by Ashley Dyer
His brows drew down, and she thought he was about to order her to take someone with her. Then his shoulders twitched in a microshrug and she realized he’d given his tacit consent.
“DC Ivey,” he said.
He knew something. But Ruth was far too experienced in interrogation techniques to fall for his clumsy attempt to use her guilty conscience to leverage an unguarded response. “You want me to take DC Ivey?” she said. “Isn’t he on the Faraday investigation?”
“You know he is,” Parsons said, displeased.
She looked guilelessly into his face, as though waiting for him to explain.
“Whatever you’ve been up to, DCI Jansen has noticed. Stay away from Ivey—Carver’s shooting is none of your affair.”
In one very important way, it was, but she said, “Okay . . .” with just enough upward inflection to sound puzzled.
He snorted. “Clear off, Sergeant—and remember what I said—I don’t want any tabloid headlines linking this investigation with psychics.”
Ruth went home to change into jeans and a sweater before heading back into town, aiming to blend in. She swapped her overcoat for a parka, let her hair down, then tied it back again—not that she was vain, but Ruth knew that her brown curls could turn heads. She screwed the ponytail tight and tucked it under a peaked corduroy cap.
At the theater, she bought her ticket just before the curtain went up, spoke to no one, and slumped low in her seat as the audience murmur died down.
Jasmine Hart was dressed in a gleaming white skirt suit. She cast a benign eye over the audience, spread her arms, and said, “Welcome.” Her pitch and tone conveyed the same warmth and kindness Ruth had experienced earlier: you might believe she was chatting with a few pals in her own sitting room—her voice implied a friendly intimacy. But that was down to a good sound system—and the psychic’s practiced and carefully modulated tones.
In the days since she started seeking out video recordings of psychic performers, Ruth had seen fast-talking con men who dazzled their marks, denying them any chance of rational thought. She had seen homely grannies who cozily invited the dead to come forward and chat. She’d seen the solemn and the serene; the smiling and excitable; psychics who spoke aloud to their “spirits” and those who seemed to listen intently, only nodding to show that they were in communication.
Mrs. Hart was a talker.
“I’ve got a young man coming through,” she would say, or “I’m hearing someone called Sally—does that mean anything to anyone?” After a series of mis-hits, she lowered her chin to her chest, let her hands fall to her sides, and was silent for ten seconds.
Just as the audience became restless, she turned her head the slightest fraction, as though sneaking a look from the corner of her eye. “Don’t be shy, love.”
A murmur of anticipation rippled through the auditorium.
“Shhhh . . .” Mrs. Hart soothed. The sleek radio mic headset was almost invisible from the audience, so it seemed that she was in conversation with someone just beyond their sight. “Don’t mind them,” she said. “They’ll not harm you.”
She twitched the fingers of her right hand, gesturing as if that someone stood to her side and she was encouraging them to come forward. “Come on then,” she said. “You can hold my hand, if you like.” Her right hand closed as if a hand had indeed tentatively slipped into hers.
She closed her eyes. “So cold . . .”
Someone in the audience behind Ruth sobbed and she turned slowly, not wanting to attract attention. A woman two rows back had a hand to her mouth. She was shaking. Another woman sitting beside her rubbed her arm. Rollinson was already making his way down the aisle toward her with the roving mic.
Jasmine Hart opened her eyes. “I’m getting a child,” she said.
There was no visible shake of the head, and the woman didn’t speak, but Ruth sensed a stiffening, a withdrawal.
“Our kid, maybe . . .” the psychic went on as if she hadn’t noticed.
The woman gasped.
“Does that mean something to you, love?”
This was Liverpool—it was a safe bet half the audience referred to a brother or sister as “our kid.”
The woman nodded. “My brother,” she said. “Our M—”
“No, don’t tell me. Let him speak for himself. He’s been waiting a long time to say this.”
Ruth saw a slight crease between the woman’s brows.
