by Ashley Dyer
Dedication
For Murf
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
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Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Ashley Dyer
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
A man strides down a moonlit alley, his heels echoing like stones dropped on cobbles. He is twenty-two or twenty-three, young enough to take his invulnerability for granted, perhaps. He is yet to learn that a lone male walking the backstreets of Liverpool is never as safe as he imagines. The cocksure swagger that shields him from hard cases and shadow-creepers this side of night cannot protect him from the hooded figure who waits, unseen, in a doorway.
He senses the presence and in a practiced glance that would serve as warning in the bars of better lit, more populous streets, he sees the figure, and a tremor of uncertainty passes quickly over his face.
Is it the stillness of the strange apparition that makes him miss his stride, or perhaps the facelessness of the threat? Darkness seems to fold in on itself in this quarter, at this hour, and neither eyes, nor a face, are visible under the hood.
The figure steps out into a thin slice of moonlight, and the young man’s shoulders twitch as if a finger has traced the length of his spine. He takes his hands from his pockets and readies himself to fight or flee. He is not afraid of face-to-face confrontation, but this threat is sly, insinuating. It matches his footfalls, echoes the echoes of every step he takes. Fear seeps into his heart.
He quickens his pace, but the hooded figure casts a long shadow. Darkness seems to ooze from it like evil intent. The shadow creeps closer and closer, flowing like poured smoke.
He half turns as the shadow catches his heel and his eyes flash with fear.
The shadow engulfs him; darkness falls.
The lights go up. A man stands on a semicircular stage. The camera pulls back to reveal a studio audience. It switches to an overhead view. A second camera swoops in on a wire, focusing on the man, as the screen behind him becomes awash with binary code, running down the screen like water.
“I am Professor Mick Tennent, and this is Fact or Fable?”
The presenter is tall and lean, his gray hair at odds with the youthful energy that seems to crackle off him. A ticker tape crawls along the bottom of the screen, revealing the episode title: “Statistical Uncertainty—Learn to Think Outside the Box.”
“Liverpool is a city in fear,” he says over the audience’s applause. “In just six months, twelve men aged between twenty-two and twenty-eight have vanished without a trace.”
The backscreen lights up and images of the missing appear in succession, their faces expanding on the screen for a brief, bright moment before vanishing again into the darkness.
“Theories abound,” Tennent says. “A ‘time slip,’ which transports the missing back in time . . .”
As if the audience couldn’t possibly imagine this preposterous scenario, the screen runs a clip of a male actor, his back to the audience, walking toward a busy street corner in the Liverpool city center. As he reaches the intersection, his image fractures in lines of interference, and he vanishes.
“Criminal gangs who prey on the vulnerable, stealing their valuables and disposing of the bodies.”
As this second reconstruction fades, Tennent pauses.
“Now, a new contender: a sinister figure locals call ‘The Ferryman.’”
An image of the faceless, hooded figure looms like a threat on the screen behind him.
“Is a serial killer really stalking the streets of Liverpool?” He gestures over his shoulder to the dark, hooded male. “Is Liverpool’s ‘Ferryman’ Fact . . . or Fable?”
Staring straight into the camera, he says, “You decide.”
1
Day 1
Ruth Lake was working at her desk when DCI Carver appeared at the door. He had lost weight in the last few months—signed off as unfit for duty for the first two. A serious head injury and a bullet in the chest had put his return to work in serious doubt for a time, yet here he was. And on the whole, he was doing okay.
“What’s up?” Ruth said.
Carver frowned. “Not sure.”
Ruth lifted her chin in acknowledgment but didn’t comment. With no clarification forthcoming, she said, “Want a lift home?”
Carver was on a phased return to work, and not yet declared fit to drive.
“No . . .” He had an otherworldly look since his injuries—a dreamy, slightly unfocused gaze, as if he permanently had something on his mind. But looks can deceive—and Ruth was one of very few who knew that in some ways Carver was sharper than he’d ever been.
“So it’s case related?” Ruth prompted, after he’d remained silent for another half minute.
“You could say that.”
She rested her chin on her hand. “Oh, you’re going to make me guess. Tell me it’s another urban myth—I like those, they’re fun.”
Carver had brought Ruth in to help with a Missing Persons case review. Of the twelve men who had vanished from Liverpool over the last six months, four were last seen around Bold Street and Central Station, an area of the city that had a reputation for “time slips”—at least among Twilight Zone enthusiasts. One local hack had even written a book on it.
Carver handed her a printout of an e-mail. The message read: “The Ferryman is no fable.”
“Urban myth it is,” she said.
“Sign out a fleet car, would you?” he said. “Nothing too flash.”
