42. Love, Anton
The routine grounded her, running fast past slower joggers and dog-walkers. At the end of the line she'd stand and look up at the great clocktower as various activists set up their loudspeakers, politicians scurried from their dark saloons and journalists prowled amongst them.
Then she'd turn and jog more slowly back to the NCA HQ. Badge in, shower and set to work opposite Liam. They'd ignore each other largely, working down their paperwork stacks while she planned next steps in her hunt for the Louisiana killer.
Every day, that had been her routine. Her compulsion.
Today she felt no drive to run. No overwhelming urge to push herself. All she felt was a lump of cold fear in her chest.
She kicked her legs out of the covers, sat on the edge of the chilly bed and scrolled her phone messages. Nothing from Liam. She called him but there was still no answer. She got out of bed, opened the door and went to his room, knocking three times, then three times more.
Only silence.
Where was he?
Back in her room, she paced, numbly scrolling the rest of her messages. Only one stood out to her. Anton Mylovich, the Lincolnshire father still searching for his daughter's killer.
She brought it up.
There were always attachments to Mylovich's messages. Photographs, maps of the breakfast club, his latest research. This time there was one zip file, 83 megabytes in size.
She'd only met Mylovich once, in a coffee shop not far from his daughter's school. Two months after the killing, there'd still been flowers outside the gates, but wilted. There'd been cards and teddies sodden with rain.
He'd been manic, though. Clearly sleep-deprived. Driven to find an answer, but she'd had nothing to give him.
She opened the email.
'Dear Sally,
I'm sorry, this will be our last communication. It has become too much for me. I see my dear Clarabel everywhere, and I cannot bear it any longer.
Please find attached my research. There is something here, I know it, but I just can't find it. Perhaps you will have more luck.
I am sorry to ask this of you. I know you have suffered more than any of us. You and all your Sisters deserved so much better.
Do not fear for me now. I am with my Clarabel again.
Love,
Anton.'
Sally's breath stilled. She read it again, but jammed at 'my dear Clarabel'. Tears welled in her eyes as she thought of the lost girls of Lincoln, and the lost girls of Louisiana.
Her friends. Her sorority Sisters. All leaving her alone after Louisiana. No parents by her bedside. That old, overwhelming sense of loss swamped her like a tide rolling back in. Liam lost. Cagen dead. The case spiraling.
The urge to run crashed over her like a Dungeness storm. Her breathing grew harsh and tight, like she was back in the dirt of Dark Peak, back under the pile of bodies in the APB sorority house...
With shaking fingers she ran an Internet search. An article on the BBC shut down any last sliver of hope.
'Father of Lincolnshire victim takes his own life.'
Her body shook. From a plastic bag she dragged her filthy, soaking, stinking marsh clothes and yanked them on roughly. Grit scratched down her face.
Then she burst from the room, down the stairs and out onto the streets of Rye. She began at a sprint, in the dark, ignoring every ache in her battered body. She sped east across the rolling Rother, southeast along the bank, past the golf club, past the Camber caravan camps, down to the sea.
She hit the beach and sped up. Sand, shingle, rocks. The vast, deserted expanse of Dungeness. Miles tore by and the pain built in her worn muscles, dashing away tears as they spilled.
But she couldn't outrun how abandoned she'd felt, alone in her hospital bed. She remembered seeing the parents of the other Sisters, watching their pain and not understanding.
"My darling," one of the mothers had said to her, at the mass funeral in St. Louis Cathedral. She'd pulled her close, crying into Sally's hair, squeezing with all her strength. "My poor, poor darling."
Her own parents hadn't been there.
"I'm OK," Sally had said. "I'm fine."
She ran harder. The Gray Lady lapped on her right, at its furthest ebb. Slack tide. Secrets in the shingle. Nancy Cagen should be here now, patrolling this shore, haunted by her own past. Now she was just another ghost.
The miles tore by and Sally kept the pace punishing. Rain lashed her. The wind cut deep. An hour, longer. Stray thoughts flashed through her mind, each flattened in seconds by the memory of Mylovich's letter.
Then back to the deaths. Jason Harrow. Nancy Cagen. Back to Liam, lost, relapsed, hiding in the dark.
She kept running until she passed the lamp post, sprinting the last stretch through driving curtains of rain to the blocky, corpse-like splay of the Dungeness reactors. She stopped in the place where Harrow's body had been found, lungs bursting and pulse crashing, bent double.
There was no sign now of his passage. The shingle was pure and unruffled. The strand line unbroken. None of that changed the truth, though. A young man had died here.
Sally straightened and stared at the reactor, wreathed in scaffold and rain.
Figures in hi-vis orange moved within it, barely visible through the drizzle, each a cog in some unknowable machine.
Her eyes had finally dried. The pain in her chest had shifted, transmuted by the long run into something so cold it burned.
Rage.
Unstoppable. Unbreakable.
Nothing else mattered now. She'd tear the marsh apart to bring justice to this narrow stretch of Kent coast. To find this killer and make them pay.
Her legs trembled. She checked her phone; nearly 7 a.m. All the Rooks were in custody now. Maybe Mayhew had gotten something on the boats from Jerome Rook. If not, Sally had to get in there with him and get some answers, whatever it took.