Slack Tide Murder

1. Slack Tide

The tide ebbed away from the barren Dungeness beach like the rasping eyelid of a corpse. Breakers crashed and sank on the shingle, a trillion tiny pieces of stone where Vikings once landed their longboats, come to pillage the ancient Britons.

Sweeping. Desolate. Immense.

All watched over by the flint-gray hulk of Dungeness nuclear power station, a mass of salt-tarnished gray reactor shields encased in scaffold as workers toiled around the clock to fulfill the decommission.

The only flash of color came from Coastguard craft out on the still Channel waters, racing to intercept small-boat immigrants from Somalia or the Sudan. Lost souls seeking a better life.

Slack tide. The frozen moment after the sea drew out, but before the world rocked and the waters stormed back up to the high tide line, where the body lay.

A young man. Tangled in frayed blue fishing net and striped with fresh green seaweed, hair brushed into a neat side parting as if by a lover's touch. Pale and still as the beach itself, washed up like an offering.

Twin cockle shells protruded where his eyes should be.

An echo of a death 30 years gone. Never solved. An echo set to resound through Kent's fragile marshland community and rip its people apart.