by Ashley Dyer
Naylor made notes—these questions would shape their strategy in the house-to-house inquiries—and Carver went on.
“There was blood in the bathroom sink. Let’s find out if any of it belonged to the killer.”
A nod from Hughes. “Already in hand.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
All eyes turned to Ivey. He was staring at his mobile phone, his skin so pale it was almost translucent.
“What?”
“A new website just got shared by the Ferryman’s followers.” Ivey swallowed, still staring at the screen.
Ruth stepped over to him and rapped his desk. “Talk to us, Ivey.”
The younger detective’s hand went to his mouth and he shoved his chair back, putting distance between himself and the image on-screen.
Ruth reached to pick up his phone. “Dear God,” she murmured. “It’s a recording of Karl Obrazki. He was alive when the Ferryman took his eyes.”
49
Karl was almost delirious with excitement when I contacted him.
Meeting him, I had a taste of what fame is like. He was breathless, thrilled, daunted—almost manic in his gabbled attempts to tell me just how much he admired and respected me.
His dark eyes shining, he tells me that my work “totally taps into the zeitgeist.”
“Really?” I say. “And how would you define the ‘spirit of our age’?”
He knows his history: quotes Hegel and Goethe, but he lets himself down referencing Peter Joseph’s film, with its tedious mishmash of conspiracy theories.
“I don’t want to know what you’ve been told,” I say. “I want to know what you think.”
“The human race is programmed to self-destruct,” he says. “We’re a zombie race cannibalizing our planet—destroying nature, laying waste so we can build—then laying waste to what we’ve built.”
“That being the case,” I say, “we’re well and truly screwed. But what about society, the common good?”
“Society is a failed experiment.”
“Oh? Why is that?”
“‘Society’ as a big melting pot is a filthy lie,” he says. “We’re divided by gender, class, age, race, religion, nationality—” He rakes his hair from his face, and it immediately flops forward over one eye. “By its very nature, it creates in-groups and out-groups—those who are in possession, and the dispossessed. Ultimately, it’s destructive.”
Communism, anarchism, a whiff of nihilism—he seems to’ve covered all the bases.
“And what part does art play in all this?”
“It reflects society—challenges us to examine our actions, analyze our motivations. But if you want to know about my art—”
I don’t. But I nod encouragement, anyway—I need a cooperative little drone for what I have planned.
He bites his lower lip, thinking. He must know that this is it—his big sales pitch.
“I want to draw attention to the dissonance between having and being. To shine a spotlight on the hypocrisy of a world that talks about individual freedom, when only the richest ten percent have any freedom at all.”
I’m tempted to slit his throat there and then, just to shut him up. Instead, I say:
“You’re talking about money, when I asked about art. And what do you hope to gain from this collaboration, Kharon? Hmm?” He opens his mouth, but I raise one finger, and he stops, his lips twitching.
“Is it F . . . A . . . M . . . E? Surely you know that money always follows fame?”
He is mortified. Stammers an apology—he only wants the chance to work with “Genius.” Genius, I note, with a capital G.
“I’ll tell you what I think. The world is afraid of change. Paralyzed by misanthropy. Risk averse. The result? Beige art.”
“Yes! Yes!” His eyes burn with passion, but he’s as blind as all the rest.
“The only people who challenge that view are the outliers,” he says. “Those on the fringes.”
“You see me as a fringe artist, Kharon?”
“Noooo!” He launches into a new, fawning appreciation of my work.
This is why I don’t usually allow subjects the opportunity to speak. They’re chosen, gathered, harvested, and reconstructed, without the grinding boredom of having to listen to them. I made an exception for Kharon because he professed an understanding—and to give him his due, he did have an inkling of the force behind my art.
I wait for him to run out of apologies and explanations.
“You understand the concept of catharsis?”
He nods, stupidly.
“Tell me.”
“It’s the purging of emotions through art.”
“Do you know its Greek origins?”
His eyes dart left. He licks his lips again, doesn’t want to admit he doesn’t have a clue.
“It’s a purification,” I say.
He smiles, nervous. “Of the emotions, yes?”
“Specifically of pity and fear—two emotions, Aristotle says, that make us weak.”
“Pity makes us weak?”
“New worlds are not conquered with pity.”
I see him scrolling through his filmography of my work; he’s troubled but trying to adjust.
“The word comes from the Greek ‘cathartic’—a medicinal remedy that speeds defecation.”
“You mean, like, a laxative?”
“No. A laxative eases the process. Catharsis is a painful cleansing.”
He nods but doesn’t really understand.
He assembled most of the triptych himself: the end panels and the center frame, following my instructions with the joy of an acolyte who feels chosen for greater things. I’d told him that this would be the grand reveal—that I would be the centerpiece, seated, at ease, in his armchair. He would record the exhibit and send it out to the world.
