56. Deal With The Devil
She answered it all. An hour, maybe, then they were done, and Brown raced off to write and file the story.
Sally kept walking, feeling loose and uncertain.
She found an all-night café near the Big Eye, then sat and drank coffee, watching the day awaken on the street outside, feeling the reality of what she'd just done seep in like a bad hangover.
She'd broken a cardinal rule. Maybe it was enough to get her back on the case, even save her career. Maybe not. But there would be a cost, she was sure of that.
Every few minutes she hit refresh on the Gaze's front page, waiting for the article to show.
It looked like some kind of poster for an action movie. The headline was worse, filling the screen.
SHE brOKE EVERY RULE.
SHE brOKE THE GANG.
NOW LET HER brEAK THE CASE!
Traffickers on the beach. A killer nobody caught in 30 years. And a young officer dead. As Sally Rogers is told to resign, The Gaze asks: is she the problem – or the only one solving it?
By Tania Brown
Sally felt a sickness stir in her belly. Of course, this was what Brown would write. She'd said as much. But seeing it in black and white, with the 'NOW' of the title in bright red, brought it home hard.
This piece would be a celebration of how she'd flouted procedure. It directly called her a rulebreaker, then challenged the police, the NCA, to do something about it. It put a crosshair on her back like never before.
But it was done now, and she could only read on:
'Look at the photograph at the top of this page.
This woman – Special Agent Sally Rogers, 29, of the FBI, currently on exchange with Britain's National Crime Agency – is not a police officer in the conventional sense of the word.
She arrived in this country three months ago carrying the weight of a massacre that left 18 of her college friends dead, one that nearly killed her too.
She came to find answers. What she found three days ago, on a desolate nuclear beach in Kent on a freezing Monday morning, was a boy with cockle shells where his eyes should be.
What happened next is a story about one officer's ungovernable drive to do what is right. It is also a story about the people who tried to stop her.'
THE MOST DANGEROUS STRETCH OF COASTLINE IN brITAIN
Dungeness is like nowhere else in England. A vast and shifting desert of shingle on the Kent coast, at turns serenely ordered, at others gripped by chaotic storms – and one of the most active small-boat landing sites in the country.
Thousands of illegal migrants have been ferried across the Channel and deposited on this shore. Most move on quickly. Some, it now emerges, did not move on at all. They were met on the beach and taken – by a local crime family who have been exploiting Britain's broken border for years.
The Rook brothers – Roarke, Jerome, Silas and Gabriel – are the kind of men Dungeness has sheltered for centuries. Men who trade in human misery with casual ease, unstoppable given the shambolic state of British policing.
Until Sally Rogers arrived.
THE BODY ON THE BEACH
Rogers was not supposed to be anywhere near Dungeness that morning. She had been on desk duty for three months – sidelined, sources say, not for any disciplinary reason but because our law enforcement establishment finds women like Rogers inconvenient.
Women who push. Women who notice things. Women who do not wait for permission.
Sally Rogers was on a personal day, completing a grueling charity obstacle race nearby, when the call came in. She drove straight to the beach in her race gear and found Jason Harrow, 19, laid out on the shingle, with twin cockle shells pressed into his eye sockets.
It was, as any reader of this paper will know, not the first time.
Thirty years ago, almost to the day, another boy was found on the same beach in the same condition. Tom Richter. His killer – hunted by a DCI who later took his own life – was never found.
Now the killer was back. And Sally Rogers was the only person in Kent prepared to say so out loud.
THE EYES AND EARS THEORY
Within hours, Sally Rogers identified the connection her own DCI, Gloria Mayhew – daughter of the last DCI to face this killer – refused to name: the Cockle-Eye Killer was back.
Sources close to the investigation claim that Rogers identified the symbolic key to these murders: an ancient fragment attributed to Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher of flux and chaos, also known as the weeping philosopher.
"Eyes and ears are bad witnesses for men with barbarian souls," the fragment claims, often interpreted to mean that nobody really sees or hears the truth.
The first victim lost his eyes. The second modern victim, Nancy Cagen, lost her ears.
"She saw the pattern before anyone else," said one source familiar with Rogers' work. "Before anyone even thought there was a pattern."
And that has been the story of this investigation from the start, with every officer in power struggling to rein her in.'
Sally had to stop. The sickness was building in her stomach. She hadn't presented any of that to Brown in that way. She'd been clear it wasn't her theory, but came from an expert team. She couldn't receive credit.
But here the credit was, again and again going to her. One woman arrayed against everyone. She almost couldn't face reading more, but now she had to. She had to know what was being said in her name.
'THE WOMAN THEY TRIED TO SIDELINE
What followed was a masterclass in institutional obstruction.
According to our sources, DCI Mayhew blocked Rogers from essential interviews, withheld connections to the 1996 case, and confined her to a training room.
When Rogers uncovered the Rooks' trafficking operation, Mayhew's response was not gratitude.
It was a formal complaint to Rogers' superior, NCA Deputy Director James McMaster.
'McMaster is a political beast,' one NCA insider told this paper. 'He knows which way the wind is blowing. When Rogers started generating headlines, his first instinct was to manage the story, not back the officer.'
McMaster declined to comment.
