by Ashley Dyer
A man leaned out of a picture frame and angled his upper body, caught in the act of painting a pencil-sketched image of himself on the wall. The effect was three-dimensional, impressive, and disturbing.
Ruth felt his eyes on her, but when she glanced in his direction, he turned quickly away. She took a sip of coffee—it was foul—then paced to the window and looked down onto the street; there were no cars parked outside. “There doesn’t seem to be anyone around.”
“Wow,” he said, “ace detective skills.”
“Does anyone say ‘ace’ anymore?”
“Only when they’re being sarcastic.”
“You texted them, didn’t you, from the pub?”
“Like I said—ace—”
“Okay. Find me a utility bill.”
“Wouldn’t do any good. Rogue pays the bills.”
“Rogue,” she said. “Does he have a real name?”
“That is his real name.”
She cocked an eyebrow. “Take your time—I’ve got all night.”
He sighed. “His given name is Roger Tickle.”
“I can see why he’d go by Rogue.”
“Piss off,” he said, but the corner of his mouth twitched.
“Who’s your other flatmate?” He didn’t answer at first, and she said, “Come on, Adam, I can check with the landlord—or come back early tomorrow, wake them all up.”
“Janus,” he said. Then, “Jamie Havers.”
She drifted to the end of the trestle table, where a few letters lay scattered next to a pile of flyers. The flyers advertised Dash-Art, the letters confirmed what Adam had just told her—there was even a letter addressed to “MadAdaM.”
“You’re not telling me your credit cards are made out to this name,” she said.
“Nah, it’s still plain Adam Black.”
“But you’re not on the electoral register.”
“Never saw the point of voting.”
She scanned the room. “I don’t see a landline.”
He snorted. “Who has a landline anymore?”
“You have cable.”
His eyebrow twitched.
“In Roger’s name, I suppose.”
Adam shrugged, took a sip of coffee.
“Right. Mobile number, work number—and the address of the tattoo parlor where you work.”
He almost choked on his drink. “Studio,” he said. “It’s a studio.”
He pinged his mobile number to her, and when she checked the screen to list it in her contacts, she saw that she’d had a brace of texts from Carver. Oh, he must be so pissed . . .
“Work address, and number,” she said. Adam gave her what she needed. The tattoo studio was on the other side of town; she dialed the number and got a voice-mail message. It was Adam’s voice.
“Satisfied?” he said.
“Far from it.” Ruth pinged her work and personal mobile numbers in return. She would have to bring him in for formal questioning in the next few days—maybe his housemates, too, but he didn’t need to know that. Not yet, at least. She rang for a taxi, said, “I’ll see myself out.”
He smiled. “I wasn’t born yesterday.”
He walked her down the stairs a few minutes later, and as the taxi drew up, Ruth said, “You know where to find me.”
The shock on his face looked like physical pain.
“It’s your home, too, Adam.”
45
Carver was brewing a third jug of coffee at 11:45. He jumped like a cat when he heard a soft tap at his flat door. Ruth Lake had a key to his place, and the odds were that it was her, but when he checked the street below, there was no sign of her car.
“Who is it?” he called, feeling both foolish and unreasonably anxious.
“Open up, Greg.”
It was Ruth. Walking past him, she seemed agitated. He couldn’t tell if it was excitement or anxiety, but it came off her like heat shimmer off a roadway.
“Is that proper coffee?” she said, shedding her jacket and walking past him to the kitchen.
Carver noticed the Casco baton attached to her trouser belt; strictly speaking, she should have checked it in at the end of her shift, but he was glad she’d at least had the sense to carry a defensive weapon. Slightly less pleased to think that she must have been expecting trouble.
She returned from his kitchen two minutes later with a mug for each of them, took a sip of her own, and swilled it around her mouth.
He crinkled his brow in question and she said: “Need to clear my palate of the pound-stretcher valu-bilge I’ve just been given by someone who should know better.”
He took his coffee to an armchair and waited until she was seated on the sofa adjacent before saying, “So you found Black?”
“He found me. Or, more accurately, someone found him for me.”
Carver shook his head. “No half-truths, no mysteries, Ruth.”
She sipped her coffee for a half minute, clearly gathering her thoughts, and he suspected that even now she was working out how little she could get away with telling him.
“Let’s start with what happened when we were cut off,” he prompted.
“I was on the street, looking for Adam.”
He noted the use of his given name—not “Adam Black,” or “Black,” but “Adam”—this was personal.
“I got scooped up by a carful of Dave Ryan’s thugs.”
“Bloody hell, Ruth . . .” Carver hadn’t been with the Merseyside force for long, but he still knew Ryan by reputation.
“They took me to his place in Edge Hill. Apparently, my inquiries have been affecting business.”
“Are you all right?” Carver asked. “Did he threaten you?”
“He’s too smart to make an outright threat,” Ruth said. “We had a chat, and a few minutes later, they brought Adam in.”