“Okay.” She turned the sheet over. “I don’t see any directions—where are we going?”
He handed her a second e-mail. It read, “Await instructions.”
She lifted the page to her nose and sniffed.
“I know,” he said. “Smells like bullshit. But look at the subject line.”
It read: “Statistical Uncertainty: Learn to Think Outside the Box”—the title of a Fact or Fable? TV program about
the disappearances.
“Digitally signed F,” she said. “Nice dramatic touch. Obvious windup.” She handed the sheets back.
“Maybe. Did you watch the program?”
“Yeah.” Of course she had—Ruth was a former CSI—science programs were her go-to TV fix at the end of a long day. Plus, Mick Tennent was a prominent statistician: she’d wanted to hear his take on their case.
“What did you think?” Carver asked.
“He rubbished the speculation, which is helpful,” she said. “His main argument was that people drop out for all kinds of reasons, and the numbers of missing males were about what you would expect in a city of nine hundred thousand souls.”
“I meant what did you think of him?”
“He was convincing. His tone’s a bit snarky—but that’s Tennent’s trademark.”
Carver nodded, still thoughtful, and she realized he’d used the past tense.
“Has something happened to him?”
“The day after the program went out, Tennent presented a lunchtime lecture at the Wellcome Trust in London,” Carver said. “He called his secretary at King’s College in the Strand to let her know he’d just finished. Told her that he’d be making a short stop to meet someone on his way in, but he’d be back in time for a meeting at the university later that afternoon. He hasn’t been seen or heard from since.”
“I’ll have the car ready in five minutes,” she said.
Ruth Lake watched in the rearview mirror as her boss tried to walk a straight line across the police headquarters car park. It was a valiant effort, and he almost made it, but by six in the evening Greg Carver had usually exhausted his reserves of energy, and twice she saw him brush his fingers lightly along the bodywork of a parked car to steady himself. She waited in silence while he eased himself into the passenger seat and buckled up.
“Do you know where we’re going yet?” she said.
“Stone Street. D’you know it? It’s near Stanley Dock.”
“I can get us thereabouts.”
The last week in March—officially springtime—but it was already dark, and a sleety rain spattered the windscreen as they turned right, joining a slow-moving stream of commuters heading home. The first mile along the riverfront was travel-brochure glossy, lit in a carefully chosen palette of blues, orange, and gold. But just past the honey-lit façade of the Liver Buildings, the road darkened, their view of the water barred by a fifteen-foot wall. A mile farther on, Ruth glanced across at her boss; his eyes were closed.
“It must be coming up soon,” she said.
Detective Chief Inspector Carver checked his smartphone and directed her into a narrow, unlit street, hemmed in on both sides by crumbling nineteenth-century light-industry units. A large storage warehouse loomed at the easterly end. Crossing a busy arterial road, they dipped down into Stone Street. A brand-new commercial unit took up a sizable plot on the corner, the rest was a huddle of ancient lockups in danger of collapse. They trundled toward a railway arch, passing an abandoned car. Every window had been smashed, the wheels stolen, the roof caved in by a chunk of concrete, no doubt dumped off the railway bridge.
“You sure about this?” she said.
He frowned. “Yes.”
“Any clue what we’re looking for?”
“The message said follow the lights.”
Ruth noticed the slight evasiveness in his words. Carver didn’t want to preempt the facts, but he was expecting something bad. She ducked her head, trying to squint up at the buildings, but the street was too narrow to see beyond the ground floor, and sleet blurred the view. “I’ll have to park,” she said, glad she’d used a fleet car—and one of the low-end models, too. Even so, she rolled forward until they were under the railway arch. No point in taking chances.
They walked on for twenty yards, collars turned up against a biting northeasterly.
“See that?” Carver asked.
“I see it,” Ruth said.
Colored lights pulsed up ahead.
Twenty yards on, they came upon a three-story 1960s commercial building. Set back from the road behind aluminum fencing, it was braced by scaffolding and swathed in plastic and tarps. Behind the sheeting, the lights phased from red to green, through blue, to purple.
On the first stage of scaffolding, a twelve-by-ten-foot section of tarp had been cut down to reveal a large wooden packing crate, open at the front. Inside the crate, they saw that the source of the light was a continuous strip of colored LEDs. Suspended from thin wires attached to the roof of the casing, three gleaming disks of plexiglass twisted in the wind.
“Gate’s open,” Ruth said.
They moved inside the perimeter fence and took a closer look.
Embedded in each disk was a flat, oval shape, convoluted at the outer edges, with a void shaped like a cat snout in the center.
Carver said, “Jesus—is that—?”
