by Ashley Dyer
“The gun?” she repeated, giving herself time to collect her thoughts.
“You said you found a gun by my chair. You kept it, didn’t you?”
She didn’t answer.
“I know you did. Where is it now?”
He wants me to get rid of it. “What if I said it was at the bottom of the Mersey?”
He smiled. “Once a CSI, Ruth . . .” At first, she thought he was reading her body language, but then she realized he was looking at the air around her.
When she still refused to answer, he said, “I think you kept it. I think you did your best to preserve any evidence there might be on that weapon.”
“It’s safe,” she conceded. A part of her would always be a CSI—he was right about that much. And being a good one, she had wrapped the pistol in printer paper to preserve the evidence, and she had sealed it up in a new evidence box the first chance she got. She lifted her chin, challenging him. “Forensically safe,” she added, challenging him, letting him know that although she had lied for him, she would not cover up a murder.
“You need to run forensics on it,” Carver said.
Ruth blinked; she hadn’t expected that. “Because . . .”
“Whoever shot me might have left some trace on the weapon. And even if they didn’t, it might be registered—or ballistics could lead us to the shooter.”
“What d’you expect me to do? Drop the weapon off at DCI Parsons’s office and tell him, ‘I’m afraid I forgot to log this’?” She threw her hands wide and let them drop to her sides. “I’ve already put my career on the line for you—why would I dig an even deeper hole to bury myself in?”
“You don’t need to implicate yourself,” he insisted. “You’re resourceful—you could find a way to—”
“To what? ‘Discover’ evidence I stole from a crime scene?”
“I know it’s asking a lot, but . . .” He rubbed a hand over his face. “What if . . .” He closed his eyes, briefly, and started again. “What if I did kill her? What if it was me? Would you want to protect me?”
“No,” she said without hesitation.
“So find a way. Please, Ruth—I can’t live with myself, not knowing.”
The police constable put his head around the door a few moments after Ruth left.
“Where is she?” he said.
“Who?”
His police guard swore under his breath, but retreated, closing the door after him, and Carver slumped back in his chair, exhausted. Faking confusion had become easier over time, but he wasn’t sure if he’d gotten better with practice, or if his mind was really slipping.
The door opened briskly, and he braced himself for the constable’s reappearance.
It was his physiotherapist.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t do this now.”
She tried to persuade him, telling him that it was important to work on his problem areas.
“I’ll get better, anyway,” he said. “You said so yourself.”
“Eventually,” she said. “But not as fast, and not as strong.”
He took a breath, but she held up her hand to forestall him. “I know you want to return to work. You’re at the stage when your muscles are mending, but if the fibers don’t heal in alignment, you could experience weakness. The scar tissue—”
“I know,” Carver interrupted. “I appreciate what you’re doing, but I just . . . I can’t. Not now.”
She regarded him quietly for a few moments, but seemed to make up her mind that it wasn’t worth pushing, and left him, promising that she would try again later.
Five minutes after that, Dr. Pendinning appeared at his door.
“Look,” Carver said. “I’ve heard all the arguments—I know she’s right, but I’m not in the mood to cooperate right now. Okay?”
“Fine with me,” she said, adding after a pause, “Whatever you’re talking about. It’s fine.”
“Oh. I just turned the physio away,” Carver said. “I thought you were—”
“Did you throw anything at her?”
He glanced up, but the smile in her eyes made it impossible to be angry. “Only words,” he said.
“Well, I’d call that progress.”
He suppressed a smile. “So why are you here?”
The psychologist came into the room and dragged a chair away from the wall to sit next to him. “I heard a police delegation had been in to see you,” she said, adding with a tiny lift of one shoulder, “And I saw the news . . .”
He closed his eyes with a sigh.
“. . . And thought you might want to talk.”
She didn’t say anything after that, but Carver sensed her quietly waiting, ready to listen, and after a while he realized he was talking.
He admitted that he was about as low as he’d been since the night of the shooting. That the few instances he did remember were disjointed and confused.
“The hallucinations,” she said.
“That’s just it . . .”
“. . . You don’t know if they are hallucinations.”
He opened his eyes. She always seemed to know what he was thinking.
She didn’t speak for a long while, and to Carver it seemed she was struggling to come to a decision.
At last she said, “I want you to try something. Settle back in your chair and close your eyes again.”
He did as he was asked.
“What do you see?”
“Eyes,” he said.
“Whose?”
“They’re tattoos—on the victims.”
“The victims?”
“I was looking at the postmortem photographs before I was shot.”
“How soon before?” Her voice was soft, no more than a murmur.
He shook his head. “I can’t remember. I couldn’t bring myself to look at Kara Grogan’s file.”
Carver recalled he’d reached for it, and for a few seconds, he was there, in the grotto. Kara’s body, glittering in the frost. Eyes staring out from her flesh. Emma, he thought and his heart rate kicked up a notch. It wasn’t Emma. You know it wasn’t. Even so, he couldn’t open the file. Remembered thinking, No, not yet.
