Splinter in the Blood

by Ashley Dyer

  The inquiry team had contacted the main British manufacturer of natural woad, a small firm based in Birmingham. They had provided a list of customers: crafters, crofters, and artists, mostly, but also a few fabric designers, and a film studio, none of whom looked suspicious. The Birmingham firm suggested the names of a few back-garden woad makers, but nothing had come of that, either.

  “I’ll take your silence as a no,” he said. “So-ooo . . . I’m thinking he made his own. Do you know how difficult that is? It takes a kilo of woad leaves to make one to four grams of dye. It has to be extracted from the plant in several stages. Soda ash is added to give the required pH, then it’s filtered, concentrated, and dried—which requires know-how, and a sizable quantity of the herb.”

  “What’s your point?”

  The gleam lit his eye again. “Doesn’t it seem odd to you that he switched from blue woad to black dye when he tattooed Kara?”

  Kara Grogan was the girl who didn’t fit the MO; it was hard to find logic in that.

  Ruth began to shake her head.

  “Come on . . . He’s making his own woad because he didn’t want to attract police scrutiny by buying it in from a traceable source. Why would he switch?”

  Ruth stared through the window onto the winter garden, its borders soggy, black, and empty. “He ran out of dye.”

  Gaines smiled, the first genuine smile she’d seen on the man. “And you need fresh leaves to make woad,” he said.

  “So he couldn’t make more.” Ruth thought back to her meeting with the botanist last August; the killer had changed from berberis thorns to pyracantha because the pyracantha was a better tool.

  “It makes sense,” she said. “He’s pragmatic, adapts to circumstances. He would still want to stay under the radar, so the black dye has to be something he can make himself.” The breeze carried a whiff of wood smoke into the room and her eyes snapped to Gaines’s.

  “You believe he’s making ink from soot?”

  “Charcoal,” he corrected.

  She glanced at Gaines’s grimy hands. “Is that what you were doing just now? Making charcoal?”

  “I favor an immersive approach to my research.”

  The false modesty in his expression was hiding something else. “Does it work?” she asked.

  He laughed. “I’m still working on the process. Ask me again in a few days. Meanwhile, there’s this.” He scooped up a netbook from beside his chair and, coming around the table, sat next to her.

  She smelled the wood smoke on him and felt the pressure of his thigh along the length of hers. For a second, she thought that he was pushing his luck again, but when he glanced across, she saw excitement of a purely scientific kind.

  The image on-screen showed an arm. Brown, tanned in the way leather is tanned, but dried like hard tack. At the wrist, three parallel black lines.

  “Meet Ötzi,” he said. “He’s fifty-three hundred years old, although he was in his forties when he died. He has many tattoos, all of which were made by rubbing charcoal into scratched skin wounds. There’s some disagreement about how the skin was prepared to receive the ink, but one theory is that they used thorns.”

  Chapter 40

  Carver sat in his armchair and watched the sun lowering in the sky. It flared briefly through the bare branches of the tree outside the window and then disappeared behind a cloud. DCI Jansen hadn’t been near since his arrest, but Carver was in no doubt that the chief inspector would be out there, meticulously building a case against him.

  If he could just remember the sequence of events on the night at the hotel—but it was still a confusion of images and sounds. He remembered following Adela into the place; the nearness of her—exciting, tormenting. He remembered the sex, and after that, Adela screaming . . . But what he remembered most was the sex, the smell of her, the softness of her breast under his lips, her hunger for him, the way she rose to meet him with every thrust.

  “Jesus, Greg . . .” he murmured. Emma was right to leave.

  Disgusted with himself, he stood. Tried to. The room shifted sharply left and he ended up sprawled in the chair.

  He consciously aligned his feet, legs, and arms in a way that had never been necessary before his injuries. Except maybe when he was drunk. He pushed up using the arms of the chair and waited a moment. He’d found that stress affected his balance, and today had had more than a fair measure of that. He seemed to be stable, so he focused on a spot on the wall beyond the open door of his room, letting his fingertips play over the arms of the chair for a half second longer before taking his first step. That worked okay, so he took another, pleased to find that he made it from the chair to the bedside cabinet on the far side of the bed without needing any further support.

  He’d come for the photograph. It had lain in the drawer since Dr. Pendinning had rescued it from the tangled mess of smashed glass and twisted frame the day before.

  He traced the contours of Emma’s face with his finger, feeling a physical pain deep in his chest. She didn’t deserve this—any of it.

  After a while—he wasn’t sure how long—he became aware that he was being observed and turned his head, expecting to see the uniformed constable staring at him, but it was Dr. Pendinning. She had the vaguely amused expression on her face that he’d come to think of as an antidote to his own grim self-absorption.

  She slipped into the room and closed the door behind her. “That picture means a lot to you,” she said.

  “I took it on our honeymoon.” Carver placed it facedown on the cabinet.

  “It hurts to look at it?”

  “Almost kills me,” he admitted. “Seeing her as she was then, knowing how we are now.”

  “And you blame yourself?”

  “Who else can I blame?”

  “It takes two to make a marriage, Greg.”

