by Ashley Dyer
An hour later, she switched to another disk. Different angles, different technologies; each camera would tell its own story, and maybe that would build to a narrative of what had happened to Kara that night. Time—and grainy photography—would tell. This camera was set higher than the last, on a building close to Bluecoat Chambers. The images were better quality, but the best shots were at a distance; anything closer than five yards of the thing was likely to be a clear shot of the top of a head. Clubbers, pubgoers, drunks, as well as the occasional rat, passed in three-shot bursts. Kara appeared a few seconds after 8:33 p.m., hesitated at Church Alley, then continued on, disappearing out of camera range.
Again, Ruth let the recording play on, but Kara was on her own, and she seemed fine. Ruth scrolled back to take a screen grab, still mulling over the pistol sealed in an evidence box at her home. Carver was right—she could never have tossed it—her CSI training and instincts were too strong for her to seriously contemplate destroying evidence.
You did, when you wiped down Carver’s flat, she told herself. But destroying fingerprints was on a whole different scale to dumping a firearm into the river.
In truth, she’d regretted tampering with the scene with the first lie she’d had to tell. It was the night of the shooting; CSM John Hughes had asked how she’d gained access to Carver’s, and she’d told him the place was “wide open.” Lie had followed lie since then—and each lie, evasion, or diversionary tactic had compounded her guilt.
The pistol she’d stolen from the crime scene could be the evidence they needed to solve both Carver’s shooting and Adela’s murder. She couldn’t destroy it, and she couldn’t hand it over without incriminating herself.
Twenty minutes on, as she watched the images flit across her vision, she realized that there was something she could do without landing herself neck deep in trouble. DC Ivey had said that the bullet that killed Adela was a .22. But it didn’t match anything on the ballistics database, which meant the gun hadn’t been used in any previous recorded crime.
She was a bit rusty on firearms legislation, but she knew that the requirements for owning small arms in the UK had changed dramatically with the 1997 amendment to the Firearms Act. It was brought into British law after the Dunblane massacre, when sixteen five- and six-year-old children and a teacher had been shot dead by a lone gunman. Automatic weapons had been banned entirely under the rules of the amendment, as was any weapon with a barrel less than thirty centimeters long.
Added to which, the regs said the overall length of the weapon should be no less than sixty centimeters; most gun enthusiasts agreed that the 1997 amendment effectively banned handguns. So the neat little shooter she’d found at Carver’s place was illegal by definition.
Of course, it could have started out as a UK-legal modified pistol and been demodified back to its original state. Legal guns got stolen all the time, and a proportion inevitably found their way to crime scenes. But those were usually shotguns with barrels sawn down, or rifle stocks hacked down to stubs. The handgun that Ruth had stowed in a box in her house was clean and neat; it seemed untouched. Even the serial number was intact.
So, could the gun have belonged to Adela? It was a well-recognized statistic that women who armed themselves with guns were more likely to be shot with their own weapons than to use them successfully in self-defense. If it was Adela’s, there were two possibilities: either she had bought a “clean” illegal weapon, or she’d had a UK-legal weapon demodified.
Ruth took a break from the CCTV recordings and used her mobile phone to search for UK-legal handguns.
Gun clubs had come up with a novel solution to the “sixty-centimeter overall length” requirement: the pistols she found for sale as “UK legal” had a barrel extender at one end that you could mistake for a silencer, and an extension rod/counterweight at the other that looked like a chunky radio aerial sticking out of the base of the grip. Which was nothing like the gun she’d found at Carver’s place.
If the gun had been registered legally, the serial number would lead her straight to the legal owner. But she would have to log in to the Police National Computer to make the search—and the electronic trail would lead straight back to her. She needed some other way to identify the owner.
A demodification that made it seem the weapon hadn’t been modified would take skill—and that meant contacts and money. Adela had the money, so where would she find someone who had the skills?
She picked up her smartphone again and searched for local shooting clubs, found five on Merseyside, and made a note of their phone numbers.
