by Ashley Dyer
Asking for directions? No. There was familiarity in their stance—not what Ruth would call intimacy. Acquaintances, maybe? A lecturer? Possibly, but they had interviewed everyone who had direct contact with Kara at the drama school. The two women exchanged a few words, then carried on their separate ways. Kara continued on a little farther and disappeared from the camera’s field of view. Ruth wound the recording back, following the woman, having to switch disks twice to track her all the way. She eventually turned left at the top of School Lane and out of view.
Ruth took a screen grab and made a note to check LIPA staff records, and to ask Kara’s friends if they recognized her. It was just possible that Kara told the woman where she was going.
She was about to make a start on the next recording, when one of John Hughes’s team came into the office with the uncut recording of Jasmine Hart’s reading from the psychic-debunking blogger. Ruth signed the continuity forms, eager to make a start, and was quickly immersed in the action. The blogger began by panning 360 degrees, taking in the entire auditorium. The theater was almost full. She recognized some of the faces she’d seen on the street CCTV recordings: a few somberly dressed groups; a young couple she’d pegged as lovers out for a night on the town.
She would run through the entire performance later, but for now, she skipped through to a few minutes before the confrontation between Rollinson and Kara, scouting for anyone who took an undue interest in the student—maybe even followed her out of the auditorium.
The blogger was focused on Jasmine, making heavy weather of a communication from a “spirit” called Alf, who didn’t seem to have anyone in the audience willing to acknowledge him. The camera whipped round fast, blurring faces and colors, finally settling on Rollinson. He stormed up the aisle, one hand raised, and came to a halt at the end of a row. Judging by the angle and the number of rows visible, the blogger was on the other side of the aisle, four or five rows back. Kara turned and looked up at Rollinson as he held out his hand. His voice was muffled, but he was clearly demanding that she hand something over. Then he reached down and yanked Kara out of her seat. She clung grimly to her e-tablet, refusing to relinquish it as Rollinson half dragged, half shoved her toward the exit.
The clip the blogger posted online had finished the moment Rollinson and Kara disappeared through the doors, but the extended version rolled on, scoping the audience for their reaction. Jasmine was trying to reclaim the audience’s attention, her voice, amplified by the sound system, was clearly audible as she began a pseudoscientific explanation of the damaging effects of electromagnetic interference in psychic readings, adding that spirits were often shy of being recorded.
All the while, the camera roved restlessly, picking up on a woman who looked upset by the incident, stopping for a few seconds at a group of three women who tutted and shook their heads, apparently disapproving of Kara. It moved on, immediately coming to rest on a face Ruth recognized.
She reached for the phone, furious. Her call was answered instantaneously.
“Twice in one day, Sergeant—people will talk.”
Ruth took a breath and let it go, along with some of the anger. “I’m looking at a video of Jasmine Hart giving a psychic performance at the Epstein Theatre on the night Kara was last seen,” she said. “Kara is in the audience—or was, for about an hour. You know who else is there?”
“I’m guessing, by your confrontational tone, that it’s me,” Dr. Gaines said. “As I am growing rather tired of telling you, I have a special interest in psychics and mediums.”
“How many times have we spoken, and yet you didn’t think to mention this to me?”
“Why would I?”
“Kara was in the audience,” she said.
“Along with another four hundred people.”
“There was an unpleasant altercation between Kara and Rollinson,” Ruth interrupted. “Is that ringing any bells?”
“Come to think of it, I do remember a bit of a scuffle,” he said. “But I was taking notes.”
He was just too damn glib for his own good.
“In fact, you seemed to be making notes about the scuffle. Funny you don’t remember that.”
“Look . . .” he said, his voice syrupy and wheedling, now. “I thought it’d look bad, my—”
“Being there the night Kara was last seen? Yes,” she said. “It looks bad.”
“I was in the audience,” he said, as if that made all the difference.
