by Ashley Dyer
It came five minutes later.
“All right, Ruthie, love?” The old woman’s greeting sounded half apologetic, and Ruth wondered if she’d sat up, worrying over the row next door.
“Fine, Peggy,” she said. “D’you want to come round? I’ve got a pot of coffee on.”
“I’ll get me coat.”
Ruth unfastened the bolt on the back gate and Peggy Connolly appeared a couple of minutes later, slightly out of breath. Winter or summer, the old woman wore a mac buttoned tight across her middle. She was four foot ten and almost the same in circumference, she walked with a roll. Already an institution when Ruth’s parents came to live in the street, it was impossible to guess Peggy’s age, and no one dared ask, but she claimed to have vivid memories of the Second World War, and Ruth had no reason to disbelieve her.
Ruth turned off her vape and helped her neighbor over the high step into her kitchen. Seated in the warmth with a milky coffee cupped in her hands, Peggy unbuttoned her coat and began talking. Small talk, at first: the unseasonable weather; her children and their children—as a child, Ruth had played on the street with some of Peggy’s grandchildren. Eventually, she worked around to Adam’s sudden appearance yesterday.
“I went out to do some messages before the shops shut. Got back around sixish, ’cos Mrs. H in number seventeen asked me in for a cup of tea and a chinwag. Adam was sitting on your wall.”
“I hope he didn’t frighten you.”
“Nah . . .” Peggy laughed heartily, clacking her overlarge false teeth. “I knew him soon’s I clapped eyes on him. He’s got the Black family good looks,” she said.
They heard loud coughing from the room adjoining the kitchen, and both stopped to listen. Adam cleared his throat, stumbled out into the hall, and padded upstairs. A few moments later, the bathroom toilet flushed, then the central heating boiler fired up; the shower was running.
“I am sorry, about the key, girl.” Peggy screwed up her face in a grimace of remorse. “I thought it’d be all right.”
“I was—it is,” Ruth reassured her. “It’s been a while—we had some air to clear, that’s all.”
The boiler cut off abruptly and they heard the thud of Adam’s footsteps as he padded about the bathroom.
“Well,” Peggy said, shoving back her chair and offering Ruth a hand to haul her up, “I’d better leave youse two to get reacquainted.”
Ruth saw her safely back to her own house. On her back step, the old woman reached out and grasped Ruth’s arm, her grip surprisingly strong.
“Don’t be too hard on him,” she said. “He’s a good lad at heart—helped me put me shopping away, listened to an old woman’s ramblings for a good hour before he made a move to go.” She nodded to herself. “That’s kindness, that is.” She pulled Ruth closer and leaned in, lowering her voice. “Not sure about them tattoos, though.” She shuddered. “Still, they’ve all got them now, haven’t they—the girls as well as the lads—even my Betty’s grandson . . .” She shook her grizzled head, for once lost for words, and turning, she disappeared inside.
Ruth had just settled down to work on her laptop in the kitchen when Adam came in. His beard unwaxed and his hair pulled roughly into a ponytail, he looked more like her brother than he had on any of the other occasions she’d seen him these last few days. Even fresh from the shower, he looked horribly hungover and a little sheepish.
He edged past the table and turned on the cold water, drinking straight from the tap.
She arched an eyebrow. “We do have glasses, you know.”
She stood and took one out of the cupboard for him.
“That the best they could do?” he asked, taking the glass without looking at it.
She glanced down and saw he was staring at the faint remains of the tattoos on the inner aspect of her left arm, just in the crease of her elbow.
Ruth poured him a coffee and went back to her laptop.
“You know, laser removal’s got its own problems—and it looks like you had a lot of blowout from the original,” he went on, apparently undaunted by her lack of communication. “It’s horrible work.”
“It isn’t ‘work’ at all,” she snapped.
“No, sorry,” he said. “My bad.” It seemed he could empathize with her on this point because he cared about the terrible “art” inflicted on her. “I could do a cover-up,” he suggested. “Something nice. No one would ever know that other shit was ever there.”