“Was he hurt?”
“He’d been roughed up, but I don’t think he’ll be in a hurry to make a complaint.”
“And he just . . . handed Black over to you. Why would he do that?”
“To get me off his back.”
That was the truth. But something else shimmered behind her words; it wasn’t the whole truth.
“He just opened the door and waved you on your way?”
“Even offered us a lift home.” She paused. “I declined.”
“So you’ve interviewed this Adam Black—what’s your interest in him?”
“He was at Catch the Gamma Wave. He’s an artist—claimed he was there out of professional interest.”
“Do you believe him?”
“I don’t know.”
Carver scrutinized the air around her; no hint of lies or evasion in that answer, at least.
“You went to a lot of trouble to find him.”
A hesitation.
“Ruth?”
She stared at him and he saw her struggle with a lifetime’s habit of secrecy.
“You put yourself in danger trying to find this man.”
“Yeah, well . . . there’s a good reason for that.”
He cocked his head to show he was listening, but she seemed to stall at the last moment.
This time, he asked outright: “Who is Adam Black to you?”
She took a breath, let it go slowly. “My kid brother.”
Carver stared at her. He didn’t even know she had a brother.
“Half brother?” he speculated.
“No, we had the same parents—I took my mother’s maiden name.”
“Your parents divorced?”
“They split up.”
“And that’s when you changed your name.”
“Around then.”
She’s holding back. Carver let that pass for the moment. “Okay. But if Adam is mixed up in the Ferryman case, even on the periphery, I need to know.”
She looked into his face—her own unreadable—and for one monumentally irritating moment, he thought she would try her usual evasive tactics on him, but her expression softened into a sad smile.
“It would be a mistake to try,” he said. “Why was he in trouble as a juvenile? Why did he end up in secure accommodation?”
Ruth Lake usually brazened out questions she didn’t care to answer with a calculatedly guileless look. But she couldn’t answer his questions, and she couldn’t meet his eye.
“Look,” he said, “I understand you’re trying to protect your brother—and I’ll try to help you—but Ruth, I can only do that if you’re honest with me.”
“It wasn’t anything so terrible,” she said. “A bit of petty theft—he lived on the streets for a month, just after his fifteenth birthday. They took him back to his foster parents, but he just kept running away. A couple of months later, he was caught drug peddling—minor stuff—a bit of weed, a few tabs of Valium.” She shook her head, remembering. “He was falling in with bad company; the judge sent him to a secure unit for his own protection.”
Carver nodded, processing this. “But why was he taken into care in the first place? Couldn’t your parents cope with him after the split?”
“It was me couldn’t cope.” She still couldn’t look at him, and for a while she said nothing, but he didn’t try to hurry her. She held her coffee mug in both hands, staring into it as if she could see the past in the cooling liquid. Finally, she placed it on the floor next to her and looked him in the eye.
“Mum and Dad were dead by the time Adam was fourteen.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, thinking, How did I not know this?
“It was kept out of my record.”
She must have read his mind, as she so often did. They had worked together for over a year. Ruth had listened to him when his marriage began to fall apart, had supported him through his recovery after he was shot. Yet he didn’t know more than the most superficial details of her life. He might make an excuse of Ruth’s determined secrecy, her knack at deflecting questions, but he should have known—or at least tried to get to know—more. He replayed her last words. There were several reasons why her family circumstances might have been kept out of the record. Would she be honest with him this one time?
“What happened, Ruth?” he asked simply.
She began, slowly, as if testing her ability to keep her emotions in check at every step.
“Mum was murdered,” she said. “They found her at my dad’s business address. Witnesses saw him in a distressed state, leaving the scene twenty minutes before her b—” She balked at the word “body.” “Before she was found.” She clenched her hands tightly and drew them onto her lap. “He went on the run. Committed suicide a day later.”
Her voice was empty of emotion, but Carver knew better than most the protective strategies we use to insulate us from a past trauma. He was certain that she was telling the truth, but he was just as sure that there was a lot more she wasn’t telling him.
“When was this?”
“I was in my final year of university.”
All true, he thought. But she was holding on to her emotions so tight the effort seemed to cling to her like a shadow. He searched for the question that would unlock her rigid control.
“Your father murdered your mother?”
She lifted her chin. “He confessed in a suicide note, admitted to the murder of his girlfriend, too.”
“His girlfriend?”
“Mum and Dad had already separated when I was in my midteens.”
Carver was exhausted. In any verbal sparring match, Ruth had all the moves, and she was infinitely lighter on her feet than Carver. She never gave up even minor personal details easily, and this was huge; she must have buried these secrets deep. But when he’d asked about her mother, there was a flare of emotion he couldn’t identify.
He’d said, Your father murdered your mother? She’d said, He confessed. The lift of her chin, the words, were both ambiguous; they felt like a deflection. She was giving him facts, but not context. Suddenly, he had it.
“You don’t believe he killed them?”
