by Ashley Dyer
“The spotlights were rigged to a simple infrared sensor on the pedestal,” he told Carver. “Ditto the music.”
“Where’s the sound coming from?” Carver asked.
The tech jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “A boombox on the far side of the plinth.”
One of the CSIs, fully kitted out in oversuit, gloves, and overshoes, was shining a high-powered Crime-lite over the pedestal and plexiglass box, searching for prints.
Ruth ended her call and joined them. “Passive infrareds are mostly designed for wide-angle detection, aren’t they?” she said.
The tech nodded.
“Those PIRs didn’t trigger till we were within six to eight feet of it,” she said.
“Are you sure he wasn’t watching, turned this lot on remotely?” Carver asked.
“He could’ve,” the tech said. “But I can’t see why he’d go to the bother of wiring up the PIR in that case.” He thought for a moment. “I can’t take it apart till the CSIs have done their stuff, and I’ll admit the maggots were a bit . . . distracting.” He gave an involuntary shudder. “But I’m pretty sure this is a model I’ve used myself. If I’m right—and I think I am—that PIR is fitted with a zoned Fresnel lens that is sensitive to slight movement, geared to detect human activity at around two meters away.”
Carver took a breath, and the tech added: “Before you ask, you can pick one up online for around twenty quid.”
“I didn’t hear a generator.”
“No—the power source is a car battery.”
“Would it take technical know-how to rig something like this up?” Carver asked.
“Not much.” The tech shrugged. “Let’s face it, you can find a step-by-step video guide for just about anything on YouTube these days.”
Which was exactly what he’d been afraid of. “Okay, but how the hell did he carry all that kit and a hunk of stone into the middle of a locked space without being seen?”
“Oh, that’s not stone,” the tech said, glancing toward the plinth. “That thing’s made of a lightweight laminate, with a marble-effect vinyl wrap.”
Carver gave a grunt of disgust.
“Sorry to pile on the misery, but the padlock is a brand-new Masterlock,” Ruth said. “And I’ve just spoken to the building manager; he says the one he used to lock the gate this evening is a Chubb, and it’s a good fifteen years old. So either the offender used bolt cutters, or he picked the original and replaced it with the new lock.”
Across the lawn, the CSI shut off his Crime-lite and walked carefully across the stepping plates.
“No prints?” Ruth said.
“We got a couple of shoe prints from the grass—not good quality.”
“No fingermarks on the plinth?”
He shook his head. “Not that I can see. We’ll shift the lot to the chemical treatment lab, see if superglue pops anything for us, but . . .” He tilted his head, unwilling to say it outright: they had nothing.
33
It was nearly midnight by the time Ruth Lake got home. She went straight to the front bedroom of her small terraced house, opened up the wardrobe, and began lifting out shoeboxes, excavating down to where she’d stashed her family album.
The binding was padded blue leatherette, and the gold lettering on the front cover had mostly worn off. She turned the thick card pages: family groupings; Mum laughing at the camera as she opened a Christmas present; Ruth and her brother at a dojo in Everton, just before an Aikido competition; certificates of achievement. The self-adhesive backing and plastic overlay had kept the photographs firmly in place, their colors almost as vivid as when they had been set there. She wished her memories could be as happily preserved, but they had been altered—tainted by all she knew, and all she’d done.
She had to force herself to move on from the photographs because, complicated as her emotions were about the “make-believe” happy family snaps, they were simple, wholesome fare compared with what came next.
She couldn’t stop thinking about her exchange with Carver in the car. She knew the man, and when he got that look in his eye, it meant he would not give up. Tonight’s new developments in the case would buy her some time, but they wouldn’t distract him for long—eventually he would come back to Adam Black. And if he decided to start his own inquiries, raked through the evidence, it might just uncover things she would want to keep buried.