“I looked through the other files, made notes. Kept going back to Kara’s, but I couldn’t . . . I just couldn’t . . .” He forced himself to breathe slowly.
“All right,” she said. “Did you pause, make some fresh coffee, perhaps?”
“I needed a drink,” he said. “Poured a whisky, brought it back to the kitchen.”
“But you were in the sitting room when you were shot,” she said.
“How did I get there?”
Silence.
He remembered going to the sitting room. The curtains stood open and he saw in the pale glow of the streetlights that it was snowing again. He drew the curtains and crossed to the cupboard squeezed into the niche on one side of the fireplace, reached inside to take out a new bottle of Jura single malt and one of the two good whisky glasses he owned. He cracked open the bottle, poured himself a large drink, and set it back in the cupboard, taking his first swallow of whisky, savoring the burn. He paused a moment, wanting more, trying to reason with himself.
You don’t need this—you don’t need to get rat arsed. But it had been a bad night; he was frustrated with the case and angry with Adela—Anna, as he knew her then.
So he opened the cupboard again and grabbed the bottle. The framed photo of Emma stood on top of the cupboard, next to a few Christmas cards. He switched the bottle and glass to his right hand, scooped up the photograph with the other, and carried the lot through to the kitchen.
“I took the bottle with me,” he said at last. “There was no reason to go back in the sitting room . . . you see, I usually passed out over the files.” He feels no shame telling her this. It’s an exploration, without judgment or shame attached to it. “But for some reason I was there.”
“Okay,” she said. “You’re in the sitting room. What do you see?”
“Nothing. It’s dark. I can smell . . .”
He takes a breath, exhales through his mouth to control the roiling sickness in his gut; the stench of whisky is nauseating. “I see shadows?” He hears the question in his tone.
“Look into the shadow. There’s light from the streetlamp outside. Find the shadow, and look into it,” she says.
He hears a buzz—a zzzzzzz-ip! of sound. He can’t move. His breath comes in short gasps.
“You’re safe,” she says.
I’m paralyzed.
Adela’s face looms out of the shadows. Afraid. No—that was at the hotel.
Did I make her afraid?
“Can you tell me what you see?”
A flash. A burst of pain. Can’t move. Can’t speak.
“You’re safe. Tell me what you see.”
He sees Ruth. Her face close to his. She looks into his eyes and he sees recognition there. She swears softly and his muscles are released, free to move again.
Carver opened his eyes. He took a huge, agonized breath, the inrush of air tearing the back of his throat.
“You’re safe,” Dr. Pendinning said again. “Tell me what you saw.”
“Adela. She was afraid. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Then Ruth came.”
“You remember Ruth coming into your apartment?”
He thought about it. “No.”
“Was Adela in your apartment?”
“No.” He felt sure of that. “Only the shadow.”
“Did you look into the shadow?”
He nodded.
“What did you see?”
“Nothing. Only darkness.”
“And this is what you see when you have the hallucinations?”
“No, they’re . . .” He wanted to say terrifying, but pride made him change it to, “disturbing.”
She gave him a comical look. “And the shadow, the paralysis, the feeling of suffocation aren’t disturbing?”
He gave a weak smile, despite himself. A sudden thought struck him and he stared at the doctor. “I just realized something,” he said.
She said nothing, but maintained an expression of quiet interest.
“They are two different things: the pictures that keep replaying in my head are memories—flashbacks, whatever. The hallucinations are a reaction to what happened to me—but they’re not real—at least, not in the usual meaning of the word.”
“And what you see in the flashbacks is real?”
“I think . . .” Ruth, her eyes dark, angry. The shadow, ghosting through the room. A flash, like a punch to his chest. “Yes. I think so.”
“Does it help to know that?”
I can’t stop them, and I can’t shut them out. But I can’t make sense of them, either. Does it help to distinguish one kind of mental torment from another?
“I don’t know,” he admitted with a helpless shrug. “The neurologist told me the auras I see around people are part of my recovery.”
“I think he probably meant auras in a different sense,” she said. “Smells, visual disturbances such as patches of gray or sparkles of light, buzzing sounds, maybe. But you say you see them around people?”
Carver nodded.
“Um, okay . . . Do they change, or does everyone have a particular color?”
“I think it depends on their mood. Ruth’s is orange most of the time—she’s angry with me.”
She put her hand to her lips and he had the sense she was controlling excited laughter. “You might just be describing a form of synesthesia,” she said.
“What, like seeing music as colors?”
“That’s one form.”
“Did the head trauma cause it?”
“Possibly. Though it’s very rare. You knew what I meant by synesthesia—did you experience it as a child, perhaps?”
“No.” But as he said it, Carver had a vague memory of getting muddled about numbers and colors in junior school. He still thought of yellow when he saw the word “Wednesday.”
She opened the door into the corridor. “Do any of the people out there have an aura?”
He watched for a second. “The nurse over at the desk. She’s purple.”
“Do you know what that means?”
