70. Together
The folder lay open on Gloria Mayhew's lap, barely visible in the gray half-light, while the van's wipers beat time across the windscreen.
Jack Mercer drove without speaking.
She turned a page. Photocopies, most of them, the print gone soft and smudged.
A birth register. A name blacked out and another written beside it.
She read the same three lines twice and took nothing in, then gave up, looking out as Romney Marsh went by on both sides, one great flat sheet of standing water.
Twenty minutes ago she'd been in her office, on the radio with the CTSFOs in Rye train station. A train had shut down just short of the platform due to a flooded track, and tempers were flaring.
Then Jack Mercer stepped in without knocking.
She buried the flicker of annoyance, because this was Uncle Jack, after all.
Her father's DI and best friend. She had clear memories of him from her childhood: hiding under his desk at Rye station, giggling uncontrollably while her father stalked through the office booming, 'Fi Fo Fum'; having dinner at their house, his laugh carrying over a barbecue while she pelted around the garden with a plastic sword.
Then afterward, too. He'd been so solemn, on one knee in that same garden, wearing his black suit and tie. Telling her that if she ever needed anything. If he could ever help in any way.
And now he was here.
She closed out the call and gave him her full attention. "What can I do for you, Jack?"
His face was grave. He shut the door behind him and came to her desk.
"I just learned something, Glory." That was his old nickname for her, Glory Hallelujah. She'd loved it when she was a child. "Something that could be definitive. But I'm worried your station's compromised."
She stood. If there was anyone she trusted, it was Uncle Jack. "Compromised? What makes you say that?"
"I've been monitoring movements of people through the station. I hope you'll forgive me, but I placed trackers on several vehicles. Illicit, I know, but you need to know what I found out."
None of that was good. Not procedurally, not for her, not for him, and not for whatever it threatened. But this was Uncle Jack.
"What did you find?"
He lowered his voice. "There's a paramedic called John Logan.
He's been at all the locations where the killer struck.
His vehicle has visited them multiple times in the days and hours since.
So I've been looking into him." A pause.
"And I just got confirmation from an old contact.
Logan's actually directly related to the Rooks. "
She froze, working that through. She'd met Logan. Crossed paths with him half a dozen times. At the reactors that first morning. At the Mustang crash site. Around the station, patching up her teams.
"Related how?"
"It turns out, John Logan is Reg Rook's son."
"He's what?"
"I know. Before Roarke and the others. They had Logan adopted out. I've got all the paperwork here." He raised the manila folder. "I think Logan killed Harrow on Reg Rook's standing orders."
The world tunneled around her. "That's impossible. I know him."
"Do you know him that well? Plus, I believe he was working with Arthur Bledd."
"Bledd and Logan?"
"More family connections, through Nancy Cagen." Jack waved the folder. "It's all here, Glory. But more importantly, I think they've waited for this moment. The storm." He gestured around him. "Maybe for years. And now they're planning an attack on the Dungeness reactors."
Her eyes flared. "What? If that's true, we need to notify them. Send CTSFOs, AROs, everything. We have to–"
"It's not going to work," Jack said, cutting across her.
"My tracking dot shows Logan's last known location was in Reactor A lot.
He's already there, Glory, and he's plugged into all our frequencies.
Last I heard, he's even started a physical relationship with your assigned NCA officer, Sally Rogers. "
Mayhew gasped. She'd heard the rumblings about that. "She can't be involved. She just got here!"
"Not involved, Glory. Compromised."
He raised the folder again. Her eyes locked onto it. All the answers she'd been hunting for years could be in there. Everything, since the day her father died. The need to see it out burned through her thoughts.
"So what are you suggesting, Jack?"
"You and I, we go now. We go quietly. We interrupt Logan and Bledd before they can trigger whatever bomb they've built. If we do anything else, if we turn up with the full cavalry, they'll blow it."
She tried to absorb that. It was so much. So many answers at once. Family relations. A plan in motion for years, just waiting for a storm.
"I need to see—"
"It's yours." Mercer tossed the folder onto her desk. "Call it in if you like, Glory, but I'm going. Now. I have to. I can't let what happened to your father happen to you too." His voice ached with that old pain. "Not when we're this close."
He waited a moment longer, then turned and strode away.
She'd looked at the empty doorway. Then at the folder. Then she snatched it up and went after him, down the corridor, breaking into a jog through the bullpen. Jack was already out of sight; following him felt like chasing the ghost of her father.
DI Gemmell stood as she passed.
"Ma'am, we've got new intel on—"
"Handle it, DI," she snapped and kept running.
"Where are you going, ma'am?"
She didn't answer, just burst out of the station into the driving rain. Jack wasn't there. The one man who'd been there for her after her father died, until even he'd gone too. The pain had been too much, he'd told her, a year after the deaths. At her father's graveside.
"I'm sorry, Glory Hallelujah. Fathers and sons. Mothers and daughters. Sometimes you just have to go."
Standing in the car park of her own station she became that lost little child again.
Then a horn sounded across the lot and the lights flashed on. Her heart leapt and she ran to him, in the driver's seat of a white panel van. He leaned over to open the door for her, smiling.
"We'll do it together, Glory."
Together.
Now the marsh streamed past the window, dark water lying flat over every field, and the folder sat open on her knees with the shadows of the rain moving across it. It was so hard to read in the half-light, so hard to focus with the storm bearing down.
Still, she turned another page. The truth had to be in here somewhere…