Page 79 of The Rising Tide

The prayer ends. The priest hands the mic to Lucy. She surveys the crowd as if unsure what to say, but when she speaks her words come easily enough. She thanks everyone for their support. Then she tells the same story she told Abraham: the dinghy, missing from the garage; her belief that Billie and Fin used it to get ashore. Some in the crowdseem galvanized by the news. Others watch Lucy more warily.

Abraham can feel it: the tide of opinion, just like the weather of recent days, gradually starting to shift. The dinghy, real or imagined, won’t change the main point in people’s minds – Daniel Locke has already confessed.

Lucy stops speaking. A Chinese lantern rises from the crowd. Others float up to join it, a silent flotilla reaching heavenward. Abraham watches for a while. Then he returns his attention to Lucy, whose gaze has moved to the tealights illuminating her children’s names. Moments later, her head lifts to the dune where Abraham is standing. He finds himself staring into her eyes. Those razored wings beneath his skin tense, threatening to split his flesh. He clenches his teeth against the pain.

Daniel Locke knows more than he’s telling. Increasingly, it seems Lucy Locke knows something too. Pretty soon, Abraham will have to act. Not as an officer of the law, perhaps, but as a blunt instrument of God. He follows a higher authority. He—

‘Samson,’ says a voice.

He wheels around. Emma Douglas is standing beside him, lips tight around a cigarette. She surveys the crowd, breathing smoke into the night air. ‘This dinghy. Is it bullshit?’

‘I can’t talk about the case.’

She drags on her cigarette. ‘I’m hearing interesting things about the Lockes.’

‘If you know something—’

‘Relax, Samson. If it’s relevant, you’ll hear about it soon enough. She’s pretty convincing – the mother. You thinkthere’s any chance what she said is true? That either of those kids could have survived?’

‘There’s always …’ He stops, curses himself.

‘Always what?’

‘You were at the press conference. Daniel Locke confessed. We’ve charged him with their murders.’

‘But what – you’re having second thoughts?’

‘Not at all. I—’

‘You think they might be alive?’

‘This conversation,’ he says, ‘is over.’

2

Driving back to the station, Abraham can’t stop thinking about Lucy Locke. Her speech at the vigil was a perfect mix: agony, hope and rousing call to action. It didn’t win over everyone, but she couldn’t have performed better. When he recalls how her eyes sought him out at its conclusion, the blood in his stomach runs cold. Was it coincidence? Or had she known he was standing there all along?

He can’t forget the reports he’s received of Lucy’s quick temper. He remembers how she burst into her husband’s room on Lundy Ward. At the time, he’d thought her behaviour understandable. Now, he’s not so sure.

There’s a note waiting on his desk. It’s a summary of what Cooper found on ECRIS. Abraham reads it once and then again, more carefully. While Lucy Locke’s never been convicted of any offence domestically, that’s not the case internationally.

3

Twenty minutes later, nursing a coffee from the machine, he’s on a late-night call to Epifanio de Santos, a member of Portugal’s Polícia Judiciária.

According to de Santos, Lucy arrived in Almería, Spain’s south-eastern province, when Billie was five months old. Her destination was Alto Paraíso, an off-grid commune in the Tabernas Desert. There, she met a man called Zacarías Echevarria. It wasn’t long before Lucy started sleeping with him.

Their relationship lasted eighteen months. Then, one night, Lucy helped herself to Echevarria’s life savings, strapped Billie into his car and hit the road. On Portugal’s west coast, she rented an apartment and found work in a beachside bar. Before long, she moved into the bar owner’s home.

Back in Alto Paraíso, Echevarria was heartbroken. Not so much about his stolen money or car – he’d fallen for Lucy hard. It took him three months to track her down. Calling at her new home, he pleaded for a second chance. Lucy refused. When he persisted, she stabbed him three times with a chef’s knife.

Echevarria survived but spent months in hospital. At trial, Lucy’s defence team – hired at great expense by the bar owner – turned her into a victim. Echevarria, they maintained, was far from the mellow, pot-smoking hippie he portrayed. The man ruled Alto Paraíso like a feudal lord. Over time, his narcissism developed into a god complex. Initially, Lucy fell under his spell. When the mask slipped, she did the only sensible thing and fled. It wasEchevarria, months later, who initiated the violence. Lucy was simply defending herself.

No matter that none of the commune residents corroborated her story. In the witness box, Lucy seduced the entire court. The jury cleared her of attempted murder. Although she was convicted on lesser assault charges, the judge – to the astonishment of law enforcement and local media – suspended her sentence. Lucy returned home with the bar owner who’d paid her legal fees. Two days later, she boarded a bus with Billie and wasn’t seen again.

Overall, de Santos paints an unflattering picture: Lucy as a ruthless manipulator who used Billie to cast herself as a maiden in distress – a woman who started small but achieved greater affluence with each new conquest, leaving in her wake a trail of destruction and heartbreak.

Listening to de Santos talk, Abraham detects more than a whiff of misogyny, but the facts are clear enough: Lucy Locke has a criminal conviction for violence with a deadly weapon.

---