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hit the shotline under the pontoon, only two metres from where she'd found the hand, it was a weird relief.

Moving slowly because she was starting to tire now, she hauled the weight out of the mud, moved it along a metre and dropped it again. She had made it secure and was checking the line was tight ready for the return journey when something happened that made goosebumps break out all over her. It was the weirdest thing. She didn't see anything, and afterwards she wouldn't even be able to swear she'd felt anything, but suddenly, for a reason she couldn't explain, she was certain someone else was in the water with her.

She twisted round, ripping out her ankle knife and jamming her back against the wall. Breathing hard she clutched the shotline and, moving her feet a little, steadied herself with the knife out in front of her, ready for something to come hurtling at her.

'Rich?' she said shakily, into the coms mic.

'Yeah?'

'See anyone else in the water?'

'Uh – no. Don't think so. Why?'

'I dunno.' She kept herself upright by sculling her hand a little, stopping the water twisting her back to the wall. The air in her suit tried to rise to the surface, gathering round her neck, pressing on her and making her light-headed. 'Think I've seen a ghost.'

'What's up?'

'Nothing. Nothing,' she said. Her head was thudding now. The shot buoy was meant to take a human's weight and she could haul herself up it in a second if anything came at her. But her training stopped her bolting for the surface and she waited, breathing hard, eyes scanning the gloom, moving the knife in a defensive circle around her. Bristol harbour, she told herself. Only Bristol harbour. And she hadn't actually seen a thing. Minutes ticked by. The needle on her SPG contents gauge moved minutely, and slowly, slowly, when nothing happened and her pulse and breathing began to return to normal, she pushed the knife back into her ankle garter. It was last night and Dad's study catching up with her again. This wasn't funny. Not at all. She steadied herself and tipped down from the waist so the air returned to her legs and she wasn't being squeezed any more round the neck. She let a moment or two pass, the silt swirling round her.

'Dundas?' she said. 'You there?'

'You all right, Sarge?'

'No. No, I'm not.' I'm having hallucinations, Rich. Paranoia. The whole works . 'You've dived me for forty minutes,' she said at last. 'I think it's time to pull me out. Don't you?'

5

Dad's study had been locked since the accident. Flea had always known where the key was – hanging on the nail in the pantry – it was just that she'd never found the courage to use it. Two years had passed since the accident and still she couldn't bring herself to go into the place Dad used to retreat to think. In the early days after the accident, her brother Thom would go in there to think, to reflect on what had happened, but now he wouldn't come near it, wouldn't even go in and help her sort everything out. Everyone knew how hard Thom had taken their parents' loss, even harder than Flea had, and maybe, when you thought about what had happened to him in the accident, it wasn't a surprise he refused even to say the words: Mum and Dad . . .

In the end she'd had to do it alone. It was a sunny Tuesday morning two days before the hand was found in the harbour. The television was on in the kitchen and she was in the pantry searching the back of the shelves for an old flour canister, a blue and white bakeware tin with a sieve in the lid that Mum always used for making sponges. She was stretching forward when something made her look sideways, and there, glinting at her, was the key. She stood for a moment, her arms pushed into the back of the cool darkness, her eyes rolled sideways, looking at it. For a moment it seemed to be communicating something to her – fanciful, she knew. Nevertheless she decided right there and then that it was telling her the time had come.

The house her parents had lived