23. Barbarian Eyes
Neither Sally nor Liam spoke for several minutes afterward. The weight of everything the Fates had said felt like a body sinking deep.
Buried under the tide. Glimpsing such dark wonders.
"She's really a bitch," Liam said at last.
Sally grunted.
"Flayed alive," he repeated. "I said it, didn't I? She's just showing off. She loves lording her 'brilliance' over us."
Sally wasn't sure what to say. Her own prescribed 'fate' had been cruel, yes. Hinting at the past. Assessing her compulsions. Calling her an animal. But maybe she'd cut Liam deeper. Perhaps there was a point to it, as Knight had suggested, or maybe it really was just cruelty.
The price of admission, perhaps.
She watched Liam. He seemed genuinely hurt. Maybe ashamed, just as Knight had said? That was something Sally didn't really understand. His partner's betrayal had been years ago. What did Liam have to be ashamed of?
"Ignore her," she said. "The rest of it was gold."
"Chaos and order? I could have told you that, without all the fancy footnotes. You just got assaulted by the beach itself, Sally. My car got tipped into a bog. The Rooks are loose. Hell is empty and all the sodding devils are right here, and now we're the ones in timeout?"
He stamped to his feet and began to pace.
"The age," she said. "Gender. The career."
"All of that too!" Liam waved a hand. "I can guess as well as she does. She doesn't have the right."
Sally didn't argue. Instead she stood and went to the whiteboard and wrote up the profile.
Male
Late 50s
Local
Fascination with order/chaos
Career in blue lights or tied to Dungeness/Romney Marsh landscape
Experienced a trauma in the '70s
She stepped back. It was a lens, if cloudy. A filter of sorts. Alongside what Mercer had told them about alibis, it ruled out all their current suspects.
"I think the Rooks really are clear," she said.
"Fuck the Rooks," Liam spat.
Sally kept looking. She thought about the theories and the history DeVon Collier had shared.
The words seemed to flow around her like a tide.
Layers of the past washing in and out, each adding a new layer of shingle to the cuspate foreland, each eroding a portion away, washing into the marsh and washing out again.
Spreading. Tainting. Contaminating.
There was something there, maybe. Something she could almost feel, on the tip of her tongue. A connection, maybe, unseen as yet but lurking.
"What did you make of their theory on Heraclitus?"
"B107? Eyes and ears? It's conspiracy theory bullshit, linking nonsense to other nonsense!" He swiveled. "What murder opens a question? Where do they even get this stuff from? And I've been to the Camino de Santiago. I didn't walk it all, OK, but I saw it, and I did not see one damn cockle shell!"
Sally half-listened, letting her mind drift back over the day, searching for whatever it was that felt off. She pictured herself standing over the body, looking down at that perfectly smoothed hair, neck craned back, sightless eyes staring.
What had this young man witnessed? Had he understood it, at the end? Had he been wise, or a barbarian soul?
"And that crap about cops being in the profile?
I knew she'd have it in for us. Head shrinkers like her always do.
Just because we're on the thin blue bloody line, it doesn't mean we're all drowning in 'trauma', can't handle our shit, are just one step away from taking a long walk off a short pier with rocks in our pockets. "
Sally followed herself back out along the vastness of Dungeness. Walking the strand line. Looking at the shells. Feeling the space, the immensity, the power. Love. Death. Chaos. Order.
Up to the Crab Shack, where its own blind, barbarian eye watched out over a beach that–
She twitched, then bolted to her feet. Liam halted another tirade mid-flow.
"What is it?"
"One second." Sally stalked to the whiteboard, mind accelerating as she made the leap. She drew a large circle around the Rook family, labelled it 'CCTV', then drew three lines pointing off to the side.
"The killer wanted to come in unseen," she said rapidly, turning back to Liam. "They wanted to be invisible. Do we agree on that?"
