No chance of throwing the stuff overboard. She looked back inside. She would dispose of it in Iceland. She would pack everything in her rucksack and take it off the ship. If First Officer Patrick Duane should come back, she would be ready for him and her suite would be clean.

She pushed her hair back and shuffled inside. Perhaps she should get off in Iceland, melt into the Reykjavík crowds and start anew in a different country. But then this trip would have been a total and utter waste of time and money, and she would lose the biggest prize of all.

Tommy and everything he owned.

With her foot she slid the door closed, and sank to the floor with her back to the glass.

Cornered.

The net was closing in on her, and she was trapped.

Chapter 19

Before

The days went on, though not like before.

Carl became an almost permanent fixture in the horrid little house that was my home.

I had thought I was protecting myself, my mother and my territory when I brandished that knife at him. I had thought I was taking back control when I locked my mother in her room and forced the withdrawal on her.

Instead, I’d simply managed to lose the battle.

Winter had arrived, and with it the first real snowstorm that I could remember since I was a child. Roads were cut off, just like our heating, and I started to arrive at school earlier each day just to get some warmth into my bones.

I was a week off my fifteenth birthday when I was called out of science class and summoned to the headmaster’s office. Inside was Miss Hayle, my English teacher, and the head, Mr Clayton.

‘Sit down,’ said Miss Hayle, and I did as she asked.

I thought back to the medical room that day when they had taken Rebecca Lavery from her home and given her a wonderful new life. She had never come back to our school, and I’d thought about her often since seeing her that night I’d gone out to buy my mother’s heroin. Wherever she was, it was not in the same place as me. I hated her and envied her in equal measure.

But now I felt a tremor of anticipation. Had my teachers realised what was happening in my home? Was it my turn to be saved?

Miss Hayle was talking now, but it was clear from her smile and the enthusiastic nodding along of Mr Clayton that they were not there to save me like they’d saved Rebecca.

I barely listened; focused instead on the old-fashioned radiator that kicked out more heat in this one room than I had in my entire house.

‘So,’ Miss Hayle prompted me, ‘what do you think?’

I stared dumbly at them.