Splinter in the Blood

by Ashley Dyer

  “You won’t find him. He rang from there to—”

  “To what?” Parsons said.

  “To make a point. To get my attention.”

  “Look, I agree with you. I think you may be on to something. But if he left a trace, we’ll find it.”

  “Yeah, well good luck with that.” Carver hung up, returned to the street, and rang next door’s bell. No answer. He tried the other side. Nothing. Across the street, a front door opened and a middle-aged Pakistani woman peeped out.

  He smiled and started to cross the street, but she slammed the door shut. He dipped in his pocket for his wallet and fished out his warrant card. He knocked, announcing himself as police, but the door remained firmly shut. He couldn’t blame her: a man with the unsteady gait of a drunk, his hair cropped unevenly, a scar still showing through the regrowth, peering in at the neighbors’ windows.

  He turned away, lost his balance, and grabbed the gatepost to avoid a fall. He sat on the low wall for a few seconds, while the street did a slow three-sixty-degree turn, heard hurried footsteps, the sound of pram wheels.

  “You all right, love?”

  He looked up, saw, not a young mother with a pram, but an elderly woman with a shopping trolley. She was as wide as she was tall and wore a rainproof jacket buttoned tight across her middle.

  “Just . . . had a bit of a dizzy spell,” Carver said.

  She folded her hands across her middle and appraised him for a moment. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll make you a cuppa.”

  He gave her a quizzical look. “Don’t you think you should be careful who you invite into your home?”

  “Go-waaay . . .” She grinned, showing a set of dentures that looked slightly too big for her mouth. “Everyone knows you. You’ve been on the telly—you’re Ruthie’s boss.”

  “Ruthie?” he said.

  She turned her back on him, calling over her shoulder, “Her mum and dad moved next door in nineteen seventy-five—just after they got married, that was.” She crossed the street, using the trolley like a rolling Zimmer frame. Still talking, she pulled a huge bunch of keys from her jacket pocket and sorted through them on the doorstep. “She grew up here—played on this front step with my grandkids.” The old woman slotted a key in the Yale lock and looked him in the eye. “Your Sergeant Lake’ll always be Ruthie to me.”

  He followed her down the hallway to a modern kitchen and she told him to pull up a chair while she brewed tea and made him a sandwich. He tried to decline, feeling a panicked sense that the more time he spent here, the more Ruth was in peril.

  She wagged the bread knife at him like a scolding finger. “When was the last time you ate?” she said, pronouncing it “et.”

  He admitted it was probably the night before, and she tutted. “No wonder you’re fainting in the street, then, is it?” She shook her head, muttering something about hospital food, and a few moments later, presented him with a mug of tea and a sandwich five inches thick.

  “There y’are—proper docker’s doorstep.”

  He felt suddenly ravenous and took a huge bite.

  She laughed. “Does me good seeing a man with an appetite sitting at my table,” she said.

  She sat opposite him and chatted, introducing herself as Peggy Connolly, mother to seven, grandmother to fifteen, great-grandmother to more than she cared to count. When he’d finished the sandwich, she skewered him with a look.

  “Now, what are you up to, hanging around Ruthie’s? You’re not gonna find her there, you know.”

  He stared at her. She doesn’t know.

  He began hesitantly, anxious for the old woman’s heart, “Mrs. Connolly—”

  “Peggy.”

  “Peggy,” he repeated. “I . . . I’ve got some bad news . . .”

  “Jesus, they haven’t found her, have they?”

  “You know she’s missing?”

  “This isn’t the Dark Ages—I’ve got the telly, haven’t I?” she demanded, instantly belligerent. “I’ve got me DAB radio.”

  “She’s still missing,” he said, feeling roundly cuffed about the ears.

  She crossed herself. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I thought you was gonna say she was dead.” Quickly over the shock, her eyes narrowed and she tapped him on the arm.

  “You’ve come to see what she’s been getting up to, all hours of the night.” She must have seen the surprise in his face, because she added, “I’m old, I don’t sleep like I used to. She’s in her kitchen till after midnight, up again before the milkman. I see the light across my backyard.”

