by Ashley Dyer
“Three down, two to go,” she said.
Again, she gave him nothing. He knew the procedure was painful, but in almost three months of treatment, she had never once complained—never even mentioned it unless he’d asked.
“Well, it’s been nice having this heart-to-heart,” he said, pleased to catch a brief flash of amusement in her eyes.
Two hours later, Ruth Lake was typing up a report of her visit to the hospital mortuary. The fabric of her blouse chafed in the angle between her forearm and biceps, wakening a nagging burn caused by laser treatment to remove inkings drilled into her skin—her own legacy of the last case she’d worked with Greg Carver.
The brain tissue was in good condition, the pathologist told her: their killer had used formalin on the first two, but not the third. As CSM Hughes had speculated, the formalin hadn’t penetrated into the center of the tissue, so the pathologist was confident that the plugs they’d taken as samples would yield intact tissue for DNA testing. The slices were cut smoothly, he’d said, with none of the “saw marks” you might expect from a standard kitchen knife. That suggested two things: their killer used a butchers’-quality knife—and he’d had practice. The dye was yet to be identified, but he thought it more likely to be food colorant than a biological stain; the chromatographic analysis would tell them more.
When Ruth asked where the killer might have got the plexiglass, he had demurred—it was not his area of expertise. But he did add that it looked like good quality—clear and colorless.
There weren’t many air bubbles, either, Ruth had noticed.
“He’s good with his hands,” she murmured, adding a note to her report.
She scratched the skin of her forearm absently, thinking about the plexiglass. She’d found companies online that specialized in “embedding” services—anything from books to tins of Spam, frozen in blocks of clear plexiglass. But the Ferryman wasn’t likely to send his trophy slices of brain for mounting, so he had to’ve made the stuff himself.
She knew that plexiglass was a form of acrylic. To make it, you needed to persuade a lot of simple, single molecules called monomers to link together to form a long-chain chemical called a polymer. Once the polymer was made, it set, so if you wanted to shape it, or embed something inside it—like, for instance, brain tissue—you had to do it while the stuff was still liquid.
But how hard would it be to get hold of the right chemicals in sufficient quantities?
A quick Google search told her that the syrupy liquid monomer base was available by the gallon. All you had to do was add an enzyme activator, stir, and pour. And you could use ordinary domestic silicone food molds. Amazon even had a helpful algorithm to ensure buyers found everything they needed for their craft project. But there must be tens of thousands of crafters across the UK, using kits to make paperweights of flowers or dandelion clocks; finding the one sicko who set human remains in acrylic would not be an easy task.
She called John Hughes to relay the pathologist’s findings and let him know her thoughts on how the Ferryman was sourcing the acrylic.
“The mortuary sent the disks back after they finished extracting tissue samples,” he said. “We could sample the material, do some chemistry on it. If it is quality acrylic, it might help your lot to identify the manufacturer.”
“That’d be great,” Ruth said. “According to the technical specs I found online, this stuff can take twelve to twenty-four hours to cure, so unless he used an air purifier with a HEPA filter, it’s likely something got caught in there.”
“We’ll start processing for trace today,” he said.
She thanked him and hung up, pausing to print out her report notes to take to Carver’s office.
He was on the phone. He waved her in and pushed a button on his desk phone.
“DCI Solen,” he said, “DS Lake has just come into my office. I’ve put you on speakerphone. DCI Solen is from SCD1,” he added, for Ruth’s benefit. “He’s the SIO investigating Professor Tennent’s disappearance.”
SCD1 was Serious Crime Directorate 1—an operational command unit tasked with investigating homicides and other serious crimes in London. It seemed they were taking the professor’s disappearance very seriously.
“DCI Solen was just saying his team has pinpointed the professor’s last location,” Carver said.
“Well, we think so,” Solen said, his accent authentic East End. “I sent you a sequence of CCTV clips.”
Carver opened the e-mail attachment on his laptop.
As it played, Solen talked them through: “The professor used his Oyster card at Warren Street Underground Station at 2:15 p.m. on the day he disappeared.”
Two short clips showed the professor passing through a ticket barrier on the underground, then boarding a train. He wore a black waterproof jacket over a gray wool suit and had a laptop shoulder bag looped over one shoulder.
“We’ve got him on CCTV disembarking at Charing Cross underground from a Northern line train at 2:31 p.m.,” Solen went on, as the action unfolded on-screen. “The CCTV shows him turning left out of the station, then he cuts through an alley called York Place.”
Suddenly, the screen went white. At first, Ruth thought that the footage had ended, but then she saw a blur of gray bird’s wings as a pigeon flew past the security camera.
“What are we looking at?” Carver asked.
“The white ‘nothing’ you can see is a Ford Transit van, parked outside a loading bay on Buckingham Street, at the back of the Theodore Bullfrog pub.”
“The professor called his secretary to say he was meeting someone on his way back to work after his lecture across town,” Ruth said. “He could have set the meeting up at the pub.”
“It’s possible.”
“Is the alley an obvious shortcut?” Carver asked.
“Not obvious,” Solen said. “But locals would know it, and Tennent lectured at King’s College’s Strand Campus, about ten minutes’ walk from Charing Cross Station, so . . .”
