S Bolton - Sacrifice

Every day that a foetus remains inside its mother's uterus, it is growing stronger and more viable. At twenty-six weeks, the possibilities of its survival are considerably better than at twenty- four. By twenty-eight weeks, its chances are getting quite good.

The next day, Emma's twenty-eight-week foetus would be delivered and rushed into one of these incubators. Emma would go back to her stage career, relieved and thankful, believing a termination had taken place. The infant would remain here, receiving a high level of care, for several months. If its brain, lungs and other essential organs remained healthy and normal it would, no doubt, command a high price at an Internet auction. Emma's 'termination' had been delayed by five days. I guessed that was standard practice with all the women who came here seeking late terminations. It would allow a little more time for the foetus to grow and develop; it would also enable the team to administer steroid drugs to encourage foetal lung development.

Twenty-four hours ago, I'd have said it was the most vile thing I'd ever heard of. Now, knowing what these guys had planned for Dana and the others, what they'd done to so many women already, I couldn't say I was exactly surprised.

I turned to Duncan. 'How long have you known?'

His eyes held mine steadily, without so much as a flicker. 'About this? The premature babies? Only a few weeks.'

'And the rest?'

'Since I was sixteen,' he said. 'We get told on our sixteenth birthdays.' He swept his hand up through his hair. 'But I didn't believe it, Tora.' He stopped, looked away, then back again. 'Or maybe I just told myself I didn't believe it. That's why I left Shetland. I went away to university and not once, in all those years, did I ever come back, not even for a weekend. I've never set foot on this island before tonight, I swear.'

Duncan was a good liar. I'd learned that in the last few days. But somehow, I didn't think he was lying now.

'But we did come back. You wanted to come back. Why?'

'I did not want to come back,' he spat back at me. 'They threatened to kill you if I didn't come back. To kill any child you and I had. I had to take those fucking pills. If I'd got you pregnant they'd have c-'

He couldn't finish. But he didn't have to. 'Cut out my heart?' I asked.

He nodded. I could see the bones beneath his face, the huge purple shadows under his eyes. For the first time, I understood what Duncan had been going through during the past few months. What he'd had to deal with for most of his life.

'Your mother didn't have MS?'

'My mother was perfectly healthy. Until they got their hands on her.'

I reached out for his hand, afraid at how cold it was. 'What the hell are we going to do?'

He glanced round at the door, as though even now someone could be watching us. 'You are going to get back on your boat, just as I told you.'

'You too. Come with me.'

For a second I thought he was going to agree. Then he shook his head. 'If I come with you, those women are going to die. As soon as we raise the alarm Richard will drop them all over the side. He'll claim he was out on an all-night fishing trip, and who's going to prove otherwise?'

'We will. We've seen everything.' I'm not proud to admit it, but I think I was too scared at that moment to really care about Dana and the other two women. All I wanted was Duncan and me off the island.

'Tor, you have no idea what we're dealing with. These people have influence you can't imagine. Even if we're allowed to live, no one will believe us. We need Dana and the others alive.'

He was right, of course. 'What are you going to do?'

'I'm going down to the harbour to get on that boat. Richard is taking it out alone. I can deal with him. I'll wait until we're out at sea and whack him on the back of the head. Then I'll drive the boat back to Uyeasound. With a bit of luck, your friend Helen will be there to meet me.'

'I love you so much,' I said.

Somehow, he managed to smile. Then he pulled me across the room and through a door at the far end. The room beyond lay in shadow. We slipped inside and closed the door behind us. We were in a nursery. Six white-painted, wooden cots stood around the edges of the room. Cartoon characters had been painted on to the white-washed walls, mobiles swayed gently as they hung from the ceiling, soft toys – overstuffed teddy bears and floppy-eared rabbits – stared down at us from shelves. There were changing tables, sterilizing equipment, a baby bath. It was all so creepily, terrifyingly normal.

The cots, unnecessary for the time being, were all stripped bare to their mattresses. As I stared at them, so much fell into place. Since hearing about Tronal, I'd been puzzling how a maternity clinic could exist, given how few babies were supposedly born here each year. Now I knew the officially recorded babies were merely the 'cover' for the island's more sinister activities.

The clinic had been built to facilitate the births of the Trows' own baby sons. The rooms upstairs would house the abducted women – often drugged or restrained – during the whole of their pregnancies. When containment wasn't necessary, when no outsiders were on the island, the women might even be allowed a certain level of freedom: because Tronal was as impenetrable a prison as any I could imagine. How many pregnant women would risk swimming half a mile of rough ocean? Of course, if they knew that shortly after giving birth they'd have weird Nordic symbols hacked into their flesh, that their hearts would be cut from their living bodies, I imagine one or two might just risk it.

The six or so babies born from these women would be adopted by Trow men and their wives, previously discouraged, as Duncan and I had been, from having children of their own. To legalize these babies, their adoptive mother would be registered as their birth mother and would appear as such on their birth certificate. Did that mean these adoptive mothers, the men's wives, were colluding in what was going on? Did Elspeth know the truth about Duncan's birth? Not a question I really wanted to dwell on.

Duncan and I ran across the room towards a door at the far end and stood listening. Nothing. We opened the door and went into a storeroom. More wooden cots had been dismantled and were propped against a wall. Folded buggies leaned against another. Two other doors: one opened on to the corridor, the other led outside. Duncan crossed to the external door and pushed it open. A rush of cold air came in as he leaned out and looked all around. From somewhere in the clinic I could hear voices but none of them seemed close.

But the Trows only made babies in every third year. The babies offered legally for adoption were few and far between. The rest of the time, the facilities on Tronal would sit empty and unused. So the enterprising Trows had come up with yet another use for the clinic: a facility for illegal late abortions. Finding desperate women through a network of hospitals, family-planning centres and abortion clinics around Europe, and dressing up the service as 'counselling and advice', they'd probably found plenty of women happy to pay over the odds for their operations. A few days on the island and these women would resume their normal lives, oblivious to what they'd really left behind on Tronal.

They'd never know that their own flesh and blood was still alive; growing and developing in the clinic's intensive-care unit until well enough to be sold to the highest bidder. It was brilliant. Monstrous, but brilliant.

Duncan came back into the room. 'OK, the dogs are locked up and most of the staff here will be moving the women down to the boat. But you still have to be careful. Go as fast as you can and don't be seen.'

I've never performed a parachute jump, but I imagine the moment of standing at the open plane door, waiting to jump, must feel exactly as I did then. I knew I had to go, leave Duncan and make my way across the island alone, but couldn't quite bring myself to do it that second. Then Duncan pushed me, not remotely gently, out of the clinic and I ran.