9. Blinded Eyes
The rain came harder now, the wind gusting. Mayhew led the way back into the lot and over to the towering reactor A structure. Up close Sally felt the true scale of it, as large as a New York city block, but windowless and wrapped with scaffolding.
"Dr. Rupert Palmer," he said, his voice deep and mellifluous, the kind of intonation Sally had come to recognize as 'posh'. "Anything I can do to help, officers, you only need to ask."
"DCI Mayhew and NCA Officer Rogers," Mayhew said. "Just the CCTV for now, Dr. Palmer."
"Of course, of course." He nodded somberly and headed back toward the reactor, the two underlings falling in silently behind. In moments they were swallowed within Reactor A's great gray bulk, following a narrow concrete corridor lit by industrial strip lights.
"This was never intended as a main entrance, of course," Palmer said, his voice echoing strangely in the tight space, sounding lightly amused. "It's been this way for several years now, given the delays to the decommission work."
"Delays?" Mayhew asked.
"I'm afraid so." He stopped at a padlocked grille door, beyond which lay a small, gray room lined with smart-looking, new lockers. Hard hats and hi-vis vests hung from pegs. "A process like this, completely cleaning out an entire nuclear facility, well, it takes time. Please."
One of his staff unlocked the padlock and Palmer led them in.
"I think, here," he said, advancing to a set of hi-vis gear. "These should fit. We generally hire men, which means larger sizes, but we keep a few for visiting diplomats."
"And police," Mayhew said.
Palmer's smile faltered. "Quite."
Sally put on the proffered vest and hat. "I was led to believe all the nuclear material had been removed from the site."
"Oh, it has," Palmer said, gesturing them back into the corridor.
They moved through and he continued ahead, like some tour guide on an open-top London bus.
"That took the longest. All fissile material, all the nuclear 'sludge', everything like that is gone.
You would be surprised how small the number of countries are that are willing to safely take, secure and bury nuclear waste products.
" He lowered his voice. "You can count them on the fingers of one hand, essentially.
Oddly, they're often the same countries whose citizens wind up on our beach. Put that together, if you will."
Sally didn't need to. "Dictatorships," she said flatly. "Countries at war."
Palmer's polite smile strained, and he stopped by a bare metal stairwell. "Up here to the control room. The elevator's out, I'm afraid."
Mayhew shot Sally a glare as she passed. They started up the featureless stairs.
"So why the extreme security at the entrance," Sally asked. "Three officers, full vehicle search, plus all the CCTV cameras. Why bother if all the nuclear material is gone?"
Palmer cleared his throat. "Well, that's not entirely true. Officer Rogers, was it?"
"That's right."
"The worst of it is all gone. But a place like this, operating for decades, there's contamination in the bones of the building itself."
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.
"You've missed it all," Mayhew said.
"I'm afraid our systems are somewhat temperamental," Palmer said. "Maintenance on an old, highly specialized site like this is difficult. James and Elizabeth here spend half their man hours chasing ghost faults around the network, and often there are no solutions."
Sally just stared at the feed. The time stamp said 3:50 a.m. At least it gave them a more precise time for the delivery of the body. "Bring up the other feeds," she said.
Palmer gestured to the techs and they did it.
All remained still but for the lapping tide, all hauntingly gray.
Between them, they covered the entirety of the beach in front of the reactors.
Sally ran the jigsaw pattern of their coverage through her mind, stitching together the edges so there was a single, unbroken panorama.
A panorama with a hole right in the middle.
"And none of the other cameras cut out?"
"Uh, that's correct," said Rowley. "They didn't."
Sally stepped closer, her hip touching the back of his chair. "Play them all. Fast forward. From 3:17 a.m."
He did. The feeds began to speed by. The white lines strobed rapidly down. There were occasional gray flashes; the shape of a seagull's wing, perhaps a bat, but nothing else. The time elapsed and Sally eased back on her heels.
"Nothing on either side. Nobody crossing the ambit of any camera." She paused, but nobody supplied the final step, so she provided it herself. "It means the body was brought in by boat."
Nobody spoke for a long few seconds. Sally turned to Palmer.
"Dr. Palmer. I understand you've had issues with your network. But we have to look into every possibility. Who would have access to override a feed like this?"
Palmer looked stunned. He turned to Mayhew, but the DCI offered nothing. She simply watched curiously. "Well, I–"
"It's a simple question," Sally pressed.
"I understand that. Well, James? Elizabeth?"
"We don't have the access to make any software-level changes," Elizabeth spoke up. "The only person I'm aware of who has that kind of admin control is the reactor director."
She looked squarely at Palmer.
"Well," he said, squirming now. "I can assure you, I made no such alteration."
Sally studied him. He seemed to be telling the truth. His panic seemed genuine, and it would be a foolhardy move by him, to alter the footage when he was the only one with direct access.
But then…
"What about analog access?" she asked, giving him an out. "A physical interruption?"
"Ah well," Palmer began, "I'm sure that could've been physically manipulated? Someone could have, perhaps, hot-wired the feed?"
Rowley made a face. Sally interpreted that to mean Palmer was spit balling.
"What about a maintenance company?" she asked. "I know of one company, Reactor Logistics, which has serviced this facility for years. It may still be operating here, for all I know, though the original company director, one Reginald Rook, is deceased."
She caught a reaction from Mayhew, a narrowing of her eyes, maybe, before Palmer answered.
"I, ah… That would be a matter we'd have to look into, I think?"
"You don't know all the people working at your reactor, Dr. Palmer?"
"That is a complicated question." He drew himself up. "At any point there are at least 100 workers on site. Many are from smaller, but highly vetted and trusted, specialist service providers. All go through stringent security and psychological tests. I don't think that–"
"The exact camera we need is out at the exact time we need it. Are you saying that's purely a coincidence?"
"Rogers," warned Mayhew. "Climb down."
"I'm suggesting nothing of the sort," Palmer said.
His tone had shifted now, becoming haughty.
"Simply that the system is old and has faults.
We will conduct a complete internal investigation, I assure you.
Reactor Logistics, you said? We'll look into it.
Now, if you don't mind, I have a reactor to decommission. "
He waved a hand and the monitors reverted to blanks.
"Decommission away," Sally countered. "You've got 20 years, so there's no rush. In the meantime, we'll need a full duty list for every person and entity on the reactor's grounds yesterday and this morning."
Palmer's face turned to ash. "Of course, we will comply with any legal request."
"You mean a warrant? What happened to 'alacrity'?"
"We will move as swiftly as possible. Now, my associates will show you out."
He turned to the blank screens. The underlings waved toward the corridor. Sally took one last look around the control room then strode out.