DAY 11
As Elin Warner runs, the air feels sticky like gum, catching in her eyes, hair.
Only six a.m., but the heat is already bouncing off the pavement, solid walls of it, with no breeze to sweep it away.
The route she’s taking is part of the South West Coast Path—houses on either side, lavish Victorian and Italianate villas that stud the wooded hillside. Gleaming pinpoints of sunlight are bouncing off the windows as her reflection shifts alongside her in the glass—cropped blond hair mushrooming up and out with each step before settling back around her face.
The exteriors of the houses seem flimsy in the heat, their edges blurred. The verges outside are parched yellow—grass not just suspended in growth, but withering and dying, bare patches opening up like sores.
Summers have been hot before, but none like this: weeks of sunshine; spiking, record-breaking temperatures. Newspapers printing endless images of cracking motorways, fried eggs cliché-cooking on the bonnets of cars. Forecasters had predicted a reprieve several weeks ago, but it never came. Just more sun. Nerves are fraying, people ready to snap.
Elin’s just about holding on, but her internal landscape is at odds with the external. With each day of blistering heat that passes comes the exact opposite inside her: the cold grip of fear creeping back.
It keeps her up at night, the same thoughts on repeat. With it, the control strategies: the running, relentless exercise. The past few weeks, an escalation—earlier runs, longer runs, secret runs. Self-flagellation.
All because her brother, Isaac, had mentioned her father had been in touch.
A few yards on, the houses on the left give way to a green. The coast path runs behind it, hugging the lip of the cliff.
Leaving the pavement, she darts into the opening for the path.
Her stomach lurches.
No fence, only a few feet of land between her and a hundred-foot plunge to the rocks below, but she loves it: it’s coast path proper—no houses between her and the sea. The view opens out: Brixham on her right, Exmouth to her left. All she can see is blue—the sea a darker, inkier shade than the chalky pastel of the morning sky.
With each step, she feels the heat from the ground rising up through the soles of her sneakers. She wonders for a moment what would happen if she kept moving: whether she’d eventually implode—an engine overheating—or whether she’d simply carry on.
It’s tempting to keep going until the thoughts stop, and she doesn’t have to try to hold on anymore—because that’s what it feels like sometimes: as though she’s having to grip too hard to normality. One small slip, and she’ll fall.
At the top of the hill Elin slows, her thighs screaming, thick with lactic acid. Hitting pause on her Fitbit, she notices a gray car cresting the hill. It’s moving fast, engine throaty, scattering the seagulls picking at a flattened carcass on the road.
Something registers as she takes in the shape, the color. It’s Steed’s car, she’s sure of it, the DC brought in to help her on her reassignment. It speeds past, a blur of dust-dulled alloy and flying gravel. Elin catches Steed’s profile: slightly crooked nose, strong chin, fair spikes of hair gelled into submission. Something about his expression pulls the last bit of breath from her. Elin immediately recognizes it: the quiet intensity of someone flooded with adrenaline.
He’s working. On a job.
The car stops at the bottom of the hill. Steed flings open the door, jogs in the direction of the beach.
Pulling her phone from her shorts, Elin glances at the screen. The Control Room hasn’t rung. A job, just down the road, and they called Steed instead.
Familiar worries resurface, the same ones that have consumed her ever since HR and Anna, her boss, decided that she wasn’t ready for full duties after her career break.
Steed’s a speck in the distance, moving toward the beach. Elin shifts from foot to foot. She knows the right thing to do is to stick to her plan—to run home to breakfast, to Will—but pride gets the better of her.
Running hard down the hill, she passes Steed’s car and crosses the road. No other cars; only a cat slinking across the tarmac, fire-striped undercarriage nearly touching the ground. She crosses the scrubby patch of grass to the empty beach beyond. No Steed.
Walking left, along the shore, she passes the restaurant jutting out on metal pillars above the beach. A rustic-looking shack, name emblazoned in driftwood above the door. The Lobster Pot.It’s shuttered. Last night, the terrace would have been heaving, strings of fairy lights illuminating wine bottles in coolers, baskets of shiny mussels and fries.
A few feet on, she finds him; there, beneath the overhang of the restaurant. He’s kneeling on the sand, muscles straining through the fabric of his shirt. The raw physicality is always the first thing Elin notices about Steed, but he’s a dichotomy: the hard, honed body belied by the softness of his features—heavy-lidded, sensual eyes, a wide, full mouth. He’s that rare kind of man: the type women simultaneously feel protected by and protective of.
They’ve slipped into an easy working relationship. He’s younger than her, late twenties, but there’s none of the thrusting bravado you sometimes get in men of that age. He’s astute, has a knack for asking the right questions, an emotional intelligence that’s all too rare.
A woman is standing beside him. She looks to be in her late forties, tall and muscular. Her blue swimming cap is still on, the same hue as her swimsuit, the thin layer of rubber emphasizing the shape of her skull. Despite the heat, she’s shivering, jiggling from foot to foot in a nervous rhythm.
Steed turns, and as he moves Elin sees it: a leg, splayed against the sand—a pale calf, lettuce-like fragments of seaweed suckered to the skin.
She finds herself stepping forward to get a better angle.
A teenager. Ugly wounds—slashes to the face, chest, and legs. The clothes are almost completely shredded, the polo shirt split down the seam, across the torso.
Closer again, and her vision blurs, the syrupy haze of the air giving the scene a sloppy focus. As she takes another step, reaction tips over into realization.
She sucks in her breath.
Steed swivels around to face her at the sound, eyes widening in surprise. “Elin?” He hesitates. “Are you—”
But the rest of his words bleed into the air. Elin starts to run.
She knows now why they’d called Steed instead.
Of course.
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