“I would,” Ruth said, her voice tight, even to her own ears.
He shrugged. “Well, if you change your mind . . .”
After an uncomfortable silence, he wandered back into the living room. As he closed the door, Ruth cursed herself. This was supposed to be the day she started mending bridges with her brother. Instead, she’d refused his sympathy, his help, and alienated him further. Way to go, Ruth.
She sighed, turning again to her laptop screen, but couldn’t focus her attention, and minutes later, she caught herself scratching her arm as if tormented by a maddening itch. But it wasn’t an itch she felt. What she experienced was an absence of feeling—a numbness—nerve damage caused by the toxins the killer used on her. She snapped her laptop closed and headed upstairs to shower.
Adam had gone by the time she came downstairs. He’d left the borrowed front door key on the kitchen table.
61
After the morning briefing, Carver took time out to see his therapist, not begrudging the break in his working day. He was feeling so much better, sleeping well, feeling less anxious and tense.
In the taxi heading back to headquarters, he got a call from Ruth.
“John Hughes rang,” she said. “When can you get back?”
He noticed two things: she didn’t ask where he was—which meant she already had a good idea—and she sounded excited.
“Five minutes.”
Ruth, John Hughes, and DC Ivey were clustered around the digital projector screen when he got to the Major Incident Room; a few other detectives were working the phones.
Hughes acknowledged Carver with a nod and started straight in. The first slide was an image of one of the disks used in Think Outside the Box. It was labeled with an evidence number and identified as Professor Tennent’s remains. Photographed from above, the image had been taken prior to the pathologist’s postmortem examination of the remains, so it was intact: a pale pink disk, containing a complete section across Tennent’s brain. The disk measured twenty centimeters across, according to the ruler the forensic photographer had laid next to it.
“As you know, we didn’t find any fingermarks on the three disks,” Hughes said, “so we focused on other aspects of analysis—DNA, tox screens, and so on. But when we found the palm-edge print on the triptych, I thought it might be worth taking a second look.”
Carver felt a stirring of optimism.
“The first two sections yielded nothing,” Hughes said. “Then we examined Professor Tennent’s.” He clicked to a slide showing the same disk of brain tissue, photographed edge-on; the ruler indicated that the disk was three centimeters thick. “See that line?” Hughes pointed to the image. It was just possible to make out a faint line about two and a half centimeters from the bottom of the disk.
“When you embed stuff in plexiglass, you have to do it in layers,” Hughes said. “Plexiglass, then the sample—brain tissue in this instance—then another, or sometimes several more, leaving each layer to almost set before adding the next.
“Our man had to put a rush on the professor’s section to have it ready in time. And he must have gotten impatient—because at some point, he tested the set by touching the acrylic with an ungloved finger.”
Carver smiled. “He left a fingerprint on the set layer?”
“On the partially set layer,” Hughes corrected. “He must have realized it was tacky, left it to prove a little longer, then overlaid it with another layer of liquid acrylic, not realizing that he’d trapped the print in there like a fly in amber.”
He mo
ved to another slide, but Carver couldn’t see an imprint. He looked at Ruth, and she jerked her chin toward the screen. Her smile said, Give him his moment.
“So we tried shining a focused beam of light at an oblique angle and . . .” He moved to the next slide.
“Oh, wow,” DC Ivey said.
The oblique light had lit up the ridges of the print, deepening the shadows of the troughs just as a lowering autumn sun will show the bumps and depressions in a lawn.
“That’s a good fingerprint with great ridge detail,” Hughes said. “We’re searching IDENT1 now, to see if it’s in the system.”
“Great work,” Carver said.
Ivey’s phone buzzed, and he excused himself. A moment later, he was back in the incident room, his pale skin flushed with excitement.
“That was the owner of one of the shops I’ve been canvassing,” he said. “A guy just used Steve Norris’s Mastercard.”
