by Ashley Dyer
“You know—that thing with the faces.”
He wanted her to say “super-recognizer,” but she wasn’t going to fall into that trap. Saying you’re better than 98 percent of the population at remembering faces was too much like bragging, and “braggart” was not a label you wanted pinned to your lapel in any cop shop.
So she tilted her head, said, “That ‘thing’?”
“They say you know everyone in this building.”
“Not true,” she said.
He smiled, and she saw he was enjoying himself. “My mistake.” He took a moment to rephrase. “They say that you know everyone in this building by sight.”
It would be churlish to deny it outright.
“Maybe,” she said.
“Cool.”
That surprised her: most men thought it freaky, rather than cool.
“A lot of cops are good with faces,” she said aloud.
“Not me,” he said. “Half the time I can’t recognize my own reflection in the shaving mirror.”
“You want to lay off the juice, Rob,” she said.
He surprised her again, this time with a laugh. Most men would have taken offense.
“Well,” he said, “I can see you’re busy . . .”
“Yeah,” she said.
The speculative look in his eye, the quick glance away, the sharp intake of breath all told her what was coming.
“I don’t suppose—”
“No,” she said.
“You don’t know what I was going to say.”
“Yes, I do.” He was going to ask her out. She saw it, just as clearly as she saw the three stripes of rank on his epaulettes.
He lifted his chin and stared at her for a second, then he huffed a laugh. “Okay, I’ll let you get back to it,” he said.
“Thanks for this, though,” she said, to his retreating back. Rob Rayburn was a good sport, she had to give him that. But work relationships were always a bad idea, and that went double for a woman.
The Matrix van’s superior CCTV technology produced much better-quality footage than the mobile phone videos she had been watching, and within minutes of Rayburn leaving, Ruth had worked out an efficient strategy. It was easier to work backward from the Matrix video of the crowd gathered on the gymnasium car park, retro-matching individuals to faces recorded at the first crime scene, scouring the footage for anyone who seemed unnaturally focused or still, or who seemed to be relishing the crowd’s appreciation of the show.
A good number of groupies appeared in both recordings. She made a note of the time stamp on each, screen-grabbing the relevant images ready for printing and distribution. Alongside the simply curious and thrill seekers were the usual proportion of troublemakers, petty thieves, and drug peddlers you’d expect to see at any public gathering. Ruth’s exceptional ability meant she could recognize faces even if she’d seen them only once—months, or even years, before. She’d spotted some wolves among the sheep at the second scene: a couple of bail absconders, a pickpocket, and a man wanted for sexual assault. She made a note to send officers to the pickpocket’s house. The absconders would be trickier, but with luck, they would turn up at another scene, and this time, the police would have their photos to hand. If nothing else, they would clear up a few outstanding crimes.
The majority of the crowd were there for the thrill of it, though—the young and trendy in their designer gear stood alongside graffiti artists wearing paint splashes on their street clothes like badges of honor. Ruth wondered if their stencil graffitist was among them. A few entrepreneurs were plying a more honest trade: she saw someone selling selfie sticks and another had an armful of T-shirts emblazoned with the F logo.
Carver appeared at the door, and Ruth gave him a nod.
“Got a minute?” he asked.
“Sure.”
He checked the room. They were alone except for the one detective who was still grinding through hours of recordings and traffic cam stills, hoping to find the white Ford Transit used to abduct the professor.
Even so, she saw Carver decide that they needed greater privacy.
“My office in five?” he said.
“I’ll come now.” She glanced at the screen, ready to note the time stamp before logging out, and her eye snagged on a face in the crowd. Her heart stopped.
It can’t be.
From across the room Carver said, “Ruth?” She heard concern in his voice. “Are you all right?”
Ruth doubted if Carver would make sense of the storm of emotion she felt right now, but he would recognize a lie. Carver read lies in shades of bile green.
She said, “Nauseated, that’s all.”