The incident room was almost empty; even so, she moved to a distant corner to make sure she wasn’t overheard placing the calls. On the fifth, she struck lucky: Ms. Faraday was on their books, and the membership secretary she spoke to was ex-police. He knew Adela had been murdered and was keen to help.
“Did she have any weapons registered with you?” Ruth asked. It was possible she’d used the club’s guns.
“Give me a minute, I’ll pull up her registration docs,” he said. “Okay . . . I’ve got her with an Iver Johnson Low Mill 1911 long barrel pistol—are you familiar with it?”
“Can’t say I am,” she said.
“It’s regulation standard,” he said. “Twelve-inch barrel, minimum twenty-four for the overall length of the weapon—that’s sixty centimeters in new money.”
The pistol Ruth had taken from Carver’s flat was no more than fifteen centimeters, barrel, grip, and all.
“Do you have a copy of the Firearms Certificate to hand?” she asked, keeping her tone businesslike.
“Sure—I could e-mail you a PDF, if you’d like?” he said.
“That’s okay—just give me the serial number for the weapon. If we need the documentation, I’ll come over and pick it up myself.”
She hung up and checked the room. Most people were out on jobs and it was almost lunchtime; she wouldn’t be missed for an hour or so.
At home, Ruth double gloved, suited, and masked up. In the spare bedroom she cleaned the top of the chest of drawers using distilled water and sterile lint, then placed a sheet of white paper over the surface before taking the sealed evidence box down from the wardrobe and lowering it gently onto the paper.
Here goes . . .
With a scalpel, she sliced through the Sellotape seal on three sides of the box, the slight tremor in her hands vanishing after the initial incision. The weapon had a standard five-inch barrel, and an old-fashioned wood grip with an owl logo carved in the center. The frame was stamped with the maker’s name and the number “1911.” Which all looked right for Adela’s gun, but the gun Adela had actually registered was technically classed as a carbine. This was no carbine.
After a few moments to catch her breath, Ruth lifted the weapon and, with infinite care, not knowing if it was loaded, gently turned it over. There was a smudge of what looked like polished aluminum on the butt of the grip, where the extension rod should be. She could see the serial number clearly stamped on the frame, just below the barrel.
It matched. No question. The gun she’d lifted from Carver’s flat was Adela’s.
She lowered the pistol back into the box, took another deep breath, and let it go slowly.
Why was Adela’s gun in Carver’s apartment? Did he take it with him after he’d shot Adela? Or was Adela shot by the shadowy figure Carver claimed to have seen in his flat? Was it possible that Carver himself was shot because of his involvement with Adela?
Ten minutes later, the evidence secreted away, Ruth stood in her backyard vaping on an e-cig. Carver and Adela were both shot with a small-caliber weapon. The stats predicted that Adela been shot with her own gun, but the only way to find out was to run ballistics on the weapon—and that was not going to happen.
She breathed vapor into the cold January air. She could nudge DC Ivey toward the gun club—tell him she had just followed a hunch. But the Faraday team might already have checked if she was a gun owner. And what good would it do an
yway? They needed the serial number for a definitive match, and that brought Ruth full circle back to the fact that she was in possession of vital evidence she could not release to the investigation.
Her phone buzzed on the kitchen work surface, startling her.
“Where the hell are you?” It was DCI Parsons.
“Lunch break, sir.”
“Well, isn’t that nice for you?”
“What’s up?” she said, damned if she would apologize for taking an hour’s break in a twelve-hour day.
“Gaines just rang,” he said. “He says that he’s found a hidden message in the tattoos.”
Hope fizzed in her blood, and she headed inside, locking the back door and hurrying toward the front of the house.
“A symbol, he says, which is common to many cultures and is used to represent secrets,” Parsons went on.
She slowed as she stepped out onto the street. “Let me guess: the Eye of Horus, Eye of Providence.”
