by Ashley Dyer
“No, but I can tell you where you can get one free, and a sandwich to soak up some of the booze,” she said.
He shoved his filthy hand at her again. “G’waan, love. Help an old man out.”
“You’re not so old,” she said, thinking, So why is he acting that way?
He laughed, and a waft of bad breath hit her. “You’re only as old as you feel, aren’t you, girl?”
Still smiling, but with serious intent in his eyes, he murmured, “You wanna watch yourself.”
“What did you say?” She took a step toward him and he backed off.
“Only trying to help.”
“By threatening me?”
“No,” he protested. “Not me . . . No, you got me all wrong . . . But look around you, girl. This is bandit territory, and you’re a moving target.” His eyes flicked right and left, and he lowered his voice to a whisper. “There’s some bad men put the word out on you. You need to be careful.”
31
Day 7, Evening
It was the end of another long day, and still no major progress in the case. Nothing, so far, from the Norris angle, although covert surveillance in his flat had caught his landlord sneaking into the property. The scene hadn’t officially been released, but they’d let him off with a stern reprimand. Friends of the missing man had readily agreed to provide fingerprints for elimination purposes; it seemed that he was a regular, upstanding citizen, as were his friends. The forensics team had identified all but one set in the flat by the end of the day, and when Ruth suggested they do a comparison with the landlord’s fingerprints—they were a match.
There were rumbles on the street—people were being terrorized by Ferryman fans wearing the F-logo hoodies. Wilshire wasn’t happy; he was taking a lot of flak from higher-ups, added to which, the press were demanding a briefing on this new development—and if there was one thing Wilshire hated more than criminals, it was dealing with the press.
Ruth was driving Carver home, as usual, and they discussed all this on the journey. Ruth had varied the route for the last couple of days, but they still had a number of interactions with the Ferryman’s ghouls, standing like waymarkers at road junctions. Ruth was feeling slightly spaced out from lack of sleep, and she found it hard to concentrate on what Carver was saying. She realized he was looking at her, waiting for a reply, and said, “Sorry, boss—I was distracted for a second.” She nodded toward a gray, hooded figure, who seemed to be tapping something into his mobile phone as they passed.
Her phone rang, and Ruth took it, using hands-free.
“Ruth, John Hughes.” He sounded tense. “Something weird is happening. Your location is being tweeted on social media.”
Ruth exchanged a glance with Carver.
“We’re being shadowed by our hooded stalkers again,” she said. “I’ll take a few evasive tactics, see if I can lose them.”
She hung up and turned off the main road. For a few minutes they saw no sign of the hoodies, but as soon as they wound back on the arterial road again, Hughes was back on the line.
“What’s your license plate number?” he asked.
Ruth reeled it off, with a sick sense of dread.
“They’re sending it out on Twitter,” he said.
Ruth checked her mirror. “I don’t see anyone.”
“Well, they see you,” Hughes said. “They’ve tweeted a photo.”
Ruth suppressed a tremor. This was more than weird; it was oppressive. Even so, she thanked Hughes with a steady voice and hung up.
“You’re not concerned?” Carver said.
“They’re a damned nuisance.” She shrugged. “But there’s nothing I can do about them.”
“You might think about requesting a fleet car till we’ve got this case wrapped up.”
“Maybe,” she said, uncomfortable to have the focus of attention on her. “So what was it you were saying?”
“Just that Ivey’s search of convenience store ATMs hasn’t turned up anything yet.”
“Ivey’s a bit of a terrier,” she said. “If there’s anything to find, he’ll dig it up.”
Carver stared thoughtfully at the road ahead. “He does seem to have potential.”
“No doubt in my mind.”
“Mm.”
The conversation was beginning to feel stilted, and Ruth suddenly became aware that Carver was tense. He was winding himself up to asking her a tricky question, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear it. She tried distracting him with chat about the house-to-house inquiries around Norris’s, and their good fortune that nobody had taken their story to the media yet, but he kept falling silent, and when he cleared his throat and said, “Ruth—” she knew there was no avoiding what was to come.
