The Cutting Room

by Ashley Dyer

  “What kind of sadist does that and calls it art?”

  “Beats me,” Ruth said. “But Doctor Yi says, ‘For him, sadism and art are inextricable.’”

  A sudden pounding of footsteps in the corridor was followed by an excited knock at Carver’s door. Ruth opened it and DC Ivey almost fell into the office. His face was flushed and he was out of breath.

  “Tom?” Ruth said.

  “We’ve had a call about the police canvass around St. Michael’s Station,” he panted.

  “They were stood down hours ago,” Carver said.

  “Yeah—I mean, yes, sir. But this guy—one of the residents at Moel Famau View—he’s just got back from holiday, and his neighbors told him about all the excitement in the close. He phoned the hotline, and—”

  “And the upshot is . . . ?” Ruth said.

  “Sorry, Sarge. The day Steve Norris disappeared, he saw two guys—one was helping the other into a white van parked near the end of the road.”

  “We need to bring him in.” Carver was on his feet.

  “He’s on his way over, right now,” Ivey said.

  Another knock, this time at the open door. Jason Parr. He seemed daunted to find all three of them in the room together.

  “We just got a buzz from reception. There’s a man waiting—says you’re expecting him, sir. It’s about Steve Norris—the lad who went missing,” he added, as if they would need a reminder.

  “Put him in an interview room,” Carver said. “I’ll be down shortly.”

  There was no sign of Parr when they took the lift down to the interview rooms, and Carver was annoyed to have to ask where the witness had been placed.

  Frank Hollis was a sprightly man in his midseventies. He waved away Carver’s apology for keeping him waiting.

  “Not like I’ve got a full schedule,” he said. “When you’ve been retired ten years, you’re looking for things to occupy your time.” He looked about him. “Never been in a police station before. Is this where you—you know—give ’em the third degree?”

  “It’s not really like that anymore, Mr. Hollis,” Carver said.

  “Oh? ’Cos my missus is a big fan of crime on telly and she—”

  Carver cut him off, anticipating a long ramble about CSI or Luther. “So—you think you saw Steve Norris?”

  The man squared his shoulders, collecting his thoughts before launching in. “I was walking my dogs in Priory Wood,” he said. “Saw a man on the footpath, half carrying his friend.”

  “Did you speak to them?” Carver asked.

  “I asked what’d happened. The older one said his mate had tripped and banged his head.”

  “Did the injured man say anything?”

  “No. The younger lad seemed a bit out of it—I was worried about that. He mumbled something, but I couldn’t make any sense of it. I told his mate, that kind of thing can be serious—you know, concussion and that. I offered to call for an ambulance, but the other feller said he was taking the lad straight to the hospital.”

  “Can you describe the men?”

  Mr. Hollis dug in his jacket pocket and dragged out a flyer the canvassing team had been handing out to the public, pointed to the image of Steve Norris. “That’s the lad that was hurt.”

  “You’re sure of this?”

  “Not a shadow of doubt.”

  “And the other man?”

  Hollis clasped his hand to the back of his neck. “Now you’re asking . . . I was paying more attention to the boy who was injured, you see. He was in running gear, same as this lad. Dark, I think.”

  “Running shoes?”

  He shook his head slowly. “I suppose . . . Didn’t really notice, I’m afraid—”

  “What time of day was this?” Carver asked.

  “Must have been between five thirty and five forty-five in the morning,” he said promptly, clearly happy to be on firmer ground. “I always walk the dogs at the same time, summer or winter.”

  Carver glanced quickly at Ruth. It was the right time frame. “Do you remember the day?”

  “Certainly—look.” He pulled out his mobile phone and called up the calendar. “The wife warned me to get back before ten to six—we were catching a bus at seven o’ clock—coach trip to Llandudno. We were there two weeks, for the walking, you know.” He turned the screen so that they could read it. “See?”

  It was the date Steve Norris failed to show up at work. The day before Catch the Gamma Wave.

  “You said that the other man was older,” Ruth said.