  Working through his unofficial case files, no doubt. Sooner or later, Parsons or Jansen or the PolSA would get it into their heads that it would be a good idea to search her place. He needed to get inside that house, if only to get rid of the evidence Ruth had stolen.

  Peggy Connolly seemed to read his mind. She heaved the bunch of keys onto the kitchen table and picked through Yales and mortises, finally holding one brass key up by its tip.

  “That’ll get you in,” she said.

  He stared at her, marveling.

  “I’ve lived here since Germany invaded Poland,” she said. “Time was, you’d leave a key with a neighbor when you went away, for emergencies, like. Got keys to half the street on here.” She lifted the bundle by the one key, jangling it, smiling to herself. “There’s some good memories in this lot.”

  She handed Carver the bunch so that he could wrestle the key off the ring.

  “’Course, there’s hardly any of us oldies left,” she said, her smile tinged with sadness now. “Some of the new kids coming in have swapped to them plastic doors, but I keep the keys anyway—for sentimental value.”

  Carver stood carefully and found his balance improved.

  “It would be best if nobody knew I was here,” he said.

  “I seen you getting out the taxi from the top of the street,” she said. “No police cars. No sirens.” She gave him a knowing nod. “Goes without saying, lad.”

  He squeezed her hand gently and shambled to the kitchen door.

  She called him, her tone businesslike, no nonsense. “Mr. Carver?”

  He turned to her, his hand on the doorknob.

  “I’ll be wanting that back,” she said, eyeing the key in his hand. “After you bring Ruthie home, safe.”

  Chapter 49

  Inside the house, Carver noticed the faint, nutty, chocolaty smell of coffee—Ruth always did like a good ground roast. It was cold, yet the house had a warmth that had nothing to do with the air temperature.

  But he didn’t have time for sentimentality.

  He started at the back of the house, in the kitchen, since that was where Peggy seemed to think Ruth did most of her work. The cupboards contained nothing but kitchenware and cooking ingredients. The sitting room, up the hall on the right, had been knocked through to the dining room, and one end was occupied by a giant wall-mounted TV. A Blu-ray player and an Xbox 360 lay on a black glass stand below the TV screen. He hadn’t known that Ruth was into gaming.

  Two bookcases built into the alcoves of the front room were jammed with everything from popular science to forensic texts, the fiction almost exclusively science fiction and fantasy. More things he didn’t know—hadn’t bothered to get to know—about Ruth. But there would be time enough for guilt and self-recrimination. He squinted along the shelves, taking advantage of the lowering rays of the sun: a fine dusting on the exposed surfaces suggested the books hadn’t been disturbed in a while; she couldn’t have hidden the files here.

  He moved upstairs, noticed that the front bedroom curtains were closed. He flicked the light switch in the gathering gloom, scoped out the room from the doorway, and almost immediately saw his box of files on top of the wardrobe. He lifted it down and set it on the bed before removing the lid. The pistol was gone. He’d half expected that; as soon as DC Ivey said they’d found a .22 in Chris Lomax’s car, his mind had gone to the pistol Ruth had lifted from his flat the night he was shot. It was only a matter of
time till ballistics established it was the weapon that killed Adela Faraday.

  Carver’s hand went involuntarily to the healing wound in his chest. Most likely they would have matched the gun to the bullet lodged near his spine, too—if the surgeons had been able to dig it out of him. There must have been a spent bullet casing in his flat; Ruth would have taken that, too—he couldn’t see her missing something so fundamental. The Thorn Killer might not have considered a shell casing, though. He lifted every file out of the box, but there was no sign of it.

  The Thorn Killer had found a way to introduce the gun into evidence and implicate Lomax as the shooter, exonerating both Carver and Ruth Lake. But Carver didn’t think for one moment that he had acted in the interests of justice. TK didn’t do anything that didn’t serve his own purpose; he had saved Ruth to use her as bait, to bring Carver back into the investigation.

  He was just as certain that Ruth was the killer’s next intended victim. What better way to keep Carver’s undivided attention than to torment him with thoughts of what she was going through? The other victims had survived weeks of torture, so it was bitter consolation that Ruth’s life was not in immediate danger, only for the horrible reason that the Thorn Killer’s “artistry” could not be rushed.

