by Ashley Dyer
Then Tennent talks through the stats of assaults, stabbings, and shootings in the city during the past five years, listing alongside the victims of violent crime impressive numbers who’ve died of drug overdoses, or alcoholic poisoning, or been dragged under buses, or mangled in car crashes. Fact or Fable? is all about balance.
Smug and disparaging, he tells his rapt audience how many men aged twenty to thirty-five go missing every year, how they are found, the duration of time missing. Reasons for disappearance: drunken binges; the call of the wild; escape from relationships and responsibilities; depression; drugs (somber face); and suicide.
He concludes that there is no evidence that the so-called Ferryman exists.
I cut him off midsnarl, click to a recording of my exhibit on Stone Street just before the police arrived. Three disks, three slices of life—irrefutable evidence that the Ferryman is no fable.
3
Day 2, 7 a.m. Briefing
Major Incident Room
DCI Greg Carver had called together a team of detectives and support staff and would draft in more when he’d assessed the scale of the inquiry. He left his office, closed the door behind him, and leaned against it for a moment. Okay. Time to get back in the saddle.
Boosting himself from the door, he strode down the corridor to the seminar room they were using as a temporary base.
The room fell silent as he entered, and he felt every pair of eyes on him. Most would be pondering on what had happened to him only a few months earlier, many assessing his fitness, a few no doubt speculating on how long he would last in the job.
He picked up the projector remote and clicked to the first PowerPoint slide: an enlarged image of the macabre scene he and Ruth Lake had been directed to the night before.
“The pathologist’s preliminary examination confirms those are sections of human brain.” He located Crime Scene Manager John Hughes. “John, what are the chances of getting viable DNA samples?”
“It depends on how much preservative he used and how deep it penetrated the tissues.” The CSM had the craggy features of a born outdoorsman. He was calm and unshowy, but thorough. “These are fairly thick slices, so there’s a chance the chemicals didn’t get all the way through,” Hughes finished.
“Which is good news?”
“It’d leave more of the DNA intact, so potentially, yes.”
Carver clicked to the next slide. This photograph had been taken in natural light, each disk laid flat against a white background. To Carver, they looked like inkblot butterflies. The first two had a slightly pink wash, although there was a hint of blue toward the edge of the lobes in the second section. The third section was paler than the other two. “Presumably he used some kind of stain to make them that color?”
Hughes nodded. “And that won’t help the DNA profiling. But we’ll ask the lab for low template analysis, just to be sure.”
“Prints? Trace?”
“Nothing from the disk surfaces,” Hughes said. “There’s a chance we’ll get something off the lighting equipment he used, or the scaffolding, but I wouldn’t hold out too much hope: rain is bad enough, but it was sleeting last night. Sleet sticks, then slides off, taking any useful trace with it.”
“What about the storage box and the gantry he hung the disks from?” Carver asked. “They were protected from the weather.”
“They are a better bet,” Hughes conceded.
Carver nodded. The message was clear: they would just have to wait until the evidence was processed. “Did the techs have any luck tracing the tip-off e-mails sent to my account?”
Hughes shook his head. “They were routed through an anonymous server.”
“Interesting that he sent them direct to your e-mail account, and not to the Contact Center.”
Heads turned. Carver introduced Doctor Kris Yi, forensic psychologist, senior lecturer at the University of Liverpool, consultant to Ashworth Hospital. Ashworth had a notoriety of its own as a secure psychiatric hospital that had housed some of the UK’s most dangerous and violent killers, including child killer Ian Brady, and Carver saw curiosity on the faces of his team.
Yi, a trim, besuited figure of around forty, acknowledged the police and forensics specialists in the room with a courteous nod. “Go to the Merseyside Police website, you’re directed to a generic ‘contact us’ page,” he said. “Google ‘contact Merseyside Police’ you get the Contact Center e-mail address. Yet the e-mails were directed to you, personally.”
He’s saying I was targeted.
“I must’ve handed out scores of business cards during the previous inquiry; every one of them carried my direct e-mail and work mobile.” Carver saw a flare of light and color around the seated detectives and blinked to try and shift it. Auras, the neurologist called these light shows; one of many aftereffects of the brain injury he’d sustained during that case, and he knew the colors represented his colleagues’ complicated emotions.
He glanced down at his notes, intending to move to the next point. But he couldn’t see the words on the page. When he looked up to address the room again, an afterimage of light persisted in the center of his field of view; his light show had morphed into a migraine. Alarmed, Carver realized he couldn’t see the faces of his team and felt his brow and neck break out in a cold sweat.
Ruth Lake said, “Thanks, boss,” as though he’d given her the nod. “Can you click to the next slide?” Carver obliged. Dizzy and nauseated, he didn’t risk looking at the screen, but he recalled that Ruth had supplied a still from her video recording of the onlookers: upward of thirty people, all holding phones up to record the scene.
“They came around the corner like something out of The Walking Dead,” Ruth said. “And that street isn’t likely to be on any list of ten cool places to visit in Liverpool. So where did they come from?”