That much was true: her heart thrummed in her chest and she fought a wave of nausea.
“Watching those things for a few hours would give you travel sickness,” she went on, listening to herself burble when he of all people knew that she was usually laconic; explaining, when she never explained.
Carver locked gazes with her, but she switched her attention to the computer, took a screen grab, and saved the image, trying to make it look like a normal log-out.
A moment later, he was at her shoulder. He stared at the screen, a slight furrow between his brows, but she’d already shut down.
“So what’s the news?” she asked, a little too brightly.
His eyes flicked to hers. His troubled expression told Ruth that he had seen right through her attempt at distraction.
“Let’s finish this in my office,” he said.
17
Carver didn’t say a word all the way from the MIR to his office.
He closed the door after Ruth and asked her to sit, moving behind the desk, leaning across it, his fingertips braced on the desktop. “What’s going on?”
“I . . . don’t—”
“Stop, Ruth. I can see you’re lying.”
He seemed to look past her, but Ruth knew that he was staring at the air around her head, seeking out stray gleams of Judas light that would tell him she was concealing a lie behind a truth. She slowed her breathing, relaxed her shoulders, and said nothing.
He sighed. “You’re not going to tell me, are you?”
“Nothing to tell,” she said.
He shook his head and lowered himself into his chair. Carver was pushing himself beyond the limits of his delicate state of health, and Ruth suppressed a pang of guilt that she was adding to his troubles. “So,” she said. “What’s this about?”
“What?”
“The news,” she said.
“Oh.” He passed a hand over his eyes. “Blood analysis shows the scall you arrested last night was five times over the legal limit for THC.”
“We already knew those two had been at the weed,” she said.
“But we didn’t know that your arrestee was half man, half kite.”
He paused and she had the sense that words had passed between Carver and her rock-climbing toker. That a deal had been struck. “I’m guessing he won’t be pursuing the civil prosecution?”
“You’re in the clear,” Carver said. “On that point. But—”
His phone rang. He answered, and a moment later he gave her a sharp look.
Ruth stood, ready to leave, but Carver raised a finger to stay her.
“John.” His voice was taut. “I’m putting you on speakerphone—Ruth Lake is with me—can you repeat what you just said?”
The crime scene manager launched straight into the reason for his call. “We got a hit on IDENT1 from one of the laptops,” he said. “Tyler Matlock. He’s got a record for assault, ABH and GBH.”
The Matrix team did the door-knock, taking no chances with a man convicted of both actual and grievous bodily harm. Matlock lived on the second floor of an ex-council block, four miles east of the waterfront. The “Enforcer” battered the door off its hinges on the second swing. Five officers in body armor piled in and cleared the one-bedroom flat in under two minutes.
“Matlock isn’t here.” Sergeant Rayburn gave Ruth Lak
e an apologetic shrug. “He could be at work.”
“He’s on disability,” Ruth said. Preliminary checks said the man had been receiving personal independence payments since a car crash two years earlier.
“When did that ever stop any self-respecting Scouser from earning a dishonest crust?” Rayburn winked. “We’ll leave the CSU to do their stuff, then.”
Ruth watched him go, taking the time to give Matlock’s small sitting room a final once-over. Crime scenes weren’t her job anymore, but with three years of study and eight in the field, it was hard to break the habit of scene analysis.
It was midmorning, and sun streamed through the open curtains. Motes of dust sparkled in the wake of the assault on the place, but the flat had an atmosphere of long absence. In a room to her left, a tap dripped, ploshing into a mug or a full bowl.
A sixty-five-inch Sony Bravia took up half of one wall, and the cabinet beneath it was stacked with a Sky box, Xbox One console, and a Bose sound system that must have been the envy of his friends and the bane of his neighbors.
