Splinter in the Blood

by Ashley Dyer

  “All the others resisted at first,” her captor says. “But eventually they revealed their secrets.”

  “You’re like a child, collecting Pokémon cards.” Ruth’s tongue feels thick in her mouth; she has to work hard not to slur.

  “This, from a former technician with a second-rate degree from a third-rate provincial university.”

  He’s engaged with you—stopped seeing you as an object—he’s trying to hurt you. You, personally, not some mannequin he’s daubing with ink. And he’s angry. Use that.

  She controls her breathing as she squints into the light. “You think I’m provincial. Which makes you . . . what—a sophisticate? You’re telling me torturing and murdering women is an intellectual pursuit?”

  He leans in, and Ruth sees eyes, a nose like the snout of a muzzled dog. She flinches, waiting for the bite. But in the next instant, he’s gone, and all she hears is the angry raggedness of his breathing.

  She calms herself, says, “I suppose it’s true what they say: scratch a narcissist, find the damaged kid beneath.”

  “You know what else they say?” The voice changer is acting against her abductor, picking up every growl and stutter of breath. “Criticize a narcissist, brace for an attack.”

  She sees another flash of the snout.

  Be still; think straight. It’s only the voice changer.

  She works hard on keeping her face and eyes empty of fear, but she can’t slow the thud of blood in the arteries of her throat and knows he has seen it.

  “Anxious, Sergeant?”

  “Yeah, well, you have me at a disadvantage,” she says.

  “Best you don’t forget that.”

  Despite the warning, she feels the heightened tension in the room turn down a degree or two. He knows he’s in control. But he is curious. She needs to tap into that curiosity.

  “I’m puzzled,” she says.

  He starts pacing again, his shadow flitting from one spotlight to the next. “By what?”

  Ruth hears a warning and a threat in those two words.

  “Why did you rescue me from Lomax?” Using his own word to flatter his ego. “Was it to draw DCI Carver back into the investigation?”

  No answer.

  “You know you have a better chance of getting away with what you’re doing with DCI Parsons in charge.”

  “Parsons has no fire.”

  “So you were bored?”

  “That, and I wanted to see what Carver would do if I took you.”

  “Manipulation,” Ruth says.

  “A field experiment.”

  Field experiment.

  The shock of recognition must show in her face, because he chuckles softly. “You don’t think I rescued you because you’re worth rescuing, do you?”

  “Oh, I know I am,” she says, relieved that he has misinterpreted shock for disappointment. “But there’s a bit of the narcissist in all of us, isn’t there?”

  She hears a slight hiss, the voice changer mic picking up every subtle intake of breath. She doesn’t need to see his face to know his reaction. In the silence that follows she can’t tell where he is, and she experiences a panicky impulse to struggle against her bonds.

  “See?”

  His voice hisses in her ear and she tries not to cringe.

  “Right now, you’re suppressing the imperative to flee with every fiber of your being.” His breath on her skin is tormenting. “I know you, Ruth Lake. I’ve been inside your suh-weet little house. I’ve seen the care you took tastefully renovating and modernizing. I’ve seen your bijou courtyard garden. I found your scrapbook really rather moving.”

  Her scalp tingles and she feels a sudden squeezing sensation around her heart. He found the scrapbook. Rollinson?

  “Odd that you should hide it like that.”

  Every nerve in Ruth’s body rebels. It feels as if a thousand snakes are squirming over her exposed flesh; she wants to scream. But she forces it down.

  “Too many painful memories?”

  She wants to kill him.

  He moves closer, whispers in her ear: “I. See . . . you.”

  “There’s really not much to see,” she says, imposing control. “I work, I run, I read a little.”

  “No, no, no. There’s more.”

  “I do have a secret passion for eGaming . . .”

  “Not so secret—your gaming gadgets are openly on display. In that context, I am curious as to why you would hide your family scrapbook.” He pauses and she sees his shadow flit from one lamp to the next, traversing the length of the table.

