The Cutting Room

by Ashley Dyer

  Carver finished the call and considered calling Ruth in to his office, but he’d scheduled an appointment with the work-appointed psychologist for six o’clock, and it was already five forty-five. Anyway, Superintendent Wilshire had been sniffing around the MIR all day: he would have to leave it till the next morning to brief the team to be vigilant for anyone hanging around their cars. Carver packed up and headed out.

  He arrived five minutes late and they got straight to it. Carver had been determined to try to tell the psychologist about the dreams that woke him every night, to admit to his fear that he was losing his mind. Instead, as usual, he ended up talking about the case. He lied to himself that he was opening up, admitting to Roman that he’d frozen when he saw the heart begin to move. But since the whole thing had been broadcast on social media as well as a few online news channels, he was only owning up to something the doctor would already have seen—telling him what was already blindingly obvious.

  “I saw a brief clip,” the doctor said. “You clearly found it deeply disturbing.”

  Dr. Roman seemed to swathe himself in a pale shimmer of calm.

  They had been talking for a good thirty minutes by this point, and Dr. Roman asked the first question of the session: “Was there some particular aspect that disturbed you?”

  Perhaps it was the fact that the psychologist had already seen his reaction to the Ferryman’s latest outrage, or maybe it was something else, but whatever the reason, Carver began to explain: “The heart was cut in segments,” he said. “When they began to fall outward, I saw . . .”

  The therapist leaned closer, and although he couldn’t look into the man’s eyes, Carver felt his sympathetic attention.

  Ruth’s words echoed in his mind: You need to open up to someone sometime.

  Here goes . . .

  “I’ve had a recurring dream,” he began again. “After I was shot. I call it a dream, but it feels so real . . .” He could feel his heart thudding against his rib cage and a wave of nausea made him stop.

  He took a breath and let it go slowly. Tell it from the beginning.

  “During my previous murder investigation, one of the victims looked very like Emma, my wife.”

  He saw a flash of Emma lying on a mortuary table and flinched.

  “I’m sorry?” the doctor said.

  Did I say that aloud?

  Carver cleared his throat. “I said, Emma is fine.”

  The psychologist nodded, his expression saying, That’s a good thing, and it’s safe to explore your fear.

  “In this vision, the victim—her name was Kara—she starts screaming.” He saw the young student writhing on the mortuary table, the horror in her eyes. “I wuh . . .” His breath failed him, and he had to try again: “I want to help her, but she . . .” He swallowed. “It’s like she’s being sliced open, from—from the inside. And Emma . . . Emma is there. Suffocating. Fighting to get out.”

  The skin of the girl’s face pares back and falls away and Carver sees Emma’s, gory with Kara’s blood, her eyes huge with horror.

  “I can’t . . .” He tried to catch his breath, but the pressure on his chest forced the air out of him. “I can’t . . . I don’t know how to h-help.” He heard his voice rise in pitch and tone, and at last, he tore his eyes from the terrible vision unfolding in his mind.

  The air in front of Dr. Roman’s face darkened.

  A sudden shaft of steel gray sliced through the distance between them.

  Anxiety.

  Carver realized that he was seeing his own emotions in the psychologist’s aura. The therapist’s body language and mind-set were holding a mirror up to Carver’s own feelings.

  He’s empathizing.

  Instantly, Carver felt himself pulled physically toward the darkness, into a vortex of emotion and terror that seemed to spark blue in the smoky haze that obscured the doctor’s features.

  Like a black hole, he thought. And like a black hole, there would be no return from it. He stood to leave.

  “Open your eyes, Greg.”

  Carver didn’t want to, but the voice was insistent.

  “You’re safe. You can open your eyes.”

  He did as he was told. Found himself lying on the floor in Dr. Roman’s office.

  “D’you think you can sit up?” The voice was Dr. Roman’s.

