The Cutting Room

by Ashley Dyer

  He lifted his chin—a tiny gesture, barely a nod—but acknowledgment enough.

  She tapped the stair rail lightly with the fingers of one hand, wondering how far she could push him, how far he would let her go.

  To hell with it—if he doesn’t hear it from me, he’ll hear it from Wilshire, and by then it’ll be too late.

  “You need help, Greg. You need to open up to someone sometime.”

  She left him on the stairs, relieved Ivey of his guard duties, and they headed down to the car park together.

  24

  Ruth Lake flung the wheel left, then right at a dogleg; it was rush hour, and fully dark and—just to add a shot of adrenaline—it was beginning to rain. She was driving a patrol car, DC Ivey alongside her.

  Every set of keys was gone from the board by the time they’d gotten to it. Cursing, Ruth had shoved through the fire doors onto the car park, hoping to hitch a ride, and saw the eager volunteer waiting for them. He held up a set of keys to a 3-series BMW—one of the relatively new fleet—very high-powered, very sleek.

  “I swiped these before the lot went,” he said. “Thought you might be needing something with a bit of poke.”

  “I like a man who shows initiative,” Ruth said, and he grinned, handing her the fob. “What’s your name again?”

  He positively preened. “Parr, Sarge. Jason Parr.”

  Ruth nodded, letting him know she wouldn’t forget, though she didn’t offer him the chance to ride along: she needed to talk to Tom Ivey about what he’d just witnessed. She drove at speed, lights ablaze and sirens blaring, and traffic parted ahead of them. She wouldn’t broach the subject, herself—but she knew that Ivey would eventually.

  At the next set of traffic lights, she hit the strobe light and yelp button, forcing stationary traffic out of the way. From here they had a clear view for half a mile ahead, and she just caught the blues of another squad car disappearing around a kink in the road.

  It was a twenty-five-minute drive from headquarters, but at this rate, they’d be there in half the time.

  A message came through on the dashboard radio: three double-crewed units were on their way, and the Matrix team had been scrambled to take charge of managing the crowd.

  This was a main arterial road to all points east of the city, densely populated, and bristling with shops and side streets.

  “Is the boss all right?” Ivey had one hand braced against the dashboard, and the strained tone of his voice told her he was distracting himself from the driving conditions.

  “He’s fine,” Ruth said, adding a blast of white noise as they hit a busy junction.

  “He looked sick.”

  “Yeah, well, he isn’t.” She kept her eyes on the road. “And I don’t want to hear any locker room gossip otherwise.”

  “I don’t gossip,” he said.

  Ruth slid him a quick, appraising glance. Ivey was gay and still firmly in the closet at work; she believed him. “Well, that’s okay, then.”

  “Even so, he did look sick.”

  Ivey was also dogged.

  “Tell me about Parr.”

  Ivey shot her a look. “What’s there to tell—Hobby Bobby, wannabe . . . ?” He shrugged.

  “Yeah, well, we’re going to be relying heavily on specials during this investigation, so you might want to rethink the attitude.”

  He shuffled in his seat. “Sorry, Sarge.”

  “I meant, what do you know about his background?”

  “Nothing. Doesn’t go much for small talk.”

  Ruth approved of that. “He’s around a lot—does he have a job?”

  “He said he’s taking time out—he’s applied to be real police, but they said he needs more experience.”

  “He’s certainly getting that,” she said, thinking he’d matched her hours over the last couple of days.

  Ruth drove on for a few minutes, concentrating on the traffic, pedestrian crossings, two bikers playing tag, weaving in and out of the lanes in the wake of the squad cars ahead. Terraced rows of houses gave way to large detached properties set behind high walls; passing Liverpool Cricket Club, they skimmed the edge of the once-gated, private village at Cressington Park.

  Less than a mile on from there, the road changed abruptly; the tree-lined central reservation, thick with daffodils, dwindled to a narrow strip of tussocky grass and finally disappeared altogether. Houses gave way to light-industry estates and retail parks, and still they blasted on, maneuvering at speed through the traffic.

