Splinter in the Blood

by Ashley Dyer

  He was sitting in an armchair by his bed, dressed in loungewear pajamas—a long-sleeved tee and jogging bottoms—and he was squeezing a green gel ball, switching it from his right to his left hand every few seconds in some kind of physio exercise. The wound where they’d inserted the drain into his skull was healing in a purplish stripe, and a fuzz of hair had started to grow over it. He looked gaunt, hollowed out.

  Ruth pulled up a chair and sat facing him. “Give her time,” she said. “She’s been frantic—she’s probably too exhausted to think straight.”

  He lifted his eyes to hers. The hazel irises, flecked with gold, usually danced with intelligence. But right now they were faded, almost colorless.

  “No,” he said. “She’s seeing things exactly as they are.”

  “She said she’s definitely leaving you?”

  “I told her I wanted to try again. She said now was not the time.”

  “So she didn’t say no . . .”

  “She said I could ask her again—when I had ‘things’ under control.”

  “Meaning the drinking?”

  “That, and the case.”

  Ruth didn’t know what to say; she wouldn’t lie to him, but she wanted to comfort him somehow.

  “Well, you haven’t had a drink in over a week. But the case—now, that’s a real addiction . . .” She twitched her eyebrows to show she was joking, and he smiled weakly.

  “Look,” he said. “I was thinking—maybe an anthropologist might make some sense of the tattoos.”

  Ruth said, “Have you been quizzing someone at the office?”

  He looked mystified, but then his eyes suddenly brightened as if light had flooded the room, pouring color and life into them. “You mean you’ve already spoken to an anthropologist? What did he say?”

  For a moment, she stared at him. “Why did you call me here?” she said.

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Is it really because you’re worried about losing Emma?”

  “You know it is.” He looked hurt.

  “I know you said you needed someone to talk to—I assumed that meant about you and Emma. But now I’m here, all you seem to want to talk about is the case.”

  “Ruth—”

  She shook her head, impatient with his excuses and rationalizations. “You’re losing her all over again because of your obsession with the Thorn Killer. Greg, you have to let it go.”

  “It’s my case,” he said.

  “And it nearly killed you.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not dead, yet.”

  “You’re unbelievable. Don’t you know how close you came?”

  “I’m just trying to do my job, Ruth.”

  She threw up her hands with a snort of exasperation.

  “Hear me out,” he said. “Just one more time, then I’ll—I’ll leave it alone.”

  She didn’t believe him for one second. She let him talk, but this was the last time—the very last—that she would fall for his bullshit about concern for his wife, or his marriage.

  “I’ve been trying to reconstruct the files in my head, to crystallize in my mind what I was thinking just before I was shot. I think I’d made a link between the victims.”

  She was curious, despite herself.

  “Which was . . . ?”

  “I—can’t remember,” he said with a shrug. “But he took the file—why would he do that unless it’s important?”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “No, I’m not. The answer is in the files, Ruth. I’m sure of it.”

  She stood up, pacing away from him, then spun on her heel to face him again. “Listen to yourself: ‘Why did he take the files?,’ ‘I’m reconstructing the files.’ It isn’t all about the bloody files, Greg.”

  “It is. It must be. Otherwise why’d he take them?”

  He didn’t take them; he didn’t take them; he DIDN’T take them. It took every ounce of self-control to keep her mouth shut, when all she really wanted to do was voice the screaming in her head.

  She took a breath, let it go. “Leave it, Greg. For your marriage, for the sake of your sanity, you have to stop.”

  “So you’re my self-appointed marriage guidance counselor, now?”

  Stung, she said, “You rang me, remember?”

  He closed his eyes and dropped his chin to his chest. “I know. I’m sorry—I just feel so . . . frustrated, stuck in here.”

  Ruth stared at the healing scar on his scalp. “You’re off the case. If you can accept that, then maybe you and Emma have a chance—but you have to stop this.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “Not with this bullet inside me as a constant reminder that somebody wants me dead.” He jabbed his chest at a spot just about where the wound dressing would be, and she winced.