“What makes it look worse,” Ruth went on, “is you not mentioning this to me or anyone else.”
“This was what—six, seven weeks ago? I didn’t make the connection.”
“You didn’t make the connection, or you thought it would look bad—which is it?”
He didn’t answer immediately, and when he did, it was with stiff formality: “Since you need me to spell it out for you, I didn’t make the connection initially, and when I did, I thought you would overreact—as, indeed, you have. Anyway, it’s irrelevant, since I had nothing to do with her disappearance.”
“It’s not for you to decide what is or isn’t relevant to this inquiry.”
In the few seconds of silence that followed, Ruth felt his hostility, his impotent rage.
“You need to come in and make a formal statement,” she said. “Today.”
“I can’t possibly—I’m . . . about to go into a meeting.”
Probably another lie. But Gaines was a leading academic in his field, a Merseyside Police–appointed consultant. He’d been vetted and approved—and recommended for this particular job by a psychologist Ruth herself knew and respected. She could only push so far.
“Tomorrow, then,” she said, keeping a lid on her temper.
“I think I might be able to find time late morning.”
“Eleven fifteen,” she said. “Don’t be late.”
Parsons listened sympathetically to Ruth’s account of what had just passed between her and Gaines, came around his desk, and offered her a seat—even made a few notes as she spoke. But the DCI was inclined to give the anthropologist the benefit of the doubt: he was a busy man, and an academic, and entitled to a little eccentricity. Surely things slipped Ruth’s mind on occasions?
“He lied, sir,” she said. “I want to know why.”
He seemed to disapprove of her bluntness. “I’ll put it to him that he could have been more frank with you,” he said.
“You will?” She shook her head. “Thanks for the offer, sir, but I can do that myself.”
“I’m sure you could,” he said. “But it might be counterproductive, given your feelings about the man.”
She raised an eyebrow. “My ‘feelings’?”
“Now, Sergeant, don’t take it that way,” he said. “I’m simply suggesting that there seems to be some . . . animus between you.”
“There is,” she said evenly. “Because . . . he lied to me.”
Parsons frowned. “Lie is a strong word.”
“He denied having seen Kara, and only finally admitted it when I confronted him with video evidence. I don’t know what else to call it.”
“And yet he has proved helpful. The significance of the tattoos, for instance . . .”
Ruth sucked her teeth, wishing she’d handled that one better.
“And the pathologist does believe that the killer used charcoal to create Kara’s tattoos . . .” Parsons went on.
“Which is no more help than knowing he used woad on the other victims.”
“I don’t follow.”
“He probably made the stuff himself,” Ruth said. “He made the woad dye—and that’s a lot harder.”
“Surely charcoal making is a factory process?” Parsons said.
She shook her head. “Doesn’t have to be. Dr. Gaines was cooking up a batch in his back garden when I went to see him earlier. I looked it up online: all it takes is wood and a couple of steel drums.”
His shoulders slumped. He’d probably been planning to task some poor sod with phoning around c
harcoal makers and retailers for customer lists. Then the incongruity of what she’d said seemed to strike him. “Why was Dr. Gaines making charcoal in his garden?”
“That’s something I’d like to ask him, sir. I’d also like to see the notes he made at the psychic event. And I’d love to know if Kara responded to a questionnaire he’s been touting on a fake website for the past two months.”
Parsons’s eyebrows shot up. “A fake website?”
She told him about Gaines’s psychic persona, Shadowman, and the fact he’d collected personal data from unsuspecting respondents.
“Did he explain why he would dupe people in that way?” Parsons asked.
“He calls it research,” Ruth said.
“I see.”
By the worried expression on his face, she thought he was beginning to.
“But there could be a perfectly innocent explanation for all of this,” Parsons added.
“If there is, I’d like to hear it.”
Parsons considered her for a long moment. Finally, he said: “I don’t know you very well, Sergeant Lake. My impression is that you’re usually a cool customer, yet Dr. Gaines seems to have well and truly rattled your cage.” He paused. “You need to ask yourself why.”