“Sections of brain—human, I think.”
“Is it real?”
“I don’t know . . .” Lake blinked against the disorientating flicker of the lights and the icy sting of sleet. The sections looked ominously organic. “Yeah,” she said. “I think it’s real.”
Carver called out, announcing their presence. No reply. He started toward a stepladder at the end of the scaffolding.
“Greg,” Ruth said.
His shoulders tensed and he turned a little too loosely, compensating with a slight sideways step to right himself. “I’m fine,” he said.
That was debatable, but she let it go. “If it is real, the victim is way past help,” she said. “We need to preserve the scene.”
The tension in his shoulders relaxed a little. “Okay.”
While Carver called in Scientific Support, Ruth Lake headed back to the car to pick up a roll of crime scene tape. Ahead, a figure appeared out of the shadows of the railway arch and Ruth felt a prickle of unease. This was the kind of street that would be quiet even during the day; at night, it became a no-man’s-land, where only the foolhardy and the wicked would venture. Her first thought was a local scally, sizing up their car for salable items to scavenge.
“Police,” she yelled. A second figure joined the first, then another. She glanced over her shoulder toward the easterly end of the street. Five or six were heading toward her from that direction. Two more rounded the corner, and Ruth called to Carver, “Boss, you might want to draft in some uniforms. We’ve got company.”
“Police!” she yelled again. “Stay where you are.”
They kept coming. Both ends of the street, at least twenty of them now.
The first lot had reached the car. If she moved toward them, the others would reach the gate before she could stop them. She did the only thing she could do: retreated to the crime scene, barring entry through the gate.
Carver joined her. “Where the hell did they come from?” he murmured.
“I do not know,” she breathed.
He yelled, “Stay back!” and the crowd halted six feet away.
Casco baton in hand, Ruth picked on a tall guy in a beanie hat. “This is a crime scene,” she said. “You need to move back.”
He gave way by half a pace.
Carver spoke quietly into his phone.
“Hey, I know you.” Beanie Hat turned to the others. “I know him—he’s the one that got shot.” The rest of the crowd paid no attention; they were watching the light show.
“What is that?” someone asked.
“Looks like bits of brain,” another said.
Exclamations of disgust, a burst of nervous laughter. Someone swore. But the shock didn’t dampen their enthusiasm for long: in an instant, it seemed that every one of them had a mobile phone in their hands. They got busy, enlarging, photographing, and video-recording the scene.
A sudden flash. The audience flinched as one. Ruth turned.
A line of text began streaming in LEDs across the bottom of the crate: “Statistical Uncertainty: Learn to Think Outside the Box.”
Ruth La
ke glanced at Carver.
With the sound of police sirens approaching, she turned on her phone video app to record the crowd: some of the onlookers would vanish into the night as soon as the uniforms arrived on the scene. If the perpetrator was among them, they might just catch him on camera.
2
They ran a trailer for that episode of Fact or Fable? for three solid weeks. Watching it now, I have to admit it is beautifully shot. The city cast in shadow and light is reminiscent of the chiaroscuro techniques of film noir. Does the program maker have any notion that the technique is borrowed from Renaissance art, I wonder?
Perhaps not. But he/she/it caught the mood: dark alleys, reflections of light on water.
“Six months . . .”
The rich bass notes of the voice-over is backed by suspenseful string music.
“. . . Twelve men.”
A lone male figure enters the frame. Let’s call him Dillon. Although it could be John, or Tyler, or any one of another half dozen. For the sake of illustration, we’ll stick with Dillon. I watched him walk his plump girlfriend home. They cooed like doves, kissed like virgins, and then he did the gentlemanly thing: he headed toward his cold bachelor pad—and fell off the cliff edge between life and death. All because he decided to hoof it home, instead of getting jiggy with Miss Piggy, his fat amore.
The double irony is this: she was perfectly safe—from me, anyway. And if he’d been less the gentleman with his porky princess, he might still be alive today.
On-screen, a young man strides down a moonlit alley, his footsteps ringing out. Behind him, a hooded figure casts a long shadow; it creeps closer and closer, finally overtaking him. He begins to turn, horror-movie-victim style, and his eyes flash, wide with fear. The shadow engulfs him and the screen fades to black.
Very dramatic. But in reality, they never saw me coming.
Tennent introduces the theme, and for the next few minutes the narrator recaps the story: the disappearances; photographs and sound bites from anxious families; tearful encomiums from the friends left behind. Fear stalking the streets of Liverpool; hysteria and paranoia among young males in the city. They deal with time slips first, needing to get that nonsense off the slate fast—this is supposed to be a serious scientific program, after all.
