Chapter one

The beam from the lighthouse swept slowly across the water, cutting through the dark like a silent clock, round and round through fog, storm, and calm, exactly as it had done since long before Lucas Ward was born.

Most mornings he barely noticed it. This morning, for reasons he couldn’t yet name, he did.

The sea was restless, rolling in long heavy swells that lifted his boat and dropped it again with a hollow slap against the hull, the wind carrying the sharp, familiar smell of salt and kelp. Somewhere above the cliffs a gull cried out into the dark. Lucas checked his watch. Half past five, and still no sign of sunrise, only a faint grey glow sitting low on the horizon, the sun itself still hidden somewhere below the edge of the ocean. Dawn would come slowly today, and he found he preferred it that way, quiet water, no tourists yet, just the slow rhythm of work before the town properly woke.

Summer changed the harbour completely, holidaymakers leaning over the railings, children pointing at the boats, the same questions asked over and over. What do you catch out here? How early do you start? Lucas didn’t mind them, not really, the town depended on them as much as it depended on men like him. But these early hours belonged to the fishermen, and the sea felt different then, older somehow, as though the Atlantic still remembered what it had been before anyone thought to build a harbour along its edge.

He nudged the throttle forward and let the boat creep along the base of the cliffs, the headland looming above him, a black wall of rock rising sharply from the water. At its very top stood the lighthouse, pale and solid against the last of the night sky, built in 1870 according to the old harbour records, though the village liked to joke that it had seen everything Porth Trevan had ever tried to hide. Lucas believed that more than most.

The tower had stood through storms that wrecked ships against the rocks, through wartime convoys slipping silently along the coast, through generations of fishermen who’d come and gone while its beam kept turning over the sea. When he was a boy, it had still housed a proper keeper, a thin, white bearded old man called Trevithick, whose hands always smelled faintly of paraffin and salt, and who’d treated the lighthouse like a living thing, insisting, more than once, that the sea respected it for that. It ran itself now, automated systems and remote monitoring somewhere on the mainland, and Lucas had always thought that a quiet sort of shame. A lighthouse ought to have a man inside it.

The beam swung across the water again, lighting the waves in brief flashes of silver, and he steered towards the first marker buoy, a small red float bobbing on the surface twenty metres off the rocks. One of his pots. He cut the engine and let the boat drift closer, the sudden quiet settling round him like a blanket, the ordinary sounds of the sea rushing back in the moment the engine noise fell away, water slapping gently against the hull, wind whispering along the cliffs, another gull crying somewhere out over the open water.

The sea pushed him gently towards the rocks. He reached for the boat hook, caught the line, and hauled it in hand over hand, the rope slick with seawater and rough against his palms. The pot rose slowly from the depths, heavy, a good sign, and he lifted it over the side and set it down on the deck. Two decent lobsters clawed angrily at the wire mesh.

“Morning to you too,” Lucas muttered, and one of them snapped its claws against the metal as if answering him. He reset the bait, lowered the pot back into the water, and wiped his hands on his coat, the wind shifting slightly as the boat drifted, and it was then, glancing out towards the open sea, that he noticed the other boat.

It sat far out beyond the headland, little more than a dark shape against the pale horizon, its engine carrying faintly across the water, a low mechanical hum rising and falling with the wind. No navigation lights. Not even a deck light. Just a black silhouette moving steadily away from the cliffs, which struck him as strange, given that most boats leaving the harbour at this hour were heading out to the fishing grounds, not coming from the direction of the lighthouse. He watched it a few seconds longer as it cut slowly across the horizon and disappeared behind a distant swell.

Probably nothing, he told himself, though it left an odd, unsettled feeling sitting in his chest all the same. Fishermen noticed things like that, small details that didn’t quite fit, a change in the tide, a shift in the wind, a boat where no boat had any business being. He shook his head and turned back to his work, the sea pushing the boat gently sideways as he moved towards the next buoy, the lighthouse beam sweeping across the water once more, briefly illuminating the jagged rocks beneath the headland before darkness swallowed them again.

He reached for the next line, and as he straightened up, something caught his eye.