  He snuffed air through his nose. “Emma said that. But the problem was, there was always a third party in our marriage: the job—and the job always came first. That’s down to me.”

  “Did Emma walk out of your marriage because of the job, or because you were having an affair?”

  “I tried, over the years, to build a barrier to protect Emma—to keep her innocent of all I saw and heard and did in this job—but I just built a wall between the two of us. I finally told her that, the day she left.” He sighed. “She said, ‘But you never told me why you were building it. And you forgot to make a door, so I could come and visit.’”

  She had smiled so sweetly when she said that, it nearly broke his heart.

  “I betrayed her,” he said. “I created the circumstances that allowed all this to happen. If I hadn’t obsessed over the Thorn Killer, I would never have been shot.”

  “Do you believe it was the Thorn Killer who shot you?”

  “No.” He bit back the urge to add, Not since Ruth told me she stole the files.

  “What about Sergeant Lake?”

  For a second he was alarmed—Had he spoken aloud, after all? “What do you mean?” he stammered.

  “Does she believe the Thorn Killer shot you?”

  “She never did,” he said.

  Pendinning tilted her head. “Why not?”

  “She thinks it lacks subtlety.” He frowned, distracted. What was that?

  “Have you remembered something?” she asked.

  “No—I just thought I saw . . .” He peered at the thin layer of air around her.

  “I do have an aura, after all.” She sounded delighted.

  “Maybe a glimmer.”

  “What color?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know, it’s gone now.”

  She seemed to regret her levity. “I’ve been looking into synesthesia. There’s a lot of hokum on the psychic forums, of course, but some scientific papers suggest that clairvoyants who see auras around people may actually be synesthetic. They are reading mood or emotion and the brain transposes them to color and light.”

  “Could my brain injury have caused it?”

  �
�I’ve only found a few documented cases brought on by brain injury, and none of those experienced your form of synesthesia. Hallucinations, on the other hand, are fairly common. Have you had any more flashbacks or hallucinations since we tried the relaxation exercise?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “When we worked on this earlier, you said there was a smell. Do you remember what that was?”

  “Whisky.” Immediately he was hit with a roiling wave of nausea and swallowed convulsively.

  “You were drinking whisky when you were reading the files.”

  “They tell me I downed a bottle of it that night, but . . .”

  “The head injury caused amnesia.”

  “That, or the alcohol.”

  “Hm,” she said. “The alcohol. Are you familiar with cognitive interviewing?”

  “Of course.” Most police forces across the UK found it useful in drawing out details from witnesses. Carver himself had received some training in the technique.

  “So we try to put you back in the environment in which the event happened, using context, emotions, relaxation, starting the narrative from a different place, maybe from another person’s perspective.”

  “Let’s do it,” he said.

  “But it can be tough, emotionally—even physically.”

  Carver had seen people break down and sob uncontrollably, remembering awful details of an attack. But he also knew that people remembered twice as much as they would in a normal interview, and that had to be better than the nothing he’d managed to dredge up so far.

  “I need to do this,” he said.

  She got him into the chair and talked him into a relaxed state.

  “Tell me about the weather that day,” she said.

  “It was cold. Cold enough for snow.”

  “But not snowing, yet.”

  “That was later.”

  She walked him through the earlier part of the day, leaving work at eight in the evening, calling Adela.

  “Let’s skip to when you left the hotel,” she said. “You’re walking back to your car. How are you feeling?”

  A quiver ran through his chest and arms. “Shaky,” he said. “Sick.” He brought his fingers to the back of his head. “I—I think I broke a mirror.”

  “Do you remember how?”

  He frowned, trying hard to think. He remembered Adela screaming. Was she afraid? His breath came sharper, faster.

  “Relax,” Pendinning said. “We can come back to that. Let’s take you home.”

  The stuttering anxiety abated, and Carver took a breath of cold air. “I’m at the car. God, I’m too drunk to drive.”

  “Not to worry. You get home safely. Do you go directly in?”

  “No.” The answer surprised him. “I think I must have passed out. I wake up . . .”

  “What color is the clock on the dash?”

  “Green.” Then, without thinking: “It’s five minutes after eleven.” That was new—he hadn’t remembered anything about arriving home before. “I’m cramped and cold. I have a crick in my neck.”

  “Okay, so you go inside. Is your flat warm, or cold?”

  “It’s freezing—it’s just started to snow. I turn on the central heating, go to the kitchen, and brew a pot of coffee. I’m looking at the files, but I can’t make sense of them.”

  “Because your head hurts?”

  “No, the paracetamol took care of that.” Excitement rises in his gut: he’s remembering more and more details. “I . . . I can’t bring myself to look at Kara’s file, which is stupid, because Kara is the one person who will lead me to the Thorn Killer.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Kara was personal for the Thorn Killer.” He said it without thinking, but now he had, it seemed true.

  “Personal?” Pendinning said. “Like a grudge?”

  He shook his head. “Like a gift.” He sensed her close attention.

  “A gift to her killer?”

  “To me.” He swallowed.

  “How do you feel about that?”

  “I don’t want it. I don’t want to be responsible for Kara’s death.”

  “You feel responsible.”

