by Ashley Dyer
Carver glanced up at Ruth. “We’d appreciate if you didn’t do that, Mr. Holst.”
“So it’s true?”
“Did you ring for a confirmation quote,” Carver said, “or—”
“—out of a sense of public duty?”
Carver waited.
“Look,” Holst said, “I hate what’s happening—believe me, I want this bastard caught as much as you do—but this could be huge for me.”
“If it’s true,” Carver said. “If the call was genuine.”
“How do I prove that?”
“What did he sound like?” Ruth asked.
“What—you mean his accent?”
They both held their breath.
“Brummy.”
A Birmingham accent—like the Ferryman.
What Holst said next clinched it for Ruth.
“But it sounded put on. I think the caller was Scouse, through and through.”
Exactly what the voice analyst had said about the Ferryman.
“I take it from your silence that’s significant,” Holst said.
“What do you want, Mr. Holst?” Carver said.
“I can hold off—like I said, I do want to help—but when the case breaks, I want my part in this acknowledged, and I want a direct quote from you, Chief Inspector—ahead of the press pack.”
While Carver thought it over, Ruth said, “I don’t suppose you recorded the conversation?”
She heard a chuckle at the other end of the line. “This came through the tip-off line. We wouldn’t get any tips if callers thought their ‘anonymous’ calls were being recorded.”
“But you’d recognize the voice again?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“So you could record the next call—if he does call back?”
“I could certainly do that.” Holst paused. “What d’you say?”
Carver looked at her in question and Ruth shrugged. What did they have to lose?
“Agreed,” Carver said. “On condition that you pass on any and all recordings without delay, so our voice analysts can check them out.”
“Done.”
They exchanged mobile phone numbers and Carver closed the line.
“Do we have a leak?” he asked. “Is someone feeding privileged intel to the killer?”
Ruth shook her head slowly. “I don’t know. It could be coincidence he released this information now . . .”
“D’you think it really is the Ferryman?”
She sighed, spread her hands. It was anyone’s guess. “How d’you want to handle it?”
“We’ll have to warn the team, of course—”
Ruth’s phone buzzed like an angry wasp in her hand, and she checked the screen. “It’s Kharon,” she said.
“Put him on speaker.”
Ruth told Kharon that he was on speakerphone, and that DCI Carver was listening. She didn’t tell him that he was being recorded.
“You were right,” he said. “He is dangerous.” He spoke in a low voice, as if he was afraid of being overheard.
“When you say ‘he’?” Ruth said.
“The Ferryman.” His voice quavered. “I thought—I guess I hoped—that he was getting his . . . his . . . materials from an undertaker, but—” A loud clang in the background, a yelp of fear.
“Are you all right, Mr. Obrazki?” Ruth said.
“It’s all good.” He gave a nervous laugh. “I was passing a building site . . .”
“Where are you?” Ruth asked.
“I’m on my way into town,” he said.
“Where exactly?” Carver said.
“I’m on Wood Street.”
Carver looked in question to Ruth. “Back of Bold Street,” Ruth said. Carver rolled his eyes; it was too secluded—and two of their victims had disappeared from that general area.
“It’s not safe for you off the main drag,” Ruth said. “You need to be somewhere more public.”
“I don’t know what to do.” He sounded panicked.
“Get onto Bold Street, stay in the open, make sure you can be seen by plenty of people. Give me a call when you’re there. We’ll send a police car to pick you up.”
“I’ve—I’ve really pissed him off.”
“Who?” Ruth said. They needed him to say it.
“The Ferryman—he’s really pissed off . . .”
“Then you should come in.”
“I want to meet with you and Mr. Carver. But I can’t be seen at police headquarters. I can’t. If he—” He stopped, sounding choked.
Carver reached for his laptop with one hand, raising the other and tracing a small circle in the air with one finger. The message was clear: Keep him talking.
“All right,” she said into the phone. “We can meet—but it’s vital you get to safety.”