But Rogers did not stop. While the establishment circled its wagons, she was building a picture of the Rook family operation – a systematic pipeline of small boats operated by cross-Channel trafficking gangs.
They deposited their human cargo on the Dungeness beach in the early hours, and the Rooks collected them.
These young women were then forced to perform in illegal livestream operations at the Rooks' farm.
One of these brave small-boat survivors described conditions as, 'Terrifying. They took our passports. They forced us onto camera. I did not want to do these things.'
Rogers uncovered all of this in less than 24 hours, where Kent Police had failed for years. When she confronted the Rooks at their farm – alone and unarmed – eldest brother Roarke Rook attempted to throttle her to death in the marsh.
He failed, and fled into the labyrinthine waterways of Romney Marsh.
Again, Rogers did not stop. She tracked Roarke Rook down within 24 hours, and when he produced an illegal shotgun and opened fire on her vehicle, Rogers made a split-second decision.
She drove her Mustang directly at his boat – breaking his arm in the collision, and saving the lives of everyone in that car.
THE COST
None of this was without consequence.
Rogers has been throttled, shot at, doused in freezing marsh water and pepper-sprayed in the face. She sustained injuries in the course of these events that would have hospitalized most people for a week.
She did not take a single hour off.
She also lost a colleague. PC Emily Chakrati, 27, of East Hythe, died in an explosion connected to the case on Wednesday. Thanks to Officer Rogers' selfless heroism, there was only one casualty.
You read that right. Rogers literally ran into a suspected bomb site and risked her own life to drag her partner to safety, seconds before the blast. DCI Gloria Mayhew – believing Rogers' actions too impulsive – actually fired pepper spray into her face to stop her.
Rogers' partner survived. Emily Chakrati did not. If not for DCI Mayhew's intervention, perhaps this promising young officer would still be alive…
In any case, the loss of Chakrati is devastating. It is also, sources tell this paper, being used by certain senior officers as a means of pressuring Rogers towards a despicable ultimatum: resign now or we will destroy your career.
The existence of this ultimatum heaps shame upon us all.
AND THE KILLER IS STILL OUT THERE
Let us be absolutely clear about one thing.
The cockle-eye killer – the person responsible for the deaths of Jason Harrow, Nancy Cagen, and Tom Richter thirty years ago – has still not been caught.
The Rooks are in custody. That is not small. What Rogers achieved represents one of the most significant takedowns of a small-boat trafficking operation this coastline has ever seen. The young women removed from that farm are safe. For that alone, she deserves the gratitude of this nation.
But a vicious killer remains, somewhere in Romney Marsh right now. Reading the news, watching this investigation from the inside. Waiting.
And the woman best placed to find them is being told to hand in her warrant card.
We ask one question of Deputy Director McMaster, of DCI Mayhew, of whoever holds the levers of power in this decision.
Is this really how we treat heroes in this country?'
Nausea ran through Sally's body now. In every way that the Gaze's last piece had torn her down, this one lionized her.
It amped up every feasible positive, from the 'charity obstacle race' she'd been running before the investigation began to the near-savant levels of human warmth she'd displayed when 'bonding' with eyewitnesses like Nancy Cagen.
It was a pantomime; pulp bullshit that painted her as some kind of saint, an exploitation of the case every bit as bad as the original podcast. She was not a selfless Sherlock Holmes for the modern age. She was no avenging angel.
But she'd enabled this. She should have realized that any good story needed its share of villains, and Brown had found plenty. Not just the Rooks. Also McMaster. Also Mayhew. Also every other police officer in Kent…
She dropped her phone to the table and buried her head in her hands. It wasn't right, but she'd helped Brown do it. Even if the article helped her, it could destroy Mayhew. She tried to think of some way the blame could be lessened, the attack leavened, but came up with nothing.
This was the deal, she realized. This was the price, and there was no undoing it now.
Her phone rang. Sally flinched and checked the screen.
McMaster.
Too soon. She wasn't ready. But there was no slowing this thing down now. She steeled herself and answered.
"Rogers."
"You've been busy," came McMaster's voice, blunt and implacable. "This piece in the Gaze? I did not expect that from you."
"I know."
He let a solitary laugh. "Shocked you too? Get in bed with a rag like that, you should expect nothing less." A moment passed. "Well, it's moving fast already, and who knows where this bag of shit ends up bursting? I think I can predict the outcome, though."
"Sir?"
"You've made enemies here, Rogers. On one hand, well played.
On another, you've damned your own DCI. Took a pop at me too.
I don't take it personally, but others will.
" Another pause. "Nobody will want to work with you again.
But here's the positive. The countdown's off.
In minutes, I'm going to make a statement, in which I am going to applaud your work and try and give some cover to your DCI. "
He paused. Sally waited, mouth dry.
"There is no ultimatum," he finished. "There never was. You are still on the case."
Sally blinked. Was it that simple? "I'm back on Dungeness?"
"Technically, you were never off it. There was nothing official."
Relief flooded through Sally. "Thank you, sir."
"Fuck you, Rogers. Solve the damn case, and never pull this shit again."
He hung up.
Sally held the phone to her ear a moment longer, gazing out of the window at the people flowing by outside, all oblivious.
Was it worth the cost?
She didn't know. It had to be. At least now she had a chance.