  “Yes.” He frowned, concentrating. “Late thirties, maybe—hard to say, these days. It’s true what they say: ‘You know you’re getting old when the police start looking younger.’” He dropped Ruth a cheeky wink.

  “Hair color?” Carver said.

  Hollis gave a slight shake of his head. “He wore one of those hooded things all the young lads are wearing these days.” He tapped the photo of the van on the flyer. “But I’m pretty sure he was in the van your lot were asking about. Rainbow reflections off the window, bit of a dent in the offside front wing.”

  Ruth asked the next question. “Did you happen to notice the number plate?”

  “Oh, yes. It had one of those vanity plates—personalized like.”

  Hollis closed his eyes and Carver held his breath.

  “A33 VAN,” he said. “Not that hard to remember, even when you get to my age . . .”

  Ruth was out of the door before Hollis could finish.

  52

  Ruth Lake drove at the speed limit along an empty stretch of motorway heading northeast out of Liverpool. She’d just arrived home from work when Adam called to arrange a meeting at the motorway services at Burtonwood, a thirty-minute drive east.

  Only a few vehicles were parked on the service station car park, and the only people in the café were a middle-aged couple, pale with exhaustion, a group of five Newcastle United supporters, huddled around one table, and a blond woman who sat with Adam in the center of the room, with a view of the entrance. This must be Tia Lowe, Karl Obrazki’s on-off girlfriend.

  The air temperature had dropped to freezing around ten, and the cold-white downlights seemed to add an extra chill. A server was sleepwalking from table to table, scooping used coffee cups into a bag attached to a trolley, swiping the surfaces halfheartedly with a dingy-looking cloth.

  Tia stood to greet her; she was taller than Ruth by a couple of inches. Dressed in khaki shorts and a gray wide-lapel mac with unfinished seams and slashes cut to reveal its yellow floral lining, she was hardly dressed to blend in, but Ruth had to admit she carried off the look with some style.

  Ms. Lowe offered her hand. It was stacked with rings in silver and gold, including the thumb, which made for an uncomfortable handshake.

  They sat at the table, Tia sipping black coffee from a paper cup, Adam with his legs sprawled out to the side and half turned away from them. He kept his eyes on a pool of spilled coffee on the tabletop and began tracing a finger through it, sketching shapes, bringing the liquid into an amorphous puddle every few seconds and starting again.

  “Karl was ecstatic.” Tia’s soft Yorkshire accent belied the sharpness of her appearance. “He was sure this was going to make him famous.”

  “He didn’t tell you what he was planning to do?” Ruth asked.

  A brief shake of her head. Her makeup was so perfectly done that it gave her skin a masklike perfection, and it was impossible to search for lies in subtle changes of skin coloring.

  “Well, did he say it was a job, or a commission?”

  “He called it a ‘collaboration,’” Tia said. “Said it was going to make him a lot of money.”

  She hid her eyes behind lowered eyelids that must have been weighted by two or maybe three sets of false eyelashes.

  “That didn’t ring any warning bells?” Ruth said, deliberately harsh.

  Adam glanced up, his focus on Tia, how she would react.

  Tia set her coffee cup down, and when she raised he
r eyes, Ruth saw anger in them. “You’re asking if I knew he’d pitched in with the Ferryman.”

  Ruth jerked her chin.

  Tia’s face remained as smooth as a Botoxed film star’s, but the muscles of her shoulders popped with suppressed emotion. “If I knew, I’d’ve warned him off. I would never have—” She stopped suddenly and glanced away.

  “Take your time,” Ruth murmured.

  Tia sniffed and lifted her chin, squaring her shoulders before she went on. “He thought this—whatever it was—would give him an ‘in’ with one of the TV or film studios. Said he’d help me get my company recognized when he had more clout.”

  “Is that what Karl was like?” Ruth said. “The sort who would help people out?”

  “He was with me.” The last word sounded like a plea.

  “He must have spoken to you about the Ferryman before—while he was compiling his bits of video and so on?” Ruth asked.

  Tia eyed her with contempt.

