22. The Fates
The NCA's Behavioral Investigative Advice Unit, or the 'Fates', comprised three of the UK's foremost criminal profilers, drawn from various fields of expertise.
Dr. Helen Knight led the unit, a formidable forensic psychologist who headed the Cambridge criminology department.
DeVon Collier was an undisputed expert in historical criminology and ritual serial killers, often called to consult with the FBI.
Dr. Olivia Shaw specialized in the social and psychological impact of early life trauma.
Sally had found they often lived up to their nickname; three God-like weavers who spun out the thread of every mortal lifespan, measured, weighed, then snipped it off with a pair of razor-sharp shears.
No deviations. No mistakes. No way to change the fate handed down to you.
Liam gripped the table as the call went through on Sally's laptop.
"Officer Rogers," came the steely voice of Dr. Knight. Her face appeared on the screen, gray hair cinched back tight, mid-50s and wearing every fine wrinkle like a seam through granite. Her blue eyes bored through the screen. "Officer Liam O'Connell. We have been waiting for your call."
"Thank you for your time, Dr. Knight. We'd welcome any assistance you can offer."
Knight's left eyebrow raised slightly. "Of course you would. The crime you face is both heinous and bizarre. Yet there is an underlying logos, or logic, if you have ears to hear it."
"We're ready."
"I doubt that. I have followed both your careers since our last collaboration. Sally Rogers, the wrecking ball of the FBI, the Bulletproof Belle, driven by an animal addiction to 'justice'. Dark Peak may have satisfied your demons for a time, but the beast always calls for more, does it not?"
Sally said nothing. That seemed to annoy Knight, and she shifted her gaze.
"Then there's Liam O'Connell. One-time prodigy of the Met, destined for the youngest-ever DCI rank, but fooled by a ten-penny partner's lies. How is that shame wearing on you, Officer? Are you drowning in it, or have you found a way to cope?"
Sally looked at Liam. His cheeks were pale and his eyes flashed.
"Dr. Knight, it can't be necessary to–"
"Every instrument is blunt, Officer Rogers," Knight interrupted. "Some more than others. But the wise surgeon knows both the strengths and weakness of all their tools, and operates accordingly."
She waved a hand, and the other two members of the Fates appeared on the laptop screen: DeVon Collier on the left, a sallow-faced black man in his early 40s, with darting brown eyes and gray-streaked hair; Dr. Olivia Shaw on the right, almost a younger mirror of Knight, with intense green eyes and a severe expression.
"You face a double murder on Dungeness," Knight went on, "separated by 30 years but linked by the insertion of cockle shells into empty eye sockets.
With this simple act, your killer places their victims inside a symbolic register that runs millennia deep.
That suggests either a highly educated mind, or someone who has absorbed the landscape so completely that its symbolic vocabulary became their own. "
Sally frowned. "What do you mean, millennia deep?"
Knight turned. "Mr. Collier."
DeVon Collier cleared his throat and began to speak, his voice soft but assured.
"The use of shells calls to mind the Venus iconography.
" He offered a faint smile. "As in Botticelli's well-known painting, the goddess of beauty and birth riding a dead, hollow scallop to shore.
Make that shell a cockle, by turns a symbol of love, the incoming tide and wild nature itself, and you have a potent combination.
Scallops are also a pilgrim symbol dating to at least Shakespeare's era, associated with journeys to the tomb of St. James at the terminus of the Camino de Santiago. "
He paused and Sally took a moment to absorb that. "Santiago. That's the famous pilgrim trail in Spain."
Collier nodded. "Legend says St. James' body was being shipped to the Iberian peninsula when a storm hit. The body was lost, then recovered several days later on the beach, miraculously unharmed and coated with scallop shells."
"So they're a religious symbol?"
"Yes, evocative of transformation through suffering. St. James was the first martyr of Jesus' 12 apostles. Any killer who uses a shell like it may be making a statement about love, death, the nature of the soul, and possibly the endless battle between chaos and order."
Sally looked at Liam. He looked furious, and she had to head him off before he erupted.
"Why chaos and order?"
"There is an older reference, also Greek in nature, from the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus.
You may know his most famous aphorism, often mistranslated as, 'You can never step in the same river twice.
' His philosophy was one of eternal and constant flux.
Everything changes. Nothing stays the same. "
Sally frowned. "That's Dungeness. Everything about it. The shingle is creeping constantly. The storms come on in seconds then fade just as quickly. Nothing lasts."
"Quite. Dungeness is the quintessential Heraclitean landscape. Romney Marsh around it is the same, or used to be; a place of shifting waters and impermanent routes, ruled by the tide. But by far the more interesting quote is tied to the etching you found on the cockle shells themselves."
Sally's attention sharpened. "The numbers? 8107."
"I have studied the photographs taken in situ, Officer Rogers, and I believe '8107' is a misreading, specifically of the first character."
"I thought it was off, somehow. You think it's not an 8?"
"I believe it is not a number at all. With some certainty, I believe it is the letter 'B', making the entire inscription 'B107'. This determinant precisely matches the naming method for Heraclitus' fragmented writings."
"Wait, what? B107 matches a piece of this Greek philosopher's work?"
"It does indeed. I trust you will find it uniquely relevant to this case." Collier paused a moment, as if bracing himself. "The full fragment runs, 'Eyes and ears are bad witnesses for men who have barbarian souls.'"
The words washed over Sally. She wasn't entirely sure what she'd just heard, and certainly wasn't sure what it meant. But eyes? "That's it," she muttered.
"I think so, yes."
"What does it mean?" Liam demanded.
Collier shifted toward Liam. "The true meaning has been debated for two and a half thousand years, Officer O'Connell.
Socrates himself struggled with Heraclitus.
