Priest hesitated, making sure that there were no more surprises, but the display had switched itself off. He stepped back to examine the safe.

‘None of them. Karl didn’t want anyone to intervene. That was the point. My guess is that both buttons blow the charges. The choice was between intervention and nature, not up or down.’

Rowlinson got up and brushed himself down. ‘You could have fucking said that earlier.’

‘Mm,’ Priest mumbled, distracted. ‘Yes, of course, sorry old man.’

Rowlinson joined him, out of breath, his face flushed. ‘I thought we were actually going to die.’

Priest examined the dial. ‘Yes, until we had about a second left, I thought so too.’

The safe door clicked automatically and the door moved. Priest hauled it open the rest of the way and bent over to peer inside. He looked away, wiped his eyes and turned back but the image was the same. Bastard!

‘It’s empty,’ he announced to Rowlinson, standing up.

The detective’s lip quivered but he didn’t say anything. Just pushed Priest out of the way and looked for himself, then turned to roar at the sea.

‘What the fuck? We just risked our lives to save some stale air!’

‘This was just a distraction,’ Priest reasoned. ‘Karl has something else in mind.’

‘What? What does he want?’

Priest stood with his back to the safe looking inland. There was a track running through the marshes from the car park below them, stretching out to where the terrain dipped. In the distance, he could just make out a cluster of small houses, which he assumed was Tome. Street lights were on, pinprick spots of light at irregular intervals and the church spire rising above them at the far end of the miniature village. Devil’s Point had been a decoy; Karl had known that they would find it irresistible. Priest cursed his stupidity. He had been royally outwitted, and the mistake might prove fatal.

‘Priest?’

‘He wants Elinor. He wants her to be united with her half-brother.’

‘Why would he want that?’

‘It’s the only way he knows how to restore the balance.’

Rowlinson had calmed down, or at least he had caught his breath. He stood beside Priest looking out into the hazy expanse below them, and to Tome. Somewhere beyond that, Alexia and Dominique’s house sat on a hillside, rotting.

A long way for a little girl to run all those years ago.

Something that had puzzled Priest since he had read the diary in Rowlinson’s car had now been resolved though. There was a passage about Elinor looking out of a horizontal window slit to where she could just see the top of the church spire against the skyline on clear days. It gave her comfort and she thought of the church as somewhere where there might be sanctuary. But when she had escaped, she hadn’t gone there, but to Devil’s Point.