  “Okay, it should be coming up any second,” Ivey said, consulting his mobile phone. “Just after the bend, there’s a roundabout. Go right.”

  “What?” Ruth said.

  “It’s a right turn,” he said.

  “I heard you.” She made the turn. “But you do know we’re heading straight for the Operational Command Center?” The OCC was the recently opened complex that housed MSOC—which had brought together under one roof for the first time all the specialist Matrix Serious and Organized Crime units from across Merseyside.

  “The bastard’s taking the piss,” Ivey said.

  Ruth lifted one shoulder in acknowledgment. Hard to see another reason for the Ferryman to take his freak show to a location that was a twenty-five-minute drive outside of the city.

  She slowed down, but seeing no sign that their killer had set out his stall at the OCC, she drove on. A couple of minutes later, turning a bend, she saw a uniform cop standing at the end of a coned-off road. She drew to a halt alongside him and saw to her left the jarring strobe of out-of-sync emergency vehicle light bars. Multiple emergency vehicles had converged in the cordoned-off section of roadway.

  The constable directed them to a layby fifty yards distant. Ruth pulled in behind another patrol car, and they returned at a jog, logged in with the constable, and ducked under the police tape at the cordon.

  Both sides of the narrow street were fenced off with rusting chain link. It wouldn’t present much of a barrier, but it would at least discourage people from trying to evade them by cutting across the fields. This was brownfield land. Small light-industrial units that had thrived in the ’50s and ’60s had lost out to bigger firms in successive economic recessions, giving way to the leaner, more modern developments that were springing up in the area.

  Lake jogged ahead of Ivey, squeezing through the cluster of police and private vehicles, passing empty, crumbling buildings. One plot had been razed to the ground; in the damp air, she could smell the sooty remains.

  Why had the Ferryman come to this desolate place? Despite its proximity to the new Operational Command Center, it was very much out of the way for a man obsessed with publicizing his “art.”

  Turning a corner, she jolted to a halt.

  On one giant concrete wall of a disused factory, a film was playing. It seemed to show a beating heart in an open chest. A crowd had already gathered, but the rain was coming down hard now, and many of them had retreated to their cars, parked on the raddled concrete in front of the building, watching the spectacle as if they were in a giant outdoor movie theater.

  DS Rayburn was standing next to a Matrix van, and Ruth knew that one of his crew would be recording every face in the crowd.

  “Hey, Rob,” she said, sidling up to him, but keeping her eyes on the crowd. “Looks like we got lucky with the location.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “This lot’s kettled themselves good and proper. Nobody goes home tonight till we’ve had a good chat.”

  Ruth turned, tracking the projector beam, and located the projector in an adjacent building, third window along. Something moved behind the light.

  “Is someone up there?” she said.

  He handed her a pair of binoculars from his pocket. “Two of ’em.”

  The men were wearing F-logo T-shirts.

  “They’ve barricaded themselves in, but we’ve got six men standing by. Soon as we’ve got enough warm bodies to contain this lot, we’ll make a move.”

  Ruth handed the binoculars to
him. “Looks like you’ve got half of Merseyside police already,” she said, then did a double take. “Wait—are those Manchester Police uniforms I see?”

  He laughed. “We’ve just finished a consultation and training exercise at the OCC,” he said. “They were up for it, and it seemed rude to refuse.”

  Ruth smiled.

  It was unlikely that the Ferryman would barricade himself in with the projector, but they would take no chances: the two projectionists would be arrested and questioned about any special knowledge of the Ferryman.

  Someone called, “Sarge!” and both DS Lake and the Matrix team leader turned around.

  On the wall behind them, the heart had begun to pulse fiercely. It continued for a few moments, then began to beat erratically. Finally, it slowed and stopped. The screen went black, and the crowd began to whistle, some getting out of their cars, applauding and whooping their approval.

  “Jesus wept,” Rayburn muttered.