His peers called him the 'weeping' philosopher for his misanthropic worldview.
But consensus suggests the B107 fragment means that those without wisdom are doomed to misunderstand the fundamental truth of the sensory world.
For him, that truth was the primacy of chaos within order, or order within chaos, where chaos itself is the only true law. "
Sally exhaled. "Order within chaos? What even is that? And how does it apply here?"
Collier looked to the side and Knight took over.
"We believe with the first killing three decades ago, your killer posed a question. One about chaos and order. They then waited 30 years to kill again, with a repeat of the same murder that now answers that question."
"So the murder's an answer? What's the question?"
"We don't know. But we can infer a great deal from the 30-year dormancy; a period of self-control most serial killers never manage. BTK paused 15 years. The Grim Sleeper roughly the same. Dahmer nine. None approached 30. It is an extraordinary length of time to resist such a powerful compulsion."
Sally instinctively began looking for gaps. "Maybe our killer was incarcerated. Maybe they committed murders that were never found."
"We are weighting against that," Knight intoned. "Searches of lengthy local prison sentences show little relevance. As for hidden murders, this is clearly a mission-oriented killer. They have a message. Killing in secret would not serve their compulsion."
"So, uh…" Sally tried to straighten that out. "So they stopped killing for 30 years, contemplating this question. How can we use that?"
"It informs what the killer likely did within that dormant period.
We believe they channeled their 'mission', seeking to answer their own question through a lifetime of experience.
This could be chaos-based, involved deeply with the shifting landscape of Dungeness: the beach, the sea, the marshes.
They may have worked in local museums or archives, sat on drainage boards, been involved in coastal defense, ecology or history. "
Sally's eyes darted to the whiteboard, with its list of the Rook men. She couldn't picture any of them in a museum or sitting on a board. But Reactor Logistics was involved with shifting the shingle on the beach…
"What about order-based?"
"It is possible the killer worked in the judicial system, within the police, as a firefighter, a member of the RNLI or the Coastguard, or even within health care. Any one of these professions would allow the killer to refine their answer over the decades, always with life and death stakes."
Sally released a long breath. That second list seemed to encompass everyone she'd met on Dungeness so far. Every police officer. Every paramedic. Every worker in the reactors. All dealt with life and death, all involved the beach or the marsh.
"We need to narrow that down."
"Quite. Your investigation requires concrete detail, and there we can offer assistance. Firstly, IQ. We do not believe the killer has an outstanding intellect. The thinking is too muddied, the historical references a hodgepodge. There is no clarity."
"But they were never caught."
"I did not say they were incapable. They are clearly patient. Practical. Locally expert, capable of blending in for three decades. Those are dangerous qualities."
"You think they've been hiding here all this time? In plain sight?"
"Yes. We do."
Sally exhaled. "Anything else?"
"Age and gender can be inferred. The average age of male serial killers upon their first kill is 27.5. The youngest begin at 19, but they are outliers. Given this, your killer is likely in their late 50s now."
Sally's eyes snagged on Reg Rook at the center of her whiteboard. "What about generational killers? A mission handed down from father to son?"
"Less likely. They would have to share the same defining pathology, the same all-consuming mission, and that is rare."
"Then multiple killers? We have a witness saying that two or three boats brought the body to the beach."
"Also unlikely," Collier answered. "Outside of fiction, such group killings are rare, and generally limited to male-female pairings, such as Fred and Rose West, the Moors Murderers, the Ken and Barbie killers. But those killings were hedonistic. Mission killers are invariably solitary."
"That doesn't help. Our witness saw what he saw. Two or three boats. That means at minimum two or three killers, or accomplices, or something."
"I can't account for what your witness saw, I'm afraid," Collier said. "Perhaps they lied. If they are telling the truth, what you're dealing with here is an extreme outlier."
"I see. So we have an age range. We have a psychology and a mission. I presume you're leaning male, because statistically that's most common?"
"We are," Knight said. "In sum, you are looking for a local male in his late 50s, whose career was bound up in the land or emergency services. But there is one further aspect you should hear. Dr. Shaw?"
Olivia Shaw began speaking, her voice cutting, her expression unshifting.
"Mission killers typically act out a powerful trauma, often incurred during early childhood.
Something that irreparably scarred their internal compass of right and wrong; a balance they now ache to set right.
They rationalize their killing as a public service, as revealing a deeper truth or showing others the way. "
"What kind of trauma?"
"Something foundational. The most formative age for creation of the self, where trauma can rewire the brain in permanent ways, lies between the ages of 7 and 14.
Given our suggested age of the killer, that places this original trauma approximately 15 to 20 years prior to the first cockle-shell murder. Around 50 years in total."
"50 years? That's back in the 1970s!"
"It is. During the killer's childhood."
Moments passed as Sally processed that. It was a lot, offering depths she didn't yet understand. It brought no direct suspects, but perhaps it was a filter.
"One more note," Shaw said. "Mission killers like this, notwithstanding the tiny handful of charismatics who dominate media coverage, are largely solitary creatures.
Isolated by choice. They have no friends, no meaningful relationships, and do not seek them; such connections would be a threat to their twisted worldview. "
"Twisted worldview. Got it."
"And twisting further. Research shows that, invariably after a relapse, such killers are no longer able to stop themselves."
Sally sat up straighter. "Wait. You think this person's out of control? There'll be more killings?"
"We do," Knight said, taking over. "And preventing them will be very challenging for a woman driven by animal urges and a man blunted by his own shame.
Your killer is part of the Dungeness landscape, and has been for a long time.
They are not hiding. They are not afraid.
They simply belong, and that affords them an invisibility you will struggle to pry away. I do not envy you your task."
She ended the call. Sally and Liam were left sitting in silence, alone.