“I had a call from a pal on the Matrix team,” he said.
“Oh?”
“He said you’ve been asking questions on the street.”
Ruth’s eyebrow twitched. “We’ve all been doing that, boss.”
“About someone called Adam Black.”
Oh, boy . . . “Yeah,” she said, not giving anything away, although her mouth had dried when he said the name. He was looking straight at her, and there was no telling how much he could read in the freaky auras he saw around people.
“Would you like to clarify?” His tone was formal, implacable.
“Just routine,” she said, wondering if the tip-off from his Matrix pal had anything to do with the homeless man’s warning the previous night. He wasn’t as old as he’d at first seemed, nor as drunk; could he have been an undercover cop?
Carver snuffed air through his nose and she realized she’d been silent for some time.
“Is this to do with the case?” he demanded.
“I don’t think so.”
That was an honest answer, but it certainly wasn’t forthright, nor was it helpful.
“Who is he?”
She didn’t answer.
“I’ve done some checking,” Carver persisted. “So I know that Adam Black has a juvenile record. He was taken into care at age fourteen, ended up in secure accommodation for a few months at age fifteen, eventually released into foster care at sixteen, but he disappeared as soon as he was legally beyond the remit of the care system.”
“Yeah,” Ruth said, knowing he wouldn’t allow her to leave it at that, and feeling a prickling itch in the joint of her elbow and forearm—the ghost tattoo playing up—reminding her that secrets and lies always came back to haunt you.
She turned off the main road, seeing another Ferryman hoodie watching them, intending to cut through a series of backstreets, but Carver was relentless.
“Ruth,” he said. “I appreciate all you’ve done, and continue to do, to cover my back. But I won’t tolerate you or anyone else withholding information from the case.”
“That’s fair,” she said, trying to ignore the maddening itch of the ghost tattoo. “But I’m almost sure this has nothing to do with the case.”
“‘Almost,’” he repeated.
“You know I’d tell you if it did.”
After a tormenting silence that told her he wasn’t convinced of that at all, Carver said, “What did Black do to end up in a secure unit?”
She wondered if she could hold him off long enough to find Adam and talk to him. On the other hand, if she held out, Carver would root the truth out for himself.
“Ruth?” he said, then, angrily: “Sergeant Lake?”
She took a breath, readying herself to confess, when Carver’s mobile phone rang.
“Contact Center,” he explained, adding: “This isn’t finished.”
He answered the phone and spoke in short, cryptic bursts: “When?” A pause. “Is that confirmed?” Then, “Give me the exact wording.” After half a minute, he spoke again: “Best dispatch a Matrix team. I’m two minutes away—I’ll head back. Make sure CSM Hughes gets a copy of the recording as soon as possible,” he added.
“Where to?” Ruth said.
He closed the phone and gave her a terse
instruction: “Turn around—head back toward Hope Street.”
They were in a quiet side street that ran parallel to the arterial road, and she found a spot to turn.
“The Ferryman?” she asked.
“What’s a sequela?” he said in answer.
The question threw her for a second, and she had to scramble for a definition. “It’s um . . . a term used in pathology—it means a consequence of disease.”
“It’s sickness, then?”
“No, it’s what follows from it.”
He shifted irritably in his seat, clearly dissatisfied with her explanation, and Ruth reached for an example as she completed the maneuver.
“Think of it this way,” she said. “Flu is viral; pneumonia is usually caused by bacteria—they’re totally different pathogens—but catch the flu, and you’re at much higher risk of pneumonia straight after. One is a consequence of the other.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” he said, almost to himself. “They’re already dead—how could there be a consequence?”
Ruth accelerated out into the flow of traffic on the main road, earning a honk from a following car driver. “It is the Ferryman, then?”