Heads came up around the room, and Ruth was already on her feet.
“Where?” Carver said.
Ivey gave a location in Aigburth. “He’s gone, boss. The shopkeeper’s wife tried to delay him, but he wasn’t having it.”
Carver was itching to send a team over, but he saw that Ivey wasn’t finished.
“The good news is, she had the presence of mind to offer the guy a scratch card. Shoved it straight into his hand, but he refused it . . . his prints must be all over it.”
There were a few cries of “Yes!”
Grinning, Carver said, “We need CCTV from the shop, a two-car crew to scout the area, see if they can’t scoop him up, and—” He glanced at John Hughes.
“I’ll get a CSI over there, and as soon as we have the IDENT1 results, I’ll let you know.”
Two hours later, they had him in custody.
Carver watched via video link as Ruth Lake led the interview with DC Ivey sitting next to her. This was his arrest, and Carver could see in the fizzing energy around the young detective that he was itching to have a go at the suspect. But this needed a more experienced hand, and Ivey had agreed that Ruth should take the lead. Even so, he was literally gripping the seat of his chair in his effort to contain himself.
Drew Scanlon was what Carver, a London incomer, now recognized as a through-and-through Scouse scally. The type that could boast five generations of forebears who were also Scouse scallies, Liverpool born-and-dragged-up going back over a century. To qualify as a true scally, it was necessary to forswear aspiration as poncey and soft. Education was for snobs, steady jobs for knobheads. The trick was to never aspire to anything, do the minimum, and have enough street savvy to stay out of reach of the law. Admittedly, Scanlon had occasionally gotten into trouble—which was why his fingerprints were in the system, but only for minor infractions: antisocial behavior, a car theft at the age of sixteen, getting involved in a public brawl after a derby match that didn’t go Everton FC’s way.
At first, he said he found the cards.
“When was that?” Ruth asked.
“Yesterday.”
“What time?” Her tone was pleasant.
“About four o’clock.”
She made a note. “Where?”
“On the street.”
“Which street would that be, Drew?”
“I dunno—”
“You don’t know.” Ruth gazed at him, her eyes wide and unjudging. Some mistook that look for innocence, but Carver had been under its scrutiny often enough to know how unsettling Ruth Lake’s dark eyes could be.
Scanlon clearly felt the same way. He shuffled in his seat and mumbled the name of a street near his home in Anfield.
Ruth continued to gaze at him while she appeared to be considering his answer. “That’s a main road,” she said. “I wonder if there’s CCTV around there.” She glanced at DC Ivey. “We could probably get Drew actually picking it up.”
“I’ll go and check, shall I?” Ivey said, following her lead, his relaxed tone implying that all he had to do was go to a magical room somewhere in the building and tap in the street name and time of day.
Scanlon scratched the back of his neck. “It might have been later. Or somewhere else.”
“Oh.” Ruth sounded disappointed on his behalf. She didn’t say anything more, and in the silence, Carver could almost hear the sweat popping out on Scanlon’s brow.
Despite his newly minted ability to “see” mood as color, Carver still wasn’t the best at reading body language, but Ruth must have seen some signal in Scanlon, because she sat back and began speaking in a low tone. “Without video footage, the magistrate is going to assume you stole it, you see, Drew. That’s theft and fraud in one neat little package.”
“Someone give me it,” he said.
“Someone?” Ruth said.
“This feller. I thought it was his—he said he’d had a bit of argy-bargy with the shop owner, wanted me to get the stuff for him—I was gonna give it back.”
“This fellow,” Ruth said. “What did he call himself?”
Scanlon’s eyes practically rolled back into his head. He knew he’d goofed. “The feller on the card. Norris.”
“I’m having trouble believing you, Drew,” Ruth said, her tone regretful. “I think you knew the card was stolen. Which means we could add handling stolen goods to the list of charges.” She tilted her head on one side as if thinking through every charge that could be laid at his door—all in the interests of clarity. “And then there’s conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.”