He shook his head. “Will it go away?”
She smiled. “Why would you want it to?” Before he could frame an answer, she said, “What color is my aura?”
He peered at the light around her. She looked pale, more tired than usual, but her skin still retained a flawless, almost polished quality that made him want to reach out and touch it. Inappropriate, he told himself. The mood swings, the impulsivity, the inappropriate thoughts—his neurologist had told him that they were another consequence of either the concussion, or the oxygen deprivation his brain had suffered after he was shot. He concentrated for a good sixty seconds on the psychologist’s face, but all he saw was white light reflected from the LEDs overhead.
“You don’t have an aura,” he said.
She laughed. “Well, you might break the news more gently.” Then in more serious humor: “You think Ruth is angry with you?” She seemed to ask out of genuine curiosity.
“I know it.”
She watched him solemnly for a second. “It’s a rare and wonderful thing to know what another person is really thinking,” she said. “Why is she angry?”
“Because she thinks I’m partly to blame for what happened.”
“Does it matter what she thinks?”
He nodded.
“Because . . . ?”
“Because . . .” He sighed. “She’s right. Because she’s a friend. Because she covered for me and protected me when I didn’t deserve it.”
“Does she know you feel this way?”
He looked into her eyes. “Is that a trick question?”
Chapter 36
Ruth checked the time. The psychic calling himself Shadowman still hadn’t been in touch, and the business center where his phone messages were being routed was at the north end of town. If she was quick, she could stop by on the way in and still make it to work in time for the morning briefing.
The receptionist was medium height, brown hair, dark eyes, in her midtwenties. She wasn’t keen to share clients’ details, until Ruth explained that she was investigating Kara Grogan’s murder. She called up the file immediately on her computer.
“Here you are . . . The account is registered to a Dr. Lyall Gaines.”
Gaines was Shadowman?
The receptionist was looking at her as if she was waiting for an answer.
“What did you say?”
“His address,” she said. “D’you want it?”
“Thanks, I’ve got it,” Ruth said.
“You don’t think he’s—”
“Thanks,” Ruth said again, cutting off the question. “This is helpful.”
She waited until she was in the car before calling his mobile.
“Good morning,” she said. “Am I speaking to Shadowman?”
A pause. “Ah.”
At least he didn’t bother denying it.
“You masquerade as a psychic?”
“I thought we’d agreed they all ‘masquerade’ on some level.”
“So the website is a sham.”
“Ye-es . . .” Apparently he found the question naive.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “What could you possibly hope to gain from this?”
“I told you last night, psychic belief is one of my areas of interest as an anthropologist. I hope to ‘gain’ knowledge.”
She hated the way Gaines quoted her words back at her as though he found them funny, but she knew he did it to rattle her. So calm down.
“What I meant,” she said evenly, “is how can you use your findings when your approach is ethically flawed?”
He didn’t reply at first.
“Dr. Gaines?”
She heard him take a breath. “I suppose that in your limited sphere one would be required to take a rigid view of right and wrong.”
The stiffness of his tone told her that she had h
it a nerve.
“The police are expected to obey the law, yes,” Ruth said, injecting a hint of a humor into her own tone.
“Quite,” he said. “However, in the study of human behavior, a degree of flexibility is required. In fact,” he added, “many academics, like myself, feel that slavishly following ethical codes actually stifles research. I could cite half a dozen studies last year alone—”
“I think I can work out the difference between right and wrong without reading it in a journal,” Ruth said.
“Sarcasm, Sergeant Lake? I’d thought you were above that. You have to understand that sometimes you need to make compromises if you want to get the job done.”
“You mean engaging in dodgy practices—hiding your real purpose from unwitting subjects?”
“Nobody made them complete the form,” he said, his tone pitying. “And the facts speak for themselves—in the space of just eight weeks, nearly three thousand people have completed the questionnaire. Can you imagine that happening if I’d complied with the narrow definition of ‘informed consent’? It would’ve killed this project. As it is, an astonishing two-thirds of respondents revealed personal details about themselves knowing—knowing—that they were talking to a so-called psychic. People will share their darkest secrets with a total stranger, apparently in denial of the fact that this same person will later claim to have insight into their psyche and their lives. Why? Because they’re convinced that the stranger who is asking them all these questions already knows their innermost thoughts and feelings. And they are convinced that this person—this ‘psychic’ whom they have never met—can provide the peace and reassurance they crave, freeing them from questions and doubts that have tormented them for years.”
“All that proves is how desperate they are.”
He laughed, mocking the censure in her tone. “That, my dear lady, is . . . the point. This entire field experiment was designed to demonstrate just how vulnerable people are to exploitation.”
“Demonstrating vulnerability by exploiting it. Doesn’t that bother you?”
“It’s research.” He sounded weary now. “You have to divorce yourself from feelings.” He sighed. “Well, I didn’t expect you to understand. Not really . . . Suffice to say it’s legitimate, valid, replicable research, with persuasive results. I’ll send you a copy when it’s published.”