“It was a relief when I saw the black-tiled roof of the house down below. My pace picked up. I scurried through the boggy ground and onto the road, but when I got to the house, Brona wasn’t about. The kitchen was empty, but the car was there, so I checked every room—the bathroom, the scullery, the cold rooms we had slept in as children—and I thought, Oh, shit, she’s gone looking for me.
“I hurried back outside, calling her. Nothing. Then I went along the road to see if she was down at her veggie patch, but of course she wasn’t. Her worrying had driven her out into the dusk in search of me, and with all the different goat tracks, all the humps of rock, it would have been easy for us to miss each other. So I ran back up along the main track and through that narrow grassy valley, shouting her name, over and over again, until eventually I thought I heard her call back, so I stood stock still, wanting the wind to hush. I was right—she was calling me from up behind the hillocks. I shouted, ‘I’m here. I’m coming. Where are you?’ And I stumbled along the high path, across the ridge, but even though I could still hear Brona’s voice, it seemed to get ever farther away. I kept shouting that I was coming, that I was almost there, running and slipping, and yelling her name as she was calling mine . . . until I found her.”
Gabriel stopped poking the fire.
“She’d fallen off the track, into the ditch, and was lying in the gorse, a tea towel stuck into the pocket of her apron, her face all scratched. Worried that I’d slipped and fallen, she had slipped and fallen. There was so little light left, I almost didn’t see her. She was cold. Heavy. Unconscious. I tried to drag her out, but couldn’t, so I took off my coat and jumper and put them over her, then struggled through the dark to the house.
“After calling the ambulance, I grabbed a torch and found my way back to her, and I held her and tried to keep her warm. The wind was bitter, screeching like a banshee, or maybe it was the banshee, come to take her. . . . I had never been so scared. It took the ambulance nearly an hour to get there—they had to come from Bantry, along that wretched winding road—and I kept stumbling back to see if it had come, until finally it was there, down at the house, and I ran down, screaming. Incoherent. I was shivering so much, they wouldn’t let me take them to her. They wrapped me in a foil blanket and put me in the kitchen, while they went to her. For all the good it did.”
“She died?”
“She was dead already.” Thea’s eyes turned back to the fire. “So you could say that I killed her. My self-absorption and selfishness forced her out into the wilderness. She was frailer than we knew. She had your brother’s heart.”
The desert took a few moments to absorb the story.
“So, you see, I know all about your guilt, Mr. Sherlock. The difference is that I don’t inhabit it, I merely live with it, even though the memory of that night, the wind, and the gorges, and me sitting alone in the dark house, frozen, watching the—”
“Blue lights flashing.”
She looked over. “Yes.”
Gabriel, suddenly, was on his feet.
“But no siren. No sound.” Thea pulled her hand around the back of her neck. “Only the beacon, lighting the room with a blue hue, then throwing me back into darkness.”
Gabriel stood on the other side of the flames staring at her, arms hanging. “Just as you left, so you come back.”
“What?”
“Lights on the wall,” he said.
“Huh?”
“I saw the blue lights. On my wall. In Muscat. I saw the ambulance.”
“Please don’t, Gabriel. Not here.”
“And then you were gone and now you’re back again, and I can’t even see you.” His eyes narrowed. “It must be the competition. You don’t like it. Twenty-six years isn’t enough? You want my whole life?”
“What are you on about?” Thea stood up and gripped his arm—anything to get his eyes off hers. “What competition?”
“A beautiful woman comes into my life and you just have to wreck it, don’t you?”
“Who are you talking to? It’s me. Thea.”
He blinked, finally, and the arm in her grasp relaxed. “I know who it is,” he said, sinking cross-legged to the ground. “I know who you are.”
She crouched beside him. “I bloody well hope so. You’re scaring me.”
“You don’t understand how devious they can be. If they want you, if they want your love, they’ll do what it takes to make sure no one else gets it. They’ll even make you mad. She made me mad—”
“No. No, you’re just tired.”
“And I loved her for it.”
“You need to sleep. We should turn in.”
Gabriel held her eye. “She’s messing with us. Be careful.”
“I won’t listen to this. I’m turning in. So should you.”
Thea bolted upright, woken. Two voices. Beyond the canvas. Gabriel talking to someone. Who? A passing Bedouin in the night? If someone had driven up she would have heard the engine. He spoke quietly, in a low drone, but there had been another voice. That was what had woken her—it had slid into her unconscious and set off an alarm. She couldn’t work out what he was saying, but she was aware of motion, of to-ing and fro-ing outside, and Gabriel ranting, tonelessly.
Then, quiet.
The silence pounded. Her ears fretted, thumping in the discomfort of having nothing to do, the pulse of blood through her veins making her agitated. There is no such thing as silence, she thought. The body won’t allow it.
There it was again. Light, wispy. A woman, outside.
She pushed off the sleeping bag and crawled toward the flap, but couldn’t see anyone until she was half in, half out
