Page 43 of The Rising Tide

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Beside the bed, the vital-signs monitor beeps in warning. Abraham doesn’t break eye contact. He notices the Bair Hugger start to shake. Daniel Locke, wrapped inside it, is panting for breath.

Abraham leans closer. He doesn’t expect violence – nothere, not now – but should it happen, he’s ready. He hears raised voices in the corridor. His gaze flickers to the door. ‘What’s your message?’

Those blue eyes aren’t just cold. They’refrozen. Chips of turquoise and azurite veined with arctic ice. Abraham recalls something a doctor once told him, about a cold and lifeless sailor pulled from the sea:You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead.So it had proved with that sailor. Thirty minutes without a pulse. Then the medical team warmed his core and shocked him back to life.

Such is the world Abraham now inhabits. But although the dialysis machine reheated Daniel Locke’s blood, there’s no warmth apparent in his face.

‘Tell her,’ Locke whispers, lips drawn back over his teeth. ‘Tell her she deserves every fucking thing she gets.’

Eyes clenched shut, he starts to sob. His back arches. The tendons in his neck bulge. A sound emerges from his throat – as raw as if it were torn out by a hook.

The door bangs open. Abraham rears back. He’s so thrown by Locke’s words that it takes him a moment to focus. In the corridor he sees Sergeant Hurst, arms around a mad thing. It writhes and screams, all hair and claws and bared teeth.

With a lurch, Abraham realizes the mad thing is Lucy Locke. Gone is the woman he met before. In her place is a creature half crazed with grief or hysteria or both. Draggled snakes of hair hang about her face. Her eyes look like they’ve taken a blast of pepper spray. Her hands and feet are blue. She’s wearing a hospital gown, badly tied. Around her arm is the torn scrap of cloth she’d been holding at the school.

I love him. He loves me too. Not every couple can say that after nearly a decade, but we can.

Lucy finally twists free. She grabs the door post, drags herself into the room. ‘Daniel!’ she screams. ‘Daniel!’

Squeals of rubber from the corridor. Annapurna appears, alongside two nurses. In an instant, the room’s occupants grow from two to seven.

All sorts of alarms are triggering on the monitor. Inside the Bair Hugger, Daniel Locke starts to thrash. Annapurna rushes forwards, shouting at the nurses to restrain him. But Locke doesn’t look like he’s having a fit, more as if he’s freaking out.

‘What’s happening?’ Lucy wails. ‘Where’s Billie? Where’s Fin?Daniel,TELL ME!’

Those last words she screams so fiercely that Abraham’s ears ring with them. As Lucy approaches the bed, Daniel Locke’s struggles intensify. Abraham grabs his shoulders and pins him down. Annapurna arrives at his side with a syringe. Locke begins to buck. His strength is unbelievable. He wrenches his arms free of the Bair Hugger, grabs Abraham’s wrists.

Lucy Locke is screaming again. Abraham bellows at Hurst to remove her. And then, somehow, Annapurna’s needle is in, and half a minute later, Daniel Locke’s animal fury fades and his struggles cease.

‘Tellme,’ Lucy sobs. Her voice sounds as broken as her husband’s. She stares in horrified disbelief.

I have a message. A message for that bitch.

Hurst has his arms around her now. When she sags, he holds her up. ‘Please,’ she croaks. ‘Where are they? This wasn’t meant tohappen.’

Tell her she deserves every fucking thing she gets.

Despite Abraham’s earlier provocation, designed to elicit a reaction, he’d been keeping an open mind on Daniel Locke. The man’s outburst has changed everything.

Abraham is a detective inspector but he’s something more than that. He’s God’s blunt-edged tool, formed at speed from the roughest clay to hand. Inelegant, uncivilized, but crudely effective.

His strength may be failing. His faith, too. Little chance, now, that Lucy’s children are still alive, but he’s going to find out what happened to them, regardless of the consequences to himself.

I’m angry, Lucy, I’ll admit it. Angry and sad and emotional. I like things to be perfect, and on that boat they nearly were. When things don’t go as planned, I get upset.

I never intended to go to the hospital. I certainly didn’t intend to see you. There’s a saying soldiers have – that no plan survives contact with the enemy. But I still can’t believe what happened out there in that sea.

For a while, just now, I almost lost heart. It’s so hard to see your pain. Even harder to be the cause. And yet I know what I’m doing is important. I’m committed to this. It’s too late to turn back.

I thought I knew you, and I didn’t. The person I met – the person who stole my heart all those years ago – isn’t real. She’s an invention, a sham, a character from one of Billie’s plays.

The thing is, Lucy, you hurt people. You might not realize it, but you do. You slide through life, charming everyone, touching lives and sharing the Lucy magic. And that’s fine for those who don’t get too close, who don’t meet the reality beneath the facade. But those of us who do get too close discover what a dark magic you wield, one that leaves nothing but misery in its wake.

I have you to credit for the cure. Remember all our drunken conversations about philosophy? Everything you taught me about Aristotle? About his theory, particularly, of dramatic tragedy?

Tragedy transports us from happiness to misery. And, at the end of it, we are cleansed.

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