“Social media,” Hughes said. “Last night, someone created new accounts on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter using the name ‘The Ferryman.’ He posted the same messages exactly fifteen minutes after he e-mailed them to DCI Carver. And he uploaded an image of the scene that was clearly taken before you or The Walking Dead got there.”
Carver was relieved to see that Ruth was beginning to emerge out of the blodge of green light in the center of his vision; the blind spot was shrinking.
“He’s getting most hits on Instagram,” Hughes went on. “Calls himself @FerrymanArt.”
“Do we know it’s the same person?” Carver asked.
“There’s no way of telling. But he uploaded a one-minute video that must have been recorded before anyone got there. He hashtagged you, Merseyside Police”—he glanced at Dr. Yi—“and your last case.”
By now, Carver’s vision had completely cleared, and he saw that Yi was frowning.
“Problem, Doctor?” he asked.
“This person seems to court notoriety, yet he timed his posts so that you would arrive at the scene before he posted the image to his followers. He wanted you to get there first.”
Another hint that the killer’s targeting me. Best to meet it head-on.
“You’re saying he’s got some kind of fixation on me?”
“I wouldn’t put it that strongly.” Yi glanced down at his mobile phone. “But you are mentioned on every one of FerrymanArt’s Instagram postings: it’s fairly obvious he’s piggybacking on your media profile to build his following.”
Dr. Yi’s message was clear: if he was a target, he was a liability.
Well, sod that, Carver thought. “Did you see the text streamer under his nasty little exhibit?”
“Text streamer?”
“‘Learn to Think Outside the Box,’” Carver said. “It’s the episode title of a Fact or Fable? program that ran several nights ago; caused quite a stir.”
“I’m not sure I follow,” Yi said.
“You said yourself he wants notoriety—he used me, and the TV program, and ‘The Ferryman’ moniker because they had ready-made hype he could clip like a badge to his virtual lapel.”
Carver shrugged. “He’s media-savvy, that’s all.”
Dr. Yi leaned back in his chair. He didn’t seem convinced. Perhaps he’d noticed that Carver had left out one important detail: that the presenter of “Learn to Think Outside the Box” was currently missing.
Ruth Lake came to his rescue again: “Okay, so the Web-based stuff doesn’t look promising, as yet, but let’s look at the disks again,” she said, turning to the CSM. “Are there traces of him, or his location, inside the plexiglass?”
“We’re looking into that,” Hughes said. “If fibers or dust got into the mix, it would be fixed there. And we’ll do an HPLC analysis on the stains; if they’re medical stains, he would’ve had to have sourced them through specialist suppliers.”
Relieved that he could rejoin the discussion with attention off him, Carver said, “As soon as we have the analysis, we can start canvassing them.”
Yi said, “Do we have a cause of death, yet?”
“The postmortem is slated for later today,” Carver said.
“A note of caution on that,” Hughes said. “With such a small amount of tissue, it’s going to be hard to determine cause of death.”
They seemed to be butting up against the need to wait for forensic results at every turn. It was Carver’s job to ensure his team made productive use of that downtime, but he detected a sludgy gray darkness beginning to shroud the heads and faces of a few in the room: they were defeated before they’d even got started.
“All right,” he said. “What do we have that we can work with right now?”
Ruth lifted her chin, indicating the crowd of ghouls at the scene. “Potential witnesses,” she said. “We can start tracking down the ones who got away.”
“Good.” Carver pointed to the screen. “The perpetrator would’ve had to have transported a heavy box, batteries, and lighting equipment to the scene. So we look at traffic and security cameras in the area.”
“It’d take a while to set the display up,” a ginger-haired detective constable offered. This was DC Tom Ivey. “We should talk to business owners, find out if there was any unusual activity in the street in the last week or so.”
“Excellent,” Carver said, and the young detective flushed brick red.
Carver looked around the room; typically, the variations of light and color were elusive, best caught from the corner of the eye, as you might catch a glimpse of a star cluster in the night sky. But when the mood was strong, Carver’s auras lingered. Right now, he was pleased to see that the gray mantle was lifting.
“Who’s doing the work on the building demolition?” someone asked. “We need to talk to them.”
Carver gave a nod of approval. “And anyone who’s been working at the site as well. DS Lake will act as task manager on this.”
With his squad motivated, Carver felt strong enough to bring Dr. Yi back into the conversation. “You said this individual wants attention,” he said. “He’s obviously willing to go to some lengths to make sure he gets it. Does the scene tell you anything that might help us find him?”
Yi took a moment to consider before answering. “The means of presentation is artistic,” he said.
That got a few mumbles of protest.
“At least to his way of thinking,” Yi added with an apologetic dip of his chin. “And judging by the Instagram name, he does seem to want people to regard this as art.” He studied the screen for a few moments. “A few questions you might consider: Why did he choose to exhibit the brain, and not some other part of the body, like the heart, for instance? Does he see himself as an intellectual? Or is he making a sly reference to some aspect of the victim’s life? Did he exhibit those parts of the brain for a particular reason?”
“Meaning?” Carver said.
“I’m not a neurologist,” Yi said, “but we all know that different parts of the brain have different functions.”
Carver glanced at the screen with a queasy familiarity: he had seen images just like it, many times during the course of his treatment.
