The barefoot man tapped his fingers together a few more times. Curiosity was a sign of an active mind and he had to admit, he was curious. A boat. Delores had had a hand in that, no doubt. He had never trusted the woman. It might amuse him to find out what had happened.

The lights on his map shone unwaveringly, each of them representing a trial in some forgotten part of a country somewhere. Not just sleep, of course – that was merely one part of his arsenal in the war he was waging.

Birdsong piped up suddenly. His micro-nap was over. He wondered whether one of his telomeres was fraying slightly because of the missed rest and imagined it, the broken fronds swaying like coral under the sea. A full day and a fixed regime stretched out before him. He would be late for his LED light bathing.

Sentimentality. It would be his downfall. He got up and Sweat Stain backed away before him as if he was a god.

Not yet.

‘Intercept the boat at the mainland. Discreetly.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Chapter 66

It had to be a hallucination.

Thea blinked. She’d already had this one before: a boat, some owls scrabbling amongst golf balls and her mother at the prow.

She blinked again.

‘Who’s that?’ Rory shielded his eyes with one hand.

Thea turned to him. ‘You can see it too?’ And then she grabbed his arm, her blanket slipping from her shoulders. ‘You can see it too!’

‘Umm … yes? And there is a woman waving at us?’

Thea clambered across the boat, the waves lurching as much as her heart because, without a doubt, there standing at the prow of the orange and navy lifeboat, vagina-printed scarf blowing back in the wind, waving her arms as if she was helping land a plane was …

… her mother.

No owls, no golf balls, no mushrooms, no hallucination. Real and in the flesh.

‘Thea!’ she heard her mother yell.

When she had been little, like all small children, she had believed that her mother could fix anything, could make anything better, that she could cry out for her and there she’d appear, ready to reprimand, repair, or rescue. It seemed, even at twenty-seven years of age, that trust held true.

Burning tree, ghost balloons, lab rat in a maze.

A daughter enveloped in a hug by her mother.

Hands had helped her into the boat and now arms held her, her face pressed close to a scarf that smelled of patchouli and herb-infused tea. All those times on the island when she’d thought that this was it, this was the moment that her life ended, on a coastal path, in a lighthouse, or a white corridor, each time she had imagined these arms around her, this smell. Part of her still thought it couldn’t be true, that the force of her imagination had conjured up this boat and all the people on it.