by Ashley Dyer
Carver saw him reevaluating.
“Oh, so the fingerprints . . .” Ivey blanched, and he closed his own hands into fists.
“Any activity on his credit cards?” Carver asked.
“His PIP benefits are still being paid, and his bank account was accessed five times after he dropped off the radar. I could find out where he withdrew the money.”
“Okay, good.” Carver turned to Ruth. “If he is still alive, do we have any idea where Matlock might lie low?”
“His neighbors don’t know and they don’t care. It’s been quiet with him off the block; they’re in no hurry to bring him back. And his family haven’t heard from him since last autumn. They don’t seem too broken up about it.”
Carver tugged one ear. “Let’s face it: Tyler Matlock hasn’t been reported missing because he will not be missed.”
Ivey’s tablet buzzed, and he glanced at it, his eyes widening. “I think you should see this, sir.”
The young detective enlarged the frame and the three of them huddled around the screen.
“This is Instagram; I’ve been following Kharon—the fan who put together the video of Think Outside the Box. He just posted a new video, put together from last night’s scene.”
They watched as Kharon’s new “appreciation” of the Ferryman’s Catch the Gamma Wave unfolded on screen.
It began with an image of the three laptops viewed over the heads of the crowd. The camera pulled back to get an overview of the crowd itself; the video was steady and the focus sharp.
“He couldn’t get that kind of clarity using a smartphone,” Carver said. A glance at Ruth told him she understood completely.
“I’ll take another look at the Matrix team’s recording,” she said.
If Kharon was using a portable camcorder, he would be easier to identify in the crowd.
The footage segued to an archive recording of the Liverpool Overhead Railway: trains approached the screen in faded black and white. Spliced between these short passages, close-ups of the ECG and EEG traces recording the victims’ deaths. The video faded to black, and for a moment, Carver thought it had finished. Then a pinpoint of light appeared. It grew bigger and brighter, and he became aware of variations at the edges of the screen: tunnel walls, rushing past.
The camera accelerated toward the light, interspersed by microsecond bursts of the victims’ gamma wave EEGs.
Carver became aware of a high, thin whistle. The light became unbearable and, simultaneously, the whistle rose to a scream. Then, a blinding white flash.
Carver winced, shutting his eyes against a nauseating disorientation.
“His version of ‘going into the light,’ I suppose,” Ivey said.
His heart hammering, Carver worked on controlling his breathing and stilling the jittery need to escape the room, but the scream lived on in his head.
Ruth looked at him, a question in her eyes. Did he want her to step in?
Carver gave a minute shake of his head.
“This Kharon calls himself a fan,” Carver said. “But what if his links with the Ferryman are stronger than that? What if Kharon is helping directly?”
“Well, if he is, he’s not doing such a good job,” Ivey said. He was scrolling down the screen as comments came in from Kharon’s followers. “This post is getting a lot of negative comments . . .” He read out a few: “The Ferryman is a FAKE”; “Photoshopped phony.” Another had written, “Recording 1 and 3 are identical. I’m unfollowing. Bye, suckers!”
“They’ve worked out that Professor Tennent’s heart and EEG trace were a duplicate of Eddings’s,” Ruth said.
Carver nodded. “That could be useful. If his followers turn against him, somebody might be willing to turn him in.”
19
Well, this is fun. Four thousand followers lost overnight—which is not a major issue. What I do have a problem with is that, apparently, I’m supposed to sit here and listen to useless tossers who never created anything of worth in their sorry lives telling me I don’t have artistic integrity.
Circumstance forced the compromise over Tennent’s encephalographs. If they had anything between their ears, they would appreciate that.
Would I have preferred to bring Tennent back alive? Ideally, yes.
If the option to create an authentic gamma wave trace for him was there, would I have taken it? Of course I would.