  “He told me about his compilations, if that’s what you mean. Asked for my opinion.”

  “But not this time.”

  “You need trust in collaborative works—if you think your creative partner’s going to blab about the concept—” Tia spread her slim, beringed hands. “I think Karl was scared someone would break the story before he was ready to go public. He told me not to come near the flat—he would call me when he was finished.” She winced, realizing what she’d just said, and she looked into the distance, her mouth working as she fought back emotion.

  After a few moments, she thumbed tears from her eyes and tutted when they came away blacked. She dug in her bag, pulling out first a tissue, then a mirror compact.

  “God, I need to fix this mess.” She stood, oriented herself, then stalked off toward the restrooms.

  Adam watched her go from the corner of his eye.

  “So,” Ruth said. “You knew Karl Obrazki.”

  He returned to his coffee doodle.

  “Adam?”

  Her brother’s shoulder barely twitched, but the thought behind the gesture was plain: So what?

  “Did you speak to him about the Ferryman?”

  “It’s weird,” Adam said, “you calling him ‘Ferryman’—I thought police didn’t like giving names to serial killers.”

  “We didn’t name him,” Ruth said. “His followers did.”

  Another tiny twitch of his shoulder, but still no eye contact.

  Push him.

  “People like you.”

  That hit the mark.

  Adam’s dark eyes flared briefly; then he reached for a napkin and wiped up the coffee spill. “I don’t ‘follow,’” he said.

  “Really?” She let her gaze track from the tattoos on his neck to his carefully styled hair and beard.

  Adam tugged self-consciously at his Vandyke goatee.

  “When did you last speak to Karl?”

  “Let’s see . . .” Adam gazed at the ceiling. “We did a module together for a term, must be a year, maybe a year and a half ago.”

  “Where?”

  “Fairfield.”

  “You were at art college?”

  He shrugged. “Fairfield is an art college, so . . .”

  “Did you talk to him about the Ferryman?”

  “I’m not clairvoyant, Ruth. Like I said, I haven’t seen him in over a year.”

  “Why d’you think he was so obsessed with the Ferryman?” She could tell by the eye roll that he was going to repeat his last answer, so she added, “I mean in general terms—what is it that draws artistic types to this man?”

  He didn’t look up. “He creates art that makes you think about life.”

  “Do you think it’s okay, what this man is doing?”

  “We’re back to that again?”

  “Yeah, sorry to be boring, but I’m investigating the deaths of five men—they’re just the ones we know about—and the murderer is creating art from their dead bodies.”

  Adam stared at her, his eyes hard and calculating. “You want to talk ethics?”

  “I do.”

  “Fine. There’s this Canadian artist—Rick Gibson—made a pair of earrings out of freeze-dried fetuses, hung them on a mannequin. Is that okay? In nineteen eighty-nine, he buys a rat from a pet shop, sticks it in a plexiglass cylinder between two canvases on a street in downtown Vancouver, hangs a twenty-five-kilogram block over it. Puts a sign under the rat, says, ‘This rat is going to die.’ Is that ‘okay’?”

  He was watching for her reaction; she gave him nothing. “I want to know what you think,” she countered.

  A frown creased Adam’s brow for a microsecond and was gone. “The pet shop sold the rat as live food for snakes and lizards—and they also sold snakes and lizards. Whichever way you look at it, the rat was going to die. You have to decide—which is the more humane death—trapping a live rat in a glass tank with a python with no escape, letting the python slowly crush the life out of it? Or dying like that?” He clapped his hands in a fast, explosive instant, startling the server and drawing the attention of the Newcastle United fans.

  A movement to her right and a whiff of perfume signaled that Tia had returned.

  “Oh,” she said. “This looks intense. Should I give you two a few more minutes?”

  Adam broke eye contact and Ruth placed a notepad and pen on the table. “Karl’s friends,” she said. “All of them.”

  Adam stared at them for a long time without moving, but finally he dragged the pad and pencil across the table.

