I shut my eyes against the glare one more time, and feel someone at my side. I open my eyes, still in the blaze of light from the lamp, and even before I can shout, ‘No!’ I hear the shot. Deafening in the confines of the light room. I see Billy step back, the glass behind him red with his blood, the light fired from the lamp off into the night turning momentarily pink.
I am knocked roughly aside as Jon steps over Billy’s body, which has slumped into a sitting position against the wall, head tilted forwards, eyes closed. He whips away the cover from Karen’s head and I see her blinking frantically in the sudden, blinding blaze of light. Her mouth is taped over and, as her pupils contract, I see her terror.
I want to throw myself at Jon, but he holds her upper arm and pushes his gun against her temple.
‘This was never going to work.’ He has, it seems, lost all patience. ‘I want the data. Now!’ His voice reverberates around the light room almost as loudly as his gunshot of moments earlier.
I nod. ‘It’s downstairs.’
I am strangely calm as I kneel on the floor with the screwdriver that I have recovered from its hiding place in the kitchen. Above me, set into the wall, are the coat hooks where the men who tended this lighthouse once hung their waterproofs. Their boots would have stood where I now kneel. One of them, in contravention of all the rules, had left his coat hanging here on the night that Ducat, Marshall and McArthur disappeared in a storm just like this one.
One by one, I remove the screws that hold the wood panelling in place below the hooks, and start lifting away the panels. Jon stands over me with his gun, Sally just a few paces behind us in the corridor, holding Karen firmly by the shoulders.
Jon says, ‘How the hell did you ever get keys for this place?’ I chuckle, though there is really nothing to laugh about. It is the irony, I suppose. ‘The first summer I was here, I landed one day to find that the Lighthouse Board had sent in decorators to paint the place. Everything was opened up. The guys were okay with me taking a look around and we got chatting. The forecast was good, and they expected to be here for a few days. So I spun them the story about writing a book and said I would probably be back tomorrow. And I was. Only this time with a pack of Blu-tack. When they were having their lunch, I took the keys from the inner and outer doors and made impressions. Dead simple. Had keys cut, and access to the place whenever I wanted thereafter.’
The final panel falls away in my hands, and I reach in to retrieve a black plastic bag. I hand it up to Jon, and he peels back the plastic to look inside. As I stand up, I lift one of the wooden panels. I know that this is the one chance I will get, while he is distracted, and I swing the panel at his head as hard as I can.
The force with which it hits him sends a judder back up my arms to my shoulders, and I actually hear it snap. He falls to his knees, dropping the hard drive, and his gun skids away across the floor.
Sally is so startled, she barely has time to move before I punch her hard in the face. I feel teeth breaking beneath the force of my knuckles, behind lips I once kissed with tenderness and lust. Blood bubbles at her mouth.
I grab Karen by the arm and hustle her fast down the corridor, kicking open the door and dragging her out into the night. The storm hits us with a force that assails all the senses. The wind is deafening, driving stinging rain horizontally into our faces. The cold wraps icy fingers around us, instantly numbing.
Beyond the protection of the walls, it is worse, and I find it nearly impossible to keep my feet as I pull my daughter off into the dark. Only the relentless turning of the lamp in the light room above us provides any illumination.
We turn right, and I know that almost immediately the island drops away into a chasm that must be two or three hundred feet deep. I can hear the ocean rushing into it. Snarling, snapping at the rocks below and sending an amplified roar almost straight up into the air.
I guide Karen away from it, half-dragging her, until we reach a small cluster of rocks and I push her flat into the ground behind them. I tear away the tape that binds her wrists, then roll her on to her back to peel away the strip of it over her mouth. She gasps, almost choking, and I feel her body next to mine, racked by sobs, as she throws her arms around me and holds me as if she might never let go. Her lips press to my cheeks, and I feel the explosion of her breath on my face as she cries, ‘Daddy!’ One simple word that very nearly breaks my heart.
‘Baby. Baby, it’s okay. We’re going to be okay.’ I squeeze her so hard, I’m afraid I might break her.
We are, both of us, soaked through, the sodden ground beneath us stealing away the last of our body warmth. The rain is as relentless as the wind, and it feels as if it is flaying the skin from our faces.
I untangle myself from Karen and lift my head up over the rocks to look back towards the lighthouse. It is almost spectral in the strange reflected light of the beam that sweeps across the island and off out into the night. And I am just in time to see Jon and Sally run out from the protection of the outer wall. He has a torch, but its light is all but snuffed out by the blackness of the night and the ferocity of the storm. He turns it in an arc around them, searching, I imagine, for some sign of us. But he must know it is pointless. He grabs Sally’s hand and they run down the concrete path, in the tracks of trams long gone, and are swallowed by the dark. I am aware, then, of Karen’s face close to mine, watching, too.
‘You can’t just let them go,’ she says.
‘Why not?’
‘Because they’ve got the data.’
I turn, and for the first time in a long time find myself able to smile. ‘And I’ve got you. And that’s all that matters.’ I gaze off into the dark. ‘Anyway, there’s no way they will get off the island in this.’
Karen looks at me very directly, and I see myself so clearly in her blue eyes. ‘You can bet they’ll try, though.’
I struggle to my feet. ‘You wait here.’
But she grabs my hand and pulls herself up. ‘I’m not letting go of you again. Ever.’
I nod. And I don’t want to let go of her either. ‘Come on, then.’
We run, crouching into the wind, across the grass, and join the concrete path again just above Clapham Junction. We turn to our left, water flowing in spate across the concrete beneath our feet, and make our way down to the concrete platform, where the crane would have dropped its loads in days gone by. From there, a short flight of steps leads down to the concrete block where the crane itself was mounted, and we find ourselves looking on to the steps far below. I pull Karen to her knees, and we lie on the concrete, offering less resistance to the wind, easing ourselves closer to the edge of the platform, so that we are looking over it into the maelstrom beneath us.
The sea is like some wild animal, possessed, and thrashing itself in a fury against the rocks. Out in the bay it is just possible to see the two anchored boats being tossed around in waves that break across them in bursts of almost luminescent spume, threatening to engulf them completely. And I know that those anchors will not hold for long.
Two hundred feet below us, Jon and Sally try to reach the inflatables. But the sea has beaten them to it. Both tenders, still tethered to the ring, are being thrown about and smashed against the rocks. The Harrisons retreat ten or fifteen feet back up the steps, and I hear a roar so human that it sends a chill through my very soul.