Was I disappointed? Again, yes. But art, like life, sometimes requires compromise. If I’m guilty of anything, it’s perfectionism—I set myself the highest standards. And, yet, watching Kharon’s montage, I truly cannot understand their objections. Catch the Gamma Wave does exactly what I intended. The effect—the impact—is just as strong as if there really had been three different traces.
Just how many of those four thousand actually noticed the duplicate? Five? Ten, maybe? Less than a dozen train-spotting nerds with nothing better to do all day than sit in front of their computers fiddling with themselves. Obviously, they just had to share their nitpicking, shit-for-brains observations with the virtual world. Naturally, the herd followed, bleating about having been “lied to.” Do they not know that ALL Art is a lie? Call it artifice, or illusion, trick, trompe l’oeil or whatever the hell you want, Art is a lie. The beauty of it is that it’s the lie that brings us closer to the real truth.
20
Day 4, Evening debrief
Chief Inspector Carver asked the sergeant leading house-to-house inquiries at the Dingle scene to speak first. The apartment blocks nearby mostly had their backs to the escarpment, to take advantage of the views over the riverfront, and many of the occupants were young professionals who were still at work at the time the fun began, so the team had had a frustrating time of it.
“We’re hauling PCSOs in to handle back-office duties as of tomorrow,” Carver reassured him. “That’ll free up some bobbies to help out. And we’ve got callouts ongoing to specials.” He located Mick Driscoll, the shift sergeant, who was lurking at the back of the room. “How’s that going?”
“We’ve got five on their way here, one who looks doubtful,” Driscoll said. Being volunteer police, special constables were not required to drop everything and head for the nearest cop shop. “Still waiting to hear from a few.”
A man at the back of the room sat up tall, a rainbow of color flashing around his head and shoulders and Carver was distracted for a moment. Then he saw Dr. Yi in the doorway, and he asked Ruth Lake to bring the meeting up to speed on inquiries into Matlock, their missing suspect.
Yi listened intently, and when DS Lake had finished, Carver said, “Any comments, Doctor Yi?”
The psychologist looked from Ruth to Carver. “You’re wondering if Matlock could be your killer?”
“Or another victim,” Carver said.
Yi folded his arms and mused a moment, his chin cupped in one hand. “He is thirty years old, which is in the right age range for this type of killer,” Yi said. “And he doesn’t have a regular job, which would leave him free to plan the abductions and murders. But he’s also violent and impulsive—an alcoholic, judging by his neighbors’ comments—which doesn’t fit with the calculated planner we’ve encountered so far.” He glanced again at Ruth Lake. “Is there any indication he has an interest in art?”
Ruth said, “His reading material seemed to consist of porno magazines; the closest I saw to art were a few bodybuilding posters on the wall of his sitting room.”
“And his web searches are mostly porn related,” Hughes added.
“Which, again, doesn’t fit the profile,” Yi said. “On the other hand, Matlock doesn’t fit the victim profile too well, either.”
“We have a victim profile?” Ruth asked.
“I misspoke,” Yi said. “However, there are some common factors: John Eddings and Dillon Martin were twenty-three and twenty-five, respectively. Both were in heterosexual relationships. Both were healthy—mentally and physically—which follows the pattern for other missing males within the scope of this inq
uiry. In addition, several of the missing, including Eddings, had talked about dropping out to travel.”
“To be fair, a lot of early- to midtwenties males talk about taking time out to travel,” Ruth said.
Carver scratched his brow. “Who spoke to Eddings’s family?”
A couple of hands went up—one was the FLO.
“Did anything pop?”
“He bought a flash apartment for cash two months before he vanished,” the first detective said. “And it’s not like he comes from money—his mum and dad live in a council flat in Netherfield.”
“Lottery win,” the FLO said. “He won two hundred K, decided to do the sensible thing and invest the bulk of it in property. It was in the Liverpool Echo—his mum showed me a cutting.”
“Martin put his engagement on hold a week before he disappeared,” DC Ivey said. “But his girlfriend seemed fine with that. He’d got a degree in engineering, after leaving the army, and was working for Phillip Jackson Group—they specialize in building engineering. They offered to half fund him for a master’s—it looked like he was going places.”