Reluctance turned to determination, and she flipped to the newspaper cuttings, trying to fix in her mind what had been public knowledge at the time; she needed to have her story straight before Carver started coming to her with difficult questions. She moved quickly past the condolence cards, the notes of sympathy, and a pressed flower from a funeral wreath. Those were still too painful to read; even Dad’s note—“I do love you. Never doubt that.”—carried a burden of guilt.
Because she had doubted that he loved them and had hated their father for his hypocrisy for many years. But even that memory had altered with time, as new circumstances came to light. Her forensics training told her that context is everything. Context changes how you look at a scene, a statement, a person, a situation. It could not alter the facts, but it could change the way those facts were interpreted, and the weight placed on them as evidence. Context had the almost magical ability to transform a guilty person into innocent bystander—even hero.
Ruth sighed impatiently. She wasn’t kneeling on this scratchy old carpet to indulge nostalgic feelings, or to philosophize on the fickle nature of human memory. This was a fact-checking mission. She took the album over to the bed and sat cross-legged while she made notes, created a timeline, listed the names of main players, descriptions of injuries, causes of deaths, as if the violence that had been visited on her own family were just another police investigation.
34
Day 8
Ruth Lake was buzzed in at the hospital mortuary by Sam, a technician she’d worked with many times in her former role as a CSI. He beamed at her as he led her through to the gowning area.
“Haven’t seen you in a bit,” he said. “How’re you getting on since that thing over Christmas?”
He was talking about the previous case. “Ancient history,” she said, denying the faint burn she felt in the crook of her arm. He seemed ready to quibble, and to divert him, she asked after his wife and two kids. “Julie was training as a nurse, wasn’t she?”
His smile broadened. “She’s fully qualified now.”
They chatted as Ruth locked her personal belongings away and slipped into green scrubs and overshoes before going through to the postmortem room.
The pathologist was a blue-eyed Irishman named Donnelly. Glancing up from the steel table, where the heart had been placed, still inside the plexiglass box, he recognized her and they exchanged greetings. Ruth gave a friendly nod to the CSI who would be taking photographs and assisting where necessary. She would also take the plexiglass away to the chemical treatment lab for fingerprint analysis.
The gold coins were still inside the box. Ruth now saw that they were newly minted pound coins, and that the heart muscle had been sliced through with a very sharp blade so that it had opened like a lotus flower under the force of the writhing mass of maggots.
A few larvae were in evidence, but the heart would have been kept in the dark, at just above freezing point, from the time it was delivered to the mortuary; she expected most of the nasty little things had retreated into the farthest recesses of the chambers and blood vessels. Those she could see were moving sluggishly. The translucent red liquid she’d seen dripping from the box at the crime scene had set to a semiopaque solid.
Wax, she thought. But she knew better than to say it—this pathologist was known to verbally lacerate anyone who dared to make a pronouncement of that kind during “his” postmortem examinations.
Donnelly went through the formal procedures, turning on the mic and giving the time, date, and purpose of the postmortem, asking everyone to name themselves for the record, before describing the heart: its
appearance and condition, the amount of fatty tissue, as well as the number, position, depth, and angle of every incision, while the technician and CSI took photographs.
The maggots were removed and placed into specimen tubes. Samples of the waxy substance were scraped off into shallow tubs, and the coins were counted into a separate container, while the pathologist kept up a constant commentary for the record. About forty minutes in, he stopped, looked at the heart from various angles, then stood back from the table.
“Huh,” he said, unhelpfully.
Ruth looked across the table to Sam and saw a twinkle of amusement in his eyes. They both knew that the Irishman liked audience participation, provided it was suitably deferential, but neither one of them was willing to play that game, so it fell to the CSI to fulfill the role.
“Something unexpected, Doctor?” she said.
“Well, now,” he said, “there’s a lot about this par-ticular postmortem that isn’t what you’d expect in the normal run of things. Like, for instance, not having an actual body. But since you ask—as I mentioned in my earlier observations, the entire heart has been coated in a thin film of the red, waxy substance you see on the base of the box.” He paused to draw a magnifier down from overhead. “But in addition, all the major blood vessels—that’s superior and inferior venae cavae, the vessels of the aortic arch, descending aorta . . . aaaand”—he continued his examination—“yup!—the pulmonary arteries and veins—have been blocked with the same.”