He blanched.
“Because he knew the card was stolen?” Ivey said helpfully.
“Wait—no . . .”
“Mm,” Ruth said, “and conspiracy carries a heavier tariff.”
“A what?”
“Longer sentence,” she translated, in that same helpful tone.
“You can’t do that—I’m a victim.”
Ruth blinked. “A victim?” she repeated. “Of . . . ?”
“I was threatened. He said if I didn’t do as I was told, I’d be next.”
Ruth watched him for a few moments, then nodded, thoughtfully.
“You believe me?”
“No,” she said, gently.
Drew wiped a hand over his face.
“The thing about lies, Drew, is you need to be convincing.”
“I’m telling the truth.”
She shook her head. “Lies, end to end. The giveaway there was you said, ‘I was threatened.’ That’s what we call vague and unspecific phrasing. Which suggests a lie. You got a bit more specific when you said, ‘He said if . . .’ and so on.”
“Well, he did.”
“Who?”
“The Ferryman.”
Carver smiled. He’d spoken without thinking—now Ruth had him.
“You spoke to the Ferryman.”
He licked his lips, realizing he’d been caught in another lie. “No . . . ?”
“Now, that came out as a question—you’re asking me what I’d like to hear. What I’d like to hear is the truth. But go on, Drew,” Ruth encouraged. “Keep telling your lies for as long as you like. This is entertaining.”
Scanlon folded his arms, closed his eyes, and snuffed air through his nose. “Fuck.” After a few moments, he let his arms fall and opened his eyes. “All right,” he said. “He promised me hard cash. Plus, he said I could use the card as long as I wanted—or till someone sussed me.”
This sounded more like the truth.
Carver could have watched Ruth all day, but just before Drew Scanlon was brought in, he’d received an e-mail from Alderson Bank about their art competition. Attached to it, a spreadsheet with a full list of applicants, including people whose entries were turned down or who didn’t make the long list. Carver flicked the video link off and made his way to his office.
62
Ruth Lake made a quick dash to Cow & Co to grab a sandwich and coffee. The fresh spring air blowing in from the river was welcome after the sweaty stuffiness of the interview room, even though she h
ad to sprint back through a sudden rain shower.
Carver was busy, so she carried her sandwich and coffee through to the MIR. Ivey was eating a bagel and swigging Coke from a bottle; a few detectives staffing the phones drifted out to find their own lunches, while one or two came in, dripping, cursing the change in the weather. Five minutes later, Ruth’s desk phone rang.
“Are you ready to catch me up on the Scanlon interview?” Carver asked.
“Sure—I’ll come to your office.” She ditched the rest of the sandwich, taking the coffee with her.
Carver was alone, and in a somber mood.
“Trouble?” she said.
“Fill me in on Scanlon.”
That was terse.
“Okay.” She began to summarize the interview, but Carver interrupted.
“I watched the first part—take it from his admission that he helped the Ferryman for the money.”
She paused, mentally running through the interview, taking her time. Whatever was going on with Carver, she wasn’t going to let it rattle her.
“He swears he can’t describe the Ferryman because they never met,” she said. “They communicated via messaging on Drew’s Instagram account. Drew was sent a key to a bedsit in a slum house in Aigburth. The clothing was left on a chair in the room, the card was in an envelope, together with instructions, in one of the kitchen drawers.”
“Is he suicidal?” Carver demanded. “Did he see what the Ferryman did to Karl Obrazki?”
“He thinks he’s immune because Karl/Kharon was stealing the Ferryman’s ideas, taking credit for his work—all Drew was interested in was the wodge of fivers he left in the envelope along with Steve Norris’s credit card.” She saw a question form in Carver’s mind and added, “He binned the envelope, says he spent the cash.”
“And the clothing?”
If the Ferryman had given Drew the clothing he’d worn, there was an outside chance they would get DNA evidence from it.
Ruth dipped her head. “He said he ditched it after the woman in the shop gave him aggro—his words.”