The Cutting Room

by Ashley Dyer

  “You met them?” He felt a stab of horror. “Ruth, tell me you didn’t go alone.”

  “Why wouldn’t I? He’s my brother.”

  “You barely know him.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “You knew him—past tense—what, eight? Ten years ago? He was a teenager back then, Ruth. Now he’s mixed up with Dave Ryan. People change.”

  She tilted her head. “Maybe.”

  “For God’s sake, wake up. Have you forgotten what happened today? Karl Obrazki was murdered and mutilated in his own flat, with his neighbor sitting behind paper-thin walls just a few feet from him, and you’re telling me you went alone to an empty motorway café to meet with a complete stranger? Have you lost your mind?”

  “Come on, Greg . . .” she said, and for once her tone was placatory. “She didn’t want anyone else there—I couldn’t just let her quietly disappear, now, could I?”

  “Protocol, Ruth. You should’ve called: I could’ve arranged a covert follow.”

  “There wasn’t time,” she said. “And anyway, I was careful.”

  “Careful how, exactly? Young, fit men have vanished without trace—” He faltered, realizing that wasn’t true—traces of them had turned up—and in the vilest of circumstances. He tasted bile at the back of his throat and swallowed hard.

  She started to say something, but he cut her off: “You’re not thinking straight, Ruth. First the unsanctioned inquiries to find Adam. Now this.” He shook his head. “You’re a bloody danger to yourself—I should suspend you from duty.”

  He saw an anxious flare of blue around her face, but the emotion was gone before it took hold.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m sorry, I should have let you know where I was going.” After a barely decent pause, she went on: “So, the girlfriend—Tia Lowe . . . ?”

  He stared at her, unable to find words.

  “What?” she said.

  “You’re unbelievable.”

  “I know . . . But the thing is, I’ve already been and gone and done it. And I’m back in one piece, so we might as well use the intel.”

  He sighed. “Okay,” he said, too tired to argue. “All right—let’s hear it.”

  It took her just five minutes to give a concise and efficient summary of her interview of Obrazki’s girlfriend, as well as her conversation with Adam about a rat in a box under a concrete weight. How Ruth could think that Adam was “okay,” listening to his cold ethical arguments about snakes and lizards and live food and art was a mystery to Carver.

  “We’ll make a start on this in the morning—you can put a couple of teams on it.”

  “Um . . . I was thinking I’d start on the list tonight,” Ruth said.

  Carver checked his watch. “It’s almost midnight,” he said. “What’s the rush?”

  She smiled. “No rush—it’s just these aren’t really morning people.”

  It was dark and cold. A fine rain misted the streets as they left the house, and easing into the passenger seat, Carver’s thoughts turned again to the risks Ruth had taken, first in hunting down her brother, then in meeting Adam and Tia Lowe on her own.

  Ruth slotted the key into the lock and started the engine.

  “This can’t go on,” Carver said. “You do know that?”

  “I don’t follow.” She pulled away from the curb.

  He saw bile-green light shimmer at the edges of his vision—she was lying—she knew exactly what he was talking about. But what the hell—if she wanted him to state the obvious . . . “Adam is a person of interest in a murder investigation.”

  “A person of interest,” she repeated, “Meaning a suspect.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  She shot him a look that said he didn’t need to.

  “But I do think he’s been dishonest.”

  “Okay, I’ll give you that.”

  “At the very least, he should be treated as a hostile witness,” Carver went on.

  She glanced across sharply. “Because?”

  “He knew Karl yet he said nothing.”

  “And now he’s opened up—given us twenty-three people who knew Karl. He’s helping, Greg.”

  “You have to ask yourself why.”

  “Why he’s helping, or why he withheld information in the first place?”

  “Both,” Carver said, firmly. “Come on, Ruth—you know how this works.”

  “I’ve been around the block a few times,” Ruth said. “Yeah, I know.”

  “I’m not questioning your experience,” Carver said, hearing the resentment in her tone. “But you could use a bit more objectivity.”

