Page 11 of Slack Tide Kill

Months of this. Careful conversations with his own partner, manicured never to lead to anything that could possibly be incriminating. Minimal contact. Never being alone too long. Ignoring her outside investigations, while praying every moment that she did not slip up, didn't reveal too much and put him in an impossible position.

And every day that passed, something inside him thinned. He looked at the bottle on the counter. Ice fogged the glass.

The best partner he'd ever had, and he'd been slow-motion betraying her for months now. In any other circumstance, he'd drink until the sound of his own conscience shut up.

But right now, he just had to walk the line one more time. Steer her. Keep his career. Keep hers. In only nine more months her exchange would be over and she'd be gone. That wasn't too long, was it?

He forced a swift shower, cold and bracing, scrubbing off the stink of the night. He drank two pints of water, ate a dry slab of stale toast then dressed in a clean suit. Standing at the door for a moment, he couldn't help but feel he was sinking. The rain outside hammered harder, as if trying to wash the whole world clean.

He grabbed the keys and stepped out of the house. A moment later he returned just long enough to snatch the bottle off the counter.

6 WATCHING

The wind came off the Channel in long gray pushes, and he stood in it and let it work at him.

From here the tape line was a thin yellow scratch on all that shingle. Figures moved along it in ones and twos, slow as beetles. A woman in a tan coat. A photographer crouching, standing, crouching. Someone in a hi-vis jacket walking a grid with his head down, as if the beach had misplaced something small.

They had no idea what they were looking at. That was the pleasure of it. They would take their photographs and bag their samples and go home tonight to warm houses and tell their wives they'd seen something terrible, and none of them would have seen anything at all.

Thirty years he had carried this. Thirty years, while the shingle crept and the sea worked at the wall and the world went on believing itself solid.

Now he had set the truth down on the strand line where anyone could see it.

He thought about the hours of it. The shells laid out under the lamp, the fine tool, the ridging that kept wanting to split. Four characters, twice over. Nobody had ever accused him of being clever, and they had been right, and it hadn't mattered. Patience did the work that cleverness could not match.

He thought about the boy's hair. How it had wanted to fall the wrong way, and how he had wetted his fingers and drawn it straight, three times, four, until it sat as it should. That part had surprised him. He had not planned it. It had simply seemed right.

Then the tide had come up around them both, and that was all.

A car turned in off the road below and rolled toward the security gate. Something low and American. It stopped. A woman got out, and even at this distance he could see she was dressed wrong for it, bare-legged, mud to the knee, hair scraped back.

He watched her jog up the shingle rise. She didn't slow at the top the way they all slowed at the top, she just kept on running.

Interesting.

Above the reactors the clouds were stacking into darkness. Within an hour or two the storm would be unleashed, and the beach would eat all of their evidence, and maybe all of them too, if he was lucky.

He smiled. There was no such thing as luck. All of this had been planned.

He put his hands in his pockets and walked away without hurrying. He knew they were never going to find him. Nobody ever had.

7 SIGN OF THE KILLER

The wind tore at Sally's thin running gear as she cut away from the crime scene, her eyes roving for the faintest hint of a trail in the shingle, while her thoughts circled the body.

The shells. The hair. His sightless gaze twisted toward the reactors. His suffering, blinded and alone in the night. And the numbers. 8107.

What did that mean? The opening digits of a telephone number, or a map coordinate? A code, maybe, a PIN, or some kind of date or an address? She brought up her phone and ran a simple search, '8107 and Dungeness'. It returned nothing relevant, just a Great Western Railway number for an old steam train.

She kept walking. Shingle and shells stretched away to the gray line of the sea; millions, maybe billions of shattered fragments. She looked up 'cuspate foreland' and found her answer; 'a low-lying, ever-shifting triangular-shaped landform of coastal deposits created where opposing longshore currents meet, causing sand and shingle to build outward into the water'.

The word 'ever-shifting' clung to her thoughts. A graveyard of sea creatures, their shells left behind, in constant grinding motion. She slowed and scooped up one half of a cockle shell. It looked much like the shells in the victim's eyes. Ridged, milky, heart-shaped. She turned it between her fingers as she walked, feeling the rough exterior and the glossy interior, stained a wine-like purple. She thought about pearls in oysters, an invasive grain of sand layered over years with glistening white matter.

Love and death, she mused. The reactors receded behind her. Her body trembled and her eyes swam from the cutting wind. She needed coffee. She needed breakfast. Ahead rose the spike of a striped black and white lighthouse, the second in only a few hundred yards.

As she approached, she tapped out an email to McMaster.

‘Dungeness looks like the work of a serial, sir. We found a number carved on the shells, 8107. I'm requesting the Fates for a full workup. They should focus on the eyes, the shells, the number.'