Page 120 of Slack Tide Kill

Because she was finished now. He was certain of that, more certain than he'd been of anything in weeks, and the certainty was a warm stone in his chest. He knew exactly how it went from here because he had watched it go this way a hundred times before. It had happened last time, too.

There would be thin reports in national newspapers. Words offered by quiet men in high places, speaking of regret. The word unfortunate used several times in one statement. Then the car back to London, and a desk somewhere, and she'd spend the next several years, if not the rest of her career, learning to hate paperwork.

They would do it to her themselves. He wouldn't have to touch her at all.

That was disappointing, but perhaps fitting. He'd spent his whole life watching institutions eat the only people in them worth anything. Now for once the machine was going to run in his favor, and all he had to do was stand still and let it.

She had been the single one of them with any wit. He'd known it the morning she came up that beach dressed wrong, and now he was sorry about it in a distant way, the way you're sorry when weather takes a good tree. He'd no longer get to take out his axe and fell it himself.

She was off the board. The rest of them were set dressing on the finale he had planned. He let out a long breath and watched the fires burning on the water.

51 LIVE WITH IT

Liam O'Connell stood on the shingle and watched the tide take pieces of Arthur Bledd's houseboat away.

They moved slowly at first, little black shapes turning in the gray water. Planks. Rope. A length of red-painted timber. Something round and metal that might have been part of a bicycle wheel. Then the current caught them properly and drew them out, all of it thinning into the Channel until even the larger pieces became hard to separate from the chop.

The boat was no more. The blast had punched it open like a rotten lung.

Where it had sat lay only blackened wreckage on the waterline and a smell that would not leave him. Petrol. Burned plastic. Something else beneath it that his mind refused to name.

He stood with a foil blanket around his shoulders, borrowed tracksuit bottoms clinging wetly to his legs, one side of his face still hot from the blast. Prospect Cottage glowed behind him, black walls and yellow frames stark under the emergency lights, while the beach around it became a working disaster area. Fire crews in helmets. Forensics in white suits. Officers moving in tight fingertip search loops, some making calls, taking notes, all pretending activity was the same thing as control.

And Sally was gone.

That was the strangest part.

One moment she'd been right there, screaming in his face, punching the breath from his body, dragging him through water. The next she was slinking off the beach, alone. He knew what that meant. He'd known ever since he'd given his debrief in the morning.

He'd told no lies. Only the truth. But it wasn't loyal. It had felt clean at the time, right, but now?

Now he remembered Gemmell telling him to shut up. That was right too. So what did that leave? Him standing here, breathing air he had no particular right to, thinking about how close it had just been. Chakrati was gone, and he'd been seconds away from sharing her fate.

"O'Connell?"

He straightened.

Mayhew stood nearby, her face gray with exhaustion, hair coming loose from its pins. Her coat was soaked, one cheek was marked red where Sally had slammed into her. She looked older than she had this morning.

"You're up for debrief," she said.

"I'll get to it."

Her eyes sharpened. For a moment he thought she might snap at him, but the anger seemed to gutter out before it formed.

"Still no sign of Bledd or Mensah," she said. "Techs are processing the cottage."

He grunted. "They'll only find what the killer wants us to find."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It's like Sally said. The boat was a trap, and she saw it before any of us."

She took a moment. "It seems that way."

"I don't think Bledd did this either."

Mayhew's jaw tightened. "Get your statement done, O'Connell."