Of course, I made him leave the room while I made the final adjustments, called him in when I had the hypodermic ready. Asked him to pose for me, so that I could be sure I’d got the angles right. He couldn’t have been happier to oblige. I think he truly understood catharsis at the moment the hypo went into his arm.
Fly on a Chariot Wheel is my most spontaneous piece of the series—two days from conception to inception—and my greatest success, judging by the clamor on social media. And I’m the lead feature on the national news.
I should do this again.
Whoever said power corrupts was wrong. Power enables. Absolute power transforms.
50
Ruth Lake stood outside her brother’s place of work. It had the look of a Victorian emporium, and possibly it had been: this was an old quarter of the city. Two tinted windows either side of the door were divided into plate glass below, and eight equal glazed squares above, all painted black. Soul Art Tattoo Studio was listed on Yelp as one of the top ten in the city, and gold gothic-style lettering confirmed its status as “Liverpool’s finest.” It was just a short walk from police headquarters—admittedly through a maze of backstreets—but Ruth was still astonished they’d never chanced to meet in the years since Adam had slipped out of her life.
She pushed open the door. The wood floors were clean swept and waxed; glass cabinets displayed sample art; more mounted and framed examples hung on the walls. A set of open steel steps, also black, led up to a mezzanine, while the ground floor was divided into the shop front, with a reception desk built in rough-cut wood, and behind that, the tattoo area. Two men and a woman in her twenties sat in a row of red club chairs to the right of the door, waiting their turn. The men seemed absorbed with their mobile phones, but the woman shot Ruth a curious glance.
Ruth checked out two more customers, seated stoically in leather recliners as tattooists, perched on ergonomic stools, worked with intense concentration on their ink. Some form of grunge rock was playing at moderate volume, more or less covering the rattle of the inking machines. She didn’t see Adam.
She turned her attention to the reception desk. The girl at the counter had jet black hair, multiple ear and b
row piercings, and the tattoo of a gnarled tree, decked with pink cherry blossoms, and delicately rendered, twisting sinuously from her left arm to her neck. She eyed Ruth with kindly amusement.
“First time?” she asked.
“Actually, no,” Ruth said, feeling a phantom itch from the erased tattoo in the crook of her left arm.
“Want to book a session?”
Ruth glanced up to the mezzanine. “Is Adam about?”
The girl’s untroubled brow creased for a microsecond. “Oh, MadAdaM,” she said, as if Ruth had made an embarrassing error, but she was too polite to point it out. “He’s just finishing with a client.”
At that moment, Adam himself appeared at the top of the mezzanine stairs. His eyes widened, then shot a warning glare, aimed like a bullet at Ruth. Adam waved his client ahead, and followed a short distance behind, his eyes fixed on Ruth as though she might start overturning the furniture.
The customer seemed oblivious, but that might have been because he was in a delirium of pain. He seemed to be in the process of having a complicated tattoo in the form of a metal zipper, which, unzipped, revealed the inner workings of his arm. The blood and sinews were only sketched out as yet, but his skin was an angry shade of red, and where the zip teeth had been inked in bold black, his flesh was raised and sore-looking.
Ruth made way at the counter, and Adam left his client safely with the receptionist, asking her to advise on aftercare and skin-calming products.
“Back in ten,” he said, reinforcing the time limitation with a forceful glance in Ruth’s direction.
We’ll see, Ruth thought. We’ll see.
He stepped out onto the street and began walking, didn’t turn back until they had rounded a corner into a quieter backstreet.
“What the hell are you playing at?” he demanded.
She was surprised to note that he had covered the bruise on his cheek with some kind of makeup.
“Aren’t you even going to grab a jacket?” she said. After a few mild springlike days, the wind direction had changed, sweeping in cold polar air, and the temperature had dropped from twelve to around four Celsius.
“What were you even thinking?” he said. “And don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“The mother-hen thing. It didn’t suit you when I was fourteen—it definitely doesn’t suit you now.” Every muscle in his shoulders and neck was tense, and the gray metalware inked on his left arm had taken on a definite blue tint, but she could see that he would rather freeze into a solid block of faux machinery than admit he was cold.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay, what? Why are you here, Ruth?”
The truth was she couldn’t cleanse her mind of trompe l’oeil eyes painted on Kharon’s sunglasses, the hollowed eye sockets beneath them. And she kept flashing to the painting on her brother’s sitting room wall: the painter painting himself. That was the reason for her unannounced visit to her brother’s workplace.
“There’s been another killing,” she said.
“Kharon, I know. What’s that got to do with me?”
“Nothing, I hope.”
There was something in the way he said Karl Obrazki’s Instagram name that made Ruth think maybe Adam knew the victim personally. She would come back to that.
“So?” He bugged his eyes and gave an irritable shrug.
She thought, I need to be sure you aren’t mixed up in the horror show playing out in the city. I need to talk to your friends to be sure they aren’t, either.
But she settled for: “I need you to come in and give a statement.” It was the safest opener she could think of.