  “Okay . . .” He took a breath and exhaled. He needed to stick with what he had and decide where to go from there. The stolen evidence was gone; there was nothing he could do about that. But the rest was intact, as far as he could tell.

  A destructive little voice whispered in his head: The files are useless—TK wouldn’t leave them if he thought there was anything that might help you. But arrogance was the greatest weakness of the psychopath: believing investigators far beneath their own intellect had snared many a killer.

  So Carver forced himself to take his time to sift through the crime scene and postmortem reports, the photographs, his notes supplemented by Ruth’s—hers more neatly filed. He found the notes he’d scratched on the transcripts of interviews with Kara Grogan’s friends and fellow students. Rereading them now, he saw them for what they were: desperate, alcohol-fueled, rage-filled rants. He’d been out of control.

  Ruth’s additions, written in her concise, objective style, made it easy to catch up on details of her discoveries: that Kara had been preparing for a film role; that she had a terror about freezing onstage. He took time over Ruth’s interviews with “psychics” and her impressions of the people she had spoken to and marveled at her ability to cold read the cold readers.

  He found Ruth’s handwriting among his charts and diagrams, too, and saw an echo of his own obsession. Does she realize it’s taken over her life, the way it did mine? She had researched stage fright, psychics, and cold readers, even tattoo symbolism. He found printouts of sigils and Celtic symbols he recognized from the victims’ bodies. One image was a nineteenth-century sampler. The text, laboriously stitched in the fabric by a teenaged girl, suggested that she had been a rape victim and had attempted suicide.

  Are the tattoos confessional samplers? Ruth had written in the margin in her neat hand. She had made notes about the secrets the victims had held back from their families—they had known about Tali Tredwin’s eating disorder and suicide attempts as a young adult, as well as Jo Raincliffe’s double identity as stripper “Joline,” but hadn’t connected them with their abduction and murder. Kara’s stage fright, the job offer, the cruel trick her housemates had played on her were all new to him.

  The eye images tattooed on the victims are symbolic, Ruth wrote in her research notes. The Eye of Providence represents knowledge, wisdom, the revealing of hidden truths.

  Beneath that, typed in bold and underlined: It’s all about secrets for the Thorn Killer. But how is he finding his victims?

  A few lines farther down, in her own hand, she’d added a note: Did we miss one of KG’s lecturers? She’d added an evidence number. CCTV, School Lane—after KG kicked out of theater. She’d noted the time log on the recording at 20:34:05. Eight thirty-four p.m., and five seconds. Woman spoke to Kara. Did K tell her where she was headed? Rendezvous with TK??? Talk to staff/students.

  Riffling through the rest, he discovered a set of e-mail exchanges between Ruth and Dr. Gaines—the man Ruth was supposed to interview earlier in the day. Her notes revealed that he was an anthropologist, a consultant brought in to advise the inquiry team.

  In a separate document, headed “Interview notes, Dr. Lyall Gaines,” Carver read with increasing concern that Gaines had posed as a psychic named Shadowman, concealing his identity until Ruth discovered it for herself.

  A Home Office–approved consultant acting like a carnival sideshow performer—what the hell?

  Reading on, Carver discovered that the anthropologist had attended a psychic reading hosted by Jasmine Hart at the Epstein Theatre the night Kara was last seen. Even more alarmingly, that he’d made a repeat appearance when Ruth had attended another reading with the same psychic and had followed Ruth after the event.

  Everything he says seems calculated to make me uneasy, she’d written. He’s glib, self-aggrandizing, and shallow.

  Dr. Gaines seemed a good a place to start.

  Chapter 50

  Ruth Lake comes to under lights so strong she can feel the heat of them.

  Am I in hospital?

  Something odd is happening: someone is circling beyond the intense, glaring white light. She squeezes her eyelids shut.

  “At last.” The voice is distorted, deep and resonant, like a man talking down a drainpipe. “It’s a pity about the bruising,” he says. “But it’ll be gone by the time you’re ready.”