“It’s likely he knew the alley as a cut-through,” Ruth finished for him. “May I?” Carver leaned back to let her take the controls and she rewound the recording to point out two CCTV cameras were mounted on the loading bay on the other side of the alley—one either side of the loading doors. Neither would be high enough to give them a view over the top of the van.
“No security cameras on the opposite wall?” she asked.
“’Fraid not,” Solen said.
Whatever was happening on the other side of the van in those minutes was lost to them.
Ruth played the recording on and the white side of the van began slipping past the lens as it pulled away from the curb, revealing a gray wall that had been hidden behind it.
Carver leaned back, and even closed his eyes briefly as the motion started. Vertigo, Ruth guessed.
The wall sloped upward, left to right, and was topped by black iron railings. There was no sign of Professor Tennent.
“The van just turned left at the junction,” Carver said.
“That’s John Adam Street,” Solen said. “The professor’s last mobile phone signal pinged off a tower near Charing Cross Station. Our dog trackers found it smashed up about a minute’s walk from there—probably chucked out the van window.”
The footage jerked through a series of shots of the van in traffic for a few seconds and the chief inspector said, “We got him on cameras all the way to Embankment.”
“Probably making his way toward the M40, to head north,” Carver commented.
“My thoughts exactly.”
Ruth heard surprise in Solen’s voice.
Then, “Oh, yeah . . . You were on Operation Trident at the Met, weren’t you?”
“Long time ago,” Carver said, cutting the conversation off before it got started. “Did you get any shots of the driver?”
A slight hesitation, then Solen said, “Fast-forward five minutes.”
He gave an exact time stamp to look for, and Ruth zipped through the sequence while Carver looked
away.
“Got it?” Solen asked.
Ruth froze the screen on a perfect shot of the front of the van in good light. The number plate was clear, but the windscreen reflected light in a rainbow of colors, the driver no more than a bulky gray shadow behind it.
“He’s used a reflective film,” she said.
“On the windscreen and side windows, yeah,” Solen said. “That stuff is called ‘chameleon film’—the colors constantly shift. The bad news is, the techs say the shimmer effect you see there is a bugger to deal with.”
“But they can clean it up,” Carver said, a question in his tone.
Ruth shook her head. “The image behind the flare just wouldn’t exist. It’d be like trying to remove the door from a picture so you can see who’s behind it.”
“Into photography, are you?” Solen asked.
“Not particularly,” Ruth said, not feeling the need to explain. “But there is a faint image of the driver, so they might be able to improve the contrast.”
Solen grunted. “Click forward to the next frame, you’ll see the cleaned-up version.”
The driver’s shape was more clearly defined. He was probably tall, judging by his head height behind the wheel, but his facial features were no more than a smudge.
“We’ve got teams scouring CCTV and ANPR from the scene onward,” he went on. “I’ll let you know if they find anything.”
“What about the number plates?” Carver asked.
“Stolen off a van in Liverpool the night before.”
Carver glanced at Ruth.
“We’ll check CCTV at our end,” Carver said. “See if we can locate the van on its way into or out of the city. What about the professor’s credit cards? Some of the missing here had items bought on their cards for weeks after they disappeared.”
“Sorry,” Solen said. “We got nothing.”
“Makes sense,” Ruth said. “Foul play wasn’t suspected in our cases—at least not at first—he’s not likely to take that kind of risk, knowing we’d be on the lookout for it.”
“Any chance of getting something from Tennent’s phone?” Carver asked.
“It got crushed under car wheels, but we retrieved the SIM card,” Solen said. “The techs are doing their best to work their magic on it as we speak.”
“He knew the shortcut through the alley,” Ruth said. “He knew how to block the CCTV cameras with the van; he took the most efficient route out of London, so either he had local knowledge, or he did some recon on the area in the days before.”
“We’ll look out for that on the recordings,” Solen said. “Anything else?”
“Could you send through a list of evidence gathered at the scene?” Carver asked.
“I’ll get the Evidence Recovery Unit to send it through,” Solen said. “But you know how it is: London alley . . .”
Ruth did. As a CSI, she’d picked up, bagged, and logged an awful lot of unsavory rubbish that had nothing to do with the cases they were investigating. Added to which, it was three days since Tennent disappeared—hundreds of people must have passed through that alley since then.
Solen signed off shortly after, and Ruth kept her eyes on Carver. His hand trembled a little when he reached for the mouse to close the video sequence.
Carver seemed to sense her attention and looked up. He lifted his chin, indicating the folder in her hand. “Is that the pathologist’s preliminary findings?”
“Yeah,” she said. “D’you want me to run through them with you?”
“Just leave the report—I’ll take a look later.”
Ruth was one of very few who knew about the peculiar aftereffects of Greg’s injuries, and she’d learned to accept it. But whatever had happened this morning was far more than simply seeing auras—and he still seemed to be struggling with the aftereffects.
“Is it Emma—is she okay?”
He stared at her, distracted. “What? No—I haven’t seen Emma in three weeks.”
It was beginning to look like Carver’s marriage had become a permanent casualty of his drink-fueled spiral into obsession during their last case.