A shape, drifting in the swell twenty metres away. At first he took it for driftwood, the tide often carried scraps of timber along this stretch of coast, old beams, broken pallets, once even the remains of a fishing crate that had likely fallen from a cargo ship somewhere out in the Atlantic. But the shape rolled slowly with the movement of the water, and Lucas frowned. Driftwood didn’t usually carry that colour.

He started the engine again and guided the boat closer, the lighthouse beam sweeping across the sea and catching the object for one pale instant.

Not wood. Fabric. A coat.

The shape turned with the next swell, and something tightened hard in Lucas’s chest. The boat drifted closer, closer still, and then the water rolled again and an arm broke the surface, pale and still, and Lucas froze at the wheel.

“No,” he whispered.

The boat rocked gently as it settled beside her. A woman floated face down in the water, her coat tangled in strands of dark seaweed, the tide nudging her softly against the rocks beneath the cliff. Lucas reached out with the boat hook and turned her carefully, and her face rolled into the grey morning light.

He knew her. Or thought he did. Everyone in Porth Trevan would recognise the name, if not the face any more.

May Hollis. Grown up in the village, gone from it for the better part of her adult life, back again only these past few weeks on some business nobody had ever properly explained. Lucas remembered her only vaguely, a woman a fair bit older than himself who’d left before he was old enough to have known her properly, and he found the shock of pulling her out of the water didn’t sit any less heavily for the distance.

Lucas stared at her for a long moment, the sea pushing the boat slowly sideways, the lighthouse beam sweeping across the water above him, and then he swallowed hard and reached for the radio.

“Porth Trevan harbour,” he said, his voice rougher than he expected. “You’d better call the police.” He looked down at her again. “There’s a woman in the water.”

The radio crackled faintly with static as someone on the harbour answered, though Lucas barely listened, his attention already drifting back towards the cliffs, where something had caught the light beneath the lighthouse. A dark gap in the rock, half hidden by shadow. A cave mouth.

He’d always known it was there, of course, everyone who worked these waters did, one of the old smugglers’ openings carved deep into the headland centuries ago, where boats had once sheltered from storms, and long before that, where smugglers had done considerably worse business. But today the lighthouse beam reached inside it for a brief second, and the light struck metal.

Something large. Something that hadn’t been there before.

For a moment the beam reflected off a smooth, unmistakable surface, bright enough that Lucas had to narrow his eyes against it. Not rusted. Not old. New.

The hairs rose on the back of his neck. The sea surged against the rocks and the cave vanished back into darkness, and Lucas stared at the cliff face for a long moment before looking down again at the woman drifting beside his boat.

“What were you looking for down there?” he murmured, though there was no one left to answer him.

The lighthouse beam swept across the water once more, patient and indifferent, and somewhere far out beyond the headland, thunder rolled slowly over the Atlantic.

Chapter two

The road into Porth Trevan followed the line of the cliffs for nearly a mile before descending towards the harbour, and Emma Trelawney slowed the car as the Atlantic appeared through the windscreen, grey water stretching endlessly towards the horizon, restless beneath a low ceiling of cloud, the wind pushing across the headland in long sweeping gusts that rattled the hedgerows lining the narrow road.

The cliffs here rose sharply from the sea, dark granite streaked with veins of lighter stone where rain and wind had worn the rock smooth over centuries. In winter storms the waves could climb halfway up them, smashing against the rock hard enough that people in the town sometimes heard the impacts from their beds at night. Emma remembered lying awake during those storms as a child, counting the seconds between the crash of the waves and the distant rumble that followed. Anna had loved those nights. She would slip out of bed and press her face against the window, watching the lighthouse beam sweep across the storm while the sea tried to tear the coast apart below it.

Imagine being out there, Anna had once said, and Emma had never needed to imagine it. Their father had been out there often enough. Fishing boats didn’t get to choose their weather.

The road dipped again and Emma tightened her grip on the wheel as the wind pushed against the side of the car, the little hatchback shifting slightly in the gust before settling back onto the tarmac. London had never had wind like this, cities broke the weather apart with buildings and traffic and endless noise, but here the Atlantic arrived without interruption, raw and impatient, and Emma had forgotten how exposed the place felt, as though the land itself was only temporarily holding back the sea.

