Page 18 of Slack Tide Kill

Sally stopped cold.

"Oh, I apologize," Palmer said. "I did not mean to suggest you're in any danger. Much of the worst has been scrubbed already. The process water we use for this cleansing process is a lower class of contaminant, presently contained within a lead-lined 500-cubic meter tank, deep underground. There is no danger."

Sally started walking again. She didn't know cubic meters, but it sounded like a lot. "Why are you keeping so much?"

"I wouldn't say 'keeping'," Palmer said uncomfortably. "Perhaps 'storing' is a better term. It is simply a very large amount of liquid, as compared to spent fuel rods and sludge, which are comparatively small and relatively simple to contain. Even fewer countries will accept an amount in this sum, so we dispense it in portions, when we can. Hopefully within 20 years it will all be gone."

"20 years?"

"Ahem. Yes. Now, if you please, the control room is this way."

They reached the crest of the stairs, revealing another barren gray corridor. Palmer led the way. They passed a rec room where prim couches sat arrayed around small coffee tables, with a small kitchen on the side and two ping pong tables. A handful of construction workers in orange gear were laid around the space, looking at their phones.

"Here," said Palmer, and they entered a room filled with at least a dozen large monitors, driven by two technicians sitting at custom-fitted desks. Each desktop was packed with hundreds of keys, buttons, indicators and switches. On the monitors Sally glimpsed numerous graphical readouts: the temperature of reactor halls A and B; capacity of siloes 1, 2 and 3; along with CCTV live feeds from corridors, vast networks of pipes, great stainless steel vats and walkways suspended over large drops.

"James, Elizabeth, if we might have the exterior beach footage from last night please."

The tech workers hit keys and all the screens cleared. Sally and Mayhew took up position before the bank of monitors and watched as they flickered to life. Each monitor showed a different angle; on the car parks, the approach road, the scaffold, and the beach.

"I hope you will look kindly on our alacrity in this matter," Palmer said. "I'd only ask that when this goes to the press office, it is reported as a body found on a beach. Not a body found at a nuclear facility. The distinction is geographically trivial and financially enormous."

Sally filtered that through her bullshit detector and turned. "Financially enormous?"

"For the British state. For our private investors. For the local community. Two words in a headline and every household from Hastings to Dover believes something has leaked. Nothing has. But we'd spend six months telling them so, and they'd spend six months not believing us." A thin smile. "I'm asking you to prevent a panic, Officer, not do me a kindness."

"You want us to leave you out of it?"

Palmer winced faintly. "In essence, yes. Whatever happened out there on the shingle has nothing to do with what happens in here."

"We understand your position," Mayhew said firmly. "I'll pass that on to press liaison."

"Thank you." Palmer sounded relieved.

Sally wouldn't have let him off the hook so easily, but that was the DCI's call. Instead she turned back to the techs. "You've already checked all these, correct? What have you found?"

The male tech, James Rowley by his dangling name badge, turned, but looked first to Palmer.

"It's quite all right, James, we are cooperating fully with the police in this matter."

Rowley looked relieved. "Well, we have scrolled through all the feeds. There's an artifact on camera 9 at 3:17 a.m."

Sally felt her heart chill. That was well within the window Akilota had offered them for time of death. "An artifact?"

"I'll show you."

He brought up camera 9, expanding to fill all the screens. The camera had to be mounted on the site's south-east corner, given the angle of the fence glimpsed across the bottom. It began to advance. The distant lapping of the sea was just about visible; faint white moonlit lines advancing like waves of static, before cutting out at the dark shore.

Sally thought she glimpsed something, perhaps the prow of a boat, then the feed whited out.

"What's this?" she asked.

"Something that happens occasionally," Rowley answered. "Across the network. Not only that camera. At least once in a 24-hour period, maybe, one of the feeds goes out."

"That's the stretch of the beach with the body," Mayhew stepped in. "How long is the outage?"

"32 minutes," said Rowley. "I'm sorry. We'll fast-forward."

The female tech, Elizabeth, worked the controls and the feed sped forward, coming to settle on the exact same image. Lines working their way down from the sea. Barren, empty. All except for the blot of the body on the beach.