  53

  Unable to sleep, Greg Carver sat in an armchair next to the bay window in his flat, sipping tea and gazing down onto the empty street. He tried to focus on the investigation, but his thoughts kept circling to Karl Obrazki, his throat slashed, the lenses of his sunglasses overpainted with disturbingly realistic eyes, the surreal cruelty of his death.

  When they’d first looked on that hellish scene, Carver had flashed back to his own apartment the night he was shot. Was it the smell of blood, congealing on the floor at his feet, or the way Karl was sprawled in his chair that had triggered it? He couldn’t say, but he knew for sure that he’d lost touch with reality for a few seconds.

  That was then, this is now. Take a breath, keep your mind on the job.

  They’d traced the owner of A33 VAN only minutes after their witness had given his statement. An armed team sent to arrest the owner had scooped up a startled painter and decorator as he arrived home, still in his white overalls. The personalized number plates, A33 VAN, were on the vehicle, but it was steel gray, rather than white, a Renault Kangoo, rather than a Ford Transit—and there was no damage anywhere on the bodywork.

  The tradesman had been working on interior decorations at a house at the south end of the city from 8:30 a.m. till 5:30 p.m., according to the house owner, and he hadn’t left the premises, apart from a thirty-minute lunch break—which he’d taken in his van, sitting in the drive of the house.

  Ruth Lake had conducted the interview. “The man’s a grafter,” she’d said. “I might just ask him for his business card.” The plates had been stolen off his van the night before Steve Norris was snatched, but he hadn’t reported the theft because it was the second set to have been stolen in six months. The last time, he’d lost a few hours’ work and gained nothing, so on this occasion he’d simply replaced the plates and got on with his life. With a little luck, the killer had kept hold of the plates and was still using them on the suspect van.

  As for Norris’s new running shoes—it turned out that he’d run record times as an amateur in a couple marathons and was aiming to qualify for the Commonwealth Games. A local sports retailer had seen him on the front page of the Liverpool Echo and approached him with a sponsorship offer. One mystery solved, one more victim added to the Ferryman’s list.

  Headlight beams tracked across the wall at the end of the street as a car turned the corner. It pulled up outside his place, and Ruth Lake got out. She glanced up to his window but didn’t wave. A few s
econds later, he heard her trotting lightly up the stairs.

  Ruth had been to Carver’s apartment many times since he was shot, but she’d almost always restricted her visits to pickup and drop-off at the roadside. So why was she troubling to come inside? It couldn’t be a break in the case—she would have called ahead. Carver felt a cold chill in the pit of his stomach; had she noticed his episode at Karl’s flat? Was that why Ruth Lake was at his door at eleven thirty at night?

  As she reached the top of the stairs, he opened the door, not waiting for the knock.

  “Coffee?” he said.

  She walked past him, crackling with energy, and apparently not in the mood for banter.

  “Maybe chamomile tea would be a better option,” he added, quirking his brow.

  “Adam phoned,” Ruth said, unsmiling. “He hasn’t had much luck trying to get Karl Obrazki’s friends to talk.”

  “Worried about their street cred?” Carver said, wondering why this couldn’t wait till morning.

  “Paranoid that they’ll be arrested, more likely,” she said. “I gather a few of them were involved in the Ferryman graffiti we’ve been seeing around the city. That, and they’re terrified that the Ferryman could be watching.”

  Carver saw Karl, his throat slashed, exposing the white cartilage of his windpipe. He banished the vision, and focused on Ruth. “Even so, he will have to give us their names.”

  She handed him a folded sheet of paper from her pocket and he tilted his head in question.

  “Karl’s friends,” she said. “Adam doesn’t have addresses for all of them, only hangouts.”

  He skimmed the list; there must have been twenty names on the sheet. “You got all this over the phone?”

  “Not exactly,” Ruth said.

  “That’s not an answer.” Carver searched her face, but she was at her most unreadable. “Ruth?”

  “He rang from Burtonwood services on the M62.”

  About a fifteen-mile drive from the city, by Carver’s estimate.

  “He said he’d persuaded Karl’s girlfriend to talk to me,” she went on. “But she wouldn’t come to the station.”