Blood and Ink

by Brett Adams

It’s funny what we humans will do together, that we’d never do alone.

  Would Charles Starkweather have embarked on a killing spree in Nebraska without his girlfriend?

  Would New Zealand teen, Pauline Parker, have killed her mother without her soul-mate, Juliet Hulme?

  Hulme went on to be a successful author of detective fiction, and won an Edgar for her short story, Heroes.

  What a world, huh?

  36

  I walked. No other choice.

  Ejected from my bunker, I was in the breeze.

  Travel, for J.G. for the foreseeable future would be by shank’s mare. Not only was I on foot, I was aimless; burdened only with my backpack, and the heavy knowledge that while I ambled, a girl was living her last day.

  Difficult thing to imagine, that. Was she, maybe, washing up after breakfast? Putting on lipstick? Last time, my dear. How does that feel? What point, lipstick on a corpse?

  But of course, she didn’t know.

  I tried to imagine what it would be like if I knew this was my last day, this my last morning walk. How would I feel? What thoughts would be swirling through my mind?

  Imagine? It could be true. Wasn’t such a stretch.

  I paused, drew a deep, deliberate breath and took in my surroundings.

  If this was my last day, I’d picked a shitty place for a walk.

  I’d fled from the hotel, not aware of my surroundings, just focusing on putting distance between myself and the police cars I imagined were en route.

  Before coming to the UK, my mental images of it were half-remembered photos from tourist promos or nature documentaries.

  This was not one of those places. This was industrial sprawl gone rotten. Perhaps ‘urban decay’ tours?

  The shells of warehouses loomed, roofs half stove-in by the elements. Graffiti on graffiti plastered the walls, in a riot of color and obscenity. Even the weeds poking from the broken asphalt looked delinquent.

  I kicked an empty drink can, sent it clanging across the road, just to connect with the vibe.

  A hoarse voice shouted for me to shut the expletive up. It echoed from the dark spaces beneath overhanging roofs and abandoned loading docks, and I realized the cardboard and cloth lumps in there were habitations. There were people here. Living here. At home here.

  Home.

  I heard Kim’s voice again: where is home, Jack? It hadn’t quite been a question . . .

  Home? My thoughts went to my house in Nedlands. Two-storeys, 3300 square feet, and a sliver of river view.

  But it hadn’t felt like home for a long time. Not since Kim left. That place, if I was honest, was a museum of a past life, and I was the janitor who ate TV dinners in it, paid for the lawn guy, and slept in its too-large bed.

  Home?

  If not there, where was my home? Right now I was homeless, lacking only the smell to truly fit into the crowd hanging out in the boxes. But I could see now how short a trip it was, from student, or insurance salesman, or hairdresser—or academic—to homeless, and I pitied them.

  Before I had got on the plane to Hong Kong for what turned out to be an abysmal failure (put that thought away), my home, my true home, the place where I burned the candle, fanned the faint embers of life and hope, was . . .

  The university.

  The university had been my home for long years now. That fact was probably the source of the hint of bitterness I’d heard in Kim’s voice.

  I’d moved out of home before she had, with twelve hour days full of numbing routine. Only, Kim hadn’t thought it was just numbing routine, had she.

  The Kim I married would never have suspected I could even countenance an affair—that she had, had fueled my anger enough to let her go. And once again I had learned something. How fear and worry can erode even the best trusts.

  I hadn’t had an affair. Call it faithfulness. Call it maths. Call it love. The one woman who might have been my wife in another life had left the department and . . .

  Another life. A Sidewise life.

  The bolt hit me: Jane.

  We’d rubbed shoulders at university, colleagues for four years—the university, my home—and then she had returned to her country of birth. To another university. And, yes, she was very much closer to home. Oxford.

  The faint roar of traffic reached my ears, and in the distance the silhouette of an overpass sliced through the urban decay. I needed to get to Oxford, and that road was my best bet.

  I cinched my backpack tighter, quickened my pace. As I walked I turned this question over in my mind: How the hell did Hiero know about Jane?