  She gripped the wheel a little tighter but didn’t respond.

  He wasn’t getting through.

  So try again.

  “I know this is hard,” he began. “We do all we can to separate our personal lives from our work, to leave our bad experiences in our past, but—”

  She turned to him, and he saw a complicated mix of colors around her.

  “Who are you trying to convince,” she said, “me, or yourself?”

  He supposed he deserved that. They drove in silence for the next few miles.

  Waiting at a set of traffic lights with the wipers ticking intermittently and cars sweeping past at a rate of one every ten seconds, he took a different tack: “You lost your brother for a while; it’s understandable that you’d want to protect him now you’re back in touch. But, Ruth, you need to find some perspective.”

  “That’s rich, coming from you,” she scoffed.

  “I don’t think I—” She saw you flip out at Karl’s flat. She knows.

  “Of course you do. Come on, Greg!”

  A clammy sweat gathered on his forehead, and he stared ahead, his hands fisted in his lap, waiting for her to say it.

  “I found you virtually collapsed in the toilets a few days ago,” she said, “but I so much as ask if you’re all right, you shut me down.”

  He felt a surge of relief. She doesn’t know. So tell her—you owe her that much.

  Instead, Carver heard himself say, “I want Adam’s whereabouts checked out for every ‘exhibit’ the Ferryman has staged since this thing started.”

  “Goes without saying,” Ruth said.

  He cleared his throat. “I want you to task someone else with the job.”

  She took a breath, then clamped her mouth shut and gave a curt nod. “You’re the boss.”

  The next few minutes, the only sound inside the car was the occasional swish of the wipers.

  “You’re angry,” he said at last. “I suppose you’ve a right to be—as a sister. But you’re police, Ruth. You can’t be partisan about this.”

  She didn’t say a word, but the cool look she gave him carried so much meaning: Hadn’t she saved his career last winter by being partisan—protecting his sorry, drunken arse for no better reason than friendship and misplaced loyalty?

  54

  Day 11, 2 a.m.

  Ruth sat at her kitchen table, weary from the unproductive interviews she and Carver had managed to conduct with a couple of Karl’s acquaintances before calling it a night. The blue leatherette photo album was open in front of her. Next to it, the timeline she’d sketched out just three days earlier. Judging by her conversation with Greg Carver, she’d need to have every detail clear, every response rehearsed.

  From her late teens, Ruth had developed the knack of separating her personal life from her work. Creating a firewall between the two had kept her safe—and able to function—through the traumatic years following her mother’s murder. Sometimes, it felt as if home and career existed in different domains, with no bridge between them. As a young CSI, her focus was so absolute that she had worked on a domestic murder scene and not made the connection with her mother until she stood preparing dinner for Adam and herself that evening. A therapist had warned her that blocking her feelings was not healthy, but for Ruth back then it meant the difference between survival and mental collapse, and after a while, it had beco
me as much a part of her makeup as her extraordinary ability to recognize faces.

  So she’d shut off her personal anxieties and sorrows from her studies and her work. Only one person had ever been able to penetrate her armor shielding: Adam. When he was still living in the family home, and even after he’d cut himself off from her, worries about Adam would intrude on her thoughts, and sometimes, out of nowhere, she would feel a wave of terrible sorrow for his loss. In some ways it was greater than hers, because for Adam, the security of home and family had been snatched away from him just as he’d begun the transition from boy to man and had needed parental guidance most. If he had known all he should know about what Dad had done, perhaps it might have been easier for him, but Ruth could never tell him all she knew.

  Maybe Carver was right, maybe she was partisan, but guilt, too, had played a role in her feelings for her brother, her tolerance for his transgressions. Because she had lied to Adam, kept secrets, withheld the truth. If it had been to protect Adam she might have felt less tormented, but the ugly truth was that her lies and omissions were all to protect herself. And now Adam was back in her life, crowding her thoughts and breaking in on her daily activities just like old times—and as if the situation wasn’t complicated enough, he’d forged links with Dave Ryan.