  “Although some of those press cuttings are outside the scope of the average family album. So perhaps it’s guilt.”

  Her guts turn to ice water, but she pushes back: “Is it guilt that makes you hide your face? Or do you think it gives you more power over the women you brutalize?”

  “That’s trite and shallow.” He sounds affronted. “Did you find a single bruise on any of my kills?”

  “There’s more than one way to brutalize a victim,” Ruth says. “You stripped those women of their identity, carved them into a creation of your own twisted mind.”

  “I revealed their true identity.”

  “Five women. Humiliated, terrorized, tortured, and poisoned—”

  “People,” he corrects. “I am interested in people—in the secrets they withhold.”

  “‘People’ implies men and women. You target only women.”

  “Women are of necessity naturally inclined to secrecy. They withhold in order to survive, subjugating their needs, hiding their resentment from those closest to them, disguising their rage against the lot they have been stuck with by virtue of their gender, sublimating it into something rather beautiful: love of family and home. That makes them inherently more interesting.”

  “‘Women subjugate their needs’?” Ruth paraphrases. “That’s not trite?”

  She hears a growl of disapproval and briefly sees again the thrust of a chin, the eyes—but only faintly, like a face pressed into a bedsheet, then he is gone again.

  “So, why Kara, or Tali, or Jo, and not someone like Adela? She had more secrets than all of them combined.”

  He scoffs. “Adela’s only real secret was she thought like a man.”

  “Because she enjoyed sex without commitment?” she says, feeling more in control.

  “Because she used sex as a weapon.”

  “A weapon?” Ruth can’t help herself; she is intrigued.

  “Adela’s financial inspirations were less spreadsheet, more bedsheet.”

  “Pillow talk?” Ruth says. “That’s how she became a financial whiz?”

  “I thought you would have worked that one out before now. Gives a new twist to insider trading, doesn’t it?” He laughs, and the sound is guttural, ugly. “She turned her charm on Chris Lomax after she discovered that Barrington wasn’t big on postcoital chat.”

  “She screwed the PA to get to the boss.”

  “To be fair, it wasn’t all about sex,” her abductor says. “And Adela didn’t demand information, she showed an interest—asked Lomax about his working day—which was, of course, centered around Barrington’s working day. Adela used that information—used him—for three years. Just long enough to make sufficient cash to quit her job and set up on her own. And when she left the firm, she cut all ties.” He clicks his fingers. “Just like that.”

  Ruth recalls the nervy, insecure PA. “Brutal,” she says.

  “Women are dealt a shit hand right from the off,” he says. “And if sex is about power—well, there’s nothing in the rule book that says the power should always be in the hands of men.”

  Ruth hears bitterness in her captor’s tone, feeling she is missing something.

  “How do you know all of this?” she asks.

  He pauses, standing at the foot of the table, his outline grotesquely enlarged by the glare of the lights. “I make it my business to know everything there is to know about Detective Chief Inspector Carver. He’s investig
ating me.”

  “You stalked him.”

  “Surveilled,” he corrected. “Him, and Adela, and Lomax, and Councillor Hill—who had quite the pash for Adela. And you, for a brief spell. Mr. Hill’s wife was a promising prospect for a while,” he adds, reflectively. “But then I saw you, shivering in the snow outside Carver’s apartment—”

  “And you were smitten.”

  “Let’s say my curiosity was piqued. Until that point, you were always so closed, I thought you simply . . . dull. But on that night, I realized just how much you were hiding.”

  Chapter 51

  Something flashed beyond the closed curtains of the bedroom, and Carver looked up. He didn’t need to take a peek to recognize the blue lights of a police vehicle.

  Leave the box of files, or take it?

  Leave it, he thinks. It could lead them to Gaines.

  He took a few quick snapshots on his phone camera, jammed the files in the box, and hobbled downstairs.

  The doorbell rang, followed by an insistent hammering.

  “Ruth Lake,” the officer shouted. “Police. Please come to the door.”