“Oh, what? Look—I told you—I went to that damn exhibit out of curiosity.”
“My boss needs to hear that for himself.”
“Fuck.” He half turned from her, then swung back. “Why d’you even have to tell him I was there?”
“I’m a cop,” she said evenly. “It’s my job.”
His sneer said everything she needed to know about what he thought of her job.
“I’m trying to find a killer, Adam. Give me a break.”
“So why’re you wasting time hassling me?”
“He’s an artist—or calls himself one. You’re an artist. So are your friends.” She dipped her head. “I’m thinking maybe you’d have insights.” Flattery was often far more effective than threats, and she waited, head cocked on one side, giving him time to think about what she’d said.
He folded his arms and she watched him wage an inward battle with himself.
“How did you find me?” he said at last.
“I didn’t,” she said dryly. “Your gangster friend, Ryan, did.”
“It was you he did the favor for,” Adam shot back.
“Come on, Adam,” she said. “He knew exactly where to find you—he’d already commissioned your art.”
“He didn’t always know. He saw my work on the street, decided he wanted it, did what art collectors do.”
“He checked out the galleries,” Ruth said, wondering how graffiti artists got their work into galleries. “But unless you signed your name, he’d have to identify your gallery work by—what, your style?”
Adam twitched an eyebrow. “It might’ve helped that I won the UK Street Art Award for Young Talent.”
“You won a prize?”
He frowned. “That’s surprising?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You kinda did.”
“No . . .” Why did he always manage to put her on the defensive? “Your work is—”
“Is what?”
“Clever . . . I suppose,” she said, with a roll of her eyes, and a slight shrug. She saw him physically loosen up. He let his arms drop to his sides and in spite of the cold, his shoulders relaxed. He even smiled a little. For that small moment Ruth saw her brother as he was before their parents died and their relationship got irretrievably messed up.
She wondered if the time had come to ask him how he knew the latest victim—she was sure he did know Kharon, but she didn’t want to alienate him just as they were beginning to connect. In the end, she came at the problem crabwise.
“D’you think your friends might be able to help?”
He frowned. “How?”
“Maybe some of them know Karl—or were in touch with him as ‘Kharon.’”
She saw again the tightening around the eyes, which said that Karl Obrazki meant more to her brother than a name on social media. But people didn’t like to be read, so she said, “What?”
He took a breath, and she waited, a calculated look of naive curiosity on her face.
He tugged at his goatee, scratched the short hair over his left ear. “I knew Kharon,” he said.
She kept quiet, and he went on. “We weren’t close, or anything, but . . . yeah, I knew him.”
“So you’ll help?”
He sucked his teeth, and she waited. Finally, with a decisive nod, he said, “Let me talk to a few people, see if they’d be willing to chat.”
51
Back at the office, Ruth pulled together all the new information she could find before going to DCI Carver—she wanted a few distractions to hand, in case she needed to deflect attention from herself.
She found him frowning at his laptop.
“Something up?” she said.
“I don’t think so,” he said, his eyes still focused on the screen. After a few seconds, he snapped the lid closed and looked at her. “I couldn’t find you earlier.”
Time to deflect.
“I’ve done a quick roundup of ‘breaking news’ on house-to-house,” she said, sidestepping the implied question. “The team canvassing at Karl Obrazki’s place have found a shop owner who saw a man heading out of the house in coveralls—a painter and decorator, he believes. There were paint splashes on the coveralls.”
“Paint splashes,” Carver echoed.
“Some red, apparently.”
“When was this?” he asked.
&nb
sp; “Around lunchtime.”
“Which puts it around the time we took the fake call from Karl Obrazki. Did the witness give a description?”
Ruth shook her head. “The suit hood was pulled up and he was wearing a protective mask.”
“Of course he was,” Carver said, with a bitter smile.
“The witness described him as tall, medium build, white. Couldn’t guess at age—but not old. He was driving a white van, so with a bit of luck, he’s still using the same one. Witness didn’t get the number plate. We’re still waiting on CCTV in the area.”
She had a sudden thought. “He didn’t leave the van on the main road all morning—I checked and there were no complaints to traffic control—and I can’t imagine him driving the thing all the way back to wherever it is he hides it, because he’d have to go and fetch it later. He must’ve parked in a side street nearby.”
Carver seemed to catch some of her excitement. “And he’d have to take his mask off if he was a distance away.”
She nodded. “I’ll ask Bill Naylor to extend the canvass.”
“Do that. Do we know when the van arrived at Karl’s house?”
“The first sighting so far is at around seven a.m.—and Karl was seen going in and out of the house with materials. No signs he was coerced. Witnesses say he seemed cheery—excited, even.”
“Poor, stupid kid,” Carver said.
“It gets worse,” Ruth said. “The SSU found Karl’s fingerprints on one of the triptych panels. It looks like Karl helped to build the apparatus.”