Page 86 of Slack Tide Kill

"Let's go," she barked, the decision locked as she dropped off the fence and ran to the Mustang. The body would wait. The Rooks would not.

Back in the Mustang, she spun a donut turn and raced back across the causeway, up the embankment and back through the holiday camp, slamming the horn to drive holidaymakers from her path.

"I have them!" Bledd called over the engine's roar, eyes intent upon his drone screen. "Three men. It's the Rooks!"

Sally floored the gas pedal. "Where?"

"St. Mary's Marsh." Bledd worked his controls while Liam relayed the location to Mayhew. "There's a self-storage facility surrounded by sewers. They're in a flatboat on the move." He turned to look at Liam. "If you send officers to St. Mary's Road, Jefferstone Lane and the northern reach of St. Mary's Bay, they'll have no way out."

Liam repeated that into his phone as Sally whipped out of the holiday camp and back onto the coastal road heading north.

"Drone's battery's done," Bledd said. "I'm putting her down. We don't have eyes-on anymore."

Sally felt Jason Harrow's gaze on her now as she pushed the car to 50, closer than ever, along with a new pair of eyes. That of an older woman, her limbs limp, her sun-lined face blank.

Familiar.

Recognition struck Sally like a winter squall. Of course.

It was Nancy Cagen.

34 THE MARSH WHISPERS

Thoughts flooded Sally as the Mustang sailed out of Greatstone along a coast peppered with bright, multicolored beach huts, as evenly spaced as blips on a cardiogram.

She'd seen Nancy Cagen just this morning. Barely seven hours ago. Alive. Spirited despite her age. Witness to the first body, and now part of the crime.

How?

Liam continued shouting into his phone in the back. The road hewed close to the beach, the blacktop faded to a narrow gravel track, and Sally barely skimmed the sea wall as waves beat against the steep shingle.

How could anyone have managed this? Had they grabbed Cagen as Sally left the beach. It was remote enough, quiet enough, and they already knew the killer had control over all the CCTV cameras.

Snatch her. Transport her. Lay her down by the Ears.

Kill her.

It felt like a blow through her own chest. Her eyes burned on the road, stinging as cold air streamed in through the open windows.

"The victim's Nancy Cagen," she shouted. "Liam, did you hear me?"

"What?"

"Nancy Cagen. The woman who found the body. I met her this morning on Dungeness."

Liam said nothing for a moment. Frozen as much as Sally was, maybe. That meant a lot of things. It meant the killer was right here still. Moving amongst them, their tracks interweaving.

Then he pressed the phone tighter to his head. "Ma'am, we have positive ID on the victim."

Sally tuned him out and stared ahead.

"Left here," Bledd said, the calm eye in the storm. They tore past a mobile coffee shop, just a booth on a tuk-tuk frame, then swerved alongside another long black sewer. Bledd directed her through another tiny village and out to the open marsh.

"This is it," he said. "St. Mary's in the Marsh. They could be anywhere on our right."

Sally accelerated, eyes darting across a now-familiar landscape, partly obscured by willow hedges and split by sewers.

"It's too big," she said, feeling the scale of the land slipping away from her.