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Something has changed. Everything has changed.
She slows for the beach turning, wheels bumping down the track. At the bottom, she’s off the Triumph before it’s even stopped. Teeth clenched against the pain in her side, she scrambles up the backshore dune.
At the top, she’s greeted by the same scene she saw from the house: indistinct figures wreathed in white. Lucy skids down the slope. She breaks into a loping run across the sand.
Dear God, I know I’ve never prayed and I know I’ve done bad things, plenty of them, but please, God, please, God, please …
In her ears, the rasp of her breathing. In her heart, a cracking, a rending. She loses a running shoe, keeps going. Trips over and crashes to her hands. Bites back a scream, tastes blood. Gets up. Limps on.
Ahead, the group begins to coalesce. She’s sixty feet away now. Fifty.
Four figures in total. One, standing, is talking into a phone. Two others crouch over a fourth lying prone.
Lucy’s strength goes. She stumbles the last few yards, falters.
The figure lying prone is a teenaged girl, clothes soaked from the sea. Her head is turned away but she has the same pale hair as Billie, cut into much the same style. The two leaning over her – female, middle-aged, red-faced with exertion – are taking turns to perform CPR.
Lucy moves around them so she can see the girl’s face. With all her energy spent, she slumps down on the sand.
The woman performing compressions is Jane Watson from the pharmacy. Talking on the phone is her husband, Gordon. Lucy doesn’t recognize the woman offering assistance.
Around them the mist settles thicker, cloaking everything but this small parcel of sand and the mercurial water that creeps up it each time a wave breaks.
Behind them, Mortis Point has disappeared. Penleith’s backshore too.
Sound comes, though – bell-like in its clarity: the whisper of surf, the calls of the herring gulls, Jane Watson’s breathing, the wail of a faraway siren.
Strange, how the sea has grown so tranquil – as if the enormity of the spectacle has affected it too. The gentle wash of water, in and out of the mist, replicates the rise and fall of lungs or gills, the basic mechanisms of life.
The girl is dead.
That’s beyond doubt. Lucy doesn’t know why the twowomen keep trying to revive her. That heart won’t beat again. Those eyes won’t see anything new.
She thinks of the story Daniel once told Fin, of the man-shaped Mobiginion that sometimes visits homes near the sea. She recalls the trail of wet footprints she saw on Friday, retreating to the study from the front door. And, a few weeks ago, the bloody impressions retreating through broken glass to Nick Povey’s couch.
The siren grows louder. Jane Watson, still working on the dead girl, glances up and sees Lucy. She calls to her husband, still talking on the phone.
The dead girl’s not Billie.
That, more than anything else, is the most difficult reality to grasp. Just now, as Lucy’s energy abandoned her and she collapsed down on the sand, she thought her world had ended right here on this beach; that the dead girl, with sea-draggled hair so similar to Billie’s in colour and style,wasBillie.
And yet she isn’t.
In a community of this size, it hardly seems possible thattwofamilies in twenty-four hours could be hit by tragedy. Yet that is what appears to have happened. And while Lucy has only sympathy for the mother of this poor child and the cataclysm she’s about to experience, she won’t spare her a drop if it means Billie can come home. The thought is ruthless to the point of inhumanity, but she won’t deny it. To save her children, she’ll sacrifice anything. Anyone.
One last whoop of the siren before it dies. An ambulance, probably, arriving behind the dunes. No need to rush. The diagnosis is clear.
Jane Watson wipes her brow and continues pumping. She starts shouting. ‘Come on. Comeon!’
Hard to know if she’s appealing to the ambulance crew or the dead girl. Gordon Watson puts away his phone and walks over. He lays his hand on Lucy’s shoulder, squeezes.
The dead girl’s feet are bare. Her toenails are painted the same lemon shade favoured by Billie.
It’s another disturbing coincidence. Another jarring detail. Lucy shivers – realizes for the first time how cold it is down here on the beach. If only she’d brought a coat, she could have used it to cover the dead girl. It wouldn’t keep her warm, but it would be a gesture, at least. If Billie were lying here, she’d want someone else to do the same.
Two paramedics emerge from the mist, equipment jostling on their backs. Gordon sinks to his knees. He puts his arms around Lucy’s shoulders and pulls her close. Together, they watch the paramedics drop their backpacks to the sand. One of them crouches beside Jane Watson and stills her attempts at revival. It really is very obvious that the girl isn’t coming back.
‘This doesn’t make any sense,’ Gordon croaks.