The Silenced

by Stephen Lloyd Jones

Genres: Suspense

Synopsis

Mallory and Obadiah were strangers, brought together for one purpose. To give new light to a terrifying world.

But now they are on the run . . . and evil intends to find them.

'The Silenced hits the ground running and never lets up . . . An electrifying supernatural chiller . . . A gripping page-turner' Guardian

The Silenced is a fast-paced thriller that will have you gripped and keep you reading throughout the night. Terrifying and electrifying in equal measure, Stephen Lloyd Jones's new novel is perfect for fans of Stephen King, Dean Koontz and Sarah Lotz.
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Mallory Grace just killed a man. To survive the next hour, she'll have to kill again. To survive the night, she'll need a miracle.

Obadiah Macintosh doesn't seem like a miracle. He is a recluse who works alone at an animal sanctuary, and he has a secret. When the dogs in his care alert him to intruders hidden by the darkness, he knows they are coming for him.

Mallory and Obadiah were strangers, brought together for one purpose. To give new light to a terrifying world.

But now they are on the run, and evil intends to find them.

THE SILENCED is fast-paced, dark and electrifying - the war between good and evil is brewing . . .

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'Original, richly imagined and powerfully told' Guardian on The String Diaries

'Outstanding stuff . . . the pace grabs hold right from the very start and doesn't let go . . . A lean, taut thriller' James Brogden on The Silenced

'So gripping you'll want to read late into the night; so terrifying you shouldn't' Simon Mayo on The String Diaries

'Grim, gory and gripping . . . From urban thriller to rural manhunt, The Silenced is a well-paced page turner, both bloody and bloody good' geekchocolate.co.uk

Release date: February 22, 2018

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 416

Sample

ONE

Mallory wouldn’t return to the bathroom because that’s where the dead man was, but she did need to wash off his blood – it clung to her skin like opera gloves worn to the elbow. She could smell it, rich and thick; in the surrounding darkness it dripped to the hallway floorboards with a steady pt-pt-pt in time with her heart.

She wanted to turn on a light. Daren’t. The dead man wouldn’t have done that, and he might have an accomplice outside. Watching the house.

If she couldn’t use the bathroom to clean herself up, that left either the master bedroom’s en suite or the ground-floor kitchen. From the landing, the staircase was a black void that promised to yield more horror; she would not descend into it so wholly unprepared.

Raising her hands – feeling the dead man’s blood run from her forearms – Mallory tiptoed along the hall. Her every move left evidence; an incriminating trail for those who wished to exploit it. Between her bare toes the blood was already congealing.

Outside the bedroom, she leaned against the doorframe and felt herself teeter on the edge of consciousness. The darkness around her head throbbed, populated by the cruellest demons her imagination could conjure.

Was most of this blood her own? Could the dead man have inflicted more damage than she’d first realised? Perhaps the adrenalin fizzing through her arteries smothered the pain of mortal injuries.

Now, another thought surfaced: had she really killed him back there? Perhaps she was mistaken about that too. Perhaps he’d climbed up from the bathroom floor and was silently stalking her across the landing while she lingered here, ignorant of the danger.

Mallory turned, expecting the shadows to produce a monster. A lick of warm air touched her skin and she clenched her teeth, certain, now, that her assailant stood mere inches away. Her heart was a bird beating broken wings against her ribs. So loud in this silence. So fragile.

She tensed in the doorway, holding herself erect, terrified that by moving she would give away her position and feel the wet kiss of a blade, or the bone-shattering impact of a hammer.

Another press of air lifted fronds of hair from her face. Abruptly, she recalled the window she had found at the back of the house, open to the night.

Of course. That was the source of the breeze. The man in the bathroom was dead. No question.

Slipping into her bedroom, Mallory saw a narrow avenue of moonlight running across the floor. When she padded through it to the bed, someone stepped out of the wall in front of her, then vanished.

A scream lodged like a beetle in her throat. Yet when she plunged backwards through the ribbon of light, she discovered that the intruder was simply her own reflection, cast from the cheval mirror beside the dressing table. The moon’s lambent shine had bleached her of all colour. Her forearms glistened, oily black. The front of her nightdress was slick. Somewhere, in the ghostly face hovering above the neckline, she recognised herself. Not the eyes, though. They appeared irredeemably lost. Two white spheres, swollen with awful knowledge:

I killed a man.

Yes. And if she were to survive this, she would have to kill again.