  37

  Marten Lacroix scanned the papers perched in her lap as the tube train bustled into London’s innards.

  She might have scanned the same information more conveniently on a laptop or a phone, but Marten preferred paper. A sheaf of cellulose, tactile, heavy. She had half a ream of email transcripts from the last six months finally unlocked by a warrant, a printout of Jack’s blog as of last night, the results of an automated language analysis of his writing, and a much smaller, but more curious, item—a set of photocopied notes entitled, Blood and Ink, by Hieronymus Beck.

  Apparently Jack Griffen had posted the notes by snail mail to the Perth police via the other side of Australia before he’d done a bunk to Hong Kong, and the package had been delayed. A sticky note had been photocopied still attached to the top sheet. It said simply: Bloody Australia Post.

  Professional outfit, these Perth cops.

  Marten held in her hands the cipher of Jack Griffen—crack the code and she might save a life.

  The physicality of the paper slowed her down, focused her thinking in a way electronic media could not. She lifted the top sheet and carefully, lest the pile slide from her lap and spray across the carriage floor, slipped it under the bottom.

  Secret code? More like cryptic crossword. Lists of facts and details about Jack Griffen’s life that somehow had to enmesh and be made to make sense.

  For today, this week, however long it took to put this man behind bars, Jack Griffen was Marten’s universe. Her challenge was to discover the Unified Theory of Jack—the smallest set of axioms by which he could be explained, and then predicted.

  This wasn’t just a dissection of his history. This game was live. She was hunting a hunter. Could she catch him before he killed again?

  Marten took a mental inventory of what she knew about Jack Griffen.

  He was middle aged. Traumatized. Divorced. Alone. Carrying an extremely rare heart condition that kept him at the scenic fringe of death. That was what the years had brought him.

  The last few weeks had brought violent assault, attempted murder, murder.

  The last few days had put a gun in his hands. And the paper she held in her hands prophesied more to come.

  A thinker become a doer.

  Marten leaned back in her seat and blinked away fatigue as the train swayed through a bend.

  Well, it was a sketch. A line drawing that needed shading to better see the character of the subject, this man.

  And in her hands, Marten hoped, were the pages that might offer those insights.

  She began again to scan the emails, and soon found they were full of detail. The problem was, none of it fit within the outline she had sketched.

  Griffen’s work emails were boringly on-topic. The communications of the machine, Marten assumed, of a university faculty. Page after page of administrative queries, meeting follow-ups, timetabling requests, project proposals. The odd thread with fellow academics at institutions in other universities in Australia, and other countries—the US, Europe, a professor in Japan. Occasional banter with office staff. No sniping. No gossip. No two-faced lies. Responses to students for what was, to Marten’s eye, a depressingly large amount of pleading for deferred assessment, which Griffen tended to politely but succinctly decline.

  But nothing to or from any ‘Hieronymus Beck’.

  With eyes glazing, Marten took a moment to stretch her neck, before turn
ing to the emails obtained from Griffen’s internet service provider. If he had left any trace of his inner self in digital form, it was likely to be here.

  A quick survey revealed that Jack Griffen only corresponded with a handful of people. There was a smattering of birthday wishes that were seen by her God’s eye view to be all the same, except for the names. But by far the most frequent correspondent was his daughter, Tracey.

  Griffen and his daughter spoke of life in California, and of the changes to Nedlands—the river, the bush, the streets of Tracey’s childhood. She spoke a lot about her mother, Kim. In the last year she began to sign-off with, ‘In Christ, Trace.’ A rash of recent emails were full of pie-in-the-sky planning on the off chance Jack could make it to the US for some father-daughter time the following summer.

  So he had a good relationship with his daughter. Scratch that idea. That was an anchor, not a pain point.

