15. Section 18
Sally and Liam headed up the Umberside Lodge trail, toward her Mustang. At the intersection with Dungeness Road, Liam's Audi had now sunk halfway into the marsh. There were no more sirens, no police presence, but that was no surprise. Every free car would be out hunting the Rooks.
"They battered the hell out of my door," Liam observed.
"Now it's got character," Sally said, then pointed at his neck. A long red welt was appearing where the seatbelt had dug in. "You too."
He touched his throat as they continued along the road. "Yeah. I could've just got a tattoo." He looked over. "You said you fought him, Sally. Are you hurt?"
She refrained from touching her own throat. "I'm fine. The dogs almost got me, but the marsh slowed them down."
"You're basically wearing the marsh. It's like a Ghillie suit."
She smiled. Her Mustang lay ahead. She reached it, opened the door and looked inside. The seat was damp and muddy already from the Mud Beast. It was about to get a whole lot worse.
"Looks like a bomb hit this place," Liam said, taking in the rubbish-filled passenger footwell. "Are you living in here? I thought you had an apartment on the Thames."
"It's in better shape than your Audi," Sally countered, then slipped into the seat, feeling the mud grind into the fabric.
"This thing's a rental, yeah?" Liam muttered, kicking a big enough gap in the trash to slide himself in.
"The Rooks can pay for the damage," Sally said, then started the engine and pulled back onto the road.
In moments they were skimming through the misting rain, back past the entrance to the reactor and the black lighthouse, south then east on Dungeness Road. They passed several press vans parked on the shingle, reporters out on their boxes with the reactor as backdrop, then reached a police line.
Sally showed her badge and they passed through.
"This place is so weird," Liam murmured, looking out of the window at the expanse of stony beach, studded with the same three houses she'd knocked at earlier. "Like purgatory. And these houses. What kind of person wants to live here?"
"An old guy who killed his family and a girl with a fisherman father," Sally answered.
He turned to her. "What? Killed his family?"
"Accidental, apparently. The Seafoam Strangler."
"What is that, local mythology? How do you know it?"
Sally felt a grin tugging at her lips. They hadn't been like this with each other in months. "Keep up, Liam. I've been at this since dawn, knocking on doors. The old guy heard the dogs, the girl too."
Liam muttered something under his breath, maybe, "Bloody Yanks," and Sally's grin spread wider.
"This Seafoam Strangler, he's not a suspect?"
"He's got cataracts in both eyes, couldn't even see the Crab Shack in front of his own door, so I don't think so. No way he could navigate a boat at night right up to Reactor A. Nor drag a body up the beach in the dark."
Liam grunted. "Just local color, then."
"About that."
She pulled onto the shore road and parked on the cracked sidewalk. The shack lay ahead of them, a low oblong cutting across the horizon line.
"Looks like the wind's settled down some," Liam said, peering up through the windshield. "No more flying tents."
"There's no place like home," Sally murmured, then opened the door and stepped out. The wind had faded and there was a chink of blue sky showing through the black clouds.
"Fickle," he muttered.
Sally started across the shingle. Liam disentangled himself from some torn-open envelopes and followed. The rain had eased, but Sally felt it carrying mud and grit down the back of her neck.
She stopped in front of the shack, metal bar in hand.
"And there's the camera." Liam pointed at the blinking red light. "I guess you're doing the honors?"
"Almost did this a couple of hours ago," Sally said, then slotted the bar into the padlock loop and pulled down.
The padlock was new, the clasp too, and neither buckled, but the door itself did; the thin, rotten clapboard tearing until the bolt hung loose from the padlock loop. The door swung outward and Sally pulled it open then stepped into the gloom.
The wind cut away, reduced to a low whistle through cracks in the walls. Rank smells hit as her eyes adjusted to the gloom; ancient cooking oil, old fish, damp. Black mold bloomed in large patches on the walls and ceiling.
She took it in. The single narrow window facing inland, half-boarded and frosted with salt.
Dust lay thick over a pair of warped metal counters.
There were plastic tubs containing some dry, blackened matter.
A rusted fryer in the corner. Coils of nylon rope hung from nails.
A small Labubu doll lay in the center of the floor, covered in silver sequins with rainbow hair and a unicorn horn.
"That's recent," Liam said, pointing.
The old rage welled up in Sally's chest. Just how old had those girls at Umberside Lodge been?
"One of the girls," she said. "Feels like proof they were here last night."
"Fingerprints and DNA will prove that. We leave it for Akilota."
Sally returned to scanning the sad, dark space for the camera monitor or DVR, but couldn't find it. There was nothing to display, nothing to record onto. Just a thin black cable ran through the wall from the camera, along the side to end at a small black block screwed onto the wall.
"Is that it?" Liam asked.
The block was a waterproof case with a simple fastener. Sally reached up, pulling a length of clean-ish fabric over her fingers, and popped it open. Inside lay a single 12-volt battery.
"Bastards," she whispered, her hand dropping back to her side. Suddenly she felt so drained. No transmitter. No recording system. Just power.
"It's a scarecrow," Liam said. "Enough to blink red in the dark. Scare off local kids, maybe. Nothing more."
Sally exhaled. No CCTV footage of the beach. No sighting of the killer. No hard evidence at all. That was a blow, but maybe it helped confirm her theory.
"It makes a kind of sense," she said softly. "If the Rooks are ferrying illegal immigrants through here, dropped off by some cross-Channel gang, nobody really wants that recorded, do they?"
Liam said nothing. The wind wheezed through the cracks in the thin wall. Sally pictured five young women, girls, huddled here after a traumatic, wave-tossed Channel crossing. Scared. Cold. Locked in place, stragglers in a strange new land, not knowing what fate awaited them.
Maybe they were the way in.
"The girls." She turned to Liam. "You said they were foreign. Do we have a translator?"
He thought a moment. "By now? Perhaps. I think they were speaking Hungarian, but who knows? Why, you think they might have seen something?"
"They could have." Sally surveyed the shack a final time. The black mold. The Labubu. "Any trafficker worth their salt would've dumped them in here and padlocked the door from outside, and you can't see a thing through this window, but while they were in transit? It's possible."
Liam raised his phone. "I'll call the DCI, try and get us in with them."