Thea wanted to sink down with her. Her eyes had begun to throb, holding the beat of a miserable tune that only they could sense. The floating black shapes in front of them melted into the general gloom, which was worse because now the whole place pulsed and squirmed as if she’d got herself stuck in a very dark lava lamp. She blinked a few times, her eyelids almost sticking together each time she did so.

One of the blinks went on longer than she’d meant it to. With a jolt, she bobbed her head up again.

Blink.

Blink.

Bli—

Pain shot through her hand. She’d stabbed herself in the palm with the scissors she’d been carrying in her pocket. Keeping the point embedded she wiggled it slightly, feeling the pain needle, a white-hot focus for her mind.

Just as she was thinking perhaps they had been wrong, perhaps the drone hadn’t spotted them after all, that it had just turned in their direction on its own special, drone business – just as she was allowing herself to think of getting to Delores’s boat … something scratched the wall directly behind her.

Thea and Rory tensed.

A bumping, skittery scratch, like a drunken bumblebee careening away from its flower of choice. A questing, snouty little scratch.

Bump, scrape. Bump, scratch.

It came again.

Bump, rasp.

Then, lazily, it made its way along the wall until it knocked and buzzed against the window in the middle of them.

A light flashed in.

Chapter 56

She tried to steady herself using the meditation techniques she’d derided so often in her first few weeks on the island.

One long breath in … and hold it … one long breath out …

The light came from the window between them. It was methodical, the way in which it tracked across the room, starting at the corner furthest from them and meticulously making its way along the floor, no patch escaping its beam.

Eventually it would track its slow careful way right over to them.

Thea nearly forgot to take the in-breath.

Rosie’s one good eye was huge in the gloom as she turned her face a little towards Thea. Her hands were pressed up against the wall behind her as if she was holding it back from collapsing and she made a strangled gasping noise. Thea tried to look reassuring, but she wasn’t sure that translated well in the dim light.

The snouty, questing scratch had turned into a snouty, questing light.

One long breath in … and hold it … one long breath out … and hold it …

Rosie’s mouth stretched wide in fear.

The torchlight beam focused on the far corner, a tea towel with a print of a saint patting a cow suddenly bright in the spotlight, the cow’s face looking almost shocked by the illumination. Then the light slowly crept over display shelves, badges, rows of crucifixes and the line of cuddly toy monks with their stitched smiles.