Page 191 of Slack Tide Kill

His alone.

The wall ahead was gray, concrete, a slapdash affair likely repainted every few months. Covering all the dents from its inmates, all flowing through here one after another, dozens of lives split by their crimes and their punishment. He felt he could spend a lifetime just studying those marks, reading the stories behind them all.

He missed his houseboat, but this was better. He'd been on both sides of the law now, and this felt more honest. He'd always been chaos, he realized. Order had never really worked for him, though he'd aped it well. Chaos behind bars.

They probably even believed, with his grand mission failed, that he would never kill again.

Only he knew that they were wrong. He'd wait, like he had before. Years, if it took that long. Wait for them to relax their guard. Take him out of solitary. Make him part of the general population. Then, when the moment came, he'd take it. A guard. A prisoner. It didn't really matter. The river didn't care which soul he sent its way.

Down to join Arthur Bledd. Nia Mensah. All the rest.

Somewhere down the corridor a door clanged, and a man laughed wildly at something, and the sound echoed around the gray walls thin and reedy and so full of want.

Maybe it would be him.

The churchyard at St. Thomas's was still half under water, gloomy even in the mid-afternoon light.

Gloria Mayhew came up the path slowly, one hand on the wall where the going was worst, because her ribs wouldn't let her do it any other way. Her skin still tingled all over, residue from the hypothermia, but a good sign, the doctors had said. Blood was repairing all her cells at the same time.

They'd wanted her to stay longer, remain under observation, but she had to leave. She had to come here, no matter how much it hurt, all the way to his small, cold gravestone.

ROBERT JOHN STEWART

She'd never brought flowers before, but this time she had. A bouquet of white lilies with a handwritten card. Her mother said they were what he'd always bought for her.

She stood in the wet grass and spoke to her father for the first time in so long.

"Hi, Dad. It's been a while."

Slowly, haltingly, she told him all of it. From Richter on the shingle to the garage of their old home, where his trusted friend and DI Jack Mercer had ended his life. She wept, but went on. She talked about the days and years that followed, as his absence took its toll. As the idea of what he'd done dug a hole in her that had never healed, only scarred.

All the way through to the end. Harrow, Cagen, the race to the reactors and the ultimate arrest of Jack Mercer.

For 30 years she'd believed his lie. That it had been her father's choice. That some door in him had just shut, and little Glory Hallelujah hadn't been somehow enough to keep it open. That he'd just passed through and left her on the other side.

None of it was true.

"I'm so sorry, Dad," she said, at the end.

The tears came in earnest, flowing down her cheeks with no sign of stopping, and nor did she want them to. These tears meant that he'd always loved her. She'd always loved him, and that was real and true.

"I've missed you so much, Dad."

After it was all said, and the tears stilled, she felt a shift in herself. For the first time in her life, this empty hole in her chest began to change. Not heal, exactly. It would never really heal. The grief was still there, as ever, but it finally felt clean. Honest. Something she could build on.

She stayed a time longer, until the tears stopped and the cold crept into her bones. The flowers were so bright and white against his gravestone. Thirty years. At the end, she put two fingers on the top of the stone, something she'd never done before, like a kiss, then went back down the sodden path to her car.

By the afternoon of the second day, Liam was no longer drifting in and out of consciousness. He was not on concussion watch like Sally, and was starting to feel better. While Sally dozed in the bed to his left, the doctor gave him crutches and said it would do him good to walk around a little.

So he did.

Outside their private ward, the hospital thrummed with motion. Doctors and nurses rushed back and forth, patients in gurneys lined the corridors, children cried, the A and E was full and ambulances kept coming in and disgorging more people.

Slathered in marsh water and mud. Hollow-eyed, hungry, searching. But alive.

He sat in the canteen and watched the world flow by. Families came in and out. Some visiting, some admitted. Tears, hugs, some shouts, some kisses. He drank coffee and nibbled on biscuits and thought about the odd path his life had taken.

His phone rang.