Page 171 of Slack Tide Kill

"Do you know him that well? Plus, I believe he was working with Arthur Bledd."

"Bledd and Logan?"

"More family connections, through Nancy Cagen." Jack waved the folder. "It's all here, Glory. But more importantly, I think they've waited for this moment. The storm." He gestured around him. "Maybe for years. And now they're planning an attack on the Dungeness reactors."

Her eyes flared. "What? If that's true, we need to notify them. Send CTSFOs, AROs, everything. We have to–"

"It's not going to work," Jack said, cutting across her. "My tracking dot shows Logan's last known location was in Reactor A lot. He's already there, Glory, and he's plugged into all our frequencies. Last I heard, he's even started a physical relationship with your assigned NCA officer, Sally Rogers."

Mayhew gasped. She'd heard the rumblings about that. "She can't be involved. She just got here!"

"Not involved, Glory. Compromised."

He raised the folder again. Her eyes locked onto it. All the answers she'd been hunting for years could be in there. Everything, since the day her father died. The need to see it out burned through her thoughts.

"So what are you suggesting, Jack?"

"You and I, we go now. We go quietly. We interrupt Logan and Bledd before they can trigger whatever bomb they've built. If we do anything else, if we turn up with the full cavalry, they'll blow it."

She tried to absorb that. It was so much. So many answers at once. Family relations. A plan in motion for years, just waiting for a storm.

"I need to see⁠—"

"It's yours." Mercer tossed the folder onto her desk. "Call it in if you like, Glory, but I'm going. Now. I have to. I can't let what happened to your father happen to you too." His voice ached with that old pain. "Not when we're this close."

He waited a moment longer, then turned and strode away.

She'd looked at the empty doorway. Then at the folder. Then she snatched it up and went after him, down the corridor, breaking into a jog through the bullpen. Jack was already out of sight; following him felt like chasing the ghost of her father.

DI Gemmell stood as she passed.

"Ma'am, we've got new intel on⁠—"

"Handle it, DI," she snapped and kept running.

"Where are you going, ma'am?"

She didn't answer, just burst out of the station into the driving rain. Jack wasn't there. The one man who'd been there for her after her father died, until even he'd gone too. The pain had been too much, he'd told her, a year after the deaths. At her father's graveside.

"I'm sorry, Glory Hallelujah. Fathers and sons. Mothers and daughters. Sometimes you just have to go."

Standing in the car park of her own station she became that lost little child again.

Then a horn sounded across the lot and the lights flashed on. Her heart leapt and she ran to him, in the driver's seat of a white panel van. He leaned over to open the door for her, smiling.

"We'll do it together, Glory."

Together.

Now the marsh streamed past the window, dark water lying flat over every field, and the folder sat open on her knees with the shadows of the rain moving across it. It was so hard to read in the half-light, so hard to focus with the storm bearing down.

Still, she turned another page. The truth had to be in here somewhere…

71 THREE YEARS

Sally hit the light bar and siren then took the squad car up to 40 mph going the wrong way around Rye's one-way system. At the town's southeast corner she arced across a swamp-like intersection onto the road headed south.

"The coast road's closed, Sally," Liam said.