Page 34 of Slack Tide Kill

"That's recent," Liam said, pointing.

The old rage welled up in Sally's chest. Just how old had those girls at Umberside Lodge been?

"One of the girls," she said. "Feels like proof they were here last night."

"Fingerprints and DNA will prove that. We leave it for Akilota."

Sally returned to scanning the sad, dark space for the camera monitor or DVR, but couldn't find it. There was nothing to display, nothing to record onto. Just a thin black cable ran through the wall from the camera, along the side to end at a small black block screwed onto the wall.

"Is that it?" Liam asked.

The block was a waterproof case with a simple fastener. Sally reached up, pulling a length of clean-ish fabric over her fingers, and popped it open. Inside lay a single 12-volt battery.

"Bastards," she whispered, her hand dropping back to her side. Suddenly she felt so drained. No transmitter. No recording system. Just power.

"It's a scarecrow," Liam said. "Enough to blink red in the dark. Scare off local kids, maybe. Nothing more."

Sally exhaled. No CCTV footage of the beach. No sighting of the killer. No hard evidence at all. That was a blow, but maybe it helped confirm her theory.

"It makes a kind of sense," she said softly. "If the Rooks are ferrying illegal immigrants through here, dropped off by some cross-Channel gang, nobody really wants that recorded, do they?"

Liam said nothing. The wind wheezed through the cracks in the thin wall. Sally pictured five young women, girls, huddled here after a traumatic, wave-tossed Channel crossing. Scared. Cold. Locked in place, stragglers in a strange new land, not knowing what fate awaited them.

Maybe they were the way in.

"The girls." She turned to Liam. "You said they were foreign. Do we have a translator?"

He thought a moment. "By now? Perhaps. I think they were speaking Hungarian, but who knows? Why, you think they might have seen something?"

"They could have." Sally surveyed the shack a final time. The black mold. The Labubu. "Any trafficker worth their salt would've dumped them in here and padlocked the door from outside, and you can't see a thing through this window, but while they were in transit? It's possible."

Liam raised his phone. "I'll call the DCI, try and get us in with them."

16 LABUBU

Sally and Liam got back in the Mustang and she pulled away onto Dungeness Road.

"OK," Liam said, taking his phone from his ear. "The DCI's going to send a forensic team to the shack. We're on the list to speak to the girls, but we need to follow full safeguarding procedure."

"Of course. Where are they?"

"A temporary victims unit at the old Lydd fire station, along with a whole raft of social services, medical, immigration, interpreters and press. It's chaos there now, apparently."

"But we're in?"

"We're in."

They drove on in silence, back past the reactor and Umberside Lodge and into Lydd, until Liam pointed wordlessly ahead.

The old fire station was a plain brick building engulfed by vehicles: a forensics wagon, press vans, several patrol cars, an ambulance and a dark sedan with a social services parking sticker. Sally parked the Mustang at the fringe and strode over.

The station's bay doors were painted a deep municipal red and overhung with an antique brass alarm bell. Sally and Liam pushed through the crowd of press; no sign of Tania Brown, which was a relief.

PC Chakrati was on the door. She smiled and waved them through. Inside, the air was sour with wet clothing, instant coffee and antiseptic. They passed through a lobby with a small gift shop, beyond which the displays had been pushed to the sides; a preserved hand pump, a rack of old helmets, a child's display about wartime firewatchers. At the center of the hall now stood several folding tables covered with bottled water, packaged snacks, foil blankets and medical kits.

The girls were seated in a cluster near the back, wrapped in silver blankets beneath a display of sepia photographs showing Lydd firemen in leather helmets.

Five girls. It was hard to tell ages at a glance, but they were all young. One had a pink hair clip pinned to the cuff of her blanket. Sally recognized the girl from earlier; still dressed in an oversized hoodie. Her eyes were watchful and roaming, until they locked on Sally. Then she bolted upright, threw off the mylar blanket and ran over, throwing her arms wide to wrap Sally in a tight hug.