  Ruth went through the album, the pages crackling as she broke the static attraction between them, and her nostrils were filled with the musty almonds-and-dust smell of old paper. She went quickly through the family snapshots, her eyes unfocused, in the hope that what followed would cause her less pain.

  “Woman Found Dead in Deeside.” This was Ffion, Dad’s girlfriend. The report said she had “serious head injuries” and was pronounced dead at the scene.

  That was the night Dad came to the family home; it was also the last time Ruth saw him alive.

  Over the twenty-four hours that followed, news media had reported on the head injuries Ffion had sustained, attaching helpful images to their reports of the kind of clawhammer that was thought to have been used in the “frenzied attack.”

  The detectives knew that Dad had turned up on their doorstep the night Ffion’s body was found, and all three of them had been questioned. Ruth remembered the fear in Adam’s eyes as he’d retold the circumstances, describing the blood on Dad’s clothing, the crazed look in his eyes, his threat, “You’re next!”

  A watch had been placed on the house, in case he came back, but he never did.

  Neither did Mum, after that day.

  Ruth flipped quickly past the headline: “Liverpool Mum of Two Slain”; she could recite the text verbatim. Like Ffion, Mum had been murdered with a clawhammer, her body discovered inside Dad’s business premises in Deeside.

  All the headlines after that were variations on “Liverpool Man Sought in Brutal Double Murder.” She’d avoided the news then, but years later, Ruth had been given urgent cause to go looking for those reports. The media had trotted out all the usual clichés: “Mum Slain,” “Frenzied Attack,” “Neighbors Shocked.” Mum was always “Mum of two”; the media didn’t seem able to cope with the concept that a woman can carry many roles. Sara Black, née Lake, had been a carer and nursery school assistant; she’d been secretary, receptionist, and bookkeeper to Dad’s firm before the banking crisis put them out of business. She’d retrained as a nurse after Dad left, and she would have hated to be defined in such narrow terms as “Mum of two.” Even so, for Adam and Ruth that’s who she was, and the way Mum had been torn from them felt like a physical wound. Those scars remained, under the armor plating, just as the ghost of the Thorn Killer’s tattoos lay under Ruth’s skin.

  The media had an opportunity to file a few more stock phrases when Dad turned up dead. It was just two days after Ffion’s murder, and headlines summed up the stories, saving busy people the time and effort of reading the details: “Double-Murder Suspect Dead in Suicide Leap.”

  Ruth had kept no cuttings of the Ryan case, although she carried the details in her head. A double murder—Damien Ryan, eldest son of gangland boss Dave Ryan, and Naomi, his bride of three months. The couple had been discovered battered about the head; the murder weapon—a clawhammer—found nearby. Naomi was two months pregnant when she died.

  Ruth had been a CSI at the time; it was during a spate of gangland killings across Merseyside: shootings, stabbings, firebombings—a grenade had even been used in one attack. Ruth had worked on one of the stabbings, and while the others were of interest, they were not part of her brief, and the curious focus that had saved her from mental breakdown after the traumatic events of her late teens had also caused her to block the Ryan murders from her thoughts.

  Dave Ryan had said, You saw to it justice was done, and in a sense she had, though some years later. By then, Ruth had been promoted from CSI to crime scene coordinator and was also a part-time police trainer. Ruth had been tasked with supervising evidence collection and analysis on the murders of John and Millie Garrod, an elderly couple, bludgeoned to death in their home. The probable weapon: a clawhammer. Initially, investigators took the approach that the killings were most likely a burglary gone wrong. Then it emerged that the couple were key witnesses scheduled to testify in the high-profile drug trial of Alan Jones, North Wales cannabis grower, brothel owner, and drug racketeer. Although the drug trial foundered, Jones was eventually convicted of the Garrod murders.

  Damien and Naomi Ryan’s deaths were not mentioned, even in passing, before, during, or after Jones’s conviction. Yet last night, Ryan had praised CSIs as the unsung heroes of the criminal justice system. She recalled his slow blink, then: We both got a result, didn’t we?