“At least it seems a long time, he says,” Mrs. Hart corrected. Another good recovery. Then, as an aside: “You’re not coming through clear, love.” Focusing again on the woman in the audience, Mrs. Hart said, “I’m getting Mark . . . no . . . Mike?”
The emotion on the woman’s face told her she’d guessed right the second time.
“Mike tells me he’s not long passed over.”
“Three months,” the woman said.
“That’s right.”
Ruth knew that when she recalled it, the bereaved woman would swear that Jasmine Hart had specified the three months.
“It was quick,” Mrs. Hart said.
The woman pressed her lips together, tears streaming down her face, the flutter of the mic in her shaking hands sounding like the irregular stutter of her heart. Rollinson was standing at the end of the row, and Ruth chanced a glimpse at him from under the peak of her cap. He was big and heavy, with hands like a butcher. He searched the audience like a bodyguard on a high-security detail, but it was possibilities he was looking for, not threats.
“Is he . . . is he all right?” the woman asked.
“He is.” With her left hand, Mrs. Hart patted the imaginary hand in her right. “There’s so much he wants to tell you.” A momentary cloud passed over her face. “He is cold, though . . .” she added with a little shiver.
“Oh, God . . .” the woman choked out. “He kept saying that, when he—”
“What’s that, love?” Mrs. Hart interrupted, talking to her imaginary companion. She laughed. “I don’t know if this makes sense, but he says they’ve got footie on the other side.”
The woman laughed into her hand, wiping snot and tears from her face. “He was mad for it—said if they didn’t have footie on the other side, he’d come back and haunt Anfield.”
Laughs of recognition and empathy from the audience.
Mrs. Hart smiled with them, her head cocked as if trying to hear a distant voice above the laughter. “Oh,” she said, and her face fell. “Okay, love. He’s going . . . says he’s tired.”
The woman stretched out her hand, brought her fingers trembling to her lips.
“What’s that, love?” Mrs. Hart turned, looking to her right. “Right-oh.” She focused on the woman. “He says he has a private message for you. But he’s fading—his first time, see—and he’s a bit shy talking in front of all these people.”
The woman levered herself out of the seat. “But how can I . . . ?”
“If you’d like to see me after the group reading, I’ll see if I can coax him. Not to worry, love, we’ll sort you out.”
The joy and anxiety on the woman’s face was pitiful.
Mrs. Hart opened her hand, as though gently releasing the “spirit” from her grasp. She swayed for a moment.
“There’s another voice coming through . . .” She held her hand out indicating the front rows, and while Mrs. Hart started a new riff on a small woman with a name like a flower, Ruth watched Rollinson take the radio mic from the first woman and send a notebook and pen down the row for her to write down her details.
The second spirit was called Rose, and on a lighter note, Mrs. Hart joked about her being thorny. The audience member, a sixtysomething who looked like she’d been around the block a few times, laughed with the rest. Rose was an elderly aunt, she said, prickly as a hedgehog. Mrs. Hart wowed them with the revelation that Auntie Rose was pleased she’d found the ring.
The woman obligingly stood and held up her left hand to show the audience the ruby ring her aunt had left her, but which h
ad been so well hidden they hadn’t found it for almost a year after her death.
Many of the “messages” Mrs. Hart received were of such a broad nature that half a dozen hands would go up, begging to be chosen. The psychic would punctuate her insights with “Do you understand?” or “Does that make sense?,” and occasionally, when it clearly didn’t, she would say firmly, “It might be something that hasn’t happened, yet. But it will make sense in the future.”
Jasmine Hart took a break halfway through and Ruth saw Harry Rollinson approach Mike’s sister and guide her to the steps at the side of the stage, where Mrs. Hart was waiting. The psychic took the woman’s hands in her own and led her backstage.
Ruth mingled with the audience in the bar, listening to exclamations at the extraordinary accuracy of the reading, telling stories of their own. She saw that Harry Rollinson had stayed front of house, too, moving from group to group, hovering at the edge of little clusters. She scanned the crowd, wondering if any of these people had been there on the night Kara was physically ejected from the theater, and on her second sweep, her eye snagged on a familiar face.
