Page 73 of Slack Tide Kill

The tower was squat and short, with dark gray walls of weathered brick. It rose from the roadside like some half-buried bone, forcing the modern town to grow around it.

"It's a Martello tower," came Liam's voice from behind her. His door slammed. "One of the old Napoleonic coastal defenses. Built for a war that never arrived. Can we go, now?"

Sally felt strangely entranced. A Martello tower. It wasn't especially grand. Not vast like the Dungeness reactor, not decorative like the lighthouse, but it had a stark, undeniable presence. A sense of purpose that burned through Sally. It had been built for cannon and invasion, for men scanning the Channel for sails, for a world where everything could have been lost at any moment.

Now it remained, sitting off the high street, blunt and ancient and faintly absurd, while traffic hissed past and greasy old chip wrappers flapped against the curb.

"Martello 24," Liam said, reading a nearby plaque. "Built in 1806. Didn't know there was one here."

Sally did not answer.

The scale of time pressed on her harder than expected. Here stood two centuries in stone. She thought about smuggling routes older than police forces. Marsh families carrying names and grudges through generations. Boys dying 30 years apart, and everyone acting as if 30 years was a long time.

Here, it so clearly wasn't. Here, 30 years was barely a breath.

She let out a long, shuddery exhale.

Liam glanced at her. "You all right?"

"Who knows?" she muttered. "Everything here is older than the case. Older than the Rooks. Older than Mayhew. Older than Spate. We think we're looking for people, but we're not. We're looking for patterns." She turned to Liam. "Shapes growing out of a landscape that remembers more than any of us."

Liam gave her a watchful look. "That sounds like something the Fates would say before charging by the hour."

She almost smiled. "Shut up."

He looked again at the tower. "I don't know, Sally. I'm not getting it. Maybe it's a good place to stretch out before a run?"

Now she smiled. "I'll follow procedure next time, OK? At least we got something useful."

Liam sighed. "I know. That's why it sucks. Your way works."

That felt like progress. "So… maybe the Rooks are here still. Somewhere in the whole of this marsh that isn't really a marsh."

"Right. It's a needle in a haystack."

She looked up at the tower again, picturing a time before the Royal Military Canal. Back when bricks and cannon counted for everything, when water was a tactic, when engineers and soldiers were locked into an invasion panic while an empire hung in the balance.

"Spate talked about the Owlers," she said, feeling this sense of the past building in her chest. Seeing a pattern. "He said Roarke copied the Owlers, and Nancy Cagen said the same thing about Reg."

"Did she?" Liam stood a little straighter. "So the whole family love the legends. They're copying them."

"Spate mentioned sunken towns. Marsh bases. Places with no access except by boat."

"How are we going to find those, though?"

Sally felt it coming now; an answer they could use. "We need someone local. A historian? Geographer? Someone who knows the land, the Owlers, all of it."

Liam snapped his fingers. "Lydd museum."

Sally turned to him.

"The old fire station," he went on. "Where we had the girls yesterday. It's a local history museum normally, right? Fire station, wartime stuff, coastguard, and smugglers, but I saw something off to the side. Glimpsed it, really. Something about Owlers."

Sally felt the path ahead click into focus. "Let's go find a historian."

29 FIFTH CONTINENT

On the winding road back to Lydd, Sally thought about Roarke Rook and his brothers. Out on the marsh somewhere, tucked into some channel or ruin or hidden mooring, laughing while the police chased card records and port sightings.