17. Swamp Beasts
Liam directed her out of Lydd and southwest on Jury's Gap Road. The Romney marshes lay to their right, the Dungeness shingle on their left, while the road ahead was empty.
There were too many holes in the case, and she just didn't know enough.
She had the Cockle-Eye Killer podcasts, but that was third-hand information.
She needed to review the old case notes, or better yet, talk to someone from the original case.
Mayhew had said she'd tried to reach DI Mercer; that should help.
She needed to look properly at the parallels. At the rituals. She needed to build a profile and a suspect list, and–
"I didn't get a proper look at the body," Liam said.
Sally turned to him.
"The shells. In situ. I couldn't get a read."
"Right, the storm," Sally said flatly.
"The storm. So, how did he look?"
Sally thought for a moment. That was a useful question.
Ground herself again. Get back to the concrete details.
She breathed out heavily. "Purposeful. That's the main thing, I think.
Staged, even. The shells, the way his hair had been combed, his body positioned, his head craned back at reactor A? It all must mean something."
"Any idea what?"
"Not yet. You listened to the podcast?"
"The first few episodes, coming down. Seems they never had a handle on it. They never had any real suspects. They just sprayed out arrests and prayed, until the DCI hung himself. Then the whole thing collapsed."
Sally nodded. Thinking back to her first moments on the beach.
"DCI Mayhew's still angry about that, I think."
"The DCI? What's she got to do with it?"
"So far, just that she's standing in our way. Like this is personal for her."
"Personal? She must've barely been a kid at the time."
"Maybe it hit hard."
Liam puzzled over that for a moment. "That's why she's slow-walking us?"
"That, and McMaster said she was a ball-ache."
Liam snorted. They drove in silence for a few minutes.
"You think it is a repeat?" he asked. "The same perp?"
"Could be. 30 years is a long time to wait, though. But then we've got Reginald Rook, the Rook boys' father? He died a few years back, but he had contracts with the reactors back then, plus he owned the Crab Shack."
"Yeah. That's all something. We can press the son on it." He looked ahead.
Sally drove on. Liam said nothing. It was the most they'd spoken to each other in months, and it felt strange. She looked over. His left hand was wrapped over his right in his lap, almost defensively. Like he was comforting himself, or maybe stilling the shakes of alcohol withdrawal.
To their left the beach gradually spread and morphed, from gray shingle to golden sand. A sign for ‘Camber Sands' passed by, and they angled northwest toward Rye. A dozen tall white windmills whipped the low clouds on the right, while a great delta of mudflats spread out to the left.
"River Rother," Liam commented. "Outlet for the Royal Military Canal."
Sally looked over at him. A small smile played on his face.
"I used to be really into canals when I was a kid," he went on. "And the Royal Military? It's the ne plus ultra. The best. Massive human engineering project in Georgian times. Construction started 1804, if I remember rightly, or thereabouts."
"1804? That's about 30 years after the Declaration of Independence. So by Georgian, you mean Mad King George?"
Liam grinned. "That's the one. He wasn't really all that mad, actually. In fact–"
"I've seen Hamilton, Liam. Don't try to polish a turd."
He chuckled. "OK. Well. We were in trouble with Napoleon back then.
" He took a deep breath. "All around this area, he was looking to invade.
Dungeness in particular. So, King George prepared three lines of defense.
First, all these massive towers along the coast. Martello towers, they're called.
Huge, round, unbreakable." He sighed contentedly.
"Plenty are still around, we might see one.
Second, there's Romney Marsh itself, boggy as hell and damn hard to cross.
Then there's the Royal Military Canal, from here to Folkestone, which they built like a moat.
Just a massive engineering work, maybe 30 miles in total, hardly anything else like it, and easy to defend. "
Sally said nothing. She figured he was done. Terraced houses appeared either side of the road.
"Millions of tons of dirt, shifted," Liam picked up again.
"All by horse and cart. Dumped in the sea.
Lots of unforeseen consequences to that.
Some great ones. Romney Marsh used to be a cesspit of standing water.
Mosquitoes, right? ‘Ague', they called it, but it was basically malaria.
" Another happy sigh. "The RMC really drained the marshes down.
Malaria levels cut right back. Pretty cool. "
Sally found herself oddly enjoying his voice. Not just the old Liam that she'd known on Dark Peak; this was a glimpse of Liam as a boy, full of wide-eyed curiosity.
"Where'd you get all that from?"
"I subscribed to a canal magazine. At least my Dad did, for me, for a while, anyway. I thought about becoming an engineer. But, well, he didn't approve. You know?"
Sally turned to him. That was an opening; the first since Dark Peak. She was about to ask why, but Liam abruptly pointed.
"Left here. Don't get caught out by the one-way system, Rye's a tricky bastard."
Sally turned.
Rye was a warren of tight, narrow streets flanked by a mish-mash of architectural styles from a collage of centuries.
There were crooked Tudor timber frames cantilevered out over the street; prim Georgian facades jutting in hard lime; medieval flint and slate hovels flowing around the occasional slice of modern glass.
All were laid haphazardly one over the other like the shingle on Dungeness.
"Should be just up ahead," said Liam, checking his phone.
Sally pulled past a tea room. Up a cobblestoned alley on the right she glimpsed a grand church atop a hill, then the police station lay before them on the right; a broad, handsome, three-story brick building nestled between a pub and a boutique hotel.
There were press vans parked on the sidewalk, and Sally weaved a line through the journalists with their stands and lights.
