The Rising Tide: the heart-stopping and addictive thriller from the Richard and Judy author(16)

When he turns towards Marjorie Knox he sees, in her throat, the jump of her pulse. He stares with horrified fascination. Above him, the hum of the strip lighting intensifies into an angry buzzing.

Abraham’s gaze settles on an olive-wood cross fixed to the opposite wall. Abruptly, he finds he can breathe again.

Detective? Would you like to see them?

He glances at Cooper, who returns him an odd look. ‘Please.’





3


In the staffroom he meets Fin’s teacher, Sarah Clay, and the school receptionist. They satisfy him on something Marjorie Knox could not: that it was Daniel Locke who arrived mid-morning and took the boy away.

The receptionist walked to Fin’s class with the message. Sarah Clay handed the boy over to his father. She’s met Locke senior five times previously. Yes, she’d stake her life on it being him. No, she recalls nothing unusual in his behaviour.

When Abraham asks her to describe the boy, Clay’s eyes fill with tears. ‘Eccentric,’ she says. ‘Funny. Interested in just about everything. I never like to say I have a favourite, but if I did, it would be Fin.’ She glances at Marjorie Knox. ‘He has faced some issues with bullying lately. Being so small, he’s an easy target.’

‘Issues we promptly stamped out, Sarah.’

When Abraham bares his teeth, Knox’s head shrinks into her neck like a tortoise retreating into its shell.

‘I’ve gone over and over it,’ Clay says. ‘Tried to think of something I should have noticed. Fin’s mum – imagine. Have you spoken to her?’

It’s Abraham’s next task.





4


The head’s office is thick with perfume and dusty radiator heat. A female PC leans against a desk. Two other women stand by the window. With Marjorie Knox beside him, Abraham feels acutely outnumbered. Beyond pitiful, to reach his age and still feel so uncomfortable around the opposite sex.

It’s easy enough to identify Fin’s mother. Dressed in an oversized RNLI jacket, she looks like she’s either woken from a coma or is about to fall into one. Abraham knows that expression well enough. Here, though, it’s a little different. There’s something – in the angle of her jaw, or perhaps the square of her shoulders – that sets her apart. She looks like a warrior readying for battle.

As she returns his stare, he feels himself being measured. The scrutiny straightens his spine, until he remembers how most people recoil from his size. Lucy Locke doesn’t, though. She steps forward until she’s as close as Marjorie Knox.

How to address her? If Locke is the surname she took in marriage, it comes from a man who may have drowned her son.

‘Lucy,’ he begins. ‘I’m—’

‘By my reckoning we’ve got about two hours,’ she says. ‘That’s until it gets dark or this storm hits or both. Things get more difficult, then. They kept me here waiting when I could be out there, searching. I’ve talked to the coastguard, the police at the quay, these officers, now you. So this better be good. And it better be quick.’

He feels the anger boiling off her, the frustration. He hopes it’ll sustain her a good while, because he knows what replaces it won’t help. ‘Lucy, I’m aware you’ve given a statement and I don’t want to duplicate any work. It probably seems like we have all the facts, but these situations rarely—’

‘I last saw my husband, Daniel Locke, just before eight this morning at home,’ she says. ‘Home is Wild Ridge, the big house up on Mortis Point. He said he was going to his workshop, Locke-Povey Marine, behind Penleith Beach. I don’t know if he ever made it, but they’re saying he arrived here around eleven. He took our son, Fin Locke, seven years old, I have plenty of pictures. He told the staff Fin had a dentist’s appointment we’d forgotten about – which we hadn’t, because no appointment existed, and I’ve phoned the dentist’s to double-check, and the two of them never showed up. Three hours ago Daniel broadcast a Mayday from our yacht, the Lazy Susan. The boat’s been found but my son and my husband are still missing. They never launched the life raft. No one spotted a flare. I know how it looks – what everyone’s thinking – but Daniel’s a good man, the best there is. He wouldn’t have put Fin in danger unless he had no choice.

‘I’ve given your colleagues every possible contact method. Is there anything else you need to know before I get out there on the water?’

She pauses, takes a breath, twists something between her fingers. At first, Abraham thinks it’s a rag. Then he realizes it’s a child’s comfort blanket. There’s no sadder sight.

Beside him, Marjorie Knox mouth-breathes her rotten musk. ‘Oh dear,’ she says. ‘This is all very distressing.’

‘There’s lots I need to know,’ he tells Lucy Locke. ‘But I appreciate you don’t want to be here and’ – a glance at Knox – ‘I certainly can’t blame you. We can talk on the way to Skentel.’





5


Abraham takes the passenger seat. Cooper drives. Lucy Locke sits in the back and Noemie Farrell follows in Lucy’s car.

The shelf cloud he saw earlier has crept across half the sky. Strange shapes cavort and flicker inside it: gulls or guillemots, driven to confusion by the changing conditions. Watching them, Abraham can’t help recalling the fifth angel from Revelation and the star that fell from heaven: He opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit. And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth.