25. Secrets In The Surf
Sally woke in the dark with the taste of salt in her mouth. Sodium light rinsed in through the open curtain, and the sliver of sky over the nearby rooftops was black and speckled with stars. She checked her phone, but the screen was dead. A bedside alarm clock illuminated at her touch.
She slid out of bed and looked out at the rain-slicked cobbled street below. A fox loped out of a nearby alley, nosing at a trash can, before padding further. She felt the pull of the road, despite the deep ache throughout her body.
There'd be no going back to bed now.
She sloughed off the gown. Her running gear hung on the radiator, touch-dry already, so she pulled it on.
It smelled of the marsh. She checked her calves; all the cuts were scabbing over well.
She brushed her teeth in the small sink, drank a pint of water, then bundled her two uniforms into the plastic bag and headed out.
Nobody was in the small, low-ceilinged lobby below. Out on the silent street, the air was so piercingly fresh it made her lungs ache.
She set off at a steady jog, retracing their footsteps of the night before. The town was dead at this hour. No press, no police, no noise. Just the soft rhythm of her boots on stone.
The station was only five minutes away; a few lights on within, no press.
Her Mustang remained where she'd left it, a dark, low shape in the rear lot, slathered with mud and beaded with rain.
She dropped in and rustled in the glovebox, fished out a cigarette lighter charger and plugged in her phone.
The road south out of Rye was empty, alongside the wide expanse of the River Rother's outflow into the Channel. She rolled the windows down and flew southeast, high beams carving white tunnels across the empty road. In 20 minutes she was pulling up to the Dungeness beach.
The Crab Shack lay ahead, wrapped in fluttering police tape, while the tide was halfway out, lapping in the dark middle distance. To the left stood the old black and white-striped lighthouse, to the right lay the glow of the reactor.
She started to run west.
Every footfall slid and crunched in the shingle. Blood pumped hard around her worn body, flushing out her calves and forcing back the sting and the ache. It felt better than she'd expected. In the darkness, in the cold, it felt right.
She ran past the reactors and the lamp post, speeding up as she entered the long desert of beach beyond.
Ahead lay only the moonlight bouncing off the wet rocks, glistening seaweed and breaking tide.
After half an hour or so, she turned back, jogging more slowly, letting her senses tune into the beach.
The grind of shells underfoot. The spattering of foam. She became aware of the tidal slip as the waters ebbed away. She watched the moon sinking to the side and the pale line of light brimming on the eastern horizon.
Back at the Crab Shack, the lighthouse loomed up into the darkness. The door was heavily barred with a bolted metal plate, the lower reaches graffitied with tags, but further up there were windows.
Something shifted at the top.
Sally blinked, rubbed her eyes and squinted into the darkness. Right at the balcony line, something was moving.
The pulse in her throat hammered and her body moved, drawing swiftly and silently up to the lighthouse's base.
This could be nothing. A nesting seagull or a broken shutter.
Or it could be something. The Rooks had put a sentry on the reactor scaffold; why not put one here too?
It was the perfect place to watch the Channel.
The metal door was impenetrable but the lowest window was within reach. Sally leaped and caught the sill on the second try, then pulled herself up. The window was narrow but she managed to slide through onto the spiral stairwell inside.
The air was dark and noxious, rich with mold, brine and seagull guano. She wiped sweat from her eyes and started upward, the darkness only deepening as she ascended. Three revolutions. Four.
Some light filtered in from above. There were clumps of feathers on the stairs, the emaciated skeletons of gulls, and a sharp whipping sound, like a whip cracking. The final ascent was up a steep ladderway, cresting into the vacant lamp room.
The great glass lamp stood in the center of a tight, circular space. The whipping sound was louder here. Moon shadows flickered as a sheet of thick fabric bulged then spilled wind outside, barring then unveiling the view of the beach like a stuttering eyelid.
Sally's pulse reached a crescendo, until she recognized the forensic tent. She laughed once, loud, more with surprise than actual humor. It must have circled in the storm then snagged on the lighthouse.
"There you are," she murmured.
She pushed through a rusted metal door onto the walkway and looked out over Dungeness under moonlight.
The breath left her lungs and for long moments she just stared.
It was beautiful. It was hard to distinguish where the sea's endless lapping ended and the shingle shore began; leaving her with a sense of constant motion, the whole world churning and turning in the dwindling dark.
A light flickered on at one of the homes down below. Sally watched as Dean Whateley hobbled out of his home and stood amongst his dirty garden gnomes, watching the tide.
After a time, Sally unhooked the forensic tent from the railing, bundled it as best she could then dropped it over the edge. It thudded on the beach below. She headed back down, slipped from the window and dropped back to the shingle.
There was a figure approaching. Up from the tide line, dressed in long green waders, a plastic bag in one hand, a heavy fabric jacket in red and green with a scarf layered over the top.
Nancy Cagen. Sally smiled and went to meet her at the edge of the lighthouse's concrete pad.
"Ms. Cagen. Officer Sally Rogers. We met yesterday."
"I remember that, my love," Cagen said, grinning. "I'm back to combing already, though it looks like you've bagged the best find already."
She pointed at the crumpled ball of the tent.
"Forensics tent," Sally said. "Lost it in the storm."
"You should never peg a tent on the beach. Thought your lot would know that."
"There's plenty my lot don't know." A moment passed. "I'd hoped to speak with you further yesterday, Ms. Cagen, but there wasn't a chance. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions now?"
"Ask away, lovey," Cagen said. There was a warmth to her that Sally hadn't expected to find on the beach. "I want this solved more than anyone. And call me Nancy, please."
"Nancy. Of course. Sally." She took a breath, marshalling her thoughts.
"When were you out here yesterday, Nancy?"
"Oh, from around 5, I'd say."
