Page 66 of Slack Tide Kill

Hawlin's face lit up. "Ah. Thank you, ma'am! Em will be stoked to hear that."

"Keep it up. Oh, and here's the file Emily gave me." She held out the sheaf of papers. "Can you get it back to her?"

"Of course."

Back in the Mustang and leaving Rye, they stopped for chicken and mushroom pasties and steak bakes from a Greggs, then ate while they drove.

"How's your Audi looking?" Sally asked, mouth half-full with pastie, circling the one-way system to the Camber Road south.

"Totaled," Liam said, chewing. "In the Hastings impound. Once water's past the floor board, it's done."

"Sucks."

"Yeah."

She pushed the gas down and they shot out of Rye. Liam ate with one hand while leafing through Spate's folder.

"Book report," Sally said as she passed through Camber.

"Looks like a proper old-school Kent villain." He looked at her. "Not top tier, but not stupid either. I'm seeing scrap metal ties, storage, the reactor thing, a lot of the same businesses as Reg." He swallowed then slurped coffee. "In his youth, 40 years ago, he got charged with affray and disturbing the peace, also conspiracy to intimidate, but not much of it stuck." He flipped pages. "Did a few short stretches, but we never landed anything big on him. Runs the caravan park where he lives, but it's almost certainly a front."

"A front for what?"

"No clue."

"He's got a boat?"

"Yeah." He flicked ahead. "A handful of privates, a small yacht. He's also invested in a fishing fleet, that's five boats I can see; part owner in a consortium."

"So the two or three boats, they could easily have been his."

"True. But it's all boats down here." He gestured to an orange-hulled boat cruising over the Channel waves. "That's RNLI. Royal National Lifeboat Institution. They'll have a bunch of boats."

Sally took the final bite of her steak bake as the road looped to skirt Lydd. This time she headed north on Romney Road rather than southeast to Dungeness. The land flattened on either side, dry fields running out under the wide gray sky, ditches flashing dark beside the verges.

"This is supposed to be a marsh, right?" she asked.

"It was. That's the power of the RMC, I guess. I'd bet all these ditches drain into it."

They passed through New Romney, rejoined the coast at a tiny holiday village called St. Mary's Bay, then Dymchurch lay ahead. A low-lying field of white static caravans sank to the right, squeezed between the road and the towering concrete sea wall like stacked goods in a cargo yard.

"There it is," Liam pointed. "Spate's caravan park. Looks charming."

A red-and-white barrier hung open at the entrance. Beside it, a cracked sign promised FAMILY FUN, SEA VIEWS, CAFÉ OPEN DAILY, though the café windows were steamed and hoary and half the caravans had their curtains drawn.

Sally rolled the Mustang down off the road and up to the café. The place looked worse from the inside; its promised sea views cut off by the sea wall, leaving only damp decking, rusted gas bottles, cracked planters and stone paths slick with moss. Ahead, a family hurried along a narrow path between two moldy caravans, the solitary child dragging a plastic bucket along the grass.

A different group was clustered at a picnic table near the kids' play area.

Six young men were smoking and drinking from cans wrapped in plastic supermarket bags. They wore stonewash jeans and cheap leather jackets that would never survive a Kent winter. One had a black wool hat pulled low. Their faces were young, wary, hollowed. Sally had seen enough border cases in the US to recognize the look of the newly arrived, fleeing something.

She walked toward them.

"Sally," Liam cautioned.

The wind came over the sea wall and cut through her uniform shirt. The young men watched her cross the worn grass, cigarette smoke eddying sideways.

"Morning," Sally said. "You boys on holiday?"