The North Sea licked at the causeway as the tide brought the water closer.
The woman didn’t want to be trapped on the mainland for the night. It had never happened to her before, but there had been times when her tires splashed through a couple of inches of water as she sped back to the island. One time, using her binoculars from the coast, she’d seen a man escape from his BMW and climb to the emergency refuge shack, while his vehicle floated away with the rising tide.
It was a gray day, slate clouds filling the sky and spitting out rain. Wet sand stretched across the lowlands, interrupted by isolated lakes and rivers left behind the last time the sea had retreated. Damp moss and green algae lined the narrow road on both sides. She checked her mirror, the way she always did, but she had the causeway to herself in both directions. Usually, there were a couple of other drivers racing the tide, but not today. No one else was heading home to Holy Island, and those who were still there were trapped for at least seven hours until the road reemerged.
As she neared the island, sand gave way to grassy marshes. Low hills rose in front of her, dotted by sturdy evergreens windblown by the fierce sea gales. Finally, a road sign welcomed her to Lindisfarne. She was home again. This time she’d been away for nine weeks. Sometimes it was only a few days; sometimes it was months. But eventually, she always returned to her cottage off the Northumberland coast, as she had for ten years.
When she was clear of the incoming tide, she pulled onto the shoulder near a grassy sand dune. She turned off the engine and opened the window, and the late-day chill spread through her Volkswagen. She took her binoculars from the glove box and zoomed in on the causeway, confirming that no cars had followed behind her. That was the reason she always kept an eye on the tidal schedule and waited until the last minute to return to the island. She liked to know who was making the crossing with her.
But today she watched the road flood, and she was alone.
The woman fired up the Volkswagen again and returned to the lonely road, which continued through empty land for two more miles. The rain increased, forcing her to turn on her windshield wipers. She soon reached the town, which consisted of little more than a few blocks of old stone buildings and white cottages clinging to the island’s southern shore. Tourists came to visit the ruined priory and the sixteenth-century castle built on a pillar of land to guard the approach from the sea. A few of the visitors stayed overnight, but most left before the tide rose, leaving the town to its two hundred or so permanent dwellers.
The rain kept the streets mostly deserted. She passed a couple of hardy souls walking their dogs, and they tipped their wool caps at her to welcome her home. Everyone knew everyone else on the island. Her neighbors knew her as Sarah Tedford, forty-five years old, training supervisor for a company called Peterman Resources Ltd. No one knew what the company did, and no one asked. They only knew that Sarah’s job took her away for long stretches at a time, and when she came back, she mostly stayed at her cottage, drinking tea on a garden patio that overlooked the sea.
That was okay. Recluses were a staple of island life.
She didn’t park near her house. She never did. Instead, she found a grassy area near the old priory and left her car there. She went inside a whitewashed two-story pub and inn called the Crown & Anchor. It was late, and she didn’t feel like cooking, and nothing in her refrigerator would still be good after all these weeks away. The barman behind the brick bar was a strapping twentysomething kid named Nicholas, and he began pulling a half-pint of hard cider as soon as he saw her. That was her drink whenever she came here. She asked for an order of fish and chips, and then she took her cider to a table near the coal fireplace to dry off.
Nicholas had hit on her a couple of times when the pub was empty, as it was now. She was flattered by the interest from a kid who was young enough to be her son, but she’d never done anything about it. She knew she was attractive. Men had told her that often enough, but she’d made a point of never letting anyone get close to her. Not in a long time. Her wheat-blond hair was wavy, sweeping over her head and falling to her shoulders. She had pale blue eyes, focused and sad. Her bone structure was sharply defined, and she could dazzle when she needed to, but she made a point of removing her makeup before she came home. Otherwise, she looked too royal for the hardscrabble island life. However, she always kept her lipstick perfect. She was vain about her deep red lips, maybe because her mouth turned naturally downward in a frown, and she didn’t often smile.
“You back for a while then, Sarah?” Nicholas called from the bar. “We’ve missed you around here.”
“Oh, I don’t know yet,” she replied. “I never know from day to day. But thank you. I’ve missed you, too.”
Her English still bore a trace of her German accent from her childhood. People on the island talked about that. Where was Sarah from? How had she come from Germany to England? She’d told them that her father had emigrated from Berlin when she was a child, and after she’d grown up, she stayed in her adoptive home country. That wasn’t true, but if anyone took the time to look, they’d find immigration records to back up her story. To the outside world, she was Sarah Tedford.
Her fingers parted the damp strands of her hair with long, slow movements of her fingers. She noticed Nicholas watching her, and she knew the gesture was seductive, although she had no erotic intentions. Or did she? Why had she told Nicholas she missed him? That was a lie. She never gave him a thought, in or out of the pub. But she hadn’t made love to anyone in a while, and she missed the physical release of having someone in her bed. It would be easy to take Nicholas home. But he was a boy, and boys could be complicated. She’d learned that ten years ago. Boys had a way of falling hard, and that was a problem for her. So she stopped twisting her hair and took out her phone, deliberately ignoring Nicholas. He continued to shoot smiles her way, but she pretended not to notice.
Ten minutes later, he brought her food, tied neatly in a plastic bag to take away. She thanked him, gave him a generous tip to make up for leading him on, and went back out into the rain. She left her Volkswagen where it was. Her cottage was only a minute’s walk away. She followed the stone border of the graveyard past the priory ruins and the ghostly, skeletal statue of Saint Aidan lifting a torch to the sky. In the other direction, on the far side of the island harbor, the fierce old castle jutted out of the flat land. She passed the church and continued to the seafront, where a flower-lined wall surrounded her property. The wall wouldn’t have been hard to climb, but she’d installed sensors at regular intervals, and notifications went to her phone if anyone came inside. She unlatched the wooden gate and let herself into the garden.
Her stone cottage was small, two stories plus an attic, with a blue painted door. When she was gone, she paid an old man in the village to mow her lawn and tend to her landscaping so everything looked manicured when she returned. She liked to keep a precise, ordered life. According to her security system, Mr. Aubrey had last been here to maintain the place two days ago, and no one had tripped the motion detectors since then.
And yet something was wrong.
Right in front of her blue door, in the shelter of the overhang, she saw a plastic-wrapped bouquet of red roses and baby’s breath. The flowers looked fresh; they couldn’t have been here long. She dug out her phone and checked the video database, but somehow the person delivering the flowers had done so without triggering her devices and cameras. She didn’t like that. For the moment, she ignored the bouquet and took a walk around the exterior of her property. Nothing looked out of place. The windows were still closed on both levels, and the rear door was deadbolted from the inside. She did a complete circle of the yard, past the back gate and steps that led down to the beach, and she saw no evidence that anyone had been here.
But when she returned to the front door, there were the flowers.
She squatted in front of the arrangement. A square white card was tucked inside the plastic. Carefully peeling the wrapping back, she removed the envelope and saw a word written in script on the outside.
Shadow
Her breath caught in her chest.
She ripped open the envelope and took out the card inside. The message contained a single sentence neatly written in the same script, but she didn’t even need to read it to know what it would say. She’d been dreading this message for years.
Ten years.
Ever since she met David Webb.
The note said: He’s coming.