73. The River
Jack Mercer didn't hear the blast, but he knew the Dymchurch sea wall was gone.
He'd waited until the last moment, almost out of range, to push the button and trigger the gasoline bomb hidden at the edge of Gerald Spate's caravan park.
Planted in one of the exact weak points his 'friend' Arthur Bledd had so often railed about.
Greatstone. Dymchurch. Scots Float.
The marsh's clearest points of failure.
He laughed.
"What's funny?" asked Glory Hallelujah. Sitting by his side. Just one more job nearing completion.
"Thinking about Sally Rogers," he covered easily. "How she led us right to Bledd, but let Logan blind her to the truth."
Glory seemed to accept that. She still had the manila folder out, straining to read the materials within, but struggling. The light was weak, the rain a constant distraction, the print font tiny. He'd done that on purpose, along with the dense paragraphs of information.
All of it was true or close to true, constructed over the last few hours, much of it repurposed from his own story, combined with a hodge-podge conspiracy of muddled genealogy, curious happenstance and random interconnections that only needed to last 10 minutes longer.
His expertise. It was how he'd stayed above suspicion for decades. Watching. Listening. Waiting. Covering with the near-guilt of others, and every time, it felt better.
The first had been a thrill. Tom Richter had been so easy. A hint of friendship, a spiked beer, then he was laying him down on the beach. Smoothing his hair, like he was someone's beloved son. Now all alone in that desolate space.
It had felt so right.
Then Harrow, left for Nancy Cagen to find. Then Cagen herself.
The thought of that hag's death left a bitter taste in Mercer's mouth even now.
Killing her should have been better than all the rest combined.
Laying her down between the great sound mirrors, those vast listening ears, should have felt amazing.
Slicing off her ears. Watching her try to beg through the ketamine haze.
Instead, he'd felt only pain. As if he was the one dying, not her. As if the past was dragging him down, not the other way around.
He'd had such hopes, coming back to Dungeness at 31 years old. Already enmeshed in the police. Returning to a father who was only 14 years older. It hadn't exactly been a welcome with open arms, but Reg had given him a role in his world; a hole the police had never managed to fill.
It was a place to be. His first real taste of belonging, in a lonely, solitary life spent bouncing between foster homes and government care facilities. Even if he wasn't allowed to join Reg in the pub with his mates, or come around to his home, the man was still his father.
Then Reg asked him to kill Richter.
Kill him and pin it on Bledd. This is how you prove yourself, son. And it had been so easy. He'd just done it then gone back to Reg. Proud. Expecting to finally be accepted.
Reg had slapped his face.
"Are you fucking mental, boy?" the older man spat, standing out on the barrens of Dungeness beach. "You've just put every copper in Kent on my doorstep. They'll be all over me for years. And you've done this, you psycho little shit!"
Mercer's jaw had stung, but worse was the rising tide of shame. "But… I did exactly what you asked."
"Cover him in shells, we said!" Reg fumed. "Not stick them in his bloody eyes! You've made a legend here, boy, and you better hope Bledd swings for it soon, or we all will."
"I'll make up for it," he said quickly, feeling the shingle shifting beneath his feet. "None of this will ever come back on you."
"It better bloody not." Reg jabbed him hard in the chest. "And the second my name comes out the mouth of any copper in Kent, that bastard goes down too. Understand?"
"Yes, Dad. Of course. I'll–"
Another slap. This one harder, almost a punch.
"I'm not your Dad, am I? Least not until you sort this out, you useless prick. Earn the name, boy. Earn it!"
He'd fled. Wept. Drank. Then he'd done the work. Twisted the investigation at every possible step. Lost documents and misplaced leads. Misheard witnesses and pushed the Bledd theory, though it never caught on.
Nobody dared say Reg Rook's name. Nobody went near his businesses.
Until one person did.
"What's this about Reg Rook having a child at 14 years old?" Glory asked, by his side.