  Of course, Ryan could have been making an innocent reference to the double murder of the elderly couple. But she doubted if Ryan had made an innocent remark in thirty years.

  Ruth had read the report on the murders of Dave Ryan’s son, his daughter-in-law, and their unborn child. Jones’s business interests extended across the Welsh border into Deeside and Wirral, and there was a known rivalry between Ryan and Alan Jones in their criminal endeavors. The police investigation had considered Jones a suspect, but there was very little physical evidence to work on, and nothing to tie Jones directly to the killings. The evidence against Jones in the Garrods’ deaths, on the other hand, was irrefutable; the case had been solved, Jones sentenced to life, justice served.

  If it had ended there, perhaps Ruth would not have been burdened with so much guilt. But Alan Jones was murdered two weeks after he’d landed in prison—battered about the head and left in a corner of his cell to choke to death on his own blood.

  Men like Alan Jones led brutal lives and made deadly enemies. His imprisonment had left a void in the drug supply network on the Welsh border, and his murder might be seen as inevitable—there were plenty of ambitious Welsh hard men who might have put a contract out on him. But Ryan’s slow blink when he’d said We got a result spoke of an understanding between Ruth and the gangster—it said he knew what she’d done to place Jones with his back to the wall in a prison cell. Ryan’s thugs had no doubt carried out the execution, but Ruth’s actions had put him there in the first place.

  The puzzle was, why had Ryan brought it up now, after all these years?

  She closed the album and set it square in the center of the table, a solid, sickening realization settling in the pit of her stomach. Ryan was a strategist: Adam hadn’t forged links with Ryan, Dave Ryan had sought him out.

  A firm believer in the maxim “knowledge is power,” Ryan gathered information and filed it away until he found a use for it. He’d formed an association with Adam because it gave him power over Ruth. Yet he hadn’t exercised that power until Ruth had rippled the waters of his toxic pond.

  Ruth had made sure that none of the physical evidence from Jones’s trial could lead back to her—but even a guess in that direction could give Ryan a slight advantage. He could hurt Ruth with what he knew—or thought he knew—and in a man of Ryan’s type, that kind of power was extremely dangerous.
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  55

  Day 11, 9:30 a.m.

  Ruth Lake stared up at the ugly 1950s building that housed Fairfield Arts College. Originally a technical college, it had been hastily constructed postwar, one of many such buildings that had grown—or been thrown—up to repopulate the bomb-devastated landscape of Liverpool. The gray concrete structure squatted in the center of a large car park, evoking Stalinist Russia rather than twenty-first-century Britain. Recent attempts had been made to soften the brutal look of the place with small birch trees and a few clumps of forsythia. The birch was still dormant, but the sulfur-yellow flowers of forsythia lit up a border at the edge of a grassy mound—all that was left of what used to be a sports field.

  Her visit was a follow-up to the information Adam had reluctantly given them the day before. She had spoken to Karl Obrazki’s personal tutor earlier that morning, and he arranged for her to stop by one of his seminars.

  As Ruth passed through the glass doorway, she noted a gray shadow on the foyer wall: a stenciled image of the Ferryman. She stopped at the reception desk and was buzzed through the barrier.

  Heads turned as she strode down the corridor; some of the students were wearing hoodies etched with the F logo.

  The tutor was already in the room waiting for his class of ten to arrive. He was chatting quietly with a student while zipping through a PowerPoint presentation on his laptop. He offered to step out of the room while Ruth spoke to the students.

  “That’s okay, Mr. Milner.” She thought it might be useful to see who squirmed the most as she asked her questions, and the presence of someone who knew them would make it harder for them to get away with putting on an act. She asked Milner to stand out of their direct line of sight, though—she didn’t want them looking to him for approval, or to gauge his reaction. Milner was in his late thirties, she estimated. Fair-haired, tall, but not exceptionally so. He had gray-blue eyes with pale, almost translucent eyebrows, and he kept his hair short, trimmed close to his broad, smooth forehead.