  Carver pushed up with both hands and struggled to a crouch. He tried to get to his feet and fell on his backside. His shoulders and chest ached as though he’d been lifting weights, and he felt weak.

  “Just sit for a minute.”

  The therapist offered Carver a paper cup; he took a sip and handed it back but when he tried again to stand up, Roman pressed gently on his shoulders. “You need to catch your breath.”

  Carver shook him off. “What the hell just happened?”

  “You stood to leave,” Roman said, “and crumpled to the floor.”

  “I fainted?”

  “You were conscious, but unresponsive.”

  Unresponsive—what does that mean? A rush of cold fear washed over Carver, flowing down his body and settling in his stomach.

  “You’re probably feeling some discomfort in your chest, perhaps tingling in your arms—”

  Carver opened and closed his right fist. How could he know this?

  “—and your mouth may be dry.”

  “Tell me what the fuck just happened,” Carver said. “What do you mean, I was ‘unresponsive’?”

  “You collapsed to the floor, curled into a ball, and stayed that way for several minutes,” Roman said in that same calm, annoying tone.

  Carver couldn’t make sense of it.

  “I believe you experienced a dissociative episode.”

  Carver felt for the chair behind him and struggled into it.

  Dr. Roman handed him the paper cup. “Your mind couldn’t cope with the feelings and thoughts associated with the recurring dream; the emotion was too overwhelming. So it disconnected from reality, took you somewhere else.” He paused. “It’s a protective response.”

  “I know what it is—and I know why it happens. It’s—” But Carver couldn’t bring himself to say the words “post-traumatic stress.” He looked at his hands. “It doesn’t matter what you call it; I know what it means—I’m finished.”

  39

  Day 9, Morning

  After a long night searching for Adam Black, Ruth Lake was tired and wired. She had scoured support services on the fringes of the system: drug counseling services, homeless charities, AA meetings, and got nothing.

  More bad news had just arrived by e-mail, and rather than sit at her desk and grind her teeth, she zipped down to Carver’s office.

  He’d turned down her offer of a lift that morning and arrived into work an hour later than she had; he was freshly shaved and it looked like he’d even had his hair trimmed, but he still had that hollowed-out, gray look.

  “Don’t say it,” he said.

  “Say what?” She instinctively covered, thinking he was much easier to manage before he developed this newfound ability to read people.

  He snuffed, shaking his head wearily. “What d’you want, Ruth?”

  “A tiny bit of good luck would be very welcome—if that can be arranged.”

  “Not in my sphere of influence, I’m afraid,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said. “There’s bad news and there’s worse news.” Seeing the look on his face, she hurried on. “And I’m just going to launch in with the bad news: no progress on Steve Norris’s place; I don’t think our guy will go back there. No sightings of Steve Norris from around the Festival Gardens or the path through to St. Michael’s Station on the morning he disappeared, either.”

  He nodded, seeming to accept it as a function of the way this murder inquiry rolled.

  “It looked for a millisecond like DC Ivey might’ve made a breakthrough,” Ruth added.

  Carver perked up a little at that.

  “He got hold of two images from CCTV cameras in corner grocery stor
es,” she explained. “A man buying items with victims’ credit or debit cards.”

  “But . . . ?” Carver said. “I feel there is a ‘but’ coming.”

  “Neither is much good: the angle is too high on one, and the image is blurred to buggery on the other.”

  “If we could find the bastard using an ATM, we’d stand a better chance of getting a useful image,” Carver said.

  “I wouldn’t bet on it,” she said. “Both of the CCTV screen-caps show the suspect wearing a scarf around the lower half of his face and a beanie hat pulled low over his brow.”

  Carver sighed. “Well, tell Ivey to keep trying—all we need is for this bastard to get careless once.”

  Ruth nodded. “I’ve suggested he should go back to every shop that we know victims’ credit or debit cards were used, and leave copies of the CCTV images, in case our man comes back.”

  “Good idea,” Carver said. “All right, I’ve heard bad news; I hesitate to ask about the worse news.”