  As for his ex-wife, evidence of direct communication between the two of them was almost entirely missing. The one exception was an email, dated February 15. Marten read it silently, imagining the cadence of Kim’s voice:

  “I’m not screening calls, Jack. I’m on a cruise. I can hear you laughing at that. What did we used to call them? Day care for adults? Well, for once in my life I’m going to be a child. For two weeks. I think I deserve that. Kim.”

  So that relationship was nebulous.

  Marten made a mental note to request his phone records to look for other signs of contact with his wife. Perhaps she was his end game. Kill the Ex?

  The train emerged into the half-light of a London afternoon in autumn. A bright red lorry caught Marten’s gaze as it matched the train’s speed on a side road for moments before turning away.

  There had to be something she was missing.

  She concentrated, willing a stab of intuition to highlight a connection, to reveal the true force that impelled Jack Griffen.

  Psychosis—if that’s what he had—was often sparked by trauma. Depression, even schizophrenia could be triggered by a death, violence, even job threat. One theory held that Beautiful Mind genius John Nash’s delusional schizophrenia was triggered by his fear of being drafted into the Korean War. In him it manifest as that mix peculiar to schizophrenia, of absurdity living side by side with clarity; of a god complex and persecution; of being caught in momentous history, and of being lost.

  And that sounded like Jack Griffen. Such a man would suspect everyone and everything. He would assume his email was being snooped. Was it schizophrenia? He was ticking a lot of the boxes.

  But then, he had been holding down a job at the university, apparently quite ably, up until six days ago. And not just any job, a professorship no less.

  Could a man be descending into a schizophrenic haze and show no signs of it? Nothing to warn his colleagues or students of the coming crisis?

  Marten flicked back to her notes of phone interviews with colleagues of Griffen she had been able to reach. There weren’t many, but they all told the same story: he was an introvert, a man who fed off silence, but showed wit and kindness when wrangled into a corner. ‘Haunted by loneliness,’ said one secretary, but that sounded suspiciously like wishful thinking from a woman with a crush to Marten.

  Marten’s cheeks billowed with a pent sigh, and she put the sheaves of paper aside, feeling no closer to solving the puzzle of Jack Griffen.

  Her hands idly toyed with the pack of business cards that Jack had dropped in the restroom at St Pancras. They were her first tangible link to him. She plucked at the rubber band, peeled it off, and flipped through the cards again. She came again to the card for the engineering consultancy, and realized that her discovery of the medical note on its reverse—cardiomyopathy—had distracted her from the obvious question. What was a card for an engineering consultancy doing among a pile of business cards for medical professionals?

  In a burst of pique, she drew her phone and dialed the number on the card.

  In no time she was talking to the proprietor. ETN, it turned out, was very small—a mere handful of employees and the owner—specializing in niche automation and design projects.

  It was nearing the end of the work day on the other side of the globe in Perth, Australia, but the owner’s manner noticeably changed when Marten raised the name of Jack Griffen.

  “Yes, I know Jack,” he replied.

  “Why would he have your business card?”

  “We did business.” He laughed.

  “What kind of business?”

  “We collaborated on a little device. Jack had some ideas. Called the project his Roald Dahl.”

  “Roald Dahl?” This conversation was making less sense than Marten had hoped.

  “The children’s author, Road Dahl? Willy Wonka?”

  “Yes, of course, I know who Roald Dahl is, but what has he got to do with the project you undertook with Jack Griffen?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Who did you say you work for again, Mrs Lacroix?”

  “UK Police. This is above board.”

  “Is Jack in trouble?”

  “If he is, we’re trying to get him out of it.” And behind bars.

  “It’s just that the project is a little sensitive. Jack was referring to Roald Dahl’s quest to design medical interventions to combat his son’s epilepsy—Dahl hired a miniature steam engine craftsman to design a cranial shunt.”

  Marten was still confused. “Jack doesn’t have a son.”

  “Correct. We designed and prototyped a device for monitoring his—Jack’s—heart. It’s a kind of watch that monitors sensors to alert the wearer to imminent cardiac arrest. The hardware is fast becoming consumer grade now—with the Apples and Microsofts of the world—but the algorithms for making sense of the data, and its connection to GPS-based emergency response are still novel. Jack named it the Medline. He wears it 24/7 and charges—”

  “Wait.” A thought occurred to Marten. “GPS? Could we use that to find him?”