Her gown lay on the bed. She picked it up, using it as a towel to scrub the dead man from her skin. His blood was gummier now, like curdled egg yolks clinging to the fine hairs of her forearms. Once she’d taken off the worst of it, she stepped towards the en suite.

Hesitated.

There were no windows in there. No hope of escape should a second intruder arrive to finish the work of the first. She could lock the door, but it would last seconds against a determined assault.

Inside, Mallory heard the echoing drip of water.

Moving to the sink, she felt for the taps and spun them. Water spattered, then gushed. She scooped up cold handfuls, rinsed her arms clean. Beneath her feet, the tiles grew slippery.

Stripping off her blood-sodden nightdress, Mallory tossed it into the shower. She placed a hand on her belly and slid her fingers across it, checking for lacerations, bruising or swelling. She touched her chest, her throat, her face.

Unmarked.

Working fast in the darkness, she washed the blood from her torso and feet. The sound of water plinking onto the tiles was a score of miniature clocks, all slowing. Time: running down, running out. Abandoning the sink, Mallory retreated to the bedroom. There, in a slim wedge of moonlight, she paused and listened.

Again, that soft breeze feathered her skin, teasing it into goosebumps. It carried upon it myriad competing scents. From outside, the subtle astringency of London’s streets, pollen-rich and laden with summer humidity. Far closer, the abattoir tang of the dead man, overlaid with her own sour sweat.

Against the far wall stood a chest of drawers. Mallory went to it. She dressed quickly – jeans, T-shirt, hoodie – and slipped her feet into Nike running shoes.

The clothes helped. Made her feel more in control.

From the dresser she retrieved her mobile phone and checked it. No missed calls or texts. No emails waiting in her inbox.

No warnings, then. No last-minute appeals for her to flee. These days, though, what allies did she have left to help her? Except Sal, of course. But perhaps Sal was already dead.

The phone had under half its battery available. How lax, in hindsight, she had grown. How careless. But spend too long in any one place and watchfulness would deteriorate; over time, the hard edges of paranoia grew as smooth as tide-tumbled stones.

From the dresser’s drawer she grabbed a clutch of passports, driving licences and credit cards, and filled her pockets.

Outside, the night wind blew, knocking the branches of an ash tree against the window. The sound was like the clatter of knucklebones across a tombstone, and it drew a shiver from Mallory that she struggled to control.

I killed a man.

From here, there was no path back to the way things had been. On the first floor of this Clapham townhouse, her world had irrevocably changed.

There remained the slim possibility that tonight’s attack had been random, that the man in her bathroom had been an opportunist – a burglar, or a rapist. But even if that were true it still meant that this house, in which she’d found sanctuary these last few years, was her home no longer.

No point fooling herself. In her gut, she knew that he had been Vasi. Knew, too, that despite her lapses, she’d been careful not to draw attention during her time in London. She was a ghost, here; a shadow. Which left only a single explanation for her unmasking, this one far too shocking to contemplate.

Beside the bed stood a wooden cabinet. Mallory pulled open the top drawer, rummaging through layers of folded underwear until her fingers touched another credit card-sized ID. She pulled it out, angled it towards the window. Saw the rainbow glint of a hologram. Of all the IDs she possessed, this was the only one not to feature her image.

The moonlight was insufficient to illuminate the boy’s face, but she felt his eyes on her even so. Felt, too, a cold serpent of nausea uncoil in her gut. She wanted to drop the card back into the cabinet and slam the door shut on it, but in her fingers it seemed to radiate a power all of its own; before she quite knew what she was doing, she slid it into the back pocket of her jeans.

Immediately, her nausea cleared. Her breathing accelerated. Adrenalin smothered uncertainty.

From under the bed, Mallory dragged out a rucksack. Packed inside was a change of clothes, a sleeping bag and bivvy, four days’ worth of rations, batteries, medical supplies and other equipment she might need. Everything else she had acquired during her twenty-four years – a few items of furniture, a small collection of art and curios – would be lost.

As Mallory slid her arms into the rucksack’s straps, she thought she heard something, deeper inside the house. She stopped, breath trapped in her lungs.

Listened.

According to the masonry stone set above the front entrance, the building dated from 1844. On summer nights like this, as the day’s heat dissipated into a cloudless sky, it grumbled around its foundations like an embittered old man. Floorboards creaked; pipework rattled and thumped; sash windows moaned in their frames.