“Take the second right,” Carver said.
“Why didn’t the switchboard just put him through to you?” she said, as she made the turn.
“He didn’t want to be put through. Gave instructions to have the message relayed.”
“Well, what’s pissed him off this time?” she wondered.
Carver didn’t answer, and Ruth sensed that she would not be forgiven until she came clean about Adam Black. But that would have to wait. Right now, they were back in the Georgian Quarter, a mix of grand mansions, some complete with Doric columns, and rows of three-story town houses dating back to the early nineteenth century.
“There should be a narrow road on the left,” Carver said, “immediately after this terrace.”
Ruth drove slowly past the row of houses and found the place. Just wide enough for one vehicle, and laid with granite setts, it had No Through Road and No Parking signs, and a warning that cars left unattended would be towed. She squeezed the car into the roadway; a row of three tiny mews properties, converted from eighteenth-century stables, faced onto the street, butting onto an eight-foot wall topped with spikes, which ran to the end of the narrow lane.
“How far down is it?” Ruth asked. He didn’t seem willing to share, so she went on, “Because if we roll right up to where he wants us, we could obliterate any tire tracks.”
She saw a slight chin lift, which told her that Carver saw the sense in what she was saying. “Pull over here.”
Since they were in the center of the roadway, and there was nowhere else for her to go, Ruth just stopped the car where it was and looked to Carver for instructions.
“The caller said to look for a gate about halfway down.”
They grabbed a couple pairs of nitrile gloves and a flashlight from the boot of her car and walked the rest of the way, Ruth checking the gutter and curb for tire tread marks.
The gate was iron, black, recently painted—and it was secured with a chain and padlock.
She shone the flashlight through the bars of the gate and they peered into a garden laid out in a modern, minimalist design: a square of lawn, slate pathways, topiary specimen plants, and a feature water-wall. A white pillar, or plinth, stood at the center of the lawn, but it was impossible at that distance to make out what it was for.
Ruth crouched to get a better view of the lock and discovered that the shank was not fully engaged in the hasp. She looked up at Carver. “It’s open.”
He gave her the nod and she gloved up before unhooking the padlock from the chain. Having no better option to hand, she hung it loosely on her own key ring and held her keys by the fob to protect any evidence. Then she drew back the latch, and the gate swung open under its own weight.
“Have we got a crime scene, or not?” Carver said.
They stepped inside and Ruth played the beam over the white object at the center of the lawn; a clear box was attached to the top. “There’s something in the box, but I can’t make out what,” she said.
For now, there was no sound of an emergency vehicle—unless there happened to be a team already deployed in the city center, it would take the Matrix team another ten minutes to make the journey from their new base on the outskirts of the city.
The garden was overlooked on two sides: backed onto by tall Georgian terraces in an inverted L-shape; the third wall was windowless, being the end of the mews terrace. Carver looked up at the windows, some lit, some not.
“He could be watching from any one of those,” he said. “But on the other hand, that plinth could be a memorial to some famous person who lived here.”
“There’s one good way to find out,” Ruth said.
He resisted. “I don’t want to look a damned fool, and right now, this is looking like an elaborate hoax. I mean, if this is a new ‘exhibit,’ where are his followers?”
“Is there anything on Instagram?”
He checked. “Not a whisper.”
“We need to take a look,” Ruth said. She shone the flashlight low over the lawn. They’d had a couple of dry days, but the clay soil in the Merseyside basin held on to moisture, and if this was a crime scene, there was an outside chance that the CSIs might get a useful shoe print.
“I think the ground has been trodden along this line,” she said, indicating with the light beam. “So if we take a diagonal line from the corner off to the right, we’d be less likely to track over any prints.”
Ruth led the way, Carver treading as close as he could in her footsteps.
The plinth in the center of the lawn looked like marble, the clear box was probably plexiglass, and there was something inside it: a dark mass.
