Page 114 of The Rising Tide

Staring at your picture, that dark Lucy magic hit me just as powerfully as before – as if the eighteen years since we’d parted were just a dream. I spent a week telling myself to forget you; to keep you in the past, where you belonged.

And then I packed a bag for Skentel.

I didn’t intend to announce myself straight away. Instead, I booked into the Goat Hotel and watched from afar.

What a life you’d built for yourself, Lucy. Quite the unexpected turnaround: the arts venue on the quay; the sailing boat; the quirky old house on the hill. Andwhata dashing husband.

I could see, straight away, that you’d filled that town with dark magic. Walking its streets, I was intoxicated. Do you remember the day I walked into the Drift Net, Lucy? Becauseyoudidn’t rememberme.

Admittedly, I didn’t tell you my name. After the stinging little death you’d just served up, why should I? Instead, I bought a drink like a good customer and tried to soak up the ambience. What awful art, though, hanging from those walls. Really, the very worst.

I had another drink and told myself to forgive you – just like I’d forgiven you seventeen years earlier. People grow, they change. Maybe I’d grown too much.

I decided to give you another chance, and I really wanted to help you with the art. I moved out of the Goat and rented the old lighthouse a few miles from town, where I could paint without distraction. And – can you believe it, Lucy? – I made the best art of my life.

Strange. I’d never liked the sea. But the air on this stretch of coast and the cries of those herring gulls – it just fills you up. I bought a boat and a captain’s hat. And I painted and painteduntil I was done. Eight individual pieces that I knew were my best work. They were forYOU, Lucy, all of them. A helping hand from a loving friend.

The Drift Net’s website had a submissions page. I wasn’t ready to reveal myself so I sent in my images under a pseudonym. I left clues in each painting, even so. I thought them sufficiently oblique, but I knew you’d find them thrilling once I revealed myself. Of course, I didn’t explain I was donating the paintings – that would have aroused your suspicions.

Your suspicions weren’t aroused at all, were they, Lucy? Because back came your email: ‘You have amazing talent but I’m afraid these aren’t a good fit.’

After all those years, that was how we ended up: YOU, rejecting MY work. RejectingME.

Despite my initial anger, in a couple of days I’d recovered. I realized it might be a test. Perhaps you’d figured out the truth and were scared of seeing me again, of dredging up all those old feelings.

I should have burned the paintings and sloped back to London. Instead, I let the dark magic talk its talk. Chances come in threes, so I decided to give you a third.

That’s when Tommo came into being. People talked to Tommo like they’d never talk to me. Maybe it was because they were looking down, rather than up.

I spent more time in Skentel, hung out at the Drift Net. When I heard about the party for Billie’s eighteenth, I knew I had to go. I developed my relationship with Bee and suddenly there I was, up on Mortis Point. In your home, Lucy. With your friends and your husband and your brood. Withyou.

Really, I can’t tell you how emotional I found it. Even more so when I discovered a painting of mine hanging on your wall.

Still, something wasn’t quite right in that house – all smilesand laughter on the surface, but something more troubling lurking beneath. I plied Bee with alcohol and watched you hard all evening. And then I saw the utterly grotesque Nicholas Povey follow you into your darkened study and purposely close the door.

I knew what was coming. I’d been on the receiving end. And now I was watching it unfold again. Worse, this time. Because you weremarried, Lucy, and you hadn’t learned, and Povey was so incredibly vulgar.

I had to make absolutely sure. I waited a few minutes and, when you didn’t come out, I grabbed Bee’s hand and burst in.

I didn’t catch you in the act, butsomethinghad been going on in that study – the guilt was etched on to your face. I could hardly bear to look at you. I dragged Bee out but you didn’t follow. Instead, you locked the door.

Within a week, you were sneaking out at night to visit him. Cosy drinks in his living room. You have me to thank for Daniel turning up. I phoned him – said I was calling from the Drift Net, worried that you hadn’t turned up. Sad, really, that he knew exactly where to find you. We both know what would have happened had he not arrived.

That night, like an epiphany, I realized what you needed: a kathartic event; a tragedy so epochal it would purify the hateful creature you’d become. I returned to the lighthouse and started work. And now here we are at the end of it: the final scene in The Redemption of Lucy Locke.

FORTY-NINE

Lucy listens to him speak, and knows she’s talking to a lunatic. Worse – that there’s no chance of dissuading him from whatever course he’s set. She feels the knife in her back pocket, senses the other weapons she’s secreted about the boat. But she’s onHuntsman’s Daughterand Lucian’s on theCetusand there’s a gulf of deep ocean in between.

Might she have avoided this? At no point, now or then, was she ever aware of his search for her. In late autumn, she couldn’t have foreseen that a newspaper feature would attract a monster. Nor does she recall Lucian’s first visit to the Drift Net.

She does, now, remember the art: eight high-res images that appeared in her inbox one morning and raised the hairs on her skin. The first painting was a chocolate-box rendering of Skentel, a river of dark blood seeping down the high street. Another showed a woman chained to the rocks of Mortis Point. High above her, a crow-picked corpse swung inside a gibbet cage, while on Penleith Beach a crowd of modern-day locals pointed in delight. A thirdimage, this one of the harbour, showed boats floating keel-up among pushchairs floating wheels-up.

She’d stared at those pictures for half a minute, growing cold. Then she’d sent her standard rejection and deleted them from her machine. Perhaps, if she hadn’t been so preoccupied with Billie’s Sea Shepherd adventure and the bullying at Fin’s school, she might have seen the images for what they were: a warning, unequivocal, that calamity was about to strike.

Lucy feels the thump of her pulse at her temples.

There’s too much water between the boats to reach her son. Whatever current was pushing them together is now pulling them apart.

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