He straightened up for a moment.
“Now, being partial to a wager as I am, I’d bet my next paycheck that your man plugged up the major arteries and veins with a very practical purpose in mind.” He looked at each of them in turn. “Would anyone care to speculate what that might be?”
No one did.
“In my opinion, its function was to contain the maggots while he set up the scene. You see, young blowfly larvae usually crawl toward light. And these, ladies and gentlemen, are young blowfly larvae.” He picked up one of the labeled containers and tapped them down to the cap, then held it horizontally and closed his hand around the bulk of the cylinder to demonstrate. The maggots obligingly crawled to the uncovered third, into the light.
“I’m thinking it would’ve spoiled the effect if they’d entered center stage ahead of cue, now wouldn’t it?” He lifted the cylinder to eye height, addressing the rascally larvae as if he found them adorable.
“So they were trapped inside the chambers of the heart. But as soon as the lights turned on, they went wild, busting out all over—like springtime.”
Ruth thought she could imagine few things that were less like springtime than what she had witnessed the previous night. She hated to spoil Donnelly’s grandstanding moment, but she needed clarification. “It was four degrees Celsius at the scene yesterday—you’d expect the larvae to be sluggish at best—but those little buggers were pretty lively.”
“Hm . . . Let’s see if we can do some detective work on that, shall we?” The pathologist sounded positively jaunty. He turned to the CSI and asked if she’d gotten all the pictures she needed, then used a spatula to pry the heart, in its pool of set wax, out of the box. An orange gel pad lifted with it.
He gently turned the heart over and the CSI snapped off a few shots.
“Now, what is this?” Donnelly mused.
The CSI spoke up. “Looks like an instant ‘hot pack.’”
“On what do you base this assumption?” Dr. Donnelly said, in the tone of a patrician rudely interrupted in the delivery of great oratory.
The CSI flushed, recognizing her blunder. But it seemed she was made of sterner stuff than Ruth had realized.
“I didn’t assume,” she said. “I said ‘it looks like,’ because that’s the exact shade of orange of the hot packs I use every weekend when I do agility training with my border collie. They’re called Hot to Go.”
Donnelly seemed stunned, and Ruth wanted to applaud. Instead she gave Donnelly her most guileless look and said, “That’ll save us both some detective work, won’t it, Doctor?”
“Perhaps you’d like to share your ‘special knowledge’ with us and explain to us how they work,” he said, ignoring Ruth and addressing the CSI with offensive sarcasm thinly disguised as icy civility.
“See the little metal doodad in the bottom of the pouch?” the CSI said, refusing to back down. “You just bend it, and the gel starts to crystallize, and it heats up. They’re pretty warm once they get going.” She gave a little shrug. “I suppose that could be why the maggots were so active.”
“Well,” Donnelly said, addressing Ruth and Sam in his favored snarky tone, but clearly tired of the exchange, “if you have any further questions, you may address them to my learned friend across the table.”
Relating the story to Carver two hours later, Ruth even managed to coax a smile out of him. Carver had been on the receiving end of Donnelly’s acid tongue on more than one occasion.
“I don’t suppose we can expect his preliminary report before tomorrow, then?” he said.
“It’s doubtful. And he was in too bad a mood to confirm much until lab investigations were complete, but if you want my unofficial version . . .”
“That’s why I sent you, Ruth,” he said. “You’re my secret weapon.”
“Let’s see,” she said, pleased that he had seemed to have called a truce over her stubborn refusal to talk about Adam Black. “The ‘blood’ dripping from the heart was, in fact, red wax—and it was used to hold the thing together until the Ferryman was ready for us. He used young larvae, because they crawl toward the light. Apparently, their behavior changes a few days before they pupate, and then they crawl away from it.”