Tania Brown was amongst them, her pink outfit unmissable. Sally's heart fired hard but she pushed on. There was a parking lot in the back and she pulled into a bay.
"We're a team in there," she said.
"We're a team," Liam agreed. "Couple of swamp beasts from the Marsh."
Sally laughed once. She couldn't argue. She opened the door and stepped out. They circled the building under a steady drizzle and tried to slide around the press gaggle.
"Sally Rogers?" called the piercing, powerful voice of Tania Brown.
Sally didn't turn.
"Look at the state of you!" Brown shouted after her. "Someone buried you again already? You've only been here a few hours!"
Several journalists laughed. Sally kept her head down and pushed through the front doors of Rye Police Station.
In the clean, plain vestibule, her mud-caked boots stood out sharply.
The smell of salt, peat and sweat rolled in with them like a second weather system.
A second set of doors lay ahead, hung with a laminated sign on a corkboard.
PUBLIC COUNTER HOURS: TUESDAY / THURSDAY 10:00-13:00
"Part-time policing," Liam muttered. "It's a bloody farce."
Sally swung the doors inward, into a narrow waiting room papered with community support posters.
The duty desk officer sat behind a glass screen at a tall desk, and looked up at the sound of their boots.
Sally recognized him from the beach, no more than 24, all fresh shave, pink cheeks and a poorly knotted tie.
His name badge read ‘HAWLIN'. His nose wrinkled as the stink of marsh hit him, but he kept his demeanor professional, sliding the visitor's ledger across the counter.
"If you could both sign in, please."
"Rick Hawlin," Sally said, scrawling her name while Liam leaned on the desk, rubbing absently at the red welt on his neck. "Afraid of heights, right?"
He blinked and looked at her. "Ma'am? How did you know that?"
She just waved a hand. "How are things with our detainee?"
PC Hawlin looked at her a moment longer, then shook himself and checked his screen.
"Detainee Rook's in processing. DI Gemmell just arrived and has started the prints.
" He scrolled further, sneaking another look at Sally.
"His solicitor's been called, looks like a pro out of London, so it could be an hour or two before he's ready to get started. "
Sally handed back the pen. "Which Rook did we catch?"
"Which Rook, ma'am?"
"There's four, and I know it's not Roarke. Which one?"
"Ah." He glanced back at the screen. "Gabriel Rook. The youngest."
"Thanks. Can you gather everything we've got on him and have it ready for us, ideally in a room to ourselves?"
Hawlin chuckled, then stopped. "Of course. Yes, sorry ma'am. One thing we've got plenty of here is spare rooms."
"Full background workup, family links, any previous contact, and anything he's said since we took him."
"Yes, ma'am." Hawlin hesitated, his eyes flicking over the mud caked on both of them. "And, uh. Showers, perhaps?"
"You have got a full thermal suite here, right?" Liam asked. "Massage, spa service, the works?"
Hawlin chuckled. "Uh, we have showers, sir. Also spare uniforms. Down the corridor, second door on the left. Towels should be in the cupboard just inside."
"Cuffs and a nightstick, too," Sally added. "PAVA spray if you've got it."
"I can't issue weapons, ma'am. The cuffs, I think we can–"
"We'll take whatever you can get," Sally said, and pushed on the access gate. Hawlin buzzed her through.
The corridor beyond was narrow and floored with gray squares of worn carpet, lined with scuff marks and stains.
The air held a lingering dampness, old brick swollen with salt winds and rain.
They passed several interview rooms, a poky canteen, the sergeant's room then went through a double swing door into an unexpectedly airy open-plan bullpen.
Skylights cut pale rectangles into a high, slanted ceiling, letting in what little daylight the storm clouds allowed. Some 15 double desks filled the space, largely empty and silent but for the low hum of fluorescent lights and the muted clatter of someone moving in custody farther back.
Liam whistled low. "Looks like an extension. Out the back of the old building. Someone got a budget bump and splurged it on this."
Sally headed across the barren space, past a briefing room and several green-carpeted offices.
"Maybe they kitted it out to tackle the small boats?" Liam murmured. "Don't make much sense, otherwise, given the whole place is part-time."
Sally didn't care. It was quiet and still and she liked it. Not like NCA HQ back in Vauxhall.
The locker rooms lay in a corridor off to the left.
They collected fresh uniforms and towels and parted at the shower room door with an awkward nod.
The women's shower room was little more than a tiled cube with two stalls and a metal bench.
Sally stripped, leaving her sodden, scratched up running kit on the floor, and caught a glimpse of herself in a full-length mirror.
Every inch of her body was a washed-out gray where the marsh water had seeped through her clothing. Her arms, legs, face, neck and hair were black by contrast, crusted with mud.
Swamp thing, she reflected. Then she stepped into the shower and cranked up the flow. The moment the hot water hit her shoulders, something inside her unclenched.
Black water spiraled around the drain, thick with marsh silt and dried blood.
She peeled the soaked bandages from her calves slowly, wincing as the adhesive dragged at skin already flayed raw by reeds and shingle.
Underneath, the cuts looked uglier than she'd thought: long red lacerations crisscrossing both calves, edges swollen, bruises already blooming around them in dark purple.
She leaned one hand against the wall and let the water pound the mud from her hair, massaging the tangle of scar tissue where the Louisiana shooter's bullet had fractured her skull.
One in a million, they'd said. Buried in bodies. As helpless as the boy on the beach. She closed her eyes and just stood there for a time, accepting the darkness.