"I suppose it's likely, sure. No one wants their killing witnessed. What's that got to do with–"
"Let's say it's true." She wrote 'Reactor CCTV' next to the first of the three lines, then drew a cross next to it. "That means they blinded the reactor camera. They knew which one. They knew how to do it, how long to do it for, and how to get away with it."
"OK." Liam's eyes narrowed. "So, we're trying to build a suspect list from that? People who were in the reactor that night?"
"It's a starting point, sure, but there's more than one way to blind a camera. The killer could have paid someone to do it. They could have set it up to go dark in advance, or triggered an analog intercept. I think we can do better."
She wrote 'Lamppost CCTV' on the second line, then added another cross. "This one was cut, and recently. The killer climbed up to ensure there'd be no oversight."
Liam watched her work. "No surprises there. But there's nothing to narrow it down. It could be anyone."
"Someone who can climb," Sally corrected, "mid-50s, I guess that's plausible, but with a ladder, whatever, yes, it could be anyone. But all this is just preamble."
"Preamble?"
Sally grinned, then filled in the third line, 'Crab Shack', and added another X.
Liam was unimpressed. "Right, but that was just a scarecrow. No recorder. It doesn't give us anyone."
"Wrong," Sally said, feeling the revelation flood through her. "What matters is that from the outside, it looked real. If you were the killer, you would have cut that line like the lamp post and the reactor, to be sure, right?"
Liam's face was blank for a moment, then he nodded slowly, maybe starting to see. "I suppose so. But it wasn't cut. So that means–"
"It means the killer had been inside! They didn't bother to cut the line because there was no need. They already knew it was a fake."
Liam's mouth opened then closed. He stared at the three bullet points, then at the names of the Rooks, then swore softly.
"Bugger me. So, the killer, or killers, have been inside the Crab Shack?"
Sally nodded. "Barbarian eyes. Or bad witnesses for barbarian souls. Whatever it was Collier said."
"So they got something right," Liam muttered. "OK. So, we need to figure out who's been in there. But the Rooks wouldn't let just anyone inside, would they? That's their trafficking depot. It's supposed to be a secret."
"Family," said Sally. "The girls. The traffickers, too."
Liam watched as she scrawled down those groups on the board.
"Either of those two would be weird, though.
The girls wouldn't, and why would traffickers?
They're probably Algerian or Iraqi or something like that.
They're not bothered about ritual kills on the beach.
The last thing they'd want is more attention. "
"Agreed," Sally said, slicing a cross through the word.
"So it's the Rooks, their family, or their close associates," Liam said. They both stared at the board. "How long's that camera been there?"
"No idea. We can find out."
"We should." Liam took a blue pen, suddenly urgent. "It could go all the way back to Reg Rook's day." He circled the central name and drew a line shooting off to the other side of the board. "Maybe back when he was using it as an actual Crab Shack?"
Sally stared at that line. Deeper into the past.
"There can't be that many people from then. Employees of the Shack, pretty much."
Liam added 'Shack Employees' to the list. "I've also heard, shacks like that, sometimes they get leased out to local fishermen? Good spot to dump equipment. The Rooks could have made a few quid just to hand over a key."
"Add it," Sally said.
'Fishermen' went up onto the board.
They both stepped back. Sally tested the connections in her head. The scarecrow CCTV was a leap, but paired with the barbarian revelation, it felt solid.
"The killer made a mistake," she said.
"They should have cut that line," Liam agreed. "Clean sweep. If they had, we'd have nothing now."
Sally circled the three remaining suspect pools.
Family
Shack Employees
Fishermen
"We can start building a master list. There's got to be records on all of these. Then we refine by the Fates' profile."
Liam returned to the desk, dragged back his chair and sat. "You want to take the fishermen? They'd definitely have ready access to two or three boats."
Sally grinned, the hook in her chest pulling tight. This was something real, finally. She took out her phone. "And you get the employees."
"On it."
The rain beat down as they placed their first calls.