SEVEN DEADLY THINGS (Henry & Sparrow Book 3), A FOX [good books to read for adults .TXT] 📗

them in her glance-around. Because she was being kind. Stupidly kind, as it turned out.

She hadn’t gone. She’d got a migraine not long after and had needed to go and lie down in the chalet. But Nikki and Craig and Talia had gone. So, it later turned out, had Mickey and Tessa, trailing along in the wake of the others and generally cramping their style. At least that’s what Talia had said later, when she’d come back to the chalet, waking her up and making excuses for what they’d done. Because they’d trapped Mickey and Tessa inside one of the bunkers ‘for a laugh’. Only, it then turned out that Mickey hadn’t been in the bunker. It was just Tessa. What the hell she was doing in there on her own nobody ever worked out, but Mickey had gone off to take a piss around the corner when they had, in a fit of giggles, dragged a bit of detached wooden safety boarding and slab of old concrete across the doorway.

When Tessa realised she was trapped, she became hysterical. Very quickly. Sand, apparently, had fallen through the cracks in the bunker and she had believed there was a landslip and she would be buried alive.

They’d got her out after only a couple of minutes. That’s what Talia had told her. But Kate, even at the time, had wondered about that. It wouldn’t have surprised her if they’d run away and left the poor girl for her brother to find. Later that day, Tessa had gone home to Norwich and Mickey hadn’t spoken about it again.

Neither had she. And she should have. She should have checked in with him and found out how his sister was. She should have apologised for them all at the time, instead of sweeping it away because she felt guilty and awkward and ashamed.

‘What happened on the beach that day,’ she said. ‘It was horrible. I really am sorry.’

‘Why? You weren’t there,’ he said. ‘You didn’t do it.’

Kate felt a ping of metal and one of Nikki’s wrists came free of its cuff. The metal chain was wrapped around the pipe, though, and she needed to get it unwound. The sand was coming in thicker and faster than ever. It was clean and fine. She could only imagine Mike had shipped several bags of it across the field and stowed it somewhere up the top of the shallow cliff, among the low, windswept trees, along with some metal drainpipes or guttering. She heard a clunk and a deep grating, shifting noise and felt fear grab at her throat. The weight from above was affecting the worn old concrete, already weakened and split by decades of storms and landslips. There was every chance they would all be crushed by a cave-in, if they weren’t choked with sand.

‘So… what did I do, Mike?’ she asked, raising her voice above the incessant hissing of the fine sand showers and the increasingly panicked noises from Nikki and Craig.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Absolutely nothing.’

She saw his point.

30

Lucas crept through the twisted limbs of a line of dwarf pine trees, hearing voices above the hiss of the sea and the cry of the gulls. Sid was thrumming against his chest, warning of instability in all directions. The crumbling cliff was ready to go at any time and so was the crumbling mind of the man crouched three or four metres below him.

He stared down, recognising the burly frame of the security chief he’d seen around the site, who was emptying a sack into an open-topped metal chute, sending sand funnelling down through broad cracks in the roof of the old concrete bunker. There was no doubt in Lucas’s mind what the endgame was. Whoever was inside that bunker was going to be engulfed in sand or maybe crushed by concrete, because the tension in the old World War Two construction was positively screaming through his dowsing senses. The land just above it wasn’t much more stable, straining under the weight of the security guy and his sacks of sand, and the metal shute he had rigged up. Lucas was aware that his own weight was adding to the danger. Clinging onto the branch of the tree, he could sense the way its roots had loosened over time and become brittle and frail. He couldn’t be sure it would hold his weight if he swung from it.

His base impulse was to jump the guy from behind, but to do so risked catastrophe for the three life forces he was reading inside the bunker. One of them, he registered grimly, was Kate. Shit, Kate! Why do you have to put yourself in these situations again and again?

He crouched, frozen with indecision, aware that the damaged psyche just below him was unlikely to be talked around. Whoever it was, the pain they had experienced over many years — most acutely two or three months ago — was directing this scene. Anger and vengeance were all this man was clinging to. Without it, he would be empty and spent.

There was no killer more dangerous than a killer with nothing to lose.

‘She wouldn’t want you to do this,’ he said, acting on instinct. His words were buffeted by the breeze and a flurry of rain spattering across the cliff edge, but the man looked around, taking off his cap to reveal thin, greasy hair. He wasn’t old — around Kate’s age — according to Sid, but he looked a good decade older.

‘Who the fuck are you?’ said the man. He did not shift his position and the sand continued to funnel down onto and into the bunker.

Lucas grasped Sid and dowsed the man as intensely as he could. He was not a psychic… but energy patterns helped him out and his lucky guesses often struck home. ‘Whoever you lost,’ he said. ‘Your… sister?’ The man didn’t argue, and Lucas nodded. ‘Your sister. She wouldn’t want this.’

‘Maybe not,’ said the man. ‘But I want this. As you can