  “Who would hate you enough to want you dead, Greg?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted.

  “You just said the Thorn Killer took the files,” she countered. “D’you think it was him?”

  “I don’t—”

  He stopped, staring past her in such a peculiar way that she thought someone must have walked into the room.

  She glanced over her shoulder. “What?” she said.

  “Your colors are all wrong.”

  She looked down at her black jacket, trousers, and shoes.

  “Forget it,” he said. “I get muddied—I mean, muddled. You seem . . . sad.”

  “You have no idea.”

  He seemed to shake himself out of it. “So I was thinking—if I could get access to the official case files—”

  “Jesus, Greg!” Ruth paced to the window and stared out onto a patch of sodden grass and a single, dripping tree. He’s never going to let this go. She came to a decision and finally turned back to him.

  “How much do you remember about that evening?” she asked.

  “Almost nothing.”

  “Almost?” she repeated, convinced he was lying.

  He shrugged.

  Okay. Fine. Let’s see how you deal with the truth. She said, “I found you sitting upright in your armchair with a bullet hole in your chest.”

  He frowned, dismissive. “I already know that.”

  She nodded. “What you pretend not to know is that there was a gun on the floor beside you.”

  “No,” he said. “There was no gun.”

  “You were shot,” she said. “There must have been a gun.”

  “Don’t be a smart arse,” he growled. “Whoever shot me took the gun with them.”

  “Somebody certainly did.” She watched his face for signs of anxiety, slowly putting on her own unreadable mask.

  He seemed perplexed, rather than anxious. His brow cleared as he made sense of what she said, and when the full realization hit him, his eyes widened.

  “Oh, no. Ruth. You took it?”

  “The files, the box, the gun.”

  “It really was you in the shadows?”

  “Like I keep telling you.”

  He wiped a hand over his face. “What were you thinking?”

  “What do you think?”

  Her mask must have slipped for a second, because a horrible realization seemed to slowly surface through the foggy workings of his brain and he looked at her in horror. “You think I shot myself?”

  The ground seemed to shift under her feet. “You were depressed. The case was driving you crazy.”

  “And you thought I’d put a gun to my chest and pulled the trigger? For God’s sake, Ruth! Why would I do that?”

  She stared at him. She couldn’t have gotten it so wrong. “You blamed yourself for Kara Grogan,” she said. “Even before that, you’d been drinking yourself stupid for months.”

  “I was drinking hard,” he said. “But . . .”

  “Really? Are you still trying to kid yourself you were in control?” She put her head back and gazed at the ceiling for a moment. “D’you think I didn’t notice the tremors in your hands when you reached for your first cup of coffee in the morning?”


  He looked away. “I was tired.”

  “Sure,” she said. “You were tired every day of the week—you positively reeked of exhaustion toward the end.”

  He began to protest, but she spoke over him. “D’you know the real reason I went to your flat that night?”

  “I told you, I don’t remember.”

  “You rang me, depressed, rat-arsed drunk, not making any kind of sense.”

  He blinked and Ruth thought he was making an effort to remember. “I came over to tell you to find yourself an AA meeting and take some sick leave or I would report you.” She watched him closely. “There was an empty whisky bottle by your chair. You stank of it—your whole apartment did—I wouldn’t have lit a naked flame within a block of you that night.”

  He stared at his hands in his lap and began digging his nails into the gel ball. “I don’t remember,” he murmured.

  “That’s the point, Greg,” she said, more gently. “It was a pattern. You knew it—we both did—we just didn’t talk about it.”

  He rubbed his hand hard over his chin. “So,” he said. “You took the file, you took the gun; you compromised the scene. Why, Ruth? Why would you do something so stupid?”

  How could she even begin to explain the horror of seeing him slumped in the chair? The panic when she’d realized—thought she’d realized—what he’d done. And the guilt she’d grappled with ever since.