Twenty years. It had been twenty years since she’d seen this road in daylight. She’d driven in the evening before as the light was going, collected the keys to her mother’s cottage from a neighbour, taken one look at the damp creeping up the walls and spent the night in a spare room above the pub in the next village instead. The car she drove now was not the sort she’d ever imagined returning in, a small hatchback bought cheaply six months earlier after selling everything she’d once owned in London, reliable enough, affordable enough, a long way from the life she’d once had.

The road curved sharply along the cliff edge, and Emma shifted down a gear, guiding the car around the bend, the Atlantic rolling below her in heavy grey swells, waves breaking against the base of the cliffs in bursts of white foam that dissolved almost instantly in the wind. She remembered this stretch well, remembered sitting in the passenger seat of her father’s truck as a teenager while he drove it far faster than he should have, Anna leaning forward between the seats, laughing whenever the tyres squealed on the corners. The memory arrived suddenly and left just as quickly, and Emma tightened her grip on the wheel and drove on, around the final headland, and then she saw it.

Porth Trevan.

The first glimpse of the town always came suddenly, one moment nothing but cliffs and empty sky, the next the land opening like a curtain and the harbour appearing below, exactly the small thrill of homecoming Emma remembered from childhood, though the harbour that had once seemed enormous now looked, from this distance, almost fragile, a handful of stone buildings gathered beside the water, a breakwater curving out into the sea like a protective arm, sheltering the fishing boats from the worst of the Atlantic swells. She could see the roofs of the cottages clearly from here, slate tiles darkened by years of rain, narrow chimneys leaning slightly with age. Nothing much had changed, which was, in its way, the strangest thing of all. Twenty years had passed, and Emma had built an entire life somewhere else, but the town looked as though it had simply been waiting.

She slowed further as the car crept along the narrow descent, watching the harbour for a long moment, fishing boats resting behind the curved stone breakwater, their hulls painted in faded reds and blues that stood out against the grey water. She had spent years telling herself she would never return, that there was nothing left for her in Porth Trevan, but life had a way of changing plans.

The road dipped again as it approached the town, and Emma glanced towards the headland and saw the lighthouse standing exactly where it always had, tall and pale against the morning sky, dominating the cliffs even from this distance, its lantern still turning slowly, the beam faint now in the growing daylight but still visible sweeping across the mist above the sea. A small chill ran through her. That light had been the last thing Anna saw, or so people in the town had always believed.

She forced her attention back to the road, past the old church, St Brynn’s, its stone tower unchanged though the clock face now bore a faint crack running through one corner, past the bakery on the corner before the harbour road, its painted sign faded but the smell drifting from inside still unmistakable, fresh bread, pastries, and for a moment Emma considered stopping before driving past instead. Some memories were easier left alone.

The harbour appeared suddenly as the road opened onto the waterfront, fishing boats rocking gently against their moorings, coils of rope stacked beside wooden crates near the quay, a few early locals moving quietly along the harbour wall preparing for the day’s work. Emma felt the familiar tightening in her chest that arrived, unfailingly, whenever she let herself remember exactly how much of this town still carried memories she’d spent half her life trying to forget.

That was when she saw the police vehicles.

Two of them stood parked near the slipway, their blue markings unmistakable even with the lights switched off, a small group of people gathered beside the harbour wall, speaking quietly while they watched the activity near the water. Emma slowed instinctively. Police in Porth Trevan were rare. Serious trouble was rarer still. She pulled into an empty space opposite the Harbour Lantern and switched off the engine, sitting a moment longer as it ticked softly, cooling, watching a man in waterproof trousers haul a crate across the quay towards one of the boats, another fisherman coiling rope along the rail of a trawler with slow, practised movements.

The work looked exactly as it always had. Fishing towns rarely changed their habits. The sea didn’t care about modern schedules or office hours.

What hadn’t changed either, Emma realised, was the way people looked at strangers, even from inside the car, a glance that lasted slightly too long, the quick exchange of quiet words between neighbours. Porth Trevan had never been a place where someone could arrive unnoticed, especially not someone who had once lived here. She wondered briefly how long it would take before the whole town knew she was back, then corrected the thought. They probably already did.

For a moment she remained behind the wheel, the wind rattling softly against the door, the quiet sounds of the harbour reaching her through the glass, ropes knocking against masts, the low murmur of voices, the distant cry of gulls circling above the cliffs. Twenty years ago she had left this town convinced she would never see it again. Now she was back, and within five minutes of arriving she’d found police cars waiting beside the harbour.

