Down below her there was fire. The golf ball building was crumpling in on itself and the fire ate it up, swishing its tongue around and around, lapping up every last bit. Then her body jolted and suddenly she was too far out. She couldn’t scrabble for purchase. Someone had hold of her neck and they were pushing her over the edge, even though she was trying to hold on, her body fizzing with adrenaline. Tensing, she tried to grab something, anything to stop her from dipping, from moving, from lurching off the edge. She was going to fall. Every muscle in her body tensed for impact as she …

… woke up.

Standing on the edge of the bed, someone’s hand on her hip.

‘Thea?’

She looked down at Harriet’s worried face as she wobbled on the springy mattress.

‘What was I—?’ Thea stuttered.

Not a hallucination, not a hallucination, not a hallucination. She was not turning into Richard and Ted and Moses. She was not. Thea thought back to the lectures she’d had, which seemed years ago now – micro sleep, that was it. The body snatching some rest. That was all.

‘Just a bad dream, I’m sure.’ Harriet helped her to sit down and then squeezed her arm, her eyes sad. ‘Delores is ready to see you now.’

Chapter 43

‘We don’t have much time. You will have to trust me.’

Delores’s desk was covered in paper, some of which she was hurriedly stuffing into a satchel. She didn’t even look up as Thea came in. Her coat had been thrown over the back of the chair, its arms trailing limply, and she’d pushed up her sleeves, crumpling the silk of her blouse.

Thea laughed.

She hadn’t meant to – it had just come gurgling out of her throat in a spasm, like vomit.

‘Trust you? Really?’

Delores stopped and considered her. She flung her hair over her shoulder in annoyance and then sighed, opened a desk drawer and got out a hair clip. She twisted her hair up and away from her face in one smooth, practised move. Suddenly the Delores from Moses’s video diary was staring back at her.

‘I’m trying to save your life Thea. When I say we don’t have much time, I really rather mean it.’

‘How can I trust someone who had Ethan killed, who drugged and hid Moses away, who … who—’

She paused. On Delores’s desk was that heavy-looking ornament, a sinuous twist of stone on a plinth, veined with greens and purples, coloured like a bruise.

‘I may as well tell you now that we had cameras placed in the lighthouse. I’ve seen what happened. What Moses gave you.’

Thea almost laughed at her own stupidity. Of course they had the lighthouse rigged! Who had she thought she was dealing with?

‘You can keep the memory stick if you so wish. It doesn’t matter to me now.’