Craig realized with a lazy kind of a horror that he’d seen it then, at the time. But his mind was a closed thing. Closed perhaps for sanity, or maybe closed because until now he’d never wanted to open that door. He’d seen something once when he was a boy, too. A tiny thing. A vision of something mundane happening to his mother. Something small and insignificant that was going to happen later. And when it did happen just like he’d seen, he’d been frightened and slammed that door shut again. Just like he had when the wind blew Sylvia’s shells away on that beach in Scotland.

It was a door he kept closed because he didn’t believe. A door that was kept firmly shut by being a policeman, a man who lives and breathes only facts. And now, with that door wide open he was sweating at what he was seeing behind the paper-thin skin of that woman. No, not that woman. That thing. That fucking thing.

He was breathing rhythmically, a pulse beating in his forehead, as he looked again into that swirling blackness behind the pretend face. The one that had been so close to Daniel. And then his eyes focused again. The rectangle of light on the floor was being broken by a dark shape. There was someone standing in the doorway.

He looked up very slowly, eyes narrowing in the dark to focus on the silhouette that was now very still in the frame of the open door. Craig McGee’s breath left his lungs. He found air again and spoke without thinking.

‘Sylvia?’

The figure didn’t move. Craig took his palms from the ice-box and let his arms fall down at his sides as he turned to face what could not possibly be in the lobby. The figure stepped forward a pace.

‘Craig? Darling?’

He was sweating heavily now, the salt stinging his eyes. He tried to swallow and failed. The figure moved again, a step closer, coming into the room.

‘Craig. Where have you been, darling? I wanted you to see the baby.’

That sing-song voice. Always on the edge of laughter. Yes. so beautiful, Sylvia’s voice.

He was unable to speak, but somewhere the lever that turned on the policeman was being pulled by an invisible hand. His eyes tore themselves away from this back-lit shadow and flicked to the side of the wall by the ice-box where the light switch was.

‘Darling. What’s wrong with you? Look at the baby, sweetheart. He has your eyes.’

Slowly Craig shifted a pace to his right and raised his hand to the wall. It met plaster and he ran it back and forward over the smooth surface searching for that square of plastic that would light up this mystery.

‘He’s been so good, darling. Not a sound while you’ve been gone. Look at the sweet thing.’