  Carver hesitated on the last step. It was a short distance from the stairs to the glazed interior door, and he could see three bulky silhouettes beyond the outer door.

  Can they see me? Ruth’s front door was one of the originals: wood, with narrow slats of glass. He just had to hope that he could blend with the shadows in the hallway.

  He moved slowly around the newel post, ducking down and keeping close to the banister as he crept to the kitchen. The door was ajar and off-center of the hall, so they might not see the extra light if he opened it wider, but he took no chances, squeezing through into the well-lit room without touching the door, praying they hadn’t sent anyone around to the back, yet.

  The hammering started up again.

  The back door was a composite, triple locked. No key.

  Shit. Heart thudding, he rummaged in the drawer closest to it, came up with a key, jammed it in the lock at the instant he heard the crunch of a key in the lock of the front door. This was an injured police officer’s home, not some scally’s doss—of course they would send a locksmith.

  Hoping they would take things slowly, not wanting to panic her, he stepped out into the freezing air and closed the door after him, crossing the yard as fast as his wobbly legs would carry him. There was no lock on the gate, only a bolt, top and bottom. He eased both back and was through in seconds, into a narrow alley that stank of dog piss and overripe bins.

  A few yards down, he saw a black grille at the near end. He’d forgotten the security gates.

  He heard them calling Ruth’s name inside the house, then, from the back door: “Door’s unlocked.” A pause. “Ruth? Ruth Lake. Police—can you answer me?”

  In the alley, Carver cast about for somewhere to hide. An unlocked gate, maybe. But he’d only find himself trapped in another backyard, and they would come looking, and they would find him.

  At that moment, he heard the click of a latch as the next-door gate opened, and he braced himself. He had failed. He turned and saw Peggy’s gray head poke around the frame.

  She beckoned him into her yard and silently pointed toward her back door, shooing him along impatiently. She stayed where she was in her carpet slippers, weatherproof jacket slung over her shoulders, unfastened.

  “What’s going on over there?” she demanded, calling indignantly over the wall. “Yiz had better clear off coz I’ve rung for the police.”

  “We are the police,” someone called back.

  “Pull the other one, love, it’s got bells on.”

  Carver was safely inside her kitchen by then.

  A second later, he heard Peggy exclaim, “Jesus, you bloody great ijit—d’you wanna give an old lady a heart attack?”

  He guessed that one of the uniforms had bobbed up over the wall to check the place out. He heard a muttered, “Sorry, love.”

  “G’waan, get out of it,” Peggy snarled, then slammed the door and locked it.

  When she turned to Carver, she was grinning. “Don’t think they’ll be knocking at my door in a hurry,” she said. “Did you get what you need?”

  Carver nodded. “Something, anyway.”

  She led him through to the hallway and made him sit on the stairs while she went to the front door, opened it a crack.

  “I’ll keep dixie, let you know when the coast’s clear.”

  A couple of minutes later, she turned to him. “They’re all inside. Think you can manage a few minutes’ walk?”

  Carver stood, testing his limbs. “Yeah. Yes, I think I can.”

  “You sure? ’Cause I can borrow you my trolley if you want.”

  “I’ll manage,” he said with a smile.

  She did one more sweep of the street before waving him forward. “Turn left out the house—it’s only about fifty yards to Smithdown Road. You can flag a cab there.”

  Carver stared at her in admiration.

  “Wha’?” she said.

  “You’re quite something, Peggy Connolly.”

  “Should of seen me in me heyday,” she said.

  Chapter 52

  Ruth Lake is burning. Awake, but without the muscle tone to enable her to move, her eyes are taped closed and she is strapped firmly to the table. Her forearm feels like second-day sunburn rubbed vigorously with sandpaper.

  He is working on her forearm again. He has punctured her skin a thousand times, replacing the thorn styluses when they become blunted. She hears him toss them aside every fifteen minutes or so, rattling into a plastic tub like discarded pencils.

  “A needle would be easier,” he says. “But less authentic.” His voice has the deep growl of the voice distorter.