  “The results have come through on the heart,” Ruth said. “It doesn’t match any of the missing persons on our list.”

  “Because this victim hasn’t been reported missing yet, or because the killer’s gone out of area again?” He was sharp today, despite his frail looks.

  Carver rubbed his chin. “I hate to say it, Ruth, but we may need to widen our geographical area.”

  “I think you’re right,” she said. “But we’re looking at a national pool of around thirty-four thousand males over the age of eighteen.”

  Carver’s eyes widened. “That many go missing every year?”

  “Mostly in the twenty-two to thirty-four age group.” The stats were fresh in her mind from her searches for Adam Black. “Though only around three percent stay missing for more than a week.”

  “What about our victim? Do we know how long he’d been dead?”

  “The pathologist says there was no sign that the heart had been frozen, and there were no signs of putrefaction—the maggots were stage dressing, rather than through natural causes.”

  “So this victim could have been killed within the last week or so?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Ruth said. “Longer, if he refrigerated the tissue.”

  “We can’t search that many records, Ruth—we just don’t have the resources to keep throwing more people at this. And even if I could find the personnel, we don’t have the budget.”

  “I hear you,” she said.

  “If we could find a stronger link between them than age—”

  “And Tennent doesn’t exactly fit that criterion, either,” Ruth said. “But we think he either pissed off the killer or was a vehicle to boost the Ferryman’s visibility, so he doesn’t fit with the other victims in any case. If we focus on the others—Eddings and Martin, and the other MisPers—they were all local to Merseyside. Say we limit our search area to a forty-five- to fifty-mile radius . . .”

  Carver tapped a few instructions into his laptop, then swung it round for her to see. “This is what a forty-five-mile radius looks like,” he said. The map he’d called up included five major towns and cities in northwest England, including Manchester, Warrington, and Preston; it even lassoed parts of North Wales in its noose.

  “Right . . .” She thought for a few moments. “On the basis of the victims so far, we can exclude people suffering from depression or with known mental health problems—a sizable number of males who go missing do have mental health issues.”

  Carver nodded, the gleam in his eye telling her that he liked the idea.

  “And ask the pathologist just how long heart tissue will keep if it’s not frozen,” he said. “See if he can give us a narrower time slot.”

  “While I’m at it, I’ll ask if there’s anything he can do to narrow the age range,” Ruth said. “There might be some cytological tests he could try.”

  “Great.” Carver checked his watch. “I have a meeting. Can you . . . ?”

  “Sure,” she said. “I’ve got it covered.”

  She saw him ghost past the MIR a few minutes later, his overcoat slung over one arm. He caught her watching and faltered for a second, seemed about to say something, but then changed his mind and walked on, heading for the stairs.

  40

  Fifteen minutes later, Carver was in Paul Halmead’s office. Halmead was an eye movement and desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapist who worked out of the same building as Dr. Roman; the office was similar—a few more paintings on the walls, a brighter rug in the reception area, perhaps—but essentially the same. It even looked out onto Rodney Street, as Roman’s did.

  His last session with Roman had ended in bewilderment and hope.

  “I’m finished,” Carver had said.

  Dr. Roman had smiled. “No, Greg. This is the beginning. This is the moment you start to heal.”

  Carver had left Dr. Roman’s office with a name, and an appointment for the next morning with Halmead.

  The EMDR specialist was about Carver’s age, a kind-eyed man, balding and perhaps a little soft around the middle, but Carver sensed a sharp intelligence behind his empathic exterior.

  “You don’t have to know . . . stuff, do you?” Carver asked. It wasn’t the most auspicious opening to his first session, but he could not physically have coped with a second dissociative episode in the space of twenty-four hours.

  “Stuff?” Halmead said.

  “About me. About what happened to me.”

  “Let’s start from the premise that something happened to you,” Halmead said, his voice warm and unchallenging.