  “Oh, I see. No, no; Jack was always very clear on the parameters there. He’s very security conscious, is our Jack.” And he chuckled, perhaps thinking that was uncharacteristically real-world for an academic. “The only time you’d get a fix on the watch’s location by design would be if it fired a distress on the emergency band, if he’s in range of a cell tower.”

  “That sounds promising?”

  “Well, at that point Jack is having—Wait a minute. I can show you . . .”

  Marten heard the muted clatter of a computer keyboard, then a different voice spoke in her ear: “My name is Jack Griffen. I am unable to speak. This is a recorded message. I am having a heart attack—”

  Hearing the voice of her quarry sent a tingle through Marten, before the recording clicked off. The engineer spoke again. “We burned that audio sample into the firmware. It would get routed to the nearest response center with a location attached, just like if you or me dialed emergency. But like he said, at that point he’s having a heart attack.”

  Minutes later when the platform of Moorgate Station slid into view, Marten was still ruminating. If Griffen hadn’t slid into psychosis, or snapped after a recent traumatic event, what did that leave?

  Marten couldn’t escape the depressing conclusion: he’s just a homicidal dickhead.

  38

  “So you’re a librarian, yeah?”

  She said it.

  My gaze slid sideways to look at the woman behind the wheel—Iona? Elsa? For a moment I warred with myself over what answer to give. I was tired. It would be so much easier to just nod.

  “No,” I said. “Not a librarian. A professor of literature.”

  Her mouth tugged down at the corners in an expression that meant she was skeptical, or else had no idea what I was talking about and didn’t want to be rude.

  “And you want to visit this Bohemian Library—“

  “Bodleian Library.”

  “—Bodleian Library because it has good books?”

  “It has all the books. By an act of
parliament in the 1600s, it’s legally entitled to a free copy of every book published in England.”

  “Can’t they just . . .” Her fingers flickered above the steering wheel. “You know, Kindle it these days. EBooks are so much easier on the hands.” She rolled her eyes in a comradely fashion.

  Let it go, came that voice, although even it sounded tired and defeated.

  “Some of the books in the library are hundreds of years old. The very rub of their pages tell us about their owners, about technology, society long ago. The oldest is a text on papyrus, preserved in ash from the eruption of Vesuvius. That’s nearly two thousand years old.” (Part of me had forgotten that the Bodleian was my excuse; ‘You’re trying to save Jane’s life, remember. This isn’t about books.’). “A draft of Shelley’s Frankenstein—the germ of the Science Fiction genre—is in the collection.”

  “Uh-huh. And this library is?”

  “Middle of Oxford, on the university campus.”

  “I can drop you near the Tesco’s. Short walk from there, I’d guess.”

  Her comment jarred me, reminded me again that I was the recipient of another act of kindness. I promised myself to drop the lecturing tone.

  As it turned out I didn’t need to. Her left hand scrabbled for the radio dial. Apparently she had run out of questions.

  She found the button for a preset station, and a song by Simple Minds filled the tiny car. She ramped the volume until the song drowned the whine of the car’s over-taxed engine. She started singing, and for a horrible moment I thought she was going to turn to me and count me in.

  The noise washed through me as I stared at a wall of yellow-flecked green streaming past the window. Maybe I dozed. It took a few seconds for the newsbreak to percolate through my hazy thoughts.

  “. . . who the press are dubbing ‘The Intercontinental Killer’.”

  She reached over and bumped the volume higher.

  “Police have begun a manhunt for Jack Griffen, the Australian man believed responsible for a spate of violent crimes, including the murder of a Hong Kong student. Citizens are advised to be on the lookout for Griffen, last seen entering the UK at St Pancras station. Griffen is six foot two inches, of slight build, brown hair . . .”