  Under normal circumstances, a derelict building like this would be the haunt of homeless people looking for a bed for the night, maybe thieves out to steal whatever metal was left in the place, but tonight, it was populated by the young and trendy. And they were applauding the death of another human being. Ruth wondered if Adam Black was among them.

  Suddenly, the screen rekindled and the film began again.

  “It’s playing on continuous loop,” Ruth said. She’d missed the titles, first time around. Now she read, “Life Passes in a Heartbeat—the Death of Hope.”

  “You ready?” Rayburn said.

  Ruth nodded. “Let’s shut this horror show down.”

  25

  Day 5, 9 p.m.

  Major Incident Room

  Greg Carver waited for the last of the stragglers to come in and find a seat. The Matrix team and six members of his squad, together with uniform police and volunteers, were still interviewing members of the public corralled at the scene, so only seven detectives and one uniform cop were present. Dr. Yi was sitting quietly, a little apart from the rest, a notebook perched on his lap.

  Carver hadn’t allowed himself to think about what had happened in the men’s room until he got to his office and closed the door. Ruth was right: he’d had a flashback. Emma had finally seen fit to return one of his calls—but only to tell him to stop bothering her with them. One minute he was arguing with her; the next, he was throwing up in a cubicle of the men’s room. He hallucinated the smell of whisky again—was overwhelmed by the reek; it seemed his nightmares had begun to seep into his waking hours.

  Mostly, the sequence of images faded as soon as he came to—it did feel like a coming to—as if he’d been absent, transported during those terrifying minutes to another place. He was grateful that those images faded—most of them, anyway. But one remained, vivid and terrifying—it was a lake of fire, and Ruth was drowning in it.

  He was feeling better now; a few hours alone, thinking through what they had, writing up his decision log, had been oddly restful, and he felt he had greater clarity and was more in control than he had been since day one. Staring over the heads of the small gathering he saw two things: an orange afterglow—the adrenaline and aggression that had built up dealing with the crowd; and, faintly, a pale blue shimmer.

  As soon as the murmurs died down, he got to business: “Tomorrow is going to be busy,” he said. “News of tonight’s events are already all over social media, and I expect the press will be baying at our door by the morning. So, while we have a quiet moment to think, I’d like opinions and ideas from everyone who feels they have something to say. Doesn’t matter how wacky—speak up.”

  “Could there be a geographical connection?” This came from Ruth Lake. “He started at the north end of the docks and seems to have taken a line heading south and east of the city.”

  Carver looked to Dr. Yi. “Too soon to say,” he said. “Although we should keep it in mind.” He left the rest unsaid, but everyone knew that geographical profiling relied upon statistics: the bigger the number, the more reliable the data.

  Carver was about to move on, when DC Ivey spoke up: “Don’t you think he’s just sticking two fingers up at us, sir? I mean, tonight’s scene is only about half a mile from the new MSOC complex.”

  “Good point.” Carver looked to Dr. Yi again. “One worth considering?”

  Yi nodded thoughtfully. “Yes . . . your perpetrator could certainly be mocking you.”

  “Brain and heart,” Carver said. “Mind and emotion . . . Is that some kind of message?”

  “It’d be a first,” a gray-haired detective said. “He hasn’t said anything at all so far—sets up his ‘exhibits’ and lets his followers do the chat.”

  “It’s not strictly true that he hasn’t said anything,” Dr. Yi said. “He communicates through the titles of his works. Which, as far as I can tell, are focused on his ability to take lives sadistically, to make the terror his victims experience a matter for public display, and his freedom to treat their bodies as objects to be taken apart and then rearranged as entertainment—or ‘art’ as he would term it.”

  Yi might have been reading a shopping list, for all the emotion surrounding his words.

  “Okay,” Carver said. “Does that help us in any way?”

  This time he did see a hint of regret in the light around the psychologist. “Unfortunately, it only confirms that this really is all about the offender—to him, we are mere shadows.”

  26

  Day 6, 7:30 a.m.

  Ruth Lake had been at her desk early: Carver had texted her to say he would be in at nine thirty; she was relieved that he was finally seeing sense, taking rest when he needed it.

