said. It was like touching someone else.
I don’t know what it is, he told her, I don’t know what it means, I just don’t want it, I can’t live with it, I have to be rid of it, and if I can’t be rid of it then I will die I swear I will die.
With Elena Maria, then, there was relief. For those few hours, for a day trip to one of the larger towns, for a weekend once in which they were adolescent girls on their own at a beach… This allowed the young Santiago to see what he truly wanted, what he had to be. But this could not happen in a world in which his father believed that toughening him up was the only answer. In order to live as he had been born to live, Santiago had run, and he’d continued running until he’d run into the arms of Raul Montenegro.
So was the worst really those boxing lessons? Alatea asked herself now. Or was the worst the promise that Raul Montenegro had held out to her and the reality of how she’d been intended to keep up her end of the bargain they’d struck with each other? She wasn’t sure. But what she did know was that Raul Montenegro was a driven man. Just as he’d been unwavering in his promise to fulfill the feminine dreams of his young lover Santiago Vasquez y del Torres, so was he equally unwavering in his decision to find Alatea Vasquez y del Torres so that she could repay him in coin he’d long ago determined.
And now here she was, as lost as ever, with no choice left but to move or to die. So she moved in the direction she hoped against hope was Arnside, although she no longer knew. Within ten yards she hit the quicksand, a scour she had feared she’d stumble upon. In an instant she was up to her thighs. And cold, cold. So horribly cold.
No panic was necessary, she told herself. She knew what to do. Nicholas had told her. A long-ago walk across the expanse of the empty bay and she remembered his words. It’s completely counterintuitive, darling, but you’ve got to do it, he had said.
She knew that. She prepared herself.
That was when the siren began to blare.
ARNSIDE
CUMBRIA
“Are you certain, sir?” the voice asked Lynley. The man at the Coast Guard station on Walney Island spoke with the kind of calm authority meant to soothe whoever was phoning in an emergency of the sort that Lynley was reporting. He spoke with cool-headed reason, which could lead to a decision, because he and he alone had the authority to put the wheels in motion. “I don’t want to launch a boat out into the bay unless we know for a fact that the woman’s out there. Conditions are deadly. Has she rung on her mobile? Was there a note?”
“Neither. But we’re certain.” Lynley described for the officer the position of the house, the lack of an escape route, and what they’d done to attempt to find Alatea Vasquez y del Torres. The only possibility besides the bay had been the walk along the seawall: a public footpath that branched into half a dozen other public footpaths leading to Arnside Knot, to the village of Silverdale, and ultimately onto the Lancaster Coastal Way. But Alatea didn’t know those footpaths other than the footpath to Arnside Knot and she had no reason to climb to the knot in the fog while she had every reason to try to make a run for it across the bay.
“What reason would this be, sir?” the officer had asked, not unreasonably.
Lynley told him he was in the midst of an enquiry into a drowning, which could have been a murder, and all the et ceteras. He was not only stretching the truth of the matter. He was actually lying to the man. But there seemed no choice available other than setting out themselves for Arnside Knot to search for her there, which he’d managed to persuade Nicholas Fairclough to do, hopeless task though it was.
Fairclough had agreed to do this, although he’d built a bonfire first on the seawall path. This Deborah was keeping at a roar, feeding into it armfuls of whatever was flammable: logs, branches, newspapers, magazines, old pieces of furniture. The fire had attracted the attention of the fire brigade as well as the good citizens of Arnside, who joined in the effort to make from these combustibles a beacon that might glow through the fog and signal to Alatea the route she needed to take in order to return.
It was more something to do than was it useful, and Lynley knew this. For if Alatea was indeed out there in Morecambe Bay and if the tide was coming in, it was hardly likely that she’d be able to outrun it. Hence his call to the Coast Guard.
The officer on Walney Island said to him, “Sir, I can put out a boat, but let’s not deal in fantasy here. Visibility just now is less than twenty yards. The bay is over one hundred square miles. With the combination of fog and the tidal bore… I’m not putting a crew out there on a whim.”
“I assure you, this is not a whim,” Lynley told him. “Surely if you set a course for Arnside — ”
“We’ll chance it, all right,” the officer cut in. “But she’s a dead woman, sir, and we both know that. Meanwhile, ring the lifeboat service to see what they can do to assist. You might want to phone the Guide to the Sands for his opinion as well.”
The Guide to the Sands was established across the water to the south of Grange-over-Sands, near a little enclave called Berry Bank. He sounded a kindhearted soul when Lynley rang him. But in over fifty years of walking curious day-trippers across Morecambe Bay and after a lifetime spent between cockling from the fishing village of Flookburgh to trawling for shrimp in the River Leven, he bloody well knew how to read the sands, sir, and if a lady was out there in the fog for any reason on God’s good earth — and he didn’t much care to know the reason — she was well on her way to being a corpse and “that’s the unfortunate truth of the matter, I’m sorry to tell you.”
Was there nothing to be done? Lynley asked. For the Coast Guard was setting out from Walney Island and he was about to ring the RNLI for a lifeboat as well.
Depends on how many corpses you want to look for when the fog lifts, was how the Guide to the Sands put it. But he made one thing clear: After all his years of reading the sands and knowing the safe routes from those fraught with danger, he wasn’t about to join the foolhardy who went out now in search of anyone.
Nor, it turned out, was the RNLI. They were volunteers, after all. They were trained to help and they wanted to help. But they needed water to launch their boats, sir, and the bay was at present empty. While it was true that it wasn’t going to be empty for long, when the water rushed in, it was going to take that woman quickly because if she didn’t drown, hypothermia would get her. They’d set off with the tide as soon as they were able, but it was useless. We’re so sorry, sir.
So the fire roared and someone thought to bring a loud-hailer from which Alatea’s name was shouted continuously. In the meantime, out in the distance somewhere, the phenomenon that was the tidal bore was coming. Awesome to witness, Lynley heard someone murmur. But deadlier to encounter.
WINDERMERE
CUMBRIA
The burglar alarm was loud enough to raise skeletons from tombs. They had to shout to each other to be heard above it. They used all their force to wedge the wheelie bin into the shop in order to give themselves a means of access, and once inside, Freddie turned to Manette and yelled, “You wait here,” which, naturally, she was not about to do.
He went for the inner door and rattled its handle. It was locked, and although he yelled, “Open this! Police!” and then “Tim! Tim Cresswell!” it was clear to them both that whoever was within the other room wasn’t about to cooperate.
“I’ll have to break it.”
Manette read his lips rather than heard him. She said, “How?” because of all the things Freddie was, he was hardly a man in possession of the brute force that was needed to break in a door. And this door wasn’t like a telly door or a film door, substantial in appearance but in reality flimsy enough to be kicked in with a single thrust of a manly foot powered by an even manlier thigh. This was a door with intentions, and those intentions were to keep out trespasssers.
Nonetheless, Freddie went at it. First with his foot. Then with his shoulder. Then they took turns and all the