“And there are three disks,” Yi was saying, “three parts to the . . . exhibit, for want of a better word. The number three has powerful cultural and mystical meaning—from the Three Graces in Greek mythology, to the Holy Trinity in the Christian tradition. There are parallels in Judaism, in Norse mythology, in Taoism, in Wicca, too—the triple goddess: Maiden, Mother, and Crone.”
“Bad luck comes in threes, and all . . .” someone muttered.
A ripple of uneasy laughter followed.
“It’s our job to make sure it doesn’t in this instance,” Carver said firmly.
4
Stone Street is closed to traffic. The razzmatazz of flashing lights and emergency vehicles from the previous night is a distant memory, and just two uniform police guard the crime scene tape at either end of the scene. A single Scientific Support Unit van is parked a couple of yards inside the outer cordon.
The mood is quiet, businesslike; CSIs come and go, carrying plastic tote boxes. Of course, they will find nothing.
The scene is flat and gray in daylight; so much of the glamour of the piece was dependent on the contrast of light and dark.
Two TV crews and a few newspaper journalists shiver at the boundary, and I am grateful for the warmth of my car. I’m in the Toyota this morning; the van safely hidden close by, but where they will never think to look. Occasionally the reporters turn to gesture down the street toward my exhibit. For now, it’s only local news coverage, but that will change.
I take a moment to check my Instagram account: comments are coming in at the rate of one every thirty seconds. My followers have surged from zero to seven thousand in twelve hours, with more following me, and “liking” and “sharing” the story, all the time. I check the profiles of the particularly vocal and find the usual: wild enthusiasm and energy coupled with ignorance. Worshippers of the weird, who have no respect for the history and provenance of the work. I take a breath and let it go. Irritating though they are, they will direct others to my art and must be tolerated.
A CSI pauses at the back of the police van, dragging the hood of her disposable oversuit down and lowering her mask. She takes a grateful gasp of cool air before lifting one foot to peel off an overshoe. She freezes, just for a second, then straightens and turns away. The police constable at the cordon glances in my direction and my heart begins to thud.
Time to go. I pull away from the street corner and slide into the steady stream of morning traffic, blending in with the anonymous and the invisible.
5
Carver sat in his office, watching a video of the crime scene recorded by the Scientific Support Unit the previous night. The footage started at the outer cordon; keeping to the common approach path marked out by a member of the team who had gone ahead of her, the CSI swept slowly left and right before panning upward to the exhibit. She’d zoomed in on the storage box with its grim cargo of disks, jangling in the wind off the bay. The display lights transitioned from red to green, to blue, to purple. Newly sensitized to color and light by his brain injury, Carver wondered briefly if the colors meant anything to the killer.
Spinning on their wires, the disks seemed to disappear as they turned edge-on, then reappear as the light shone on their faces. The brain tissue, fixed in plexiglass, like inkblots in a nightmarish Rorschach test, and their constant motion made him slightly queasy. The image blurred as spots of sleet hit the camera lens, and the CSI gave it a quick wipe, then focused in on one of the disks. At that instant, the LEDs cut out, and Carver saw his own face reflected by the disk; trapped, it seemed, inside it.
Darkness.
Something skulks in the shadows just beyond his field of view.
He can’t see; can’t move.
Turn your head. He tries, fails.
He’s paralyzed, unable to fend off the malevolent force, knowing it is close enough to touch, but is powerless to act.
Sleep paralysis, he tells himself. Wake up!
A rap on the door.
&nb
sp; The darkness lifts. He blinks, his eyes watering with the sudden influx of light, and he feels a slight tingling in his fingertips.
Another sharp rap, then Ruth Lake poked her head around the door.
“Greg?”
It was just a dream. But he didn’t really believe he had been asleep, and if what he’d just experienced wasn’t sleep paralysis, then what the hell was it?
“You okay?” Ruth said.
“Fine. Must have nodded off.” Ruth had seen him at his worst; he could admit minor weaknesses to her, knowing they would go no further. He closed his laptop without looking at the screen. “What’s up?”
Ruth didn’t answer at first, but her brown eyes fixed on him, and he met her gaze. She was reading him—a default position with her, reading people—a reflex, like breathing.
“The pathologist rang,” she said at last. “His written report will take a day, but he’s ready to talk someone through his findings. Should I head over there?”
Carver stood, reaching to take his jacket from the chair. “I’ll go with you.”
The room tilted hard left, and he put a hand out to steady himself, scattering papers and pens from his desk to the floor.
Ruth stepped smartly inside and shut the door behind her, scooping up the mess in one smooth and graceful action.
Carver left his jacket where it was and lowered himself back into the chair.
“Maybe I’ll sit this one out,” he said.
“Sure.”
He was grateful not to see concern or anxiety in Ruth’s eyes. “Still keeping up with the physio?” she asked.
Physiotherapy was a required segment of the agreed rehab plan that the neurosciences center and Merseyside Police Human Resources and Occupational Health departments had put together as a condition of his phased return to work.
She was entitled to ask the question, under the circumstances, but he countered with a question of his own: “How about you—finished with the laser therapy?”