Ruth took another step, and spotlamps flared all around them, drenching them in light. Ruth ducked instinctively, reaching for her Casco baton. But Carver seemed transfixed, staring at what was inside the box.
“Jesus,” he breathed. “It’s a heart.”
Ruth did a quick three-sixty, thinking the Ferryman must be watching—how else would he know the exact moment to flick the switch?
More windows lit up; a few opened as residents leaned out to see what was happening. It was only a matter of time before word got out to the Ferryman’s followers—if he hadn’t already sent it.
Ruth called for mobile unit backup and Scientific Support—they would need more than the Matrix team for this—then turned her attention to Carver.
He blinked and seemed to come out of some kind of trance. The heart was dripping red; the liquid oozed from under the plexiglass box. But even as she asked Carver if he was all right, she thought, It doesn’t look right for blood.
Carver swallowed. “It’s moving,” he said.
Ruth was a scientist, a coolheaded logician, but she couldn’t suppress a shudder of horror as she looked again at the heart and saw that it did seem to be moving. Tiny undulations of the muscle rippled through it, as if it was still alive. As they watched, the heart seemed to split in several places at once.
Incisions, Ruth thought. He sliced through the tissue.
The cuts opened and the source of rippling movement revealed itself, as a writhing mass of maggots burst out, and the heart disgorged handfuls of shiny gold coins onto the plinth.
Sound blasted suddenly from nearby, and Ruth jumped like a cat. Her heart rattling in her throat, she realized it was music—10cc, playing “Art for Art’s Sake.”
Simultaneously, an engine roared, and tires screeched on the roadway beyond the wall.
“Stay there,” Ruth said, although she didn’t think Carver was capable of moving at that moment.
She ran to the gate as five Ferryman groupies spilled out of a Vauxhall Corsa.
“Hell!” Sirens wailed nearby, but they would be too late to hold back the mob. Sod it. She slammed the gate and slipped the padlock through the chain, locking it.
&n
bsp; 32
An hour later, Carver stood at the edge of the garden, near the wall. The place had been floodlit for the CSIs who were processing the scene. The street’s limited access was both a blessing and a curse: initial clearing of the area had been hairy as the crowd, disgruntled at being kept away from the exhibit, got aggressive. Ruth’s car had been damaged by a few determined Ferryman fans who’d climbed onto it in an attempt to get shots of the garden, but the wall spikes had kept them out. The arrival of a double-crewed unit scattered a few of them, and the Matrix team had made some arrests when they showed up two minutes later, so the situation was quickly contained.
Carver watched DS Lake, who was talking on her phone a short distance away. At least he wouldn’t have to nag her to switch to an unmarked car; insurance should cover a rental for the next week or two while she sorted repairs.
Detectives and uniform police were knocking on doors, canvassing the buildings that overlooked the scene. On Carver’s order, the identity of anyone entering or leaving was being carefully checked and logged in the record.
Scientific Support had held back until the area was made safe, and even after they’d been given the okay, they’d had to park a couple hundred yards from the cordon and lug their equipment to the scene. Evidence boxes were stacked against the wall, next to their instrument cases and spare disposable suits, vinyl gloves, and overshoes. John Hughes had attended the Dingle crime scene, and protocol dictated that he could not go near this one, but he had pulled in two of his most experienced CSIs for the job and sent a tech with them to assess how this bit of “artistry” had been achieved.
The technician’s first job was to check the area for high voltages: the SSU’s high-powered floodlights had revealed cables radiating out like the spokes of a bicycle wheel to spotlamps placed in a circle around the plinth. He was small and stocky, but he worked fast, and the air around him glowed faintly with violet light. Having quickly established the area was safe, he turned off the sound system that was playing “Art for Art’s Sake” at full blast in a continuous loop. Job done, he left the CSIs to get on with it, trotting over the aluminum stepping plates that marked their common approach path, light on his feet for a stocky man.