“He’s manipulative,” she said. “And I don’t like being lied to. But what really rattles me is that he has withheld key information, possibly hampering the progress of this inquiry.” She might add that he was an arrogant, patronizing, sexist wanker, but that would only confirm what Parsons had already said. He had a point: Ruth had been subjected to enough sly sexual comments in her work to know that some men regarded it as innocent banter—even deluding themselves that women found their innuendo flattering. And senior officers and peers alike had taken credit for her work at one time or another. But if there was one thing every man and woman in the job hated, it was a whiner. It would take more than a gut feeling and a few off-color remarks to tempt her to confide in Parsons.
So instead, she finished with, “He’s slippery and untrustworthy, and I’ll say it again—he’s a liar.”
Parsons pursed his lips, his expression grave. “Well, yes, you do seem to’ve caught him in a lie,” he conceded.
She watched him think through the options, keeping her gaze steady and cool, knowing that he’d come up with a compromise before he even opened his mouth.
“All right,” he said. “You can take the lead at interview. But I will be in the room, and you will take a respectful tone.”
“Thank you, sir,” she said. “I will.”
As respectful as the toerag deserves, anyway.
Chapter 42
The evening briefing was mercifully short, but Parsons wanted a written update on her interactions with Dr. Gaines, so it was after seven by the time Ruth walked out into a clear, cold night.
She couldn’t stop thinking about Adela’s gun, and she knew that the problem would gnaw at her until she did something about it, but she kept coming back to the impossibility of getting the weapon to the murder team without admitting her own guilt in stealing it. Adela’s flat had been thoroughly processed, as had Carver’s, so smuggling it into evidence that way was not an option.
She eased herself behind the wheel feeling about a hundred, and turned right, intending to scoot immediate left along Wapping toward home. Traffic was heavy, and she crept forward, sitting through three changes of lights at the T-junction. Across the roadway, the squat buildings of Albert Dock glowed in the spotlights, reflecting bronze and blue and white off the glassy-black waters of the dock. The Wheel of Liverpool, ghostly white on its southerly edge, rotated inch by inch, reflecting the slow circling of her own thoughts. Why had Carver been targeted? How could she have been so stupid as to steal the gun from his apartment?
Squeezing at last onto the main arterial road, a new, more helpful question popped into her head. Why did Adela feel the need to even own a gun? She had been a financial adviser, and the 2008 crash had bankrupted a lot of people. But not Adela. Could Adela have been threatened by a disgruntled client who saw her continuing to prosper when so many had failed? Had she bought the gun for personal protection?
Counterintuitive though it was, the stats said that women had less to fear from strangers than from the men close to them. It followed that gun-owning women were more likely to have their guns turned on them by those same male partners and lovers. And Adela had plenty of those.
Ruth made a sharp left at the first available turn, looping back on herself, in a detour to Adela’s gun club in the north of the city.
On the outskirts of Aintree, housed in a disused railway tunnel, Fenton Shooting Club boasted four ranges, each with eight firing points. The floodlit car park was almost full and the clubhouse busy. The friendly membership secretary she’d spoken to earlier in the day was unavailable, and Ruth was asked to wait in the bar-restaurant area while they called the manager in.
Adrian Garvey was a privately educated fortysomething businessman. Tall, not overtly handsome, but with the charisma to draw appreciative looks from the female club members when he came through the door.
“I understand you want to talk about Adela Faraday,” he said, offering Ruth his hand. “Terrible business.” He gestured to a table in a quiet corner of the room, and Ruth positioned herself to gain a good sweep of the place. Couples, groups of men, and, incongruously, families, gathered around tables, eating their evening meals. A waitress came past carrying a tray of food, the tantalizing aroma of steak pie and chips wafting in her wake, and Ruth realized she hadn’t eaten since she’d snatched a round of toast at breakfast.