Lyall Gaines?
He started to turn away, and it looked like he would try to duck out, but he must have realized he’d been rumbled, because he turned back and sauntered over, pasting a cocky smile on his face. “You look surprised to see me,” he said.
“I’m surprised to see you at a psychic show—”
“Reading,” he interrupted. “It’s ‘a reading.’”
“I’m surprised to see you at a psychic show,” she began again, “when I’m still waiting for a report on those tattoos eleven hours after you said you’d deliver it.”
“I think I actually said I could give it to you orally in time for the morning briefing.” He paused. “The written word is a far more demanding task mistress, isn’t she?” he added, nipping the pink tip of his tongue between his upper and lower incisors.
“When can I expect it?” she asked, reflecting on how he managed to oil all his exchanges with innuendo.
He smiled. “Relax. You’ll have it by lunchtime tomorrow.”
“And the reason you’re here?” Ruth asked.
“Are you interrogating me, Sergeant?”
“If that’s what you want to call it.”
She kept her eyes on him, and after a moment, he shrugged.
“It’s work. As an anthropologist, I have a professional interest in psychics. The human craving for a spiritual afterlife that transcends this mundane existence is cross-cultural. This”—he glanced around at the knots of people—“or versions of it, exist in every corner of the world . . .”
She let Gaines burble on while she kept an eye on Rollinson. He had his back to a small group: two women, two men, and a teenage boy—family, judging by the resemblance.
“The shamans of ancient cultures from Alaska to Taiwan worked via supernatural channels,” Gaines went on. “And shamans were often tattoo masters.”
She glanced at him and his eyes brightened.
“I thought you would find that interesting. Tattoos, supernatural insights, religion, and ritual are bound up in human history and our psyche. The shamans of ancient cultures derived their power from the ancestral spirits they communicated with in dreams or visions. They have a lot in common with modern mediums, clairvoyants, and psychics.”
“You think?”
He followed her gaze. Rollinson was staring at his smartphone, and occasionally thumbing in a few words, but he was listening so hard to the family group his ears were practically flapping.
“Shamans or charlatans. It’s all about belief, Sergeant.”
Gaines watched her watching Rollinson for a while; she could feel his steady scrutiny.
“Got Mrs. Hart and her ‘assistant’ worked out yet?” he asked.
“He’s more than just the mic man,” Ruth said. “He’s watching the audience like a dog on point. I think they have some kind of code, too—and she’s pretty good at cold reading.”
“Well, you would know.”
“Meaning?” she asked pleasantly.
“Never mind.”
She lifted her chin, indicating Rollinson. “He’s probably sending texts to Jasmine right now, feeding her a few choice facts about the bereaved family over there.”
Gaines’s eyes gleamed. “Are you disappointed?”
“I’d have to’ve believed in ‘psychic phenomena’ in the first place.”
“There are more things in heaven and earth . . .”
“Yeah, more bullshit, too.”
He laughed. “They are quite the double act. Daddy also haunts the bar before curtain up, gleaning little snippets they can use during the night.”
“Rollinson is Jasmine’s father?”
Gaines nodded. “Her real name is plain Jane Rollinson.”
It seemed Rollinson père wasn’t the only family member who favored aliases.
“I saw Jasmine take Mike’s sister off for a quiet word,” Ruth said, thinking about Kara.
“Common practice,” he said. “An audience member reacts strongly to mention of someone ‘passing over’ suddenly or violently. They home in and extract info that the ‘spirit’ died by suicide, a tragic accident, murder—whatever.” He eyed her, curiosity and devilment in his look. “What do you think happened to Mike?”
“He kept saying he felt cold,” Ruth said. “And they had time to talk about whether there was football in heaven. My guess is he got sick.”
“That’s how I would have read it,” Gaines said.
“The charade with the hand-holding was a neat trick.”