Mallory had not heard anything like that, and yet she could not recall exactly what she had heard. Perhaps her subconscious had begun to weave menace from the tattered threads of her composure.

She stepped into the hallway, one hand raised before her. Here, the darkness was absolute. Her heart thumped so fiercely that she felt its echoes in her throat, her wrists. Treading softly on the old floorboards, Mallory edged along the hall. On her right – although she couldn’t see it – ran the balustrade overlooking the stairs. She reached for the handrail and used it to guide her, fearing, as she progressed, that she would touch the hand of a second intruder approaching from the opposite direction. The thought made her skin prickle.

Silent, she walked past the guest bedroom. When her knuckles knocked against the newel cap at the corner of the landing, she halted.

To her right, three stairs descended to a quarter-landing. From there, the main flight led down to the unlit ground floor. Directly ahead, invisible in the darkness, a single step dropped into the passage that served the first-floor bathroom and the box room above the kitchen. The smell of blood was stronger here, so heavy that it clung to the back of her throat like a spoor.

Mallory tilted her head. Interrogated the darkness.

If she turned right, taking the main stairs, she could be outside within a minute, but would forego the emergency cash she kept hidden in the box room. Although she’d retrieved her credit cards, if her suspicions about this attack proved correct she would need all the money she could get. That slim fold of banknotes might mark the difference between evasion and capture; life and death.

But the box room also contained the forced-open window through which the dead man had entered.

Don’t think about that.

Do this last thing. Then get out.

Nudging forwards, feeling with her foot for the edge of the step, Mallory descended into the passage. She kept close to the wall, minimising the chance of a loose tread betraying her position.

Night air pressed against her cheeks. Did she detect another scent on it now? One that hadn’t been there before?

She wanted to close her eyes. Didn’t. Extended her right arm instead. Gently she swabbed it left and right, hoping to give herself the earliest possible warning should someone emerge in front of her.

Behind, from the direction of the master bedroom, came a sound like an expelled breath. Mallory jerked around, biting back a cry. When she heard it a second time, she recognised it for what it was: the bedroom door whispering gently across the carpet.

Wind. Nothing more.

She turned back to the passageway. Another two paces would put the mouth of the upper stairs at her back. The prospect filled her stomach with acid, but an assailant ascending from the ground floor would be at a disadvantage, however fleeting. She could use the passage as cover should she need it; she knew the layout of this house better than anyone.

Another step. Now, the darkness surrendered to a soup of charcoal-greys. On her right the bathroom doorway emerged, a hard rectangle of black.

Mallory had vowed not to venture inside again, and yet to leave the bathroom unexplored while she continued to the back of the house would ignore all of Sal’s advice.

The door hung open in mocking invitation. Through it rolled the manifold smells of death: not just blood and meat but urine too; the dead man, despite his passing, continued to violate her home.

Worse, however hard Mallory peered into the darkness, she could not see him lying there. The thought from earlier returned: had she really killed him? She could smell him readily enough, could recall the thickening gush of his blood. He had spouted like a slaughterhouse calf, and yet the human body was as resilient as the spirit; it accepted death reluctantly. If she intended to retrieve her cache of money from the box room, she could not leave the question of his fate unanswered.

From here, the merest illumination would betray her position. To do this, she would have to work blind.

Jaw set, Mallory pushed against the bathroom door. It squealed as it opened fully, tearing the silence. She cringed, readying herself for movement. When no attack came, she allowed the breath to trickle from her lungs and took another.

Three-quarters of the way through its arc, the bathroom door bumped against something solid.

She listened.

Took a tentative step forwards.

The air in here was still. She could no longer hear the knucklebone tap of the ash tree’s branches, the thump of Victorian pipework or the pop of attic timbers.

Was she alone in the bathroom? No. She couldn’t be. The door had bumped up against an obstacle that could only have been the dead man’s legs.

Straining her ears, Mallory lowered herself into a crouch. A corpse was rarely entirely silent, especially one so recently dead; pockets of air escaped from settling lungs; small muscles – for a while, at least – spasmed and twitched; the stomach produced gas.

Around her, sepulchre-like quiet.

Slowly, excruciatingly, Mallory reached out. She clenched her teeth, determined not to scream if her hand met empty air, determined not to scream if it didn’t. The chance that the man had survived her kard’s upward thrust was minimal – there had been so much blood – but she’d heard of stranger things. The possibility existed, however remote.