“Can I get you anything?” Garvey asked. “A drink . . . ?” He glanced over to the bar, and Ruth caught the barman ogling her. He looked quickly away.
Ruth declined. “I was wondering if you might answer a few questions about Adela,” she said.
“Whatever I can do to help.”
Ruth nodded her thanks. “What reason did she give for wanting to own a firearm?” The law required a stated reason on the application form, and the majority used the catchall “sport.” Ruth expected the same of Adela, but she was curious to see the manager’s reaction.
“This is a sport club,” he said. “We do target shooting. A few are licensed to shoot vermin on their land, but members come here for the sport, and to socialize.”
He hadn’t answered the question, she noticed, but she’d come back to that. “What did Adela like best—the shooting or socializing?”
He smiled. “Adela was a party animal. Life and soul.”
“You knew her personally?”
“She was the sort of woman who could light up a room,” he said, fondly. “But Adela was an excellent shot, too. Had one of the club’s highest scores for a .22 multishot carbine.”
His admiration of the dead woman was obvious, and Ruth wondered how far that admiration went.
“She had her own pistol, I understand.”
“Yes, but she usually came direct from her office in Liverpool, so more often than not, she borrowed a club gun.”
Ruth lifted her chin in acknowledgment, thinking, That’s odd, because Adela’s riverside apartment was on the main route to the north of the city; surely it would have been easy for her to stop off and pick up her own carbine.
“D’you have changing facilities here?” she asked.
He blinked. “We have restrooms—why do you ask?”
“Well, Adela being a financial adviser, I imagine she dressed business-smart. She must have changed before she went onto the range.”
“Oh,” he said. “I suppose . . .”
Ruth felt eyes on her and glanced over at the bar again. The barman was slight, average height, gray-haired, with a neatly clipped beard. He looked panicked to have been caught and turned sharply away.
Now, what’s got you so twitchy?
“Could I change my mind about that drink?” she said. “I could use a tonic water.”
“Of course.” Garvey called over to the barman
and ordered drinks for both of them. The barman looked decidedly jittery at the prospect of bringing them over.
“So what kind of people do shooting for sport?” she asked, tracking the room.
“As you can see,” Garvey said, with an amused smile. “All kinds.”
“Specifically?”
He glanced at the ceiling for inspiration. “Historians, keen to fire their antique weapons, ex-police and armed forces—as you’d expect. Businessmen and women . . . a fair few engineers—”
“Engineers . . .” That surprised her, but thinking it through, it made sense. “I suppose the mechanics of weaponry would be kind of in their line?”
It was a leading question, but it didn’t put the manager on the defensive.
“I expect so,” he said. “I hadn’t really thought about it.” Garvey sat back, opening the conversation to the barman who had just arrived with their drinks. “David would know.”
The barman looked alarmed at being put on the spot. “Know what?” he said.
“You were an engineer before you retired, weren’t you?” Garvey said. “David’s here most days—and nights—filling in for absences and so on. Detective Sergeant Lake was just wondering why we have so many engineers among the members.”
“Schoolboys who never grew up, I guess,” the barman said, with a weak laugh.
“You must have known Adela Faraday,” Ruth said.
The barman looked ready to deny it, but Mr. Garvey said, “You were friends, weren’t you, David?”
The barman looked stricken. “Shooting partners,” he corrected, but it didn’t sound like a denial.
“Did Adela seem worried in the weeks before her death?” Ruth asked. “Had she been threatened, or followed? Pestered by anyone?”
“We didn’t really talk about personal stuff,” he said.
Carver had used more or less the same words. “She didn’t mention a name—someone she was having trouble with in her work?” Ruth asked.
David shook his head, avoiding her eye.
“Well, if you think of anything—anything at all—give me a call.” She offered him a business card. For a second he looked at it stupidly, and when he reached out for it, his fingers trembled slightly.