  With the briefing set for ten o’ clock, the office was quiet, and she took the opportunity to run through the list of onlookers interviewed at the scene. Adam Black was not among them. But of course, names could be changed.

  She had already searched the database of County Court Judgments, looking for debts against his name. He was in the clear, and he had no criminal prosecutions. She tried the online database “People Tracer” but could find no debt relief orders, independent voluntary arrangements, or registered bankruptcies. No marriages in the General Records Office database, either—at least not around Liverpool.

  The electoral register listed eight Adam Blacks in the Merseyside area—none under his full name, Adam Saul Black—but to be certain, she would pay each plain “Adam Black” a visit. A name change was looking more and more likely; certainly, it wouldn’t be the first time for Adam. Finding him was not going to be easy.

  A message popped up in her inbox: John Hughes. There was plenty of trace at Tyler Matlock’s flat, including fingerprints belonging to a wanted criminal—a scumbag who’d absconded while on bail for aggravated assault—but nothing that could help them right now.

  Ruth skimmed the house-to-house inquiries team’s report: nobody had been seen near Matlock’s place for the last fortnight, though neighbors had seen a man—not Matlock—coming and going in the early days. They didn’t see his face—and some had confessed they didn’t want to. Better to stay out of any business that involved Matlock and his dodgy associates. It could be their absconder, could be the Ferryman, but in reality, it looked like another dead end.

  The white Ford Transit van used to abduct Professor Tennent continued to elude them, although London Met had tracked it on the Automatic Number Plate Recognition system all the way through London on its way back to Liverpool the night of the kidnap, lost it for a bit around Fulham, then picked it up again forty minutes later, and had it in view all the way to Watford, about twenty-five miles from the abduction site. Then it vanished. ANPR on the route to the Ferryman’s last exhibit was a bust, too. He must have switched plates again.

  Ruth’s desk phone rang. It was her contact at the Missing Persons Bureau.

  “Hi, Terry,” she said. “What’ve you got for me?”

  “Ah, no, Ruth,” he said. “This isn’t about Adam Black.”

  She had flag
ged up his name with Terry the day before.

  “Okay.” She picked up a pen and dragged her notebook over.

  “It’s a new report,” Terry said. “Just in, fits your criteria. And it’s bang in the middle of your area.”

  “Go ahead,” she said.

  “Steve Norris.” He spelled out the surname. “He’s been missing for four days.”

  Putting his disappearance on the day after the first exhibit.

  “He failed to show for a wedding anniversary party at his parents’ house. They couldn’t rouse him at his apartment, and when they checked, he hasn’t been to work, but didn’t call in sick; work colleagues can’t reach him on his mobile or by e-mail, and friends haven’t been able to raise him on social media, either.”

  “Thanks, Terry.” DC Ivey had arrived, and she noticed him watching her, his thin face tense with anticipation. “What’s his address?” she said into the phone; then, to Ivey: “Tom, find out if DCI Carver’s in yet.”

  She jotted down Norris’s address and was on her way out as Ivey reappeared from down the corridor.

  “His door’s still locked, Sarge,” Ivey said.

  It had been a very late night for the troops, and the office was still sparsely staffed, but the volunteer special, Parr, was there, as always. He seemed to haunt the MIR, ghosting down the corridors, lingering in the canteen.

  He caught her eye, and the eager light in them said, Pick me! Pick me!, but Ruth wanted this done fast, so she let her gaze slide past him to a researcher, yawning loudly and staring dumbly at his computer screen. “I need you to contact a keyholder,” she said.

  He blinked, still not quite with it. “Who . . . ?”

  She scribbled the address on a Post-it note. “This address.” She stuck the note on the doorjamb. “Ivey, you’re with me.”

  Ruth let the young constable drive so that she could call Carver. His phone was switched off, and she left a message. Steve Norris rented a dockside apartment built on what used to be Herculaneum Dock, the city’s southernmost dock, now mostly infilled, a large development of four- and five-story-high apartment blocks.