“He said he’d discussed it with you—why didn’t you bring it to my attention at the briefing?”
All credit to you, Gaines, she thought. You blindsided me with this little maneuver.
“He didn’t think it was worth pursuing when we discussed it,” she said, feeling it was pointless getting into an argument over who had come up with the idea.
“Well, he does now. And so do I. We need to look at the victims again, see if there’s anything they might have been hiding. The ex-teacher was working as a stripper, wasn’t she?”
“Jo Raincliffe, sir. Yes,” Ruth said. “And Tali Tredwin hid an eating disorder from her family. Kara—”
“You’ve been investigating this and didn’t see fit to mention it to me?”
She picked up her car keys and slipped the latch on the front door. “Just looking over the files, trying to see connections, sir.”
“This isn’t a TV quiz show, it’s a major investigation, Sergeant Lake,” he growled. “I want you back at the office, and I want everything you’ve got on this lead.”
“Sir.”
“Everything,” he repeated.
The killer watches as DS Ruth Lake leaves her house. She is in the process of finishing a call, and as she slips her phone into the pocket of her overcoat, she is deep in thought—swathed in it, layered in it.
I would relish the chance to peel back those layers, uncover the truths you hide.
The detective passes by without so much as a second glance. Don’t you feel my eyes on you?
Thirty minutes before, the detective had appeared at her front bedroom window. As she reached to draw the curtains, she was wearing pale blue nitrile gloves. What could she have in her home that would warrant crime scene getup?
Secrets, Ruth. So many secrets.
Now, minus the gloves, the detective sits in her car. Minutes tick by. When she finally turns on the ignition, she executes a quick turn and guns the engine.
Quandary: Follow DS Lake, or discover what she’s hiding? Torn, the killer watches her drive away. The taillights of her car flash like Morse code as she brakes hard at the junction. The phone call seems to have rattled her. Lake revs the engine aggressively, and the decision is made: anything that breaks through Ruth Lake’s armor-plated veneer of imperturbability is too tempting to miss. Her house will still be there in an hour, or two, or three, and anyway, it will be easier to gain access under cover of darkness.
Chapter 39
Dr. Lyall Gaines owned a big Victorian house at the regentrified end of Ullet Road, not far from Sefton Park. Set well back from the street, the house was hidden behind a four-foot sandstone wall topped by a smartly clipped beech hedge. Ruth parked her car on the street and walked through two massive wooden gates onto the driveway.
Many of these grand houses had fallen into near dereliction in the 1980s and 1990s, but the new millennium had brought the wealthy middle class back into the area in search of restoration projects they could reinvent as homes with “character.” This place had it in spades, with a steeply angled roof and ornate finials, bay windows, a gothic-style front door, and what looked like genuine antique tiles on the top step; all it lacked was a turret.
A BMW saloon was parked in the drive next to a Lexus SUV, and the sweet aroma of burning wood wafted from the back garden. She rang the doorbell, half expecting Westminster chimes to ring out through the house, surprised to hear what sounded like an old-fashioned electric bell.
After a minute, she rang again, and went around to the side of the house. The way through to the back garden was gated and locked. She rattled the gate, and called Gaines’s name, but no one answered. It was one thirty, and DCI Parsons was waiting. She turned away and was almost through the driveway gates when she heard Gaines call her name.
He was dressed in his usual khaki combats and a sweatshirt hoodie; no jacket despite the cold. He dusted off his hands, eyeing her speculatively. “Well, this is an honor,” he said.
“I came to congratulate you. I hear you’ve made a breakthrough with the symbolic meaning in the tattoos. Something about hidden truths?”
He combed soot-blackened fingers through his hair and she saw a hint of defiance in the lift of his chin. “Yes, we discussed it, if you remember.”
“Oh, I do,” she said.
He jammed his hands in the pockets of his hoodie and, realizing that they were still begrimed, pulled out a rag and began carefully wiping his hands.