“Good start,” she murmured, and opened the door.

The wind hit her immediately, cold Atlantic air carrying the sharp scent of salt, diesel, and seaweed drying on the harbour wall. Several people near the wall had noticed her arrival, their conversation fading as they watched her, and Emma recognised a few faces despite the years, the fish merchant who used to shout prices across the quay when she was a child, a woman who’d once worked in the village shop, two older men she vaguely remembered leaning against the harbour wall most afternoons discussing tides and weather. Older now. Greyer. But the expressions were the same. Curious. Cautious.

The woman from the shop spoke first. “Well now.” Her voice carried easily across the harbour road. “Emma Trelawney.”

“Morning,” Emma said, with a small, polite nod.

“Didn’t expect to see you again.”

“I didn’t expect it either.”

The group exchanged glances, and Emma understood exactly what passed between them without needing to hear a word of it. Small towns had long memories, and Emma had given Porth Trevan a story it would never quite forget.

“What’s going on?” she asked, nodding towards the police vehicles.

The group grew quiet, and finally it was the fish merchant who answered. “Body found this morning. Down by the lighthouse cliffs.”

The wind tugged at the collar of Emma’s coat. “Who was it?”

“May Hollis.”

Emma felt the name land strangely, out of place among the ordinary business of the harbour. “May Hollis? She left years ago, didn’t she. Before I did, even.”

The merchant shook his head slightly. “Came back a few weeks past. Some sort of research, apparently, though nobody got much more out of her than that.” Something in the small group’s silence carried more weight than the answer itself, the particular discomfort of people who’d half known someone once, long ago, and never quite worked out how to place her again.

“Accident?” Emma asked.

“Police haven’t said.”

Before she could ask anything further, the door of the Harbour Lantern opened behind her, and a sharp voice carried across the road. “Are you lot planning to stand around gossiping all morning?”

Emma turned. Maggie Trevithick stood in the doorway of the pub, and despite the years, she looked exactly the same, a few more lines added to her face, her hair turned a brighter shade of silver, but her posture still straight, her eyes still sharp enough to miss very little that happened in this town. She looked from the group by the harbour wall to Emma, said nothing for a moment, then gave a short, decisive nod.

“Well,” Maggie said. “If it isn’t Emma Trelawney.”

“Hello, Maggie.”

“Thought you might show your face here again one day.”

“I didn’t.” Emma managed something close to a smile.

Maggie stepped aside from the door. “Come inside before you freeze. Wind’s worse today than it looks.”

Emma followed her through, and the moment the door closed behind her the wind vanished almost entirely, the quiet warmth inside the Harbour Lantern settling round her like stepping into another decade. The wooden floorboards creaked faintly beneath her boots exactly as they always had, and someone had polished the bar recently, its surface reflecting the soft glow of the hanging lamps like dark glass. She had spent more afternoons here than she could properly count as a girl, waiting for her father to finish talking with the other fishermen, waiting for Anna to come down from the cliffs, waiting for the weather to calm enough that the boats could safely return. She could still picture exactly where she and Anna used to sit, a small table near the back wall where they could watch the harbour through the window, Anna guessing which boats would return first, Emma preferring, always, to read. Strange, how clearly some memories survived, and how carefully she’d avoided them for twenty years all the same.

Only two other customers were inside, both fishermen, seated at a table near the window with mugs of tea, speaking quietly. One glanced up as Emma entered, then returned his attention to the conversation.

Maggie moved behind the bar. “Coffee?”

“Yes please.”

She poured from a metal pot that had clearly been sitting on the warmer a good while, placed the mug on the counter, and said simply, “Sit.”

Emma took a stool at the bar, the warmth of the room settling round her shoulders almost immediately, the wind rattling faintly against the windows behind her. She wrapped her hands round the mug and let the heat seep into her fingers.

“So,” Maggie said. “You’ve heard.”

“Someone outside said a body was found near the cliffs.”

“That’s right.”

“May Hollis,” Emma said. “I barely remember her, if I’m honest. She’d already gone by the time I was old enough to properly notice who lived where.”

Maggie wiped the bar slowly with a cloth, her expression carefully unreadable. “She’d not been herself since she came back, this past month or so. Wandering about the town asking questions nobody expected from someone who’d been away so long.”