  “She would be alive now, if it weren’t for me.”

  “But another girl would be dead.”

  He opened his eyes.

  “You find that thought shocking?” she asked.

  He considered that. “No. If he hadn’t taken Kara, he would have chosen someone else.”

  “But not with you in mind?”

  Carver nodded.

  “Close your eyes again,” she said. “You’re doing well. You’re in your kitchen. You smell coffee. Fresh brewed?”

  “Cold.”

  “So you’re avoiding opening that one file . . .”

  “I go to the cupboard in the sitting room where I keep the whisky. Open a new bottle.” He opened his eyes again. “It was a new bottle. I went straight to the hotel from work. I don’t—didn’t—drink during work hours. I’d had a glass of champagne, with Adela. Maybe two, but it hardly touched me. How come I was drunk coming out of the hotel?”

  She didn’t answer, leaving him to think it through.

  “I wasn’t drunk,” he said at last. “I felt sick because I hit my head.” He felt an instant of euphoria, quickly succeeded by dark oppression. “Why can’t I remember leaving Adela’s room?”

  “We’ll come back to that,” she said. “Your blood alcohol was dangerously high when you were brought here for surgery. You’d opened a new bottle of scotch that night. Do you remember drinking it?”

  He shook his head slowly. “I poured a slug. Put the bottle back, changed my mind, and took it through to the kitchen. After that . . .” He sighed, frustrated.

  “You’re doing well,” Pendinning said, her voice calm, reassuring. “When Ruth came into your flat, what do you think she saw?”

  “A pathetic drunk, passed out in his chair.” He said it without bitterness.

  “Do you think she had compassion for you?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I didn’t deserve compassion.”

  “You’re hard on yourself,” she said. Then, “Are you ready to look into the shadow again?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. I have a whisky miniature with me. The sense of smell is more closely bound with memory than any of the other senses,” she said.

  “I know.” Didn’t everyone? The odor of suntan oil on a hot day, the scent of a lover’s perfume—it was the closest thing to time travel most people would ever experience.

  “It’s also highly emotive,” she said. “It may well unlock your memories, but you have to consider that you are still recovering from serious trauma. You may not be ready to face those memories just yet.”

  “I’m ready,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  He heard the metallic crack as she broke the seal on the whisky bottle.

  He couldn’t help himself—he opened his eyes. It was Jura, his favorite malt. Carver’s heart thudded in his chest and he heard the blood roar in his ears.

  “We can stop right now,” she said. “If you’re not comfortable with this, you just have to say.”

  “No,” he said. “I want to. I need to know.”

  She brought the bottle up to his nose and he braced himself. His stomach rolled at the familiar smell of the malt, but he swallowed hard, said, “I’ll take a taste.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” she said.

  “I’m not going back now.”

  He reached for the bottle; she kept hold of it but allowed him to guide it to his lips.

  Fear. A flash. A roar of light. Sound and light become one. Darkness penetrates the light, overpowers it. He feels his breath tear through his chest, and suddenly he can’t breathe at all. Bzzz-zzzzziiip!

  Can’t move.

  Ruth looms, her face distorted, amoeboid. The scream of a kettle whistle—her face splits in two. Ruth is holding a gun. The reek of whisky is n
auseating. He is drowning in a lake of flame.

  Fear. Terrible FEAR.

  Ruth’s face shatters, falls in shards, light scattering facets of her to the ground. Behind her a shadow. He has to warn her.

  “Greg. Greg Carver . . .”

  He opened his eyes. Dr. Pendinning was bending over him. She held a glass to his lips and he panicked, pushing her away.

  “It’s water,” she said. “Just water.”

  He took a cautious sip, then another.

  “You’re all right,” said. “You blacked out, but you’re all right.”

  Her face blurred and he saw again a smudge of light around her head.

  “What did you see?” she asked.

  He tried to recall the terrible images just before he’d blacked out, but all he could remember was the fear, the feeling that he was drowning in fire, and a terrible dread that was somehow linked to Ruth Lake.

  Chapter 41

  Under strict instructions from DCI Parsons, Ruth Lake spent the afternoon typing up her notes on Tali Tredwin, Jo Raincliffe, and Kara Grogan. Parsons had tasked detectives to reinterview the family and friends of Evie Dodd and Hayley Evans, the other two victims, aiming to uncover their secrets.

  Parsons had worked up such a head of steam it was pointless trying to explain why she hadn’t included her suspicions about the women during the morning briefing. The fact that Gaines had given them something to follow up on Kara’s tattoos had confirmed his usefulness in Parsons’s eyes. Ruth had checked with the pathologist—things were backed up at the lab and they hadn’t yet done the electron microscope scans, but preliminary analysis did indicate the presence of crystalline carbon in the skin samples they had taken from Kara, and Ruth was willing to bet it was charcoal.

  The reports completed and delivered, she returned to the tedious process of working through the CCTV recordings of School Lane on the night Kara disappeared. The next camera in the sequence picked up the street action just after Bluecoat Chambers. A minute or so after the time on the last recording, Kara continued on her journey down the lane and encountered another woman. They stopped and exchanged a few words.