The Rising Tide: the heart-stopping and addictive thriller from the Richard and Judy author(14)

Abraham is used to seeing portents in the world around him. Rarely do they offer much succour. As he studies the approaching weather front, he imagines a host of black stallions charging towards him, and thinks of another passage in Luke’s Gospel: People were eating, drinking, marrying and being given in marriage up to the day Noah entered the ark. Then the flood came and destroyed them all.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Cooper says. ‘Will you look at that shelf cloud?’

Abraham flinches at the blasphemy. In his thirty-year career, he’s never reconciled himself to his fellow officers’ faithlessness. One would have thought, surrounded by crime and misery, they’d have far greater reverence for the Word.

One would have thought.

‘Shelf cloud?’ He ducks his head for a better look. ‘What’s that?’

Cooper wrenches the steering wheel. They overtake an articulated lorry carrying farming equipment and swerve back into their lane.

‘A type of arcus cloud,’ the DS says, changing up a gear. ‘You get a shelf cloud like that along the gust front of a major weather system. What you’re seeing is the cool air sliding under the— JESUS!’

Ahead, a red Nissan pulls out of a side road, directly into their path. Its driver sees the approaching blue lights and locks his brakes. Cooper flicks the wheel. The car rocks wildly, veering into the opposite lane with no loss of momentum.

Cooper throws a daggered look at the Nissan’s driver as they pass. ‘Sliding under the warmer air hugging the coast,’ he continues. ‘The warm air rises and its moisture condenses.’

‘Quite a sight,’ Abraham mutters, releasing his grip on the door rest.

The road, now, is flanked by tall hedgerows. Cooper hugs the white line as they round a blind bend. ‘In the most extreme cases,’ he says, ‘you’ll see vortices along the leading edge. Gustnadoes, they’re called.’

‘I didn’t realize you were so interested in weather.’

In truth, Abraham hadn’t realized Cooper was interested in much at all. There’s a wife somewhere, he believes. Has he seen a photo on Cooper’s desk, confirming that? About the only thing he knows for sure is that the man never seems to eat his meals at a table or use a knife and fork.

If he had his time again, he’d make far more effort with those around him. Too late now.

Abraham shifts his weight, hunting for a more comfortable position. The bar beneath the passenger seat is broken. As a result, his six-foot-four-inch frame is squeezed into a space more suited to a dwarf. Seatbelt or not, if Cooper hits another vehicle, Abraham’s face is going through the windscreen.

He distracts himself by recalling what he knows about the situation they’re racing to meet. Just under three hours ago, the coastguard picked up a distress call from Daniel Locke, skipper of the Lazy Susan. Locke went off air before relaying his position, but rescuers approximated the signal. A lifeboat located the vessel, but not Daniel.

Along this part of the coast, a sad but unexceptional tragedy. Then, thirty minutes ago, Locke’s wife called 999. Arriving at her son’s school for pick-up, she’d learned that her husband had collected the boy hours earlier.

It’s the kind of case few investigating officers relish and from which there are likely no good outcomes.

The boy, Fin Locke, is seven years old. Hazel eyes, mouse-brown hair, 110 centimetres tall. He wears thick plastic glasses with characters from The Avengers along the side and was dressed in his Headlands Junior School uniform. Abraham hasn’t seen a picture, but he knows when he does it’ll snap his heart in two.

So far, that’s all he has on the boy. Pulling out his notebook, he reviews what he scribbled down about the father.

Daniel Locke. Forty-two years old. Blue eyes, black hair. Five foot ten, average build, a four-inch scar on his right forearm. Last recorded sighting around 8 a.m., when his wife says he left the house. He told her he was heading to Locke-Povey Marine, an outfitting company he co-owns. Right now, no one there is answering the phone. A patrol car has been dispatched to check the place out, but with so few officers assigned to this stretch of coast, even the simplest of tasks takes time. Meanwhile, a uniformed patrol in Skentel is searching for Locke’s car.

Abraham looks up from his notes. Westwards, above the treeline, that wall of black stallions charges closer.

Shelf cloud, he thinks.

The gust front of a major weather system.

Abraham hasn’t yet glimpsed the ocean. The coastguard chatter suggests that conditions are rapidly deteriorating. He wonders how long the search can continue. And he wonders, more than anything, what Daniel Locke did to his son.

There are no more vehicles in front of them. Nothing but empty road and sky. Cooper switches off the siren. They blast along the carriageway, blue light bouncing off the road signs. Finally, through a break in the trees, Abraham spies the sea.

Anyone dismissing the recent weather warnings as hyperbole can’t dismiss them now. From coast to horizon a destructive force has mustered that’s frightening to behold. The muscles tighten in Abraham’s neck, his chest. If ever there was a sight to confirm God’s power over His creation, this is it. Troubling that he doesn’t find himself more awed. How cruel – that at the point in his life when he needs his faith most, he can feel it ebbing away.

While the sky has marshalled black stallions, the sea commands white chargers; rank upon rank of them chase towards the land. The rocky stacks beyond the peninsula known as Mortis Point are being smashed. And yet in the instant before trees yet again block his view, he sees something remarkable: a flotilla of yachts and fishing vessels spreading out from Skentel’s harbour.