“What kind of questions?”

Maggie glanced towards the window, towards the lighthouse headland visible beyond the harbour. “The caves,” she said. “Beneath the lighthouse.”

Emma followed her gaze, the lantern still rotating faintly against the grey sky. “And people didn’t like that?”

“Depends who you ask.” Maggie’s cloth paused against the bar. “She asked about your sister too.”

Emma felt the words settle heavily in the room. “Anna?”

“That’s the name she used.”

“Why would a woman who left this village half a lifetime ago come back asking about something that happened twenty years ago? What could she possibly have known about Anna?”

“No idea. But she wanted to know where your sister had last been seen. Whether anyone ever searched the caves properly after she disappeared.” Maggie watched Emma carefully as she said it, gauging, perhaps, how much this was worth telling. “She asked something else too. Whether anyone remembered strange boats near the cliffs, around the time your sister disappeared. Late at night. No lights.”

Something flickered through Emma, surprise layered over an older, more familiar unease. “Boats?”

“That’s what she asked. Mostly nobody had anything to tell her. You know how this town works.”

Emma did know. Porth Trevan had always been good at keeping its own business to itself, even, apparently, from a woman who’d once belonged here and had spent decades somewhere else entirely before deciding, for reasons nobody could quite account for, to come home and start asking exactly the wrong questions.

She finished the coffee and set the mug down. “Police think it was an accident?”

“They haven’t said.”

Emma stood, pulling her coat tighter round her shoulders. “Well. I suppose they’ll figure it out.”

Maggie studied her for a moment. “You planning to stick around a while?”

“I need to sort out my mother’s house.”

“Haven’t seen anyone there in years.”

“I know.”

“Well, if you’re thinking of wandering down to those cliffs today, I’d wait a bit. Police will have the place crawling with officers.”

Emma allowed herself a small smile. “That’s never stopped a journalist before.”

Maggie raised an eyebrow. “You still doing that?”

“Not exactly,” Emma said, and didn’t elaborate further, and Maggie, to her credit, didn’t press.

At the door, Emma paused and turned back. “One more thing. Did she say why? Why Anna, why now?”

Maggie shook her head. “No. Just that she wanted to know. Seemed to be building up to something, if you ask me, though she never said what.”

Emma nodded and pushed the door open, cold wind rushing in from the harbour as she stepped outside. The sky had brightened slightly, though the sun remained hidden behind its blanket of cloud, and police officers were still moving near the slipway. She walked slowly along the harbour wall, the water restless beneath the stone, slapping against the rocks in its steady, endless rhythm, and stopped to look towards the headland again, the lighthouse taller from here, its beam sweeping faintly through the morning mist. The sight stirred something uneasy deep in her chest. Something about this place had always felt unfinished.

For twenty years she had tried to accept the story everyone else believed, that Anna’s disappearance had been a tragic accident and nothing more. But the questions May Hollis had apparently spent her final weeks quietly, uncharacteristically asking suggested something else entirely, and Emma found she couldn’t simply set that aside, whatever exhaustion had brought her back to this village in the first place.

She didn’t notice the man standing near the fishing sheds, watching her. He’d been there several minutes already, hands resting casually in the pockets of a dark jacket, watching as she spoke with the locals and disappeared into the pub, watching still as she stood alone now by the harbour wall, with the particular patience of someone who already knew exactly who she was. After a moment he turned and walked away along the narrow street beside the sheds, and Emma, still staring towards the lighthouse, never saw him go.

The old instinct was returning, the one she’d tried so hard to bury after leaving journalism behind, the sense that something important was being carefully hidden, and that the truth of it lay somewhere beneath those cliffs. If May Hollis had been asking questions about Anna in the last weeks of her life, then perhaps the past was not nearly as settled as everyone in this village had spent twenty years agreeing to believe.

Emma pushed herself away from the wall and turned towards the road leading out of the harbour, towards the cliffs, towards the lighthouse standing pale and patient above the water. Whatever had taken Anna, she understood now, standing there with the wind pulling at her coat and the whole grey weight of the Atlantic spread out before her, it hadn’t finished with this place. And for the first time since she’d left London, Emma found she wanted, properly and completely, to find out why.