  “So you don’t need to know?”

  The psychologist was silent for a few seconds. “It’s quite normal for people to feel shame or guilt when they’ve been through trauma,” he said. “But that’s faulty thinking—it’s caused by our natural human need to rationalize things that happen. The ‘If I’d done this, then that would never have happened’ type of scenario. Traumatic events don’t happen to one person rather than another because they’re bad, or because they deserve it.”

  “I know that,” Carver said.

  “Objectively, on an intellectual level, I don’t doubt it,” Halmead said. “But the part of the brain that responds to trauma is instinctual, prelinguistic, emotional—you might as well try to reason with your pet dog. The guilt you feel is at a visceral level.”

  “Look, Mr. Halmead, I know you’re trying to help. But I went through all this with Dr. Roman. I really don’t feel guilt, or shame. I’m just frustrated that I can’t shake this thing. You see, I’m exposed to what you might call traumatic events on a regular basis in the work I do, and I keep having these flashbacks. Can you fix that?”

  “The human brain isn’t a machine,” the therapist said mildly. “You can’t tune it up like a lawnmower.”

  Carver braced his hands on his thighs, ready to stand.

  “Look,” the therapist said in the same quiet, unhurried tone. “Why don’t you tell me what you want from these sessions.”

  Carver deliberated.

  “I want to feel less afraid,” he said at last. “I want to be able to deal with the everyday confrontations of my job without blacking out. I want to sleep at night.”

  “Doesn’t seem much to ask, does it?” Halmead said quietly. “Can you tell me something about what happened to you—no details—just the bare outline of it. Was it a car crash, for instance? Or . . .”

  “Someone tried to kill me,” Carver blurted out. “They almost succeeded. I was conscious, but I couldn’t—” He took a deep breath and let it go slowly. “I was trapped, paralyzed for a time.”

  He remembered the shadows, and the reek of whisky and gunsmoke.

  “During the traumatic events, a primitive part of your brain called the amygdala is triggered,” Halmead said. “The amygdala controls the ‘fight or flight’ response.” He touched two points either side of his head, midway between his temples and ears. “Now, that’s a good thing, if you’re capable of fight or flight—but y
ou were literally paralyzed—unable to do one or the other. You were powerless.”

  “That was then,” Carver said. “Why can’t I control it now?”

  “The amygdala is nonverbal,” Halmead said. “The message flashed direct from your sensory organs—your eyes, nose, and ears—to the amygdala, to this primitive ‘lizard’ brain that only feels. Your higher brain was cut out of the loop. The result: total communication breakdown.”

  “That was then, this is now,” Carver repeated.

  “But the verbal and nonverbal parts of the brain are still not on speaking terms,” Halmead said.

  “What can I do about it?” Carver heard the note of desperation in his voice.

  “We have to put them back in touch.”

  “I don’t see how; I’ve tried everything.”

  “You haven’t tried everything until you’ve tried EMDR,” Halmead said.

  “How does it work?”

  Halmead smiled apologetically. “To be honest we don’t really know how it does what it does. But we do know it works.”

  “But I don’t have to talk about what happened, because I don’t think I could—”

  “No,” Halmead reassured him. “But I won’t lie to you—you do have to think about your experiences.”

  Carver took a breath and exhaled.

  Halmead cocked his head. “I’d guess that you’re having to clamp down so hard to control those feelings of helplessness that you’re blocking even normal emotions.”

  Carver croaked a reply, cleared his throat, and said, “Yes.”

  The therapist watched him for a few moments. “There’s a term in rehab: white-knuckle sobriety. You could be dry for years, but it’s like being on a roller-coaster ride—you just grab the handrail and hang on, ’cos you know if you let go, it’s a long way down.”

  “That’s exactly what it feels like,” Carver admitted.

  “How would it be if you could think about those things as something unpleasant that happened in the past, but can’t hurt you now, in the present—to be able to acknowledge the past, but let it go?”