“These people are masters of manipulation,” he agreed. “Cynical atheist that I am, their quiet chitchat with the dead while they stare into the grieving relative’s eyes sent shivers up and down my spine. When the person is on the point of breaking down, they’ll say that the deceased has a lot to communicate, but they feel it should be done in private; or the mark’s loved one is ‘drifting away,’ or there are other voices shouting them down. Classic pressure sales tactics. They exchange details, set up a session, one session becomes two, and . . .” He spread his hands.
Ruth said, “Do they always focus on bereavement, the dead? Or do they sometimes tap into other aspects of people’s lives?”
Gaines narrowed his eyes. “What are you thinking?”
She was thinking that Kara might have confided her fear of freezing onstage, might even have arranged a private reading, but she wasn’t about to tell Gaines that.
“Could they pick up on some insecurity or trauma the person had gone through?” she asked.
“It’s their stock-in-trade,” he said. “Self-awareness makes the naked ape lonelier than any other on the planet. Nobody really ‘gets’ us. And yet, here is someone who seems to read our thoughts, empathizes with our pain . . . It’s heady stuff.”
The bell for the second half of the performance sounded and Ruth headed toward the auditorium. Gaines shadowed her, and she glanced over her shoulder at him. “Was there something else?”
“Where are you sitting? I could slide alongside, give you some quick and dirty tips. We could go for a drink after—compare notes.”
She smiled. “I’m fine, thanks,” she said. “But I’d really appreciate it if you could get that report to me by tomorrow.”
Chapter 34
At the end of the show DS Lake flashed her ID to gain backstage access.
Mrs. Hart was seated at the mirror in her dressing room, her back to the door, while Rollinson sprawled on an armchair in a corner. As Ruth entered, he gripped the armrests and boosted himself out of the chair, blocking her view of the psychic. He seemed even taller standing so close—bulkier, too.
“Help you, love?” he said. He spoke with the same Lancashire accent as Jasmine, and his tone was affable, but Ruth sensed an undercurrent of violence.
“Maybe.” Ruth didn’t explain further, and his smile hardened.
“Jasmine’s just about tapped out
for the night, but I can take your details,” he said. “She’ll give you a ring tomorrow—how’s that?”
“As a matter of fact, it’s you I wanted to see, Mr. Rollinson.”
“I don’t get that too often, now do I, Jasmine?”
Ruth watched him in silence, interested to see how he would react.
He spread his hands, the smile rigid on his face. “Well, here I am, love.”
Still she didn’t speak.
“Shall I do a twirl?”
Mrs. Hart peered around her father’s solid back. “Oh—” she said. “Harry . . .”
He ignored her.
Ruth watched those hands, thinking how Rollinson had manhandled Kara out of the theater. He wore a ring on the little finger of his left hand; there was something etched on the face, but she couldn’t make it out.
“Nice ring,” she said, knowing he would automatically turn it over to look at it. “A Celtic knot—symbol of the eternal cycle, isn’t it?”
“What d’you want?” he demanded, the smile gone. “Some kind of journo, are you?”
“Harry.” Mrs. Hart tugged at his sleeve. “Wind your neck in. This is the police lady who came to see me. Now shift yourself—I’m getting claustrophobic.”
He moved out of the way and Jasmine Hart stood, looking a little flustered.
Normally, Ruth would let Mrs. Hart’s introduction stand, but she wanted to see how Rollinson responded when he was caught off-balance, so she took out her ID and formally introduced herself.
“So what do I call you—Harry? Brian? Or is it Henry?”
His mouth twitched. Now he knew that she’d looked into his criminal past he was probably scrolling back through his recent misdemeanors to try to establish which had caught him out—but he was too good a con man to show it.
“Harry’s fine,” he said. “Now, what did you want to see me about, Sergeant?”
“Kara Grogan,” she said.
He looked blank. “You’ll have to give me a clue, love.”
She showed him the photo of Kara and he took it, frowning.
“The lass I told you about,” Mrs. Hart said quietly, and there was a warning in her tone.