No reply, just Kharon’s anxious breathing, and the whip and crack of wind catching the mobile’s microphone.
A moment later, Carver turned his laptop and pointed to a Google street scene.
“Meet us outside Bold Street Coffee,” Ruth said. “It’s near the top end of the street.” It was a good choice; its plate glass window would give a clear view of the street, making it difficult for the Ferryman to snatch Kharon without being seen by scores of people, both in the café and on the street.
“No patrol cars.” Kharon’s voice faded in and out—he was running. “Just you and Mr. Carver. No one else.”
“Just the two of us,” she reassured him.
“Okay . . . Okay.” He sounded calmer now. “I’ll call you back.”
“No, wait—”
But he’d already hung up.
He wasn’t at the coffee bar.
Ruth had tried Kharon’s phone three times on their way to pick up an unmarked car from the fleet; she tried it again now.
“Anything?” Carver asked.
“Straight to voice mail,” Ruth said.
They split up, Ruth cutting through the square opposite to check out Wood Street, while Carver ducked into the café. They met outside five minutes later.
Ruth shook her head in answer to Carver’s unspoken question.
“Well, we know where he lives,” Carver said.
They had parked in a scruffy cul-de-sac on double-yellows, and Ruth saw a traffic warden sniffing around the car. She flashed her badge, asked if he’d seen an anxious dark-eyed, full-lipped kid with a soft sweep of black hair.
“In my job, it’s not a good idea to go eyeballing people,” he said.
“I take your point,” Ruth said, “but this kid could be in serious trouble. You see anyone like that, call me, okay?” She handed him her card and he nodded.
Carver had been on his mobile. He closed the phone. “I had the techs ping his mobile,” he said. “He was actually in Fairfield when he made the call.”
“His flat is in the Fairfield district,” Ruth said.
Carver nodded grimly. “The little shit set us up.”
Ruth unlocked the car. “Where is he now?”
“Phone’s switched off.”
47
Kharon, aka Karl Obrazki, rented a studio flat in a converted Victorian house on Sheil Road—not far from the last known location of his mobile phone. Four purple wheelie bins cluttered the narrow strip of concrete below the ground-floor window, and haunting country music blasted out from an open window of one of the upstairs flats.
Carver leaned on Kharon’s doorbell, while Ruth checked the upper floors for signs of movement. When that failed, he punched every doorbell on the panel. Finally, an upper window next to the music lover’s was thrown open, and an angry face appeared.
“What the fuck d’you want?” he yelled.
Ruth showed her warrant card. “Police,” she said. “Can you open up? We need to speak to Mr. Obrazki.”
The window slammed shut, and for a moment it looked like they were being left out in the cold. Seconds later, the front door was flung open and they were confronted by a man in shorts and a T-shirt. The angry face from the upst
airs window.
“You can tell him to turn that shit off, while you’re at it,” he said. “I can’t get no joy out of him.”
Ruth glanced at Carver. “Another setup?”
He shrugged. There was only one way to find out.
Carver hammered on the door of the flat, and for a few seconds there was silence. Then the music started up again, a mix of banjo and guitar, maybe even a fiddle.
“Police, Mr. Obrazki,” Carver yelled. “Open up.”
No response.
“What are those lyrics?” Carver asked.
“Something about rowing,” Ruth said, with a prickle of uncertainty. She listened more closely. “Oh, God—I think it’s about the Ferryman.”
Carver hammered louder, and suddenly, the music cut out.
Ruth saw Carver’s eyes widen. “Did you hear that?”
She began to shake her head, but then she heard it, too. A low, choking sound.
“Jesus,” Carver said. “Call for paramedics—and we’ll need backup.” His hands braced for balance on the banister behind him, he kicked the door, hard. It gave with a creak and crack of splintering wood.
Ruth finished the call and followed him through the door.