Carver nodded thoughtfully. “Suggesting either that our offender knew what he was doing, or he’d experimented and found the best option. Well, we know he hones his craft, so he’d need a quantity of maggots. We should check shops that sell fishing bait—there can’t be that many around Liverpool these days, can there?”
“I’ll get someone on it,” she said. “But you can have them delivered by mail order, and they’ll keep for about two weeks in the fridge.”
He winced, and she wondered if it was frustration at the Ferryman’s ability to stay ahead of them or disgust at the notion of keeping live maggots in a fridge.
“Were there any sightings of him setting up the scene?” she asked.
“The building manager locked up at dusk, as usual,” Carver said. “A couple of residents noticed some activity in the garden—lights and a male figure carrying boxes through the gate from a white van. But they didn’t take much notice—end of the day, getting dark, dinner to prepare, and so on.”
“Even so, the man must have ice running through his veins,” she said. “Anything from ANPR on the white van?”
“Not based on the number plate we’ve been running up to now. Which convinces me he’s switched plates. I’ve got a couple of detectives checking CCTV in the area for something that meets the description of the van he used in London.”
Ruth nodded. Carver definitely seemed more on top of things.
“Do we know if Kharon was there?” Locked inside the garden while the crowd was forced back, Ruth hadn’t been able to check for herself.
Carver shook his head. “No one saw him. We’ll just have to rely on the Matrix van’s CCTV and assess the crowd. I’ve requested a copy. I know you’re busy, but . . .”
“I’ll find time,” Ruth said.
“So—maggoty heart, gold—is this an obvious reference to money and corruption?” Carver asked.
“Beats me,” Ruth said. “If we knew who the victim was—”
“I’ve put a rush on the DNA profile,” Carver said. “As soon as that’s done, we’ll try to match it to our missing persons. Until then, all we’ve got is the PM results.”
“There were ten coins . . . I’m not big on the Bible—and the New Testament definitely isn’t my strong point—but . . .” Ruth frowned, trying to recall. “Wa
sn’t there a parable about a merchant giving out gold to his servants?”
“The parable of the talents,” Carver said. “A rich merchant goes away on a trip and gives each of his servants a talent to look after. I always assumed a talent was a gold coin.” He dragged his laptop closer and typed in a search. “Yep.” He scanned the screen. “There’s a difference of opinion on its actual value, but several results talk about gold. Says here, one of the servants invested the money and returned ten talents to his boss.”
“The thing about talent is it can be read two ways,” Ruth said. “And our guy seems to be all about gaining recognition for his ‘talent.’”
“If the ten gold coins are supposed to symbolize money and talent, the music makes more sense, too: ‘Art for Art’s Sake/Money for God’s Sake.’”
“There’s another meaning to ‘art for art’s sake,’” Ruth said. “I checked it out last night: it’s based on Théophile Gautier’s philosophy, ‘L’art pour l’art,’ which means art, with a capital ‘A,’ doesn’t have to justify itself, morally.”
Carver scoffed. “Sounds like a psychopath’s manifesto. Which reminds me—I’ve spoken to Dr. Yi. He urged, in the strongest terms, that we should leave our work phones at work when we’re off duty. We’re feeding into the Ferryman’s narcissistic grandiosity, apparently.”
“He’s probably right,” Ruth said. “But we’ve seen what happens when we deny him access—especially to you.”
“I said the same thing,” Carver said. “But I have agreed to step away from the mic, let Superintendent Wilshire be the public face of the investigation for a few days.”
“Good idea.” She might have added that it would give Carver more time to rest but decided that the comment would be unwelcome.
“I am worried, though,” Carver said. “We denied the Ferryman his big reveal last night. Hughes tells me the techs haven’t found any clear shots of the heart on the plinth. There’ve even been some disparaging comments suggesting that you’d see better art on a butcher’s slab at your local supermarket.”
