Its bright beam illuminates the underground room.
'Jesus,' breathes Nelson.
'Sorry Ruth,' says David, again sounding quite normal, the shy helpful neighbour who had looked after her cat and to whom (Oh God!) she had given her mobile phone number.
'David…' Ruth croaks.
'I have to kill you,' explains David, 'now you know about Lucy.'
'Why did you do it?' asks Ruth. She genuinely wants to know the truth, even though she knows it might be the last thing she hears.
'Why?' asks David, surprised. 'For company, of course.'
He moves towards her, holding out the knife. Ruth backs away, wondering what her chances are. They are standing on a raised bank, behind David is the pool she passed earlier. She has no idea how deep it is. Even if she manages to get past him, she can hardly swim across the water in the dark. Behind her are the sand dunes and the sea crashing relentlessly forwards. She is exhausted and overweight; she knows David would catch her easily. She opens her mouth to say something. To beg for mercy?
She doesn't know. But, then, another noise fills the night.
Three echoing calls, harsh and even. It is the sound that she heard earlier, beside the hide. David looks at Ruth, his face is transfixed.
'Did you hear that?' he whispers.
Without waiting for an answer, he turns his back and starts walking away from her, towards the sound. It comes again. Calling, calling across the black marshes. Is it the voice of a dead child? The will o'the wisps? At this moment, Ruth will believe anything. She too starts to move towards the sound.
What happens next is like a dream. Or a nightmare.
Moving as if hypnotised, David walks straight into the pool. He is waist deep but does not even seem to notice.
Ruth sees his yellow jacket moving steadily through the inky water. Then, the clouds move and Ruth sees a figure on the opposite bank. A figure wearing a dark jacket that comes to below its knees. Lucy. There is something in her stance, something poised and purposeful, that is almost terrifying. Suddenly Ruth has no doubt that it is Lucy who is making the strange, unearthly call.
David, though, is beyond thought. He walks on through the water, head up, pulled as if on invisible strings. And then, so suddenly that no-one has time to cry out, a huge white-edged wave comes crashing over the sandbank and into the pool. David loses his balance and disappears under the water. Another wave follows, turning the pool into a cauldron of foamy water. Ruth feels spray on her face and shuts her eyes. When she opens them again, the pool is still and David has vanished.
Now Ruth screams but she knows no-one can hear her.
She knows too that there is nothing anyone can do for David and is surprised at the strength of her impulse to save him. It seems that even the death of a murderer can provoke pity.
Another figure appears on the opposite bank. A tall, thick-set figure. Nelson. He is shouting something but Ruth can't make out the words. She starts to make her way towards him, around the edge of the pool. As she does so, the sky is filled with a sound like the beating of enormous wings. A police helicopter appears overhead, its rotors churning up the black waters. It circles the pool and then heads out to sea. The water is still once more.
On hands and knees, Ruth crawls along the shingle bank on the south side of the pool. It is further than it looks and she is beyond exhausted. The sound of the helicopter fades away and now she can hear human voices and, in the distance, dogs barking.
By the time she has reached the far bank, the police dogs have arrived. Actual bloodhounds, straining at their leashes and uttering low, booming barks that seem to come from another century. Ruth reaches Nelson just as he is looking, with dawning wonder, into the face of the girl next to him.
'Nelson,' says Ruth, 'meet Lucy Downey.'
CHAPTER 31
Ruth is walking along the sand. It is early March and although the wind is cold there is a faint promise of spring in the air. She is barefoot and the clam shells cut into her feet.
She is near the henge circle. The sand, rippling like a frozen sea, stretches far in front of her. She thinks of Ozymandias, 'the lone and level sands stretch far away'.
There is something grand and terrible about the great expanse of sea and sky, something terrifying, yet at the same time exhilarating. We are nothing, Ruth thinks, nothing to this place. Bronze Age man came here and built the henge, Iron Age man left bodies and votive offerings, modern man tries to tame the sea with walls and towers and bridges. Nothing remains. Man dwindles into dust, less than sand; only the sea and sky stay the same. Yet she walks jauntily, with a spring in her step, stepping lightly over mortality.
She is due to meet Nelson, who is going to give her the latest news of Lucy. This is one legacy of that terrible night, three weeks ago. Ruth feels bound to Lucy and knows that this connection will last forever, whether Lucy wants it or not. Ruth may soon fade in Lucy's mind – indeed, she hopes many things will fade from Lucy's mind; one day she will become just the strange, large lady who comes with presents at Christmas and birthdays, bringing with her a faint memory of a dark night, a wild sea and the end of a nightmare. But for Ruth, that moment when she held Lucy in her arms was a turning point. She knew then that she would do anything to protect Lucy. She knew then what it is to be a mother.
Nelson told her about Lucy's reunion with her actual parents. 'We called them, didn't tell them what was up, just asked them to come to the station. It was four in the morning, God knows what they thought. The mother thought we'd found Lucy's body, I could see it in her eyes.
We had a child psychologist standing by; nobody knew what would happen. Would Lucy even recognise her parents? She was very calm, just sat there, huddled in my jacket, as if she was waiting for something. We made her a cup of tea and she screamed. Hadn't expected it to be hot.
Probably hadn't had a hot drink for ten years. She screamed and dropped the drink on the floor, then she cringed away from me, as if she expected me to hit her.
That bastard ill-treated her, I'm sure of it. So I left her with Judy. Then, when I came in with the parents… she made this noise, this little cry, like a baby. Then the mother said, "Lucy?" And Lucy just howled "Mummy!" and flung herself into her arms. Jesus. There wasn't a dry eye in the house. Judy was weeping buckets and Cloughie and I were both sniffing away. But the parents, they hugged her as if they'd never let her go. Then the mother looked at me, over Lucy's head, and said "Thank you." Thank you! Jesus.'
'Will she be alright, do you think?'
'Well, she's obviously seeing an army of psychiatrists but they say she's remarkably resilient. She has to learn to be a teenager, not a little girl. In some ways, they say she's stuck at five years old but, in others, she's amazingly mature. I think she understands a lot more than we give her credit for.'
And Ruth, remembering the way that Lucy had used the bird call (the call, she is sure, of the Long Eared Owl) to lure David to his death, believes him.
They have not found David's body. It must have been washed out to sea and carried by the tide to another shoreline.
Perhaps they will never find it and David's remains will one day join the Neolithic bones and relics that lie beneath this shallow sea.
They did find Erik though. The great shaman, who knew the marshes like the back of his hand, had drowned in a marshy pool just a few hundred metres from Ruth's cottage.
Ruth went to Norway for Erik's funeral. Despite everything, she found that she still had some love left for him and for Magda. Erik had always said that he wanted a Viking's funeral. Ruth remembers him, by the camp fire in full storyteller mode: 'The ship, its sails full in the evening light. The dead man, his sword at his side and his shield on his breast. The flame, that burst of purifying fire that will send him to Valhalla to sit with Odin and Thor until the world is renewed…' So they had taken his ashes and put them in a wooden boat built specially by Lars, Magda's lover. They had set fire to the boat and sent it sailing out onto the lake, where it burnt all through the night and was still smouldering in the morning.