She closed her eyes for a second, and he realized she was every inch as weary as he was. “Doesn’t matter what I believe,” she said. “It won’t bring them back.”
That, coming from Ruth Lake, was blatant bullshit.
“Why would your father confess to something he didn’t do?”
“I didn’t say he did.”
Carver raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t say he didn’t, either.”
46
Day 10, Morning Briefing
Ruth Lake addressed a packed Major Incident Room: “Based on cellular and physiological changes in the heart muscle of the latest victim, the pathologist has revised his age upward.”
Dr. Donnelly had phoned her before sending his report by e-mail, clearly feeling the need to explain why he’d missed this in his first postmortem examination of the remains.
“Of course, the heart wasn’t chemically preserved,” he’d explained, “because your man wanted the maggots to stay lively for the big reveal.” He went on. “And there’d already been some minor deterioration of the tissue, which made the changes harder to see.”
Ruth felt some sympathy for Donnelly’s bruised ego and had thanked him warmly for getting the results to her so fast.
“How old?” Carver asked. He was leaning against the wall at the side of the room. The dark circles under his eyes were testament to the late night she’d caused him, and she wondered if he needed the wall to prop him up.
“Collagen increases as we get older, along with a buildup of fatty deposits in the blood vessels,” she said. “Dr. Donnelly said our victim’s heart has unusually high levels of both—as a rough starting point, we should start looking at men aged forty-plus.”
A rumble of appreciation from the gathering: this would make the search easier.
“And he says that the relatively low level of decomp suggests the heart was harvested less than two weeks ago.”
“So we have a narrower demographic and narrower time frame.” Carver looked energized; he stood up straight, although she noticed the fingertips of his right hand maintained contact with the wall.
“Here’s what we’ll do. For the next three days, we limit the search to males aged over forty who disappeared from home in the past two weeks. The families will already have supplied DNA samples for matching?” He addressed the question to Ruth.
“It’s likely. But if Heart Guy had been reported missing, you would expect the relevant police force to’ve put a toothbrush sample on the DNA database, so we would’ve already had a hit against the heart.”
“And since we didn’t get a hit,” Carver said, “either he’s not been reported missing, or someone screwed up.”
She nodded.
“All right,” Carver said. “We’ve already extended the geographical area. If, after three days, we don’t get a match to the heart, we’ll gradually extend our search parameters, a little at a time, and just hope our victim gets entered into the system at some point.”
Four hours later, Ruth was back in Carver’s office, briefing him on the various house-to-house inquiries they had ongoing. They’d at last had a couple sightings of Steve Norris, the man who had vanished on his way to work: one witness placed him around the Festival Gardens the morning he’d disappeared, the second had seen him at the traffic lights at the edge of the gardens, close to St. Michael’s Station, both shortly before he was expected to start work.
“So he almost certainly disappeared between the traffic lights and the footpath through to the railway station,” Carver said, adding a note to the pad on his desk.
“Looks like,” Ruth said.
“But no sign of the van . . .” He tapped the block of paper with the pen. “So maybe he’s switched vehicles.”
“It seems likely. D’you think it’s time to stand down the canvass of that area, move people on to other duties?”
“Like interviewing Adam Black and his associates?”
She’d walked into that one.
“I’ll follow up on that today.”
He held her gaze. “We can keep your family relationship between the two of us, for now,” he said. “But I want him brought in for formal questioning.”
“Sure.”
“Today.”
She took a breath. “Okay.” Since telling Carver about Adam and what had happened to her parents, Ruth had felt lighter and more relaxed than she had in a long time. A tension she hadn’t known was there had suddenly loosened in her chest, as if she’d been holding her breath underwater for too long, but now she’d broken the surface and could breathe again.
He nodded, apparently satisfied, but kept his eyes on her for a moment longer and she realized that the gold fleck that sometimes twinkled in his hazel eyes had returned, that Carver was sharper, more alert than he’d been in a while.
“What?” he said.
“You seem better,” Ruth said.
“Better than what?”
“Better than you’ve been lately.”
“Good to know.”
She saw a faint smile at the corners of his mouth. His desk phone rang, and he picked up, a merry twinkle in his eyes, but all trace of humor vanished in a second. “Put him through.”
He switched to speaker and said, “Get the door, would you?”
Ruth swung the door to. “Who is it?”
“Ferg Holst, from Liverpool Daily,” Carver murmured.
A burst of background chatter told them the line was live and Carver introduced himself and Ruth. “I understand you’ve had a call, Mr. Holst.”
“He claimed to be the Ferryman,” Holst began. “He said, ‘The police think they got the jump on me. They didn’t. In fact, they couldn’t find their collective arse with both hands and a wing mirror. They’re holding back info about Art for Art’s Sake—I’m telling you because people need to know. Are you writing this down?’”—Holst broke off—“I was: what I’m giving you now is verbatim. He said, ‘The heart is from an older man.’ He said he wanted me to print that, put it online.”