  Tears sprang to her eyes. She hated showing weakness and tried to cover it with anger. “See this?” She picked up the honeymoon picture from the nightstand. “I found it in your kitchen with the crime scene photos, along with all those images of Kara. If I hadn’t taken the gun, you know what people would say? That the Thorn Killer’s mind games got to you. That you couldn’t take the pressure.”

  He shook his head, slowly.

  “You know what they would have seen? A sad drunk. A coward who tried to take the easy way out, shot by his own hand—dying alone in his empty flat.”

  He stared at her, his face gray. “Oh, Ruth . . . I thought you knew me better than that.” He sucked in some air, and for a few moments the only sounds were his shuddering breath and the distant chatter of staff and patients on the other side of the door. “I may be an idiot,” he said at last. “I know I’m a drunk. But I’m no coward—how could you even think that?”

  Looking into his face, she knew he was telling the truth. Oh, God, Ruth . . . What have you done?

  “What else was I supposed to think?” she said, and her voice sounded weak and defensive to her ears.

  “What everyone else did,” he said. “That I was about to break the case—that this was the Thorn Killer, covering his tracks.”

  “Except we both know he would never do something like this, don’t we?” she said softly.

  He hesitated, but finally he nodded. After another short pause, he said, “Okay . . . What’s the damage?”

  Ruth returned to the chair opposite and took a few breaths before she began. He watched her intently, and she had that odd feeling that he was looking at a third person in the room again.

  “The only fingermarks we have from your flat are mine because I wiped the place down.” She swore softly. “I cleared up after the shooter.”

  Her hands were shaking and she clasped them between her knees.

  “Ruth,” he said.

  She couldn’t look at him at first, but he dipped his head, trying to catch her eye, and eventually she looked up.

  “The shooter probably cleared up before you arrived.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’ll keep telling myself that. Doesn’t make what I did any better, though, does it?” Her phone buzzed and she checked the screen.

  “Urgent briefing,” the text read. “Thirty-five mins.”

  “I’ve got to go,” she said.

  “But you will come back?”

  “I will,” she said. “Of course I will.”

  Chapter 24

  Carver watched Ruth go with a looming sense of dread, and not only because he had no memory of calling her the night he was shot. It wasn’t as if it was the first night he’d got blind drunk, but if he couldn’t remember the simple fact of making a phone call to her, what else had he done that night?

  The argument he’d gotten into filled his head in a blast of light and noise: screaming, breaking glass.

  He stopped. Before the argument, he’d had sex—he remembered that, now. But he couldn’t push past that moment, couldn’t remember what happened after the fight, the screams, the sound of breaking glass.

  Had it been a fight—had he gotten physical? Would he use force against a woman? Did he?

  The day she threw him out, Emma had said, I don’t even know you when you’re drunk, Greg. You’re a different person—it isn’t safe to be around you when you’re like that.

  He wiped sweat from his brow. His skin was cold and clammy, and his hands were shaking. DTs or terror? It was hard to tell the two apart. Harder still to pinpoint the exact moment when his heavy drinking became binge drinking and slid into dependency.

  A nip of whisky had become a part of his daily ritual after he and Emma split up. A takeaway meal, a splash of whisky to dull the edge while he read over the team’s reports for the day, compared details of the killings, looking for a pattern that would help them crack the case. But a splash of whisky became a slug, and as the months crawled by and the Thorn Killer took another victim, and another, he’d lost the knack of sleeping. So he would pour a drink—just one—he told himself, stoppering the bottle firmly. Yet, a half hour later he would be on his feet again, ready for a top-up, and a little later, topping up again, drinking steadily for hours, poring over his files, waiting to pass out so that he could get some rest. But he would wake with a clang in the early hours, his mind grinding over the same questions, carrying the same sense of failure that he hadn’t prevented another murder.