“Was there something else, Sergeant?” Carver asked, his tone a little too sharp.
“I don’t know,” Ruth said. “Is there?”
He sighed. “I had a migraine. I’m fine now.”
She nodded. “I’ll get someone on tracking that number plate.” She muted the sharpness in her tone but kept enough edge in it to let him know that she wouldn’t take any crap from him.
He exhaled. “Yeah. Yes—thanks, Ruth.”
Not an apology, but as close as she’d get, and it was enough. She gave a quick nod, then left, closing the door softly behind her.
6
If I’ve learned one thing in life, it’s the importance of timing. The tick-tick swing of the metronome that separates good moment from bad moment is largely misunderstood by artists. Those who consider themselves on a higher moral plane than the rest of humanity might say that even thinking about timing is monstrous, that taking a business approach to aesthetic creativity is tacky. But would they try to mount an exhibition of fine art outside a football stadium on a wet Saturday afternoon in November? Of course not—it’s all about catching the wave.
I’ll admit, I’ve been through my share of personal wipeouts; I’ve even missed the wave entirely because of bad timing. So, while I am impatient, I can wait for the surf to swell beneath me.
Which is why I am watching the news updates hourly, listening to the tick-tick of the metronome, waiting for the announcement that will signal a change in pace, and launch the next phase of my campaign.
So far, the press releases have been unforthcoming. Apparently the postmortem examination is “complex and delicate.”
It pains me to contemplate what they will do to my art: dismantle, dissect, slice, macerate, analyze the component parts as though they were no more than sliced meat. And all this in a fruitless search to discover hints of my presence. No matter: as Gustav Metzger once said, “Destroy, and you create.” I must think of this as artistic process, constructive destruction.
My followers continue to grow, which is consolation—fifteen thousand at the last count, and no sign of a slowdown. They reach out to me, flattering, trying to coax me into a response. But timing is of the essence in this, too, and I will not be rushed. I monitor, and I wait.
Tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick.
7
Day 3, Morning briefing
Greg Carver stood at the front of the room. The projector screen to his left was lit with the Merseyside Police logo, and the mood was tense: they knew something important was coming, they just didn’t know what, yet.
“DNA analysis of the brain sections came through overnight,” he said. “We have not one, but three victims.”
A buzz of murmured conversation. The case had evolved from a Missing Persons review to a serial murder inquiry in under three days.
Carver waited for silence.
“The victims, all male, have been identified.” He looked into every face in the room. “Their names will be released by the Press Office after the relatives have been informed; I don’t want that information to come from any member of this team.” He saw nods of agreement. “And I don’t want any speculation about a serial killer.”
“That won’t stop the press, boss,” someone said.
“I know,” Carver said. “They’ve already got a name to hang on him, and once this is in the public domain, it’s going to feed public anxiety.” He waited until every pair of eyes were raised to his. “So no one talks to press—on or off the record—okay?”
When he was sure that message had gotten across, Carver clicked to an image of a dark-haired man of slight build.
“John Eddings, twenty-three. He went missing six months ago—September of last year. Walked out of a bar on the Albert Dock and vanished.” He clicked to the next image. “Dillon Martin, twenty-five.” Martin was fair-haired and muscular. “He disappeared in October
of last year. He saw his girlfriend back to her flat in Wood Street after a night out in the center of town. Never made it home. Martin owned an apartment in Kings Dock Mill, Tabley Street. That’s a ten-minute walk from his girlfriend’s place.”
He called up the final slide—a lean, gray-haired man, with a fiercely inquisitive gaze.
“Professor Mick Tennent,” he said, over gasps of recognition. “Aged fifty-two.”
He clicked to a short clip of the professor presenting Fact or Fable?
“Liverpool, a city in fear,” Tennent said. “In just six months, twelve men aged between twenty-two and twenty-eight have vanished without trace. Many believe that a sinister figure they call ‘The Ferryman’ has lured these young men to their deaths.
“Could a serial killer really be stalking the streets?” He gestured over his shoulder to a dark, hooded male. “Is the Ferryman fact or fable?” Staring straight into the camera, he said, “You decide.”
“That program ran just under a week ago,” Carver said, closing the frame. “The episode title was ‘Statistical Evidence: Learn to Think Outside the Box.’ And in case anyone is in any doubt, Tennent rubbished the Ferryman theory, so while John Eddings and Dillon Martin might have been taken at random, it’s clear that Professor Tennent was deliberately targeted. London Met is talking to his family, the TV producer, and his university colleagues.”
He glanced at Ruth Lake. “DS Lake will organize teams to interview friends and colleagues of the two Liverpool victims. Family liaison officers will talk to the immediate family. But before you speak to anyone, familiarize yourselves with the original witness statements.” Carver went on. “Try to clear up any discrepancies, establish a reliable timeline. We need to know if there were links between the victims, so ask about their habits, hobbies, likes, and dislikes. Who did they associate with? What were their favorite haunts? Was there something going on between Martin and his girlfriend? Did they have an argument or dispute before he disappeared; did she have a problem with ex-partners?”
He watched them scribble down notes.