“All right,” Carver said. “Let’s see if we can find out more about Matlock. Track down his drinking buddies. Did he have a favorite pub? He was a football supporter—did he have a season ticket? Who did he go to matches with? We need to establish exactly when he disappeared.”
“He’s been missing for months, boss—that’s not going to be easy.”
This came from the gloomy detective who had made a big deal of tracing the suspect van.
Carver quelled an urge to snap back: intimidating the team would not get the job done. “Even so—” He racked his brain, trying desperately to recall his name again, gave up on it, and turned instead to the crime scene manager.
“What about the footwear marks on the rock ledge?” he asked.
“One belonged to the pothead arrested at the scene,” Hughes said. “We got two partials we haven’t been able to match, but according to the footwear database it’s a right Adidas trail running outsole.”
“Sorry to be such a ray of sunshine today,” Ruth said. “But that’s in the top fifty most popular sports shoes.”
“On the positive side, we got some unique features on it,” Hughes said. “So find us someone to match it to and”—he lifted one shoulder—“Bob’s your uncle.”
This gave rise to cynical laughter, which at least provided some relief from a bad news situation. But the bad news wasn’t over.
Teams had searched and cleared all sixty-three storage units under the escarpment, and found just one casemate, which, to the embarrassment of the registered owner, was being used by a lessee to store stolen goods. Other than that, nothing.
Carver was beginning to sympathize with the gloomy detective; it felt like they were playing catch-up with the killer. He had put time and physical distance between himself and his victims, and he could set up his “exhibitions” at leisure, knowing he was ahead of their inquiries by many months.
“Has the Met had better luck with Professor Tennent, boss?” Ruth asked, and Carver realized he’d flipped out for a moment.
“They managed to extract a brief voice memo from Tennent’s damaged smartphone,” he said, trying not to sound too downbeat. “Tennent said he was going to meet a man called Charoneau.” He spelled the word out, watching the detectives write it down.
“The first part of the name: C-H-A-R-O-N, is an alternative spelling of Kharon,” he went on.
“So, this Kharon is helping the killer?” someone said.
It was a question Carver had asked himself, but he said, “Let’s not jump to conclusions. ‘Charon’ is just an alternative name for the mythological Ferryman—a joke at Tennent’s expense, maybe. For now, our Instagram Kharon is a person of interest, that’s all.”
He picked up where he’d left off. “In his voice memo, Tennent said the mystery caller named our two victims, Eddings and Martin, and claimed to have definitive proof of what happened to them. The professor agreed to meet in a public place, and they settled on the Theodore Bullfrog Pub.
“The original call was made on a burner phone,” he added. “And the only DNA on the cord they found at the scene was Prof. Tennent’s.” Which reminded him—“Why is it taking so long to track the suspect van down?”
“We’ve only got one pair of eyes on that now, boss,” Ruth said.
The glum detective, Gorman (Carver finally remembered his name again), spoke up: “He’s not on ANPR, so he must have switched plates. I’m going cross-eyed searching CCTV for white vans with reflective windows now.”
Hard not to see the day as a complete bust, but morale was as much Carver’s job as were management decisions. So he told everyone that they had done a good job eliminating false leads; the footwear impression had given them physical evidence that could link their perpetrator to one of the scenes; and they now had two persons of interest they needed to trace, interview, and eliminate.
There was little else he could do, and he’d already exceeded his allowed hours for the second day running, so he left Ruth Lake at the helm and caught a taxi home.
21
Ruth Lake sifted through a stack of video stills she’d screen-grabbed from the Matrix team’s CCTV recording. Buried beneath the others was one that she had kept to herself.
The man had been standing in a group with three others: two men and a woman. Unlike the rest, he hadn’t been recording the scene. Hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched, back toward her, this man should have looked like any other dark figure on the video, but seeing him, she’d felt a prickling of uncertainty in the lizard part of her brain.