It gave onto an inner hall. Straight ahead, a blank wall. One door was visible to their left across the hallway, about fifteen feet from the entrance. The choking, stuttering breathing seemed to be coming from somewhere closer.
It’s amplified, Ruth thought.
They moved left and found an open door at the end of the blank wall—a tiny galley kitchen. Empty.
Tucked in a recess at right angles to the kitchen was a second door. The choking sound was coming from behind it. Carver locked gazes with her and Ruth nodded, sliding her Casco baton from her belt and deploying it with a sharp flick of her wrist. He turned the handle and the door swung open smoothly.
And they looked on a scene from hell.
Three six-foot-by-six picture frames had been rigged in the center of the room. In the first, a montage of photographs—the four crime scenes to date. In the third, one large, hi-res photograph of a bench. It was laid out with trays containing the tools of the Ferryman’s trade: scalpels, knives, scissors, chisels, forceps, retractors, a rotary autopsy saw.
The centerpiece of the triptych was Karl Obrazki. He was bound with zip ties to an armchair set behind the empty center frame, but his left leg and right arm extended beyond it. The arm, palm up, was strapped to the wooden armrest of the chair. A large-gauge hypodermic syringe had been inserted into a vein, and the clear plastic tube attached to it drained blood into a gallon demijohn, set on the floor in front of the frame. The jar had overflowed, and some of the dark red liquid oozed down the sides, already congealing on the filthy vinyl floor covering. Obrazki’s throat had been slashed straight across; Ruth could see the white cartilage of his trachea. The larynx had been severed.
His sunglasses were jammed on his nose, the lenses overpainted with brown eyes—good facsimiles of Karl/Kharon’s, Ruth realized with dull horror. The awful choking breaths went on, relentlessly, and Carver made a move.
“No.” Ruth caught his arm. Carver tried to shake her off. “The choking is not him, Greg. Karl is dead—see the neck wound?” It was a wonder the head was still attached to the torso.
Carver stopped struggling. “There’s hardly any blood,” he murmured.
“The poor kid exsanguinated before the bastard ever cut his throat.” Ruth jerked her chin toward a Sonos speaker by the window. “Probably recorded him as he died.” She stood where she was and looked carefully around the room. It was sparsely furnished, just the chair in which Karl’s body was posed; a sofa and coffee table had been stood on their end against the wall to make room for the gory triptych. The two end panels were big enough to hide someone small, but she could see clear through the centerpiece frame, and when she angled her body and stooped to a crouch, she had a good line of sight behind both.
Words printed in gold around the edge of the center frame read, “What dust do I raise! L. Abstemius.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Carver asked.
“I don’t know.” Ruth tore her gaze from the dead man. “Look, it’s just Obrazki in here. We need to back off, let the CSIs do their stuff.”
Carver took a step back into the little recess by the kitchen.
A quiet flump a little farther down the hallway sent a shock wave through Ruth. They both turned. This time, she took point. Two doors, either side of the corridor. The door to the left stood wide.
Bathroom, Ruth registered.
Carver swung left. “Clear,” he murmured. “But there’s blood.”
The door to the right—bedroom, must be—opened a half inch, then bumped shut against the jamb. It swung open a hairbreadth and bumped against the jamb again.
Ruth and Carver exchanged a look—they had to go in. Carver eased close behind her. A furtive movement just inside the room made the hairs on Ruth’s arms and neck prickle.
She raised her baton over her right shoulder, keeping it tight to her body.
“Police,” she called out. “We’re coming in.” With her left hand, she shoved the door wide.
A wild howl, then a ball of shrieking, spitting fury hurled itself at her from the bed. Ruth swung the baton low and hard, missed, realizing at the same moment that her assailant was a cat. It streaked past her and out through the open flat door.
The window was open a crack, allowing a slight breeze. Ruth checked under the bed, and inside the tiny melamine wardrobe, before taking a peek out the window. It was a forty-foot drop to the street below; nobody had left that way. Sirens blared abruptly, as police and paramedics negotiated a sharp bend in the road. They braked to a halt on the street below. Backup had arrived.