“I’d had the ‘hidden secret’ scenario in mind almost from the off.” He sounded defensive, now. “I told Parsons we’d discussed it.”
Was this his idea of giving credit where it was due? She gave a mental shrug—if he had something new to say, she needed to hear it.
“Okay. But it wasn’t in your report.”
He stared at her blankly.
“I meant something must’ve happened to change your mind—otherwise, why would you phone DCI Parsons to talk to him about it?”
“Oh,” he said. “Yes, I see what you’re driving at. But it was nothing, really—I just didn’t want to risk your lot missing something important.”
So there was nothing new; this was just Gaines building his reputation on others’ ideas. She nodded, keeping her eyes on him, and finally he shifted uncomfortably. “Well, if I’d known you were going to be so possessive about it, I’d have spoken to you first. Anyway, there’s something else—something far more significant.”
“Oh?” she said.
“Look, it’s freezing out here—let’s go inside—warm our toes in front of the fire.”
He was through the side gate before she could stop him. She followed, just in time to see him vanish through a pair of French doors. Glancing right, she saw that the garden was sizable—thirty meters long, at least. A tree at the far end had been taken down, leaving only the wide, flat plane of its stump; a giant stack of logs was piled to one side. On the bare earth caused by the old tree’s shadow stood a large oil barrel, mounted on two strips of bricks. Flames licked the top of the barrel and the fire crackled. There wasn’t much smoke, so she guessed it must be burning fairly hot.
“Well, come along,” Gaines said, returning to the door.
He showed her through a heritage-meets-modern kitchen to a sitting room overlooking the garden. A fire burned in the hearth, the alcoves either side of which were built floor to ceiling with bookshelves. Those to the left of the fireplace were dedicated to books on psychics, mediums, mentalism, and cold reading. Ruth recognized some of the texts Kara Grogan had in her collection. The right side was filled with books on anthropology, history, archaeology, cultural and sociological texts, while the walls were hung with grouped sketches of tattooed men and women, and photographs of ritually scarified Africans, with raised keloid scars in elaborate patterns on their skin.
“Fascinating, aren’t they?” Gaines said. “In order to create the desired shape of scar, the wounds might be packed with clay or ash—or held open by stretching the skin.”
“It must be incredibly painful.”<
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“Intensely.” His eyes widened and his nostrils flared for the briefest moment. “But rites of passage are rarely pleasant or easy. Blood and pain feature in so many traditions—to acquire status, beauty, desirability, one must endure.”
She nodded, finding it difficult to attune to the notion that scarring could be a sign of beauty.
He was watching her closely. “I can assure you, the feel of scarified skin under the fingertips is a powerfully sensual tactile experience—highly sexually charged. I myself have a set of keloid scars—here.” He placed both hands over his abdomen, fingers splayed and pointing inward toward the pelvic bone. “Want to see?” His eyes gleamed with mischief.
Ruth gave him a cool look.
“Oh, you’re shy . . .” His eyes roved over her body. “Surely, you have at least one tattoo—testament to your rebellious youth?”
She let her gaze slide past him to the herbal illustrations hung in matching frames on the wall, many of which she knew as poisonous plants. “You said there was something significant.”
He didn’t answer and she forced herself to meet his gaze, giving him absolutely nothing. His eyes went dead, and he visibly clicked into a different mind-set.
“Take a seat,” he said.
She didn’t move, and he indicated a sofa in a curiously chivalrous gesture. “Please,” he said.
Ruth sat on a sofa in front of a table arrayed with more research: poisons, tattoos, fetishes, shamanism. He waited for her to be seated before turning to a chair near the fireplace. A text on Celtic symbolism lay open on the seat cushion, and a newspaper article entitled “Britain’s Ten Deadliest Plants” was draped over the arm of the chair, the monks’ hoods of aconite shining like sapphires from the page.
“Research,” he explained, clearing them to the bookcase before sitting down. “I take it you still haven’t identified the source of the woad used to make the tattoo dye?”