with God’s own therapist. In no time at all, he graduated from mentor to lover. As the months sailed by, Lucy realized that Alto Paraíso had a religion, after all; and that she was sleeping with it.
That year and the next, a steady stream of wanderers rolled into the camp. The demands on Zacarías’s time increased; the queues outside his trailer lengthened. But as the commune grew, so did his hubris. Lucy began to suspect that their relationship wasn’t as exclusive as she’d imagined. When she caught him in bed with two of the newest arrivals, she strapped Billie into his car and headed west.
Months later, in Portugal, Zacarías tracked her down. He pleaded for another chance. When Lucy refused, he used every trick of rhetoric to change her mind. When thatfailed too, he tried to take Billie. Lucy put herself between them. A physical fight ensued. Zacarías, screaming death threats, pursued Lucy to the kitchen, where she grabbed a knife and defended herself. In the criminal trial that followed, every word of her testimony had been true.
All these years later, would she recognize Zacarías if he passed her in the street? Possibly, but she couldn’t guarantee it.
You might think you know me but you don’t. You don’t have the first clue. Nor does Nick.
Lucy closes her eyes and that’s when the thought ambushes her, slipping into her mind before she can fight it off. It swells like a canker. And then itbursts, poison gushing from it in a tide.
What if that emailwasfrom Daniel?
What if shedoesn’treally know him?
She’s always had a talent for self-deception. What if she’s been engaged, all this time, in nothing but a monumental act of denial?
Lucy pushes away from the counter and staggers to the sink. She dry-heaves so hard and for so long that she feels blood vessels rupturing in her face. Turning on the cold-water tap, she sticks her head beneath the flow until she’s soaked and shivering.