  Ready? Ruth’s heart rate triples in the space of three seconds. She tries to move. Can’t. Her head is propped up by some kind of molded foam support; she can feel it supporting her neck. She is naked, except for her underwear. Her wrists, upper arms, thighs, and ankles are strapped to the table, but she can’t feel the restraints. Can’t feel her limbs at all.

  The inner aspect of her forearm already bears a symbol: a face, no eyes, nose, or mouth. A mask on an elongated stem.

  Oh, God . . .

  “Background work,” the voice says. “Different skin types take color in different ways. Next time, you’ll be awake.”

  She tries to move, to struggle—to do some damn thing—but her body won’t obey her, and it feels like a weight is pressing on her chest.

  “The paralyzing effect of the poison,” the killer says, interpreting her actions. “Actually, I cheat a bit—I prep all my girls with a neuromuscular blocker. It’s more reliable, less . . . risky.”

  “Tali,” Ruth slurs. “Thasss-why you dint f-finishhh.”

  “Yes, Tali was . . . unfortunate. It’s difficult to predict the potency of the aconitine decoction—and she was highly sensitive—succumbed before I’d really hit my stride.”

  Ruth tries to remember how she’d got here. Recalls the office building, talking to Adela’s former boss, the nervous PA. She’d looked down at his ID card. Pain exploding in her head.

  “Lomax,” she murmurs. “Bastard . . . They’ll get you . . . I left word . . .”

  “Poor Sergeant Lake. You’re confused. I rescued you from Lomax—don’t you remember?”

  She does. She was in the boot of a car, thinking, So this is how it ends. Lomax drew his fist back. Then he turned, arm raised in defense. She remembered the wet thud of his skull as it hit the concrete floor.

  “Lomax?” she says again.

  “. . . is dead. You know he murdered Adela?”

  Ruth tries to nod. Can’t. “Yes,” she says.

  “That’s my girl.” The man in the shadows pats her shoulder. His hand is rough, calloused. “The police found the gun in the glove compartment of Lomax’s car. His fingerprints are on it—I made sure of that.”

  How did he get the gun? The fog lifts and she knows. He was in my house.

  “You don’t seem very pleased,” the killer says. “Carver is exonerated, Adela’s murderer is dead—you will be hai
led as a hero. You should be happy.”

  She forces disdain into her voice: “So you’ve been in my house. Well, good for you. D’you think you left anything of yourself there? Criminals are never as careful or as clever as they think they are.”

  “I seem to’ve covered my tracks fairly effectively at Chief Inspector Carver’s apartment.”

  “So Carver was right,” Ruth says. “You were there the night he was shot.”

  “No—I meant on previous occasions.”

  He’s been inside Carver’s flat multiple times? How long has he been watching them?

  “I did slip in a couple of nights later to pick something up on Greg’s behalf,” he went on. “But the night of the shooting there was only Chris Lomax—and you, of course. Yes, Sergeant, I was watching. Saw you arrive. Saw you empty the place of anything that might help the investigation. That piqued my curiosity, I’ll admit.”

  Ruth closes her eyes. You screwed up, Ruth—you made such a terrible mess of everything.

  “No smart comeback, Sergeant?” the faceless voice says. “Well, don’t feel too badly. Carver is about to return the favor. He’s inside your house as we speak, rooting through your files. The police should be there any moment now.”

  He’s reading you. You need to do better, Ruth.

  “Carver’s more resourceful than you give him credit for,” she says.

  “Really?” The mocking tone is gone; she hears a hunger in his voice.

  He wants more. Instinctively, she knows she needs to give less. She focuses on her facial muscles. She can feel her lips, her cheeks, in the way that you feel them as a dentist’s injection wears off: they feel bigger, bulkier, only marginally under her control.

  “You’re a detective. You read crime scenes—and you say criminals don’t cover their tracks very well,” he said. “Well, I read people. And they are never as adept at covering their feelings as they think they are. I eased up on the paralytics, too—that’ll help.”

  Keep still, think of a blank sheet of white paper. It isn’t hard under the blinding white of the spotlights.