Mercer snapped back to the present, then almost laughed again. She almost had everything she needed, but she would never suspect him. That was the power of family, something Reg had taught him, and it was funny. He jerked the wheel abruptly, forcing Glory to spill the papers in the footwell.
"Sorry," he said, "thought I saw someone in the road."
Glory spun, scanning the rear window. "A person, out in this?"
"God, I hope not. Can you keep lookout? It's taking everything I've got to stay on the road."
"Of course."
She rested a hand on his arm. That was nice. He wondered how her face would shift when he finally pushed the button that brought all this lonely, aching misery to an end.
Chaos. Order. The only answer he'd found in his years of banishment in London, after Reg sent him away a second time.
"It's getting too hot here, son," he'd said, this time out in the marsh.
"You've done me proud. You really have. But now I need you to sod off for a while until things cool down, or the whole family comes crashing down.
A sacrifice for the whole; then you'll come back.
Take your rightful place as my eldest. You understand that, right? "
He'd said he did. He'd left. He'd waited. He'd worked hollow-eyed for the Met, doing a job that didn't matter. He'd waited and watched and listened, and the fog hadn't shifted until word finally came to him that Reg had died.
Then he'd finally seen the truth.
His father had never intended to call him back.
Family wasn't real. Blood relations didn't matter. Fathers and sons, mothers and daughters. None of it meant anything, because family was a choice, one made not just once, but again and again.
And no one had ever chosen him. In that moment, he'd glimpsed his answer.
"What's that?" Glory asked, leaning forward to peer into the side mirror.
Mercer heard it then, the distant whine of a siren. He peered into his rearview, through the gray and the storm, but couldn't see anything. Just the tides swelling down the road, the sea backfilling across the marsh through the holes he'd blown in their defenses.
Then there.
He saw it. Now he laughed out loud. Blue and red lights flashing in the murk. It wasn't possible. How could it be? He'd left them all at the station. But then the girl was crazy. The boy would follow her anywhere. It had to be them.
"Why are you laughing?" Glory asked, but he couldn't stop now. He pushed the accelerator down and the van surged forward.
Sally Rogers. Liam O'Connell. The first time he'd met them he'd felt it, but the second was when he'd been sure. At his houseboat on the Rother, when he'd already had Nancy Cagen dosed in his living room just yards away. He'd teased them about rhubarb while Cagen breathed her final breaths.
What a merry chase.
"It's a police car," Glory said. "Stop, Jack. We have to see what they want."
"Your father was just like them," he said, pushing the gas down harder. He was so close now.
"My father?"
He turned and looked into her eyes. "He kept on pushing. Always asking questions. It made him a brilliant detective. And an easy target."
He watched the shift as her eyes went round and big. 30 years, this moment had been coming.
"What are you saying?"
It was time.
"I watched over you, that night. Afterward. Asleep in your bed. I thought even then, some part of you knew I was there. Some part of you understood."
The silence carried, then she spoke again, her voice quavering like a child on the verge of tears. "What are you saying, Uncle Jack?"
Mercer savored it. Family broke everybody in the end. The belief. The failure.
"I think you know, Glory. I think you've always known."
She leaned forward. The lights grew brighter behind them, the siren louder.
"You can't," she muttered. Her arms came up slowly, reaching toward the wheel as if through mud. "Jack, you can't mean–"
"Your father was like a father to me, too," Mercer said, then looked at her one last time. "But he wasn't my father, was he?"
She lurched into motion, grabbing for the wheel.
He lashed out harder. The point of his elbow hammered little Glory Hallelujah in the cheek and smashed her back into her seat.
The shock reverberated up his elbow. It felt so good. 30 years in the making, since he'd stood over DCI Stewart on the floor of his own garage, the noose around his neck, gazing mutely as Mercer started hoisting him up.
People would do anything for family.
The siren screamed. The lights flared. Then the impact came.