  She wonders why he is still using it when she is blindfolded. Because you know him, and he doesn’t want you to be able to connect with him as a human being. He wants you to remain a mere object.

  Periodically, he pauses, rubs carbon powder into her skin. It sears like hot coals. Then he starts over again, pricking over the same swollen and inflamed patch of skin.

  “Your first Eye of Truth is about halfway done.”

  Is that what he calls them?

  “How does it feel?”

  Her breathing is shallow and rapid, and sweat springs from every pore. Her heart beats painfully hard against her rib cage.

  “Fuck off,” she says, and he laughs.

  “When we really get into it, you won’t be able to make a squeak, so feel free to yell, now.”

  She suggests a better use for his thorns—one that involves an orifice and every discarded stylus in his sharps tub. “Suit yourself,” he says. “I’ve used muscle relaxants and barbiturates this time, so you’re actually mildly sedated. You’ll be completely paralyzed for the larger patches—intubated and ventilated, of course, but you won’t have any anesthesia or pain relief. You will be fully conscious.”

  Feverish with pain, Ruth tries to tune him out, but his voice drills into her skull. She can’t help it; a tear squeezes from under her eyelid.

  “Stings, doesn’t it,” he says.

  Distance yourself, she thinks. Disown the pain. You know how.

  She slows her breathing and focuses on a cloud she imagines into being. It carries her on a cool draft of air, miles away, and her tortured arm is no longer a part of her.

  With the pain under control, she is free to think. Mind racing, she works back through their last exchange of words: he had been following Carver and Adela and Lomax. And you, her inner voice says. That was how he intercepted Lomax in the car park of LC&K Assets; that was how he stayed way ahead of them in the investigation. He’d been inside Carver’s flat, her house—had probably read Carver’s files as he wrote them up, witnessed his rapid disintegration after Kara’s body was found.

  But he murdered Lomax in a city center car park in broad daylight. That seemed like a desperate act.

  “You screwed up,” she says.

  She hears a ga
sp of surprise, feels a stab of bruising pain as he inadvertently jabs the thorn deeper than he had intended.

  “Careful,” he says. “Wouldn’t want to make a mess of this.”

  “I wasn’t supposed to make the connection between Lomax and Adela—you didn’t think I was capable.”

  “As I recall, you went to interview his boss,” he says.

  But she notices that he hasn’t gone back to work on the tattoo.

  Ruth feels a hot numbness in her arm. The aconitine working its way into her system? Don’t let the fear control you. She forces her mind back to the problem.

  “How did Lomax find Adela? She was careful. She sold her house, moved into an apartment without even telling the concierge—” She breaks off. “Is that how you did it? Did you send Lomax to Adela’s hotel that night?”

  A sharp scratch and the torture begins again. Okay, you missed the mark this time.

  She leaves the pain where it is and floats above it. He did mess up, that much is certain. Adela was known at the Old Bank Hotel—was a regular—but the desk manager said she’d been coming to the hotel for only about six months. So she must have switched from another venue. If Lomax didn’t go to the hotel the night of the shooting, then he couldn’t have followed Adela home. Unless . . .

  “You gave Lomax the address of Adela’s riverside apartment.”

  “You’re delirious,” he says.

  “It was fun watching Carver fall apart, but Adela provided a release for him, a distraction from the case. You wanted her out of the way, so you sent Lomax after her. What you didn’t bargain for was him coming after Carver as well.”

  The killer’s breath stutters behind the mask and she knows she’s hit home.

  “Lomax overreacted,” he says. “I took care of him.”

  “You murdered him.”

  “I saved your life.”

  “That’s funny,” Ruth says.

  “I don’t hear you laughing.”

  “You sent him an e-mail in Adela’s name. No,” she corrects herself. “A text—probably on a burner phone to make it more like old times. Maybe even spun him a line about how she regretted breaking up with him. He went to Adela’s apartment; my guess is she pulled the gun, they got into a wrestling match, he shot her by accident, decided to set Carver up for the murder.”