Page 72 of Slack Tide Kill

"He won't."

"You don't know that."

"He hates them." Sally kept her eyes on the road. "You heard him. He's been waiting three years for someone to do to Roarke what Roarke did to him. He wasn't warning anybody. He was getting revenge."

Liam laughed once, without any humor in it. "So you read him. In eleven minutes, through a wall of weed smoke, you read all that."

"Yes."

"And if you're wrong?"

Sally didn't answer that.

The high street narrowed and she came down to 20. Wet blacktop, shuttered arcades, a mother pulling a child past a closed souvenir shop. Beside her, Liam's left hand was wrapped over his right, holding it still.

"Stuff like that's supposed to go in the log," he said. "You know that. Disclosure of operational detail to a person of interest, unrecorded, no authorization. It goes in the log and then somebody reads the log."

She looked at him again. He seemed strange. Different, like he was a bow under some invisible pressure. "So write it up. I'll sign it. Mayhew will kick us both off, and I'll pay the price."

"That's not–" He stopped. Breathed. "That's not the point."

"Then what is? Because from here it sounds like the point is paperwork."

His jaw worked. She watched him choose not to say something, watched the choice cost him.

"Fine," he said.

"Liam–"

"No, you're right. It's paperwork." He looked out the window. "It's always paperwork with me. I'm the one who covers for you while you get things done."

That landed harder than she expected, and she wasn't sure why. There was something underneath it she couldn't get a hand on, some grain running the wrong way through the wood.

"That's not what I meant."

"It's what you said."

She took a breath. "I say a lot of things at 11 in the morning on four hours' sleep." She let the silence sit for a second. "I should have found another way, maybe. The Dover thing. Some kind of lie would have done the same job."

Liam said nothing. To either side the buildings of Dymchurch pressed close to the road. A coffee shop. A gelato shop.

"That's an apology," Sally said. "In case it wasn't clear."

"It was clear." A beat. "It's fine."

It wasn't, and they both let it not be.

She was still turning it over, the shape of his anger, too big for the offence, when something caught at the edge of her vision, down a narrow alley.

She slowed, then pulled in sharply, across traffic, bumping over the grass verge to a rocking halt.

A tower stood before them.

"We're not supposed to park here," Liam said.

"What is that?" Sally asked, opening her door.

"Don't leave the car," Liam protested, but she stepped out anyway.