Simultaneously, Ruth’s phone rang. “CSM Hughes,” she said, sliding the bar to answer.
“You’re being video-streamed, live, online,” Hughes said, as the police and paramedics’ footsteps pounded up the stairs.
Ruth’s eyes snapped to Carver’s. “We need to get out of here,” she said. “Now.”
48
Two hours later, Carver assembled a small team in the Major Incident Room. The crime scene had been turned over to the forensics specialists as soon as they’d jammed Wi-Fi signals around Karl Obrazki’s flat, effectively taking down the spy cameras the Ferryman must have installed inside. Tracing the livestream URL had taken longer, but Carver had called in a computer forensics expert to help Hughes’s techs and he’d just received word that the job was done.
Ruth Lake came into the room alongside CSM Hughes. Dr. Yi had arrived early; he sat at a desk to Carver’s left, watching the others as they came through the door. DC Ivey, pale and even leaner after his many days of pounding the streets in search of an elusive ATM image of the killer, had taken a seat near the front. Sergeant Naylor, the thirty-year police veteran managing house-to-house, sat next to a detective who was organizing interviews of the scores of people who’d attended the Ferryman’s “exhibits.” A few volunteers made up the rest of the gathering; Carver recognized Parr, the special who’d messed up at the Art for Art’s Sake scene. He’d doggedly turned up for duty every day since, and from all accounts was working hard to atone for his lapse.
Superintendent Wilshire was absent but had sent a text to say he’d try to make an appearance at some point. Carver didn’t envy him, fielding press queries after this latest outrage.
He opened the meeting by asking Ruth to brief them on the pathologist’s preliminary comments.
“The CSIs need the body in situ while they search for trace,” she began. “So all we have for now is Dr. Donnelly’s external examination.”
She looked around the room, her calm brown eyes taking in far more than most of her colleagues would ever suspect.
“Karl’s throat was cut from left to right by a wide and extremely sharp-bladed knife, possibly a butcher’s knife, with a long flat section and a curved tip. It sliced through the lower
end of the larynx and the upper part of the trachea. The carotid veins, esophagus, carotid arteries, and major nerves were all severed, and C7 and C8 vertebrae were damaged.”
“He was almost decapitated,” someone murmured.
Ruth nodded. “Yet there was very little blood loss at the site of the wound or blood spatter around the chair, suggesting he bled out before his throat was cut.”
Carver glanced around the room, seeing a mud-brown mix of confused emotions, shot through with orange flashes of hot anger.
“The head was held in place by heavy-gauge wire, which was stitched into the skin at the back of the head, then pushed through the fabric of the armchair and twisted into a knot behind the chair back.”
A few winces at that.
“And he took the eyes.”
Carver blinked against a sudden confused explosion of light and color around the room.
Naylor muttered, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”
Hughes had seen the crime scene video, but even he frowned and gave a minute shake of his head, as if his mind refused to accept the cruelty he had seen inflicted on Karl.
Ruth continued without comment, her delivery cool—some might say distant—but Carver knew that her distance and her coolness were her armor, as essential to her as Kevlar to a firearms officer. He wondered, momentarily, if she was thinking of her own brother as she spoke of Karl’s terrible death.
“A coin had been placed in his mouth,” she was saying. “A penny, dated 1978—the date might be significant.”
“Liverpool won the European Cup.”
A few laughed, and DC Ivey seemed appalled that he’d said that aloud.
“We’ll keep that in mind,” Ruth said, deadpan, and the young detective blushed brick red.
“Any signs of struggle?” Carver asked, remembering the blood he’d seen in the bathroom.
“Donnelly thinks he was heavily drugged—he’s put a rush on the basic tox screen, but even so, it looks like Karl struggled against his bonds for at least part of the time.”