Sally thought back to the tide tables. "High tide was around 3 a.m. Low comes six hours later. So you wouldn't have been able to reach the slack tide then."
Cagen gave Sally an appraising look. "More than just a pretty face. You've been studying up."
"Tides and tent pegs. I'm a quick study. 5 a.m. would put you four hours shy of slack tide."
"True, but then I walk for hours, my love. Talking to the Lady. Musing on the past. Get to my age, you spend more time in the past than you do the present."
Sally let that hang for a moment. The salt breeze rubbed her cheeks and the gulls cawed chaotically above.
"How long have you been combing on Dungeness, Nancy?"
"Well, 50 years, at least. Since I was a lass."
"Did you see the first body? 30 years ago?"
"Not on the beach. On the news, of course. Our Ephraim's lad, that was."
That name tweaked in Sally's memory. "Ephraim Richter? The victim's father?"
Cagen nodded. "My nephew. Ephraim was a shit, of course. My sister's man. Beat on her something rotten. The lad too." Her tone turned wistful. "You didn't know that? Figured little Glory Hallelujah would've told you."
Sally felt like she'd just touched a live wire. Mercer had said something similar, at least the first half of that nickname. "You mean Gloria Mayhew?"
"Yes. Just what we called her around here."
"So you know the DCI well?"
Cagen shrugged. "Some. And it ain't so surprising I guess.
We've all got our pasts, all interwoven.
" She sighed wistfully. "That boy, though, Tom?
Such a sweet little tyke. Used to bring me worn old slips of glass from the beach for jewelry.
I'd call them amber and give him a pound each time.
Still got a little bucket filled with those pieces. "
Sally considered. "One moment. You're saying you're the original victim's aunt?"
A smile played on Cagen's face. "I am. I suppose I could've led with that, eh? Glory didn't want me to, though, did she?"
Sally just stared. It felt like the beach was reshaping around her. Mayhew had held this back, which seemed bizarre. Then for Cagen to find the body this time? She didn't know what to make of any of it.
"Why wouldn't she want you to?"
"Oh, who knows. Glory's tied up in this like the rest of us, tangled like the Strangler's victims."
Sally blinked. "The Seafoam Strangler?"
Cagen tilted her head. "You've heard of him? Ask me, if my whole family went into the Boils, I'd have dunked myself too."
Sally forced herself not to shiver, remembering Dean Whateley's cloudy gaze.
"So how's DCI Mayhew tied up in all this?"
Cagen eyed Sally. "That's for her to say, isn't it? I'll gossip on my own tales, but not on others."
Sally absorbed that. "I see. Well, on that. Yesterday, you were about to tell me who you thought killed your nephew?"
Cagen cackled. "Aye, of course I was. I tell it whenever I can, and no bugger listens. Told them all back then, didn't I, like Glory said, but your lot never looked into him properly. The sot's dead now, along with Ephraim and my sister too."
"Who was it?"
"Reg Rook, of course! Big man in a bad bunch, him. Figured he was the second coming of Dr. Syn, all those Owler smugglers?" She hawked and spat into the shingle. "You've got one of his boys locked up now."
"We do, yes."
"Well don't let the little shit out. Rooks are bad news, that's a forecast I'll stand by. Reg was bad, but his full litter of sons?" She shook her head.
Sally felt like she was barely keeping up. Full litter was an odd expression. "Why do you think Reg Rook killed your nephew, Nancy?"
"Because I saw him that night. Tom, I mean. And he was running scared. Came by my house, like he used to when he was just a lad. Told me he'd fallen in with the Rooks, and he'd seen something he shouldn't have. It weren't people they smuggled back then. It were something worse, he said."
"What's worse than people?"
"I've no clue. He never said. But he was scared, proper. Then he was dead, done with the shells in his eyes to warn off other tattletales, I figured."
Tattletales. Sally tried to piece that into her understanding of the initial case. "And you told this to the detectives at the time?"
"Oh, yeah." Cagen waved a hand. "I said it to the man in charge, Stewart, about the only decent one in that lot.
He promised to look into it. But I was a bit of a drunk back then, so ain't nobody listened to me much.
Pretty bad, the whole mess." She chuckled.
"No doubt Rook had his hand in half those coppers' pockets. So, it died on the vine."
Sally's phone rang. The sound was loud and jarring, cutting through the weight in the air. "Just one moment," she said, and answered. "Rogers."
"Rogers, it's DCI Mayhew," came the stern voice. "If you and O'Connell are still operational, get here ASAP. We have the victim's ID."
Sally looked at Cagen. "What's the name, DCI?"
"Get here and find out."
The line went dead.
Cagen smiled. "Our Gloria, was it, Sally?"
Sally looked at her. The older woman's features blurred against the ebbing gray tide.
Along with the reactor, the lighthouse, the Crab Shack and now two dead boys, this woman seemed just as much a part of the Dungeness landscape.
Worn and weathered by the wind and waves.
Half-sunk, maybe, like a rock brimming with secret gems, under the slack tide line.
She thought of what the Fates had told her. That the killer belonged. That they wore that belonging like a cloak of invisibility.
"I'd like to talk again, Nancy," she said. "About Reginald Rook. About your nephew and the other officers on that case."
Cagen waved at the beach. "You know where I'll be, Sally. Always happy to share my old ghosts for a spell."
She turned and walked away, receding into the pre-dawn gloom. A shiver ran down Sally's back, then she scooped up the forensics tent and headed back to her Mustang.
The tent filled the whole back seat. She collected the plastic bag containing her borrowed uniforms and wriggled into the newer set, then called Liam.
He answered groggily. "Sally?"
"We're in business, Liam. Mayhew's got the ID. I'll see you in Rye."
A few seconds passed. "Are we not in Rye now?"
"You are. I'm on my way."