Ruth had learned to trust the primal instincts of fight or flight; the limbic system could trigger evasive action before the conscious brain was even aware of threat. So she’d paid attention. A second later, the man had turned to one of his companions, and, Oh, jeez . . .
And when Carver asked was she all right, her secondary survival instincts had straightaway kicked in: show no weakness; hide the truth.
Now, knowing that she was safe from curious eyes, she stared at that face frozen in profile. Dark hair, buzz-cut sides, with a knife-sharp parting just above the ear; a longer hank tied in a topknot. Vandyke goatee and a nose ring. God, he’s changed so much! But scrutinizing his face, she saw that he still had the same intensity of expression.
The same anger, too? she wondered.
Adam Black, nine years on.
What the hell is he doing with this rabble? Ruth knew the answer to the question even as she posed it: Adam was with the rabble because he had always been drawn to trouble.
Should have told Greg Carver.
But the explanations that must follow, the memories that would rekindle, the emotions—and, yes, the guilt—were excellent reasons to keep her mouth shut. Better to deal with this herself.
She remembered with painful clarity the last time she’d seen Adam Black, the look of hate on his face, the rage in his voice as he screamed at her to get out. She had convinced herself that he would calm down—was so sure of it that she had rung the next day. He’d hung up. She’d waited until the next week and tried again, and the week later, and the week after that. He hung up every time. She left it two weeks before ringing again, then three. After a couple of months, Shauna answered the phone. She was kind but said that Adam didn’t want to speak to her. Every month for a year Ruth had dialed his number. He never forgave her, and he never spoke to her again.
At the end of that year, just before her final exams, and after yet another rejected call, Ruth had been summoned to her personal tutor’s office. Shauna sat across from him, and she looked close to tears.
The room seemed to close in from the edges, and sudden fear scrabbled at her insides.
“Is something wrong? Is Adam—?”
“Adam’s fine,” her tutor said.
“He asked me to come and speak to you, Ruth.” Shauna was a big woman, and she had a heart as big and soft as her size t
wenty frame. Ruth could see this was hurting her.
“You know how to reach me,” she said, confused by the woman’s formality, by her grim looks.
“Yes,” Shauna said. “But—”
“Why didn’t you ring me—why put me through this?”
“Adam wants you to stop,” the older woman blurted out.
“Stop what?” Ruth glanced at her tutor. He avoided her gaze.
“You know what.”
Shauna’s voice had a sharp rasp she’d never heard before, and Ruth stared at her, surprised.
“The phone calls,” Shauna said. “He wants you to leave him alone.”
Ruth felt a muscle jump in her face.
She looked again at her tutor, but he was staring at his hands, clasped in front of him on the desktop.
“He doesn’t mean that.”
Shauna sighed, and Ruth blundered on, unable to stop herself: “Look, if we could just sit down, face-to-face, I think we could straighten this out. He’s built a wall between us, that’s all. I understand why, but—”
“For God’s sake, Ruth!”
Ruth flinched; Shauna never raised her voice.
“I’m sorry,” Shauna said, “but this harassment has to stop.”
“I h-haven’t been harassing him,” she stammered. “I just—I . . . I want him to understand.”
“You’re harassing him—and if you persist, he will take this to the courts.”
“He can’t.”
“Yes, he can. And I will do everything in my power to help him.”
Ruth stared at Shauna, trying to hear what she was saying over the booming in her ears.
“I know you want to work with the police after your degree,” Shauna said. “And I don’t want to put that in jeopardy. Which is why I’m here, and not the police. But if you call Adam just one more time, we will take it further.”
Ruth had responded with a sarcasm it embarrassed her to recall.
“Let’s get it over with,” she’d sneered, pulling back her sleeves and offering her wrists, ready for the cuffs. “Arrest me. ’Coz I won’t stop caring for him just because he’s too bloody-minded to have a sensible conversation!”
