Page 17 of Slack Tide Kill

The CSM shook his head. "Nothing yet. His pockets are empty. We're running facial photographs through local databases, as well as Coastguard records and shared resources with French immigration. If he's from within a 50-mile radius of this point, we should have him soon. Now, if you'll excuse me, we need to work fast before this storm gets any worse."

As if to punctuate his point, the tent fabric flapped violently.

"Of course, thank you," Mayhew said, and Akilota returned to the body.

"What about the reactor's CCTV, DCI?" Sally pressed.

Mayhew's lips pursed. Maybe she'd been hoping to keep that to herself. "Dr. Rupert Palmer just arrived. I'm about to go view the footage and–"

"We're about to go," Sally corrected. "I'd like to see it, plus I have some questions about this reactor connection."

Mayhew's jaw worked under the skin. "Come on then. They're waiting."

She pushed out of the tent into the storm, and Sally followed.

9 BLINDED EYES

The rain came harder now, the wind gusting. Mayhew led the way back into the lot and over to the towering reactor A structure. Up close Sally felt the true scale of it, as large as a New York city block, but windowless and wrapped with scaffolding.

Three figures in smart black suits capped with hi-vis jackets and hard hats waited at the construction workers entrance. The tallest amongst them, a man in his late 50s with steely gray stubble and sharp brown eyes, stepped into the rain to meet them, extending his hand to DCI Mayhew.

"Dr. Rupert Palmer," he said, his voice deep and mellifluous, the kind of intonation Sally had come to recognize as 'posh'. "Anything I can do to help, officers, you only need to ask."

"DCI Mayhew and NCA Officer Rogers," Mayhew said. "Just the CCTV for now, Dr. Palmer."

"Of course, of course." He nodded somberly and headed back toward the reactor, the two underlings falling in silently behind. In moments they were swallowed within Reactor A's great gray bulk, following a narrow concrete corridor lit by industrial strip lights.

"This was never intended as a main entrance, of course," Palmer said, his voice echoing strangely in the tight space, sounding lightly amused. "It's been this way for several years now, given the delays to the decommission work."

"Delays?" Mayhew asked.

"I'm afraid so." He stopped at a padlocked grille door, beyond which lay a small, gray room lined with smart-looking, new lockers. Hard hats and hi-vis vests hung from pegs. "A process like this, completely cleaning out an entire nuclear facility, well, it takes time. Please."

One of his staff unlocked the padlock and Palmer led them in.

"I think, here," he said, advancing to a set of hi-vis gear. "These should fit. We generally hire men, which means larger sizes, but we keep a few for visiting diplomats."

"And police," Mayhew said.

Palmer's smile faltered. "Quite."

Sally put on the proffered vest and hat. "I was led to believe all the nuclear material had been removed from the site."

"Oh, it has," Palmer said, gesturing them back into the corridor. They moved through and he continued ahead, like some tour guide on an open-top London bus. "That took the longest. All fissile material, all the nuclear 'sludge', everything like that is gone. You would be surprised how small the number of countries are that are willing to safely take, secure and bury nuclear waste products." He lowered his voice. "You can count them on the fingers of one hand, essentially. Oddly, they're often the same countries whose citizens wind up on our beach. Put that together, if you will."

Sally didn't need to. "Dictatorships," she said flatly. "Countries at war."

Palmer's polite smile strained, and he stopped by a bare metal stairwell. "Up here to the control room. The elevator's out, I'm afraid."

Mayhew shot Sally a glare as she passed. They started up the featureless stairs.

"So why the extreme security at the entrance," Sally asked. "Three officers, full vehicle search, plus all the CCTV cameras. Why bother if all the nuclear material is gone?"

Palmer cleared his throat. "Well, that's not entirely true. Officer Rogers, was it?"

"That's right."

"The worst of it is all gone. But a place like this, operating for decades, there's contamination in the bones of the building itself."