Sacrifice

'Your mother didn't have MS?'

'My mother was perfectly healthy. Until they got their hands on her.'

I reached out for his hand, afraid at how cold it was. 'What the hell are we going to do?'

He glanced round at the door, as though even now someone could be watching us. 'You are going to get back on your boat, just as I told you.'

'You too. Come with me.'

For a second I thought he was going to agree. Then he shook his head. 'If I come with you, those women are going to die. As soon as we raise the alarm Richard will drop them all over the side. He'll claim he was out on an all-night fishing trip, and who's going to prove otherwise?'

'We will. We've seen everything.' I'm not proud to admit it, but I think I was too scared at that moment to really care about Dana and the other two women. All I wanted was Duncan and me off the island.

'Tor, you have no idea what we're dealing with. These people have influence you can't imagine. Even if we're allowed to live, no one will believe us. We need Dana and the others alive.'

He was right, of course. 'What are you going to do?'

'I'm going down to the harbour to get on that boat. Richard is taking it out alone. I can deal with him. I'll wait until we're out at sea and whack him on the back of the head. Then I'll drive the boat back to Uyeasound. With a bit of luck, your friend Helen will be there to meet me.'

'I love you so much,' I said.

Somehow, he managed to smile. Then he pulled me across the room and through a door at the far end. The room beyond lay in shadow. We slipped inside and closed the door behind us. We were in a nursery. Six white-painted, wooden cots stood around the edges of the room. Cartoon characters had been painted on to the white-washed walls, mobiles swayed gently as they hung from the ceiling, soft toys – overstuffed teddy bears and floppy-eared rabbits – stared down at us from shelves. There were changing tables, sterilizing equipment, a baby bath. It was all so creepily, terrifyingly normal.

The cots, unnecessary for the time being, were all stripped bare to their mattresses. As I stared at them, so much fell into place. Since hearing about Tronal, I'd been puzzling how a maternity clinic could exist, given how few babies were supposedly born here each year. Now I knew the officially recorded babies were merely the 'cover' for the island's more sinister activities.

The clinic had been built to facilitate the births of the Trows' own baby sons. The rooms upstairs would house the abducted women – often drugged or restrained – during the whole of their pregnancies. When containment wasn't necessary, when no outsiders were on the island, the women might even be allowed a certain level of freedom: because Tronal was as impenetrable a prison as any I could imagine. How many pregnant women would risk swimming half a mile of rough ocean? Of course, if they knew that shortly after giving birth they'd have weird Nordic symbols hacked into their flesh, that their hearts would be cut from their living bodies, I imagine one or two might just risk it.

The six or so babies born from these women would be adopted by Trow men and their wives, previously discouraged, as Duncan and I had been, from having children of their own. To legalize these babies, their adoptive mother would be registered as their birth mother and would appear as such on their birth certificate. Did that mean these adoptive mothers, the men's wives, were colluding in what was going on? Did Elspeth know the truth about Duncan's birth? Not a question I really wanted to dwell on.

Duncan and I ran across the room towards a door at the far end and stood listening. Nothing. We opened the door and went into a storeroom. More wooden cots had been dismantled and were propped against a wall. Folded buggies leaned against another. Two other doors: one opened on to the corridor, the other led outside. Duncan crossed to the external door and pushed it open. A rush of cold air came in as he leaned out and looked all around. From somewhere in the clinic I could hear voices but none of them seemed close.

But the Trows only made babies in every third year. The babies offered legally for adoption were few and far between. The rest of the time, the facilities on Tronal would sit empty and unused. So the enterprising Trows had come up with yet another use for the clinic: a facility for illegal late abortions. Finding desperate women through a network of hospitals, family-planning centres and abortion clinics around Europe, and dressing up the service as 'counselling and advice', they'd probably found plenty of women happy to pay over the odds for their operations. A few days on the island and these women would resume their normal lives, oblivious to what they'd really left behind on Tronal.

They'd never know that their own flesh and blood was still alive; growing and developing in the clinic's intensive-care unit until well enough to be sold to the highest bidder. It was brilliant. Monstrous, but brilliant.

Duncan came back into the room. 'OK, the dogs are locked up and most of the staff here will be moving the women down to the boat. But you still have to be careful. Go as fast as you can and don't be seen.'

I've never performed a parachute jump, but I imagine the moment of standing at the open plane door, waiting to jump, must feel exactly as I did then. I knew I had to go, leave Duncan and make my way across the island alone, but couldn't quite bring myself to do it that second. Then Duncan pushed me, not remotely gently, out of the clinic and I ran.

Stopping for just a second to get my bearings, I made for the ridge of rock that would shelter me from anyone searching the immediate grounds. I reached it and dropped low, giving myself a second to get my breath back and make sure I hadn't been spotted. Looking back at the clinic, I saw the door had been closed. There was no sign of Duncan. When I had enough courage I set off again, retracing my footsteps. I found the rucksack I'd left earlier and pulled on my waterproofs, then followed the cliff path until I reached the marker stone I'd left on the wall. I climbed over, squeezed through the gap in the barbed wire and ran to the cliff top. I was about to start the scramble down when I stopped. Something was moving on the beach.

It was the cliff birds. They'd scared the hell out of me earlier; they were just doing it again, that's all. I had to get down there. Duncan was going to need help. Whatever it was moved again. I froze. No bird could be that big. I crept down the cliff path. A loose rock went tumbling beneath me and I froze again. Below, where I guessed the boat would be, a light flashed on. A beam of light started to creep around the rocks. I flattened myself against the cliff and kept as still as I could. At one point the torch's beam touched my foot but didn't linger and after a minute or two it was switched off.

Slowly, carefully, I started to climb back up the cliff, praying I would disturb no more loose rocks. I reached the top and paused for breath. My boat had been discovered. They would be looking for me, would search the island until they found me. I might manage to hold them off until dawn, but once daylight came there'd be nowhere to hide. And they had dogs. If they set the dogs loose…

One way or another I was getting off that island; and there was only one other way I could think of. Richard was about to get another passenger. I set off again, running almost due north. Once I reached the track I kept as close to it as I dared for the half-mile or so that took me to the other side of the island. At one point I had to dive for cover when the sound of a diesel engine came roaring up from the harbour. It was a large four-wheel-drive vehicle, similar to the one Dunn drove. It might even be his car. Several men were inside it. They were travelling at considerable speed, given how rough and potholed the road was.

I ran on, getting more and more out of breath. I reached the highest ridge I had to cross and began to stumble down the other side. The water of Skuda Sound was ahead of me and, tantalizingly close, the lights of Uyeasound. The motor launch was still moored to the pier. Its cabin lights were on and, from the bubble of water at its stern, I knew its engines were running.