Her fingers touched fabric. Beneath it, she felt the firm curve of a calf, horribly warm. Trying not to gag, Mallory walked her fingers up the dead man’s leg. When she reached his waist she encountered the stickiness of congealing blood. Maintaining her crouch, she shuffled closer. The floor was tacky beneath her feet. Her trainers smacked like chewed gum when she lifted them. She felt for his hand and found it.

It was warm and dry, so brutishly large that it could have completely enveloped her own. The fingers opened like the lobes of a carnivorous plant when she touched them. They were blunt-tipped, calloused, the nails bitten and jagged. She searched for the pulse-point at his wrist and lingered there, feeling for signs of life.

No insectile tick of pumped blood.

His arteries were silent.

Mallory suppressed a sob. This man – this Vasi assassin – had sought her out, had broken into her home with the intention of killing her. She felt no remorse for what she had done, but in taking his life she had lost something intangible, had created a void inside herself – a black burrow of emptiness – and for that she felt the profoundest sorrow, because if circumstances forced her to kill again, that emptiness would doubtless expand; over time, it would extinguish her as reliably as a bullet or blade.

The window blind was down, but a little moonlight leaked through the slats, enough to see the dull glimmer of the kard’s ivory handle. It stood up straight like a grave marker, immutable in the shadows.

I killed a man.

The air inside the bathroom had spoiled; Mallory’s throat burned with the ammonia stench of urine. She pivoted on her feet, rubber soles crackling in coagulated blood. Careful to prevent the rucksack overbalancing her, she rose from the floor and stepped back into the passage.

Here, the night breeze still flowed. A few streets away she heard the rumble of London traffic; beyond it, the faint clatter of a train. So strange to think that out there life continued as normal.

In one of the neighbouring gardens, a fox screamed.

Fists clenched, Mallory crept along the passage. The box room had already spawned one horror this evening. No reason to believe it couldn’t spawn more. A second intruder would be warier, more attuned to danger, more prepared for sudden violence. She should have retrieved her kard when she had the chance, but the thought of wrenching it from the dead man’s throat had made her light-headed with revulsion. She could venture downstairs, arm herself with one of the weapons she kept there, return for the money. But instinct told her that right now speed was more important than caution.

Outside, the fox screamed again. From some distance away came an answering cry.

Padding along the passage, Mallory reached the box room. Moonlight, falling through the open sash window, had painted it silver. Either side of the sill, the floor-length curtains billowed like the sails of a schooner.

Cupboard in one corner; shelving unit along the far wall; a few woven seagrass baskets on the floor. Nowhere for an intruder to hide – which meant that unless someone had crept up the main staircase behind her, the building’s first floor was clear.

Ducking down, careful to conceal herself from anyone watching outside, Mallory went to the shelves by the far wall. Finding a stack of old board games, she prised the lid off one and removed the board. Beneath, among the cards and counters, lay a fold of banknotes secured with a metal clip. As she shoved it into a pocket she heard something behind her, and wheeled around so fast that her rucksack thumped the shelf, knocking the board games to the floor in a shower of chits and bits. When a cardboard lid bounced off her leg, she nearly yelled.

No one leapt at her. No one plunged a blade into her belly or slashed at her throat. She wondered if the sound had come from the house itself. Perhaps there had been no sound at all.

Mallory moved to the door, and from there to the passage. Plum darkness greeted her. Steadily, she edged into it. She passed the bathroom without slowing, her stomach flopping at the rich odours wafting out.

On her left, the staircase beckoned like an open coffin. After a moment’s hesitation she began to descend. It was cooler here; the air held a mausoleum chill.

Reaching the bottom of the flight, Mallory stepped into the ground-floor hall. The parquet floor near the front entrance glowed amber: illumination from streetlamps shining through the fanlight. When the wind pressed the branches of the ash tree outside, the light flickered and moved as if it transmitted images from a twirling zoetrope.

Opposite her stood the living-room entrance. Turning right would take her to the rear of the house, towards the kitchen and the study. Of those two rooms she chose the latter, padding across the hall and slipping inside. Earlier, she’d drawn the floor-length curtains. Like all the drapes in the house, they were lined with blackout material. When she shut the door behind her, total darkness returned. Here, for the first time, she dared to use a little light. Retrieving her smartphone, she activated its torch and shone the beam around the room.

Heavy oak furniture. Leather-upholstered chairs. No sign of disturbance.