In the unforgiving light, she saw that a fine dust had settled on every surface, even the TV remote, and judging by the sizable dip in the seat cushion of his La-Z-Boy sofa, Matlock watched a lot of TV. A top-of-the-line gaming chair to the right of it crowded one corner, while a barbell and a stack of weight plates took up the space beneath the window. A pair of dumbbells sat next to the sofa, also lightly filmed with dust. No one had been in the place for a while.
On one wall, a full-length mirror. Arrayed around it, posters on weight training.
Ruth gave her stab vest a sharp tug, then hooked her fingers over the top to pull it away from her chest, listening to the heavy tread of the Matrix crew clomping down the stairs, delaying for a few more moments until she was sure Rayburn had gone. She said a quick hello to the CSIs logging in with the constable on duty and stepped into the hall to make way for them.
As she signed herself out of the scene, the door opposite opened. A sixtysomething woman sized her up from the doorway. Her hair was worn loose to the shoulders, dyed brown, and her face was fully made up, including ruby red lipstick and false eyelashes.
“Hi,” Ruth said. “Do you know Mr. Matlock?”
“What’s he done now?” the woman asked.
“You first,” Ruth said, softening the rebuff with a smile.
The woman folded her arms and tapped her elbow lightly with one finger, as if considering how much she was willing to say. “I wouldn’t say I know him,” she said, at last. “But I know the type.”
“Which is?”
“Let’s see some ID.”
Ruth’s police stab vest identified her as police, but she dug out her warrant card anyway and waited while the woman scrutinized it.
Handing it back, the woman opened her front door wide and tilted her head, inviting Ruth in. “This could take a bit,” she explained. “And Tyler’s a man who comes and goes—wouldn’t want him to catch me talking to the police outside his bashed-in front door.”
Her name was Maria Reilly. Ruth stood in the doorway to her tiny galley kitchen while Maria brewed an excellent dark roast and filled in some of the background on Tyler Matlock’s “type.”
“Bane of the block, he is,” she said. “When he isn’t boozing, he’s brawling. He’d steal the newspaper out your letterbox to save him a fifty-yard walk to the corner shop.”
“He lives alone, then?”
The woman looked over her shoulder. “What makes you think that?”
“All that boozing and brawling,” Ruth said. “And his flat has a definite whiff of bachelor about it.”
Maria left the coffee to drip while she warmed a jug of milk in the microwave. “Fact is, she never had much say in what went on.”
“Oh yeah?” Ruth said.
“You know the story, girl—feller thinks he’s got God-given privileges just because he’s got the right equipment in his trousers.”
“So where’s Mrs. Matlock now?”
“Walked out six months after the car crash.”
Ruth heard a note of triumph in the woman’s voice.
“What d’you know about that?”
“What d’you mean, what do I know?” Now she sounded defensive. Afraid she’d get Matlock’s wife into trouble, perhaps?
“Here—” The woman shoved a mug of coffee into Ruth’s hand. “Help yourself to milk and sugar.”
Ruth added a dash of milk and breathed the nutty aroma before taking a grateful sip, giving Maria time to calm down.
“First decent cup of coffee I’ve had all day,” she said.
Maria gave a satisfied nod, lifting her own cup to her lips.
“We’re investigating a series of murders, Maria,” Ruth said.
The woman’s eyes widened. “And you think he—?”
“We just need to locate him. And I need to know that Mrs. Matlock is okay, so anything you can tell me . . .”
Maria gazed at Ruth over the rim of her coffee cup, drumming her perfectly manicured fingernails musically on the porcelain.
“I don’t want to get her in any bother.”
Ruth didn’t respond to that, not wanting to make promises she couldn’t keep.
After a moment, Maria sighed. “What d’you wanna know?”
“Tell me about the car crash.” Ruth sensed this would be the easiest place for her to start.
“Shelly—Mrs. Matlock—was driving. He’d had a skinful—as per. Phoned her to come and fetch him from a pub out Aigburth way. This was half eleven at night. It was icy, she skidded. Nothing serious, just a bit of a fishtail, you know. He punched her in the face to remind her to pay attention. She crashed the car.”