  The night he’d gotten the message to go and look for Kara—a text from a burner phone giving him the location, signed off as TK—he was already a quarter of the way down a new bottle of scotch. He had laid off the booze while he’d called in the CSIs and briefed Superintendent Wilshire and spoken to his team. He drank coffee while he talked to Ruth Lake about prioritizing tasks and briefing the press office, and later, speaking to the Home Office pathologist, he was stone-cold sober—juiced on nothing stronger than caffeine and adrenaline. But when the day’s work was done, he had downed the rest of that scotch.

  No, it wasn’t the first night, nor even the tenth that he had drunk himself unconscious, and it wasn’t the first that he had blanked out the stupid, destructive, shameful things he’d done. The rows, the insults, the maudlin phone calls to Emma. How many times had he conducted morning briefings with a headache that felt like someone had taken a sharpened pencil and jammed it into his eye socket?

  In the months since he and Emma had broken up, a pain seemed to center around his heart. At first, he thought it was an ulcer, that stress, caffeine, bad food, and hard drinking had burned a hole in his gut, but now he saw it as a physical expression of his self-disgust. He had thought he couldn’t go any lower after Emma kicked him out, but now he could see that Kara’s murder had sent him on a final downward spiral that landed him in a coma, with Ruth believing he had attempted suicide.

  Ruth Lake had covered for him dozens of times in the last few months. Consoled him, and calmed him too, with her quiet, undemonstrative presence. What an arrogant prick he was, berating her for thinking he could attempt suicide. He had been killing himself for months—only more slowly, with booze.

  Chapter 25

  Ruth Lake rang DCI Parsons on his landline and his mobile. He wasn’t answering, so she tried John Hughes.

  “Have you been called to this emergency briefing?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Any idea what it’s about?”

  “My guess would be the new body, just turned up at Beetham Tower.”

  She said, “Is it one of ours?” It can
’t be. Not so soon after Kara.

  Someone spoke off mic and the crime scene manager said, “I’ll be right there.” Then, “Sorry, Ruth. I’ve got to go.”

  She hung up and ran to her car. It was headline news on the radio: a woman’s body found at Beetham Tower. The block was only half the height of the iconic Manchester skyscraper, but still tall enough to dominate the Mersey waterfront. Less than a mile along Strand Street from the Merseyside Police headquarters, it was among the priciest property locations in the city.

  The cluster of press and media had vanished from the station entrance when Ruth Lake returned to HQ. A police constable on guard was stamping his feet and blowing steam into the freezing air on the steps outside. Ruth could imagine the scramble when the news came in: reporters and photographers and social media snappers dashing for taxis to take them to the scene, hoping for another Thorn Killer victim.

  She hurried up to the Major Incident Room. The place was empty, but farther down the corridor she could hear a buzz of chatter from the larger seminar room. The place was packed. DCI Parsons stood at the front, notes on a clipboard, set square against one of the corners of the desk; several more stacks of papers laid out next to it; whiteboard markers arrayed in a row between two of the stacks.

  Ruth sidled up to John Hughes. “The Beetham Tower murder,” she said softly, keeping her gaze on Parsons and her face free of any emotion. “Does it look like one of ours?”

  “Adela Faraday,” Hughes said. “A stockbroker. She was found on the terrace of her penthouse apartment.”

  “Ah,” Ruth said, feeling some of her jittery nervous tension dissipate: the Thorn Killer’s victims had all been found in public places. “Cause of death?”

  DCI Parsons rapped on the table to call them to order so she didn’t get to hear the answer. He was wearing a charcoal-gray suit with a white shirt and dark blue tie today. He cleared his throat and smoothed his tie and fixed them with his serious gaze.

  “An hour ago, a woman’s body was found in her apartment at Beetham Tower,” he said. “Fifteen minutes later, these headlines were appearing online.” He picked up a remote-control unit for the data projector and clicked on a link. One tabloid newspaper’s website had run an image of Beetham Tower with the headline “Slain Businesswoman Thorn Killer Victim?” A second link led to the more lurid headline “Was Shooting Victim Tattooed?”