Opposite stood a Regency-period display case with leaded glass panels. Mallory went to it and opened the doors. From its rows of books she selected just two, the first handwritten by her great-grandfather, the second an out-of-print work by a Balliol College scholar. From a desk drawer she took a spring-loaded stiletto.

Now, the decision. Did she leave the house from the back or the front? The dead man had entered through the box room above the kitchen. If an accomplice was watching outside, where was the most likely place he would station himself? Towards the rear, where he could monitor the initial breach? Or at the front, where he could cut off any escape attempt?

Over the last few years, Mallory had allowed the back garden to grow wild. In the far wall, a padlocked cast-iron gate opened into an unlit alley. It offered her the best route off the property undetected, but if she was intercepted there, the outcome would be quick, brutal and likely without a single witness.

The building’s front entrance, by contrast, looked onto a well-lit street regularly populated – even at this time of night – with dog-walkers and those returning from late appointments in the city. Anyone monitoring the house would have to do so from one of the vehicles parked nose-to-tail along the pavement. If Mallory was fast enough, she might be able to escape before her assailant managed to get out of his car. She was weighed down with a rucksack, but she knew these streets and she trusted her speed.

In the end, with both options so tightly balanced, she made her decision based on the location of her Nissan. She never parked it in the street outside her home – one of the lessons from Sal she hadn’t ignored. Right now the car was waiting in Montgomery Row, a sycamore-lined avenue just around the corner.

Mallory checked her pockets: car keys; IDs; credit cards; money. Reflexively she tightened the straps of her pack. Looked around the room one last time.

Over the fireplace hung a painting of the Library of Celsus at Ephesus in western Turkey. Sal had given it to her at their parting, and it pained her to surrender it. Likewise, the long-necked bağlama in the corner that she’d never quite learned to play. There were other instruments, too: a Turkish cura mey, beautifully carved; a hide-covered davul; even a twenty-six-string qanun, with which she’d had a little more success.

None of these items she would see again. Nor this magnificent old house, in which she’d lived, for a while, in safety and obscurity. Nobody here knew her. Nobody bothered her. Her name appeared on none of the mail that was delivered. Nor on the building’s deeds. Once she left, ownership would revert to those who had endowed it; her mark on the place would disappear.

Time to go.

Clutching the stiletto, its blade still retracted, Mallory switched off the phone’s torch. Then she inched open the study door and stepped into the hall.

With a glance towards the kitchen – not that she could make out anything in the inkwell of darkness back there – she padded to the front entrance.

The door was solid oak, seven feet in height. A brass letter box offered her the option of scouting her route, but opening it would alert anyone watching outside. It might make the difference between a successful escape and a fatal interception.

Was there anything she had forgotten? The Nissan’s keys were in her right-hand pocket. She had the two books from the study.

That was it.

Reaching for the deadbolt, she carefully drew it back.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

Somewhere, a few streets away, a car alarm began to wail. Moments later, a dog started barking.

Mallory counted. One. Two. Three.

Snapping up the latch, she swung the door wide. Beyond it, concrete steps descended to a narrow courtyard enclosed by railings. Blocking her path to the street stood a man wearing a black motorcycle helmet, leather jacket and boots.

His visor was down, masking his features. Such was the menace that rolled off him that he seemed to Mallory not a man at all, but a monster woven from the darkest threads of the night.

Biting back a cry, she backtracked into the hall, grabbed the front door and slammed it. Before it could close fully, the stranger charged from the other side.

The door rebounded, striking Mallory in the chest. Her trainers squealed as she tried to recover her balance, but her feet couldn’t move fast enough to compensate. In sickening slow-motion she toppled backwards, and as the parquet floor rose up to meet her the door crashed all the way open, its latch gouging a fat chunk of plaster from the wall.

Silhouetted in the doorway, the black-clad rider stood almost the height of the transom. He strode forwards, buckled boots ringing on the hallway floor. Without a word he closed the door behind him, sealing the two of them inside.

TWO

Obadiah Macintosh stood outside the back door of the West Penwith Animal Sanctuary, listening to the wind as he smoked a hand-rolled cigarette laced with crumbled buds of purple kush.

On nights such as this, a few miles north of Sennen Cove near the tip of Land’s End, it was easy to imagine that he was the last human on earth. Above, the sky was cloudless: so vast and black that it commanded the eye. This deep into Cornwall’s most sparsely populated peninsula, no glow rose up from the farmland further east. No light was cast from solitary vehicles travelling the night, or from what scattered buildings existed. Nothing sought to compete with that celestial tapestry twinkling overhead. The Milky Way was a smoky mist, feathering the heavens all the way from Perseus to Scorpius.