“Mr. Matlock received compensation for his injuries,” Ruth said.
Marie arched an eyebrow. “Oh, he got compo, all right. Claimed it off her insurance. Didn’t mention the fact he’d knocked her silly a split second before they hit a lamppost. Made sure she didn’t, either.” She smiled bitterly. “She had the last laugh, though. Packed her things, cleaned out their bank account, and done a flit the day the compensation come through. The exact same week he was due to get out of hospital.”
“His flat’s well kitted out for a man on benefits,” Ruth said.
“That’ll be the compo he got off the council. That was the winter they run low on grit—he claimed they hadn’t salted the road right.”
Ruth did a quick calculation. “This’d be, what, eighteen months ago?”
“About that.”
“Has Shelly been home since?”
“This was never a home for her, love. And no, she hasn’t been back; her own mother doesn’t know where she is. Took herself out of harm’s way.”
“So you’ve no idea where she is?”
“I get the odd postcard; not signed, but they’re from Shelly all right.” Her face softened into a smile. “Always nice places.”
“It’s an extreme move, breaking ties with her family . . .” Ruth let the comment hang; an observation often yielded more than a direct question.
“Safer for her, safer for them.”
“Did he ever threaten you?”
Marie took a sip of coffee, and Ruth saw a shadow flicker behind her eyes.
“I knocked on his door, one time. He had his music blasting and him and his mates were giving it some welly after Liverpool had won a big match. Now, I was a barmaid—worked bars and pubs round here for thirty years before I retired—so I’m used to dealing with drunks and dickheads. But when I asked him, nice like, if they wouldn’t mind keeping the noise down, he stepped outside, told me he’d do whatever he effing wanted. And if I bothered him again, he’d break every finger in both my hands.”
“What a charmer.”
“Oh, that was only for starters. Said if I ever so much as looked his way he’d cut my cat into tiny pieces and post him to me in a jiffy bag.”
18
DC Ivey knocked on Carver’s office door just as Ruth Lake had finished bringing h
im up to date on Matlock. The young constable carried a Samsung tablet in one hand.
“Matlock bought all three laptops on eBay six months ago,” Ivey said. “Delivered to his address, paid for on his PayPal account, which is linked to his bank account.”
“Any other purchases?” Carver asked.
“A commercial-grade meat locker.”
“Delivered where?” Not that it was likely the Ferryman would have the thing delivered anywhere that would reveal his true identity.
“An empty shop in Walton.” The north end of the city. “The landlord says a charity calling itself Community Art rented it for a week, last October, as a pop-up gallery.”
“I’m guessing the community exhibition never happened.”
Ivey shook his head. “I canvassed the shop owners on the street. One of them remembered a large item being delivered—it stuck in his head because within a couple of hours, two guys in a white van rolled up and took the package away again.”
“Description?”
“That’s it: ‘two guys, white van.’”
“Well, someone must’ve been there to take the original delivery,” Ruth suggested. “And to let the removals men into the shop to take it away again.”
“Nobody saw them,” Ivey said. “The manufacturer put me in touch with the firm who made the delivery, and I spoke to the driver. He makes twenty or thirty deliveries a day, and this was six months ago—he couldn’t even remember the shop, never mind who signed for it.” Ivey’s light blue eyes shone with excitement. “Is Matlock our man?”
“Not necessarily,” Carver said. “We can’t rule him out as a victim yet.”
“But he isn’t on our missing persons list,” Ivey said. “He hasn’t even been reported missing.”
“Even so, he hasn’t been seen for months,” Ruth said.
“His fingerprint’s on one of the laptops.”
Ruth shook her head. “You can’t age a fingerprint.”
Ivey’s high forehead wrinkled; he still wasn’t getting it.
“Tom,” Carver said, “we know the Ferryman keeps body parts . . .”
