54. Everything Would Change
Liam O'Connell sat in the dark of his second room at the Mermaid Inn, a bottle before him, half-drunk already.
Voices carried up through the floor from the bar below. Not officers, not anyone he knew, just ordinary people on a Wednesday night. Laughing, talking, living their lives. But there was an edge.
He'd heard that same edge many times in the station before he left. It always came through different words, always disguised, but impossible to ignore.
The fear. He'd heard it from DS Flaherty, in between tears for Emily Chakrati, asking numbly, 'What's going to happen now?
' He'd heard it from Simms and Gemmell, exchanging ideas on Bledd and Mensah, but too loud; as if brashness could make up for a death.
He'd heard it from DCI Mayhew's face, as she gave her statement to the press, trying to project strength despite her obvious grief, and revealing more.
Rye was afraid. The killer had claimed a police officer. A blast on the beach itself. Three victims now. Possibly more, if Bledd and Mensah had been framed. Where were their bodies?
Sally had started off that line of thought. He hadn't believed her then. But now?
'Shut your mouth, O'Connell,' DI Gemmell had said. 'She saved your fucking life.'
He'd been right. And what had Liam done for her in return, but sunk the knife in deeper?
He knocked back another shot of the cheap whisky. It burned all the way down, brought on the fog, but still the edge crawled through, boring into him.
Sally was gone, and everything felt colder. He began to feel the shape of what he'd done setting like concrete inside him; a permanent change, forcing him to twist and stretch around it, contorting in ways he didn't think he could survive.
Wilcot had started this, but Liam couldn't lay the blame there. He'd made the choice, and now Sally was finished. 40 minutes in a room with Mayhew and a recorder, answering every question accurately, and he'd watched himself damn her for good.
He raised the bottle.
Down in the bar somebody laughed, somebody else shouted, "No, no, that's not what she said at all, that's just the papers, that's just what the papers said about her."
Liam stopped with the bottle an inch from his mouth. It had to be about Sally. He pressed the bottle the rest of the way to his lips, crushing them hard. But he didn't drink.
The papers. What the papers say.
Was there something there?
He wasn't sure. It was tiny, like the flicker of a spark in a dark night. It needed kindling, and care, and time to grow into something bright. He sat like that for a while, arm bent, the whisky tilted so temptingly against his lips, and realized who he'd really damned with that debrief.
It wasn't just Sally.
An image came to him from the darkness. DCI Stewart, hanging from a rope in his own garage. Defeated by the case, maybe. More likely defeated by something he'd done, or hadn't done.
But it was too late, now. He'd made his own bed. Time to lie in it.
Gloria Mayhew had not meant to come to this place.
She had meant to drive home. She had got as far as the Winchelsea road and then found herself turning, and now she stood in the dark at the edge of St. Thomas's with the rain coming sideways off the marsh and her coat not buttoned.
The stone was small. He hadn't wanted anything else; her mother had been very firm about that, in the years when her mother still spoke about it.
'ROBERT JOHN STEWART'
She had not brought flowers. She never did. She had come here perhaps nine times in 30 years and every single time she had stood exactly here, brimming with emotions she'd never fully understood.
Anger at how he'd left her. Despair, that he'd seen no other way.
Sadness, because despite it all, she missed him.
He'd been such a good father. All her memories of him, hiding beneath his desk at the station, running between the officers in the bullpen, playing tag with Uncle Jack in the parking lot, at the dinner table, over Lego in their living room, it just didn't add up.
None of it added up.
Why had he done something so permanent? Why had he left her? She'd never understood, and she ached to.
Rain ran down her cheek. Never tears. She hadn't cried for him once. She tried to think of something she could say, some words that might matter, but as ever she found none.
She stayed another few minutes. There were no answers. Then she went back to the car and sat with her hands on the wheel, not starting the engine, until the windows had fogged completely and there was nothing to see out of them at all.
Tania Brown was still at her desk in her rented room at the Albion Hotel, Lydd. That was unusual, because Tania Brown would normally be in a bar somewhere by now, drinking cocktails and putting the smut of the day behind her.
But not tonight. She had two documents open in front of her.
The first was the one everybody else would run tomorrow. THE AMERICAN WHO GOT AN OFFICER KILLED. It was easy. Clean. It would do numbers for four days and then be gone, and she would be the 40th person to file it.
The second document was empty. There had to be another angle. Something that turned the whole thing on its edge, a spin, a way to turn this bread-and-butter teardown into something unique. Special. Career-making.
She'd worked for too long and too hard, seen too many opportunities pass her by, to just let this one go. It was there, it had to be, she could almost taste it.
She looked at the photograph again, taken two days earlier with a telephoto lens.
It had come out remarkably, given the rain and the wind.
It showed Sally Rogers sprinting across Dungeness beach against a black sky, dressed in her bloody fitness gear, hair torn sideways, covered in mud.
She'd sat on it ever since, feeling something in her bones, though she hadn't known what.
The villain story bought half a day of middling coverage. But something fresh? Flip her to a hero, maybe? That could be worth a fortnight, if she could figure it out. Maybe even a book.
All the pieces seemed to be there, but she couldn't stitch them together. Too tired, maybe. She ran a hand down her face and checked the time. Coming on for midnight. She had a dawn filing deadline, and had no intention of sleeping until she'd run every possible idea into the ground.
She went to the tiny kitchenette, really just a tray with a kettle, and prepped an instant coffee, her second since 10 p.m. She settled back into her seat, fingers on keys, straining for inspiration.
Then her phone rang. Not so unusual when she was on a deadline. She checked the display. Now that was unusual. She didn't quite believe it, but the numbers didn't lie.
She answered and raised the phone to her ear.
He washed a cup, standing in his tight but perfectly neat, perfectly ordered kitchen.
He did it properly. Inside first, then the rim, then the handle, then the base, which nobody ever did. He rinsed it and held it up and turned it under the little yellow bulb until he was satisfied, then he dried it and put it on the shelf with the others, handle out, all in a line.
The rain came down on the roof with a hard, metallic patter. Getting louder. That was the storm coming on already. In the background, the weather channel on the radio upgraded its predictions for wind strength, rainfall and high tides across the south of England.
The wait had been so long.
Now he looked at the shelf. There were four cups on it. For a time, maybe another answer had seemed possible. But now he knew the truth. There had only ever needed to be one.
He took the towel and hung it straight off the oven's handle. He turned off the light and stood in the dark listening to the river passing by, moving south, always flowing, going where it always went.
Everything was ready for tomorrow. Tomorrow, when everything would change.