Minutes earlier, standing beside the exercise yard’s perimeter fence, Obe had watched a waxen dish of moon set over the Atlantic. Inside the sanctuary, the dogs had fallen temporarily silent. From their kennels they had no direct view of the ocean, but they seemed to sense the change regardless. While countless myths had sprung up about the moon’s effect on animal behaviour, Obe knew that among the hearsay lay truths that no one fully grasped. While he could not read the minds of the animals in his care, he remained convinced that out here, on this lonely stretch of peninsula, they seemed particularly attuned to the moon’s changing state.

The West Penwith sanctuary occupied the site of a former dairy farm that had long ago fallen into disuse. Of the original house, only three stone walls and a fireplace remained. These days its surrounding pastures served as grazing land for the charity’s equine residents – six Dartmoor Hill ponies and a dapple-grey Belgian Warmblood. The centre itself had been built on a patch of flattened land where the old feed sheds had stood. Initially a collection of prefabricated huts, subsequent funding from a national body had enabled the installation of a more permanent timber-built structure. It would win no awards for architecture, but the animals it housed were cared for no less passionately as a result.

Founded by Lynette Burgess, a retired Penzance hotelier, WPAS had been running for seven years, staffed almost exclusively by volunteers. As Lynette’s only paid employee, Obe worked the night shift alone. He did not abhor the company of others – in fact he often craved it – but unless he was stoned or otherwise intoxicated, prolonged exposure to strangers, or even close associates, gave him headaches that only long periods of isolation could cure. Lynette had seemed to understand his condition without a word needing to be said. In repayment of her trust, he worked hard, rarely took holidays, and looked after the animals as best he could. Right now, it was time he checked on them.

As well as the horses overnighting in the stables, currently the centre was home to eighteen dogs, sixteen cats, three Nigerian dwarf goats, two Argenté de Champagne rabbits and a particularly vociferous ccara llama. Only one of those creatures had not been rescued from cruelty or abandonment – Lynette had purchased the llama, named Carlos Santiago, on a whim two years earlier. To everyone’s surprise he’d turned out to be an excellent night watchman, within a few days of arriving appointing himself guardian of the Nigerian dwarf goats. Twice so far he had foiled the predations of a local fox, raising the alarm with a cry like a badly oiled hinge.

Taking a last drag, venting smoke into the night air, Obe stubbed out the roll-up and ducked back into the office. Earlier, he’d switched off the desk lamp so as not to lure moths into the building. The darkness smelled of lemon detergent and dog. It was to the dogs that he went now.

The office opened into the main reception space. The lights were off here too, the only illumination coming from the corridor that branched off it. There, a row of ceiling spots glowed on their lowest setting. Opposite the reception desk, reams of fresh printer paper stood beside a recent delivery of food, a pallet of bleach, and black bin liners filled with donated items: dog beds, cage scratchers, newspapers and toys. Later, it would be Obe’s job to tidy everything away. It was a task he enjoyed, repetitive enough to soothe the chaos inside his head.

Crossing the room, he stepped into the corridor.

Here, doors with large inset windows accessed the laundry room, the intake room and the clinic. At the far end stood the entrances to the indoor dog kennels and the cattery. Between them was the food storage room, which also contained the dishwashing facility and grooming tub.

Outside, wind sawed at the rafters. Even in midsummer it rolled off the Atlantic with a fierceness that could knock a man flat. Along this part of the peninsula, few trees managed to gain a foothold. Below the fenced exercise yards, heather-felted headlands offered granite bedrock as sacrifice to the pounding sea.

Further south lay Sennen Cove, a community of a few hundred that had grown up beside a sandy crescent beach popular with surfers. On the hill above its tiny lifeboat station, Obe rented a one-bedroom flat. He’d lived there three years, ever since moving to Cornwall at seventeen and abandoning everyone from whom he’d needed to escape. Although the village attracted tourists during the summer, his working hours meant that their paths rarely crossed. Thanks to the job, he rarely saw other human beings at all – except Lynette, and those WPAS volunteers he met during shift handovers.

He loved people, but couldn’t be around them.

He loved animals, and could.

At night, he kept the kennel lights on low, so that the dogs could sleep without fear. The eighteen units were split into two rows of nine, served by a narrow central aisle. Each epoxy-floored ken