by Ashley Dyer
Milner’s delight was apparent. “Have you seen the original?”
“No,” Ruth said.
“Oh, you must—it’s at the National Gallery. Wright was an asthmatic; can you imagine painting that poor animal’s suffering, knowing what it felt like to suffocate?”
“Terrible, I should think.”
“Indeed. As you say, little was known about the air we breathe at that time, so for Wright, Lavoisier’s new theory must have been particularly compelling.”
Ruth could see vividly in her mind’s eye the avid expression on a little boy’s face in the left of the painting, two girls on the right, clearly sisters, one with her eyes covered as the white cockatoo fluttered desperately in the bell jar. The younger girl looked anxiously at her older sister. Next to the girls, an older man—Ruth always thought of him as their father—urging them to engage fully with the experiment.
“The people watching all respond differently to the experiment,” she said, half to herself.
“For me, that’s one of the most remarkable things about the painting,” Milner said. “The response of the observers is portrayed as an integral part of the experience.”
Hadn’t Jim Barrow said Alderson Bank’s Art Awards favored submissions that invited audience interaction?
Interaction, participation, she thought. That was exactly what the Ferryman was doing in his exhibits—inviting engagement.
How did that fit with Adam’s spat with the college? What had he done that would alienate his open-minded lecturers to the point that he couldn’t go back? She thought she knew, and if given the choice, she would rather not hear the details. But Adam was a person of interest, if not a suspect. She needed to keep in mind that he was a stranger; she could not assume he was, in essence, the fourteen-year-old she had shared home and family with all those years ago.
“I take it Mr. Black’s ‘installation’ was a kind of performance?” she said.
Milner nodded. “His original presentation plan used a 3-D print of a cockatoo. He incorporated some clever light effects to create the effect of chiaroscuro—light and dark—in the demonstration, which made it look like the bird was moving. As the air was extracted, the bird’s movements became more frantic, then feebler, until the jar faded into darkness.”
Ruth experienced a queasy certainty as to where Milner was going with this.
“It was powerful,” Milner said. “Everyone who saw it had a visceral reaction to the installation. He got people talking.”
“About what?”
“Piety and hypocrisy; fascination versus voyeurism—about the function of art in society. It was easily good enough to guarantee him a first.” He took a breath and exhaled. “But ‘good enough’ is never enough for a perfectionist like Adam. So . . .”
Ruth knew what he was going to say before he even opened his mouth.
“In the finals, he substituted the 3-D print with a live cockatoo.”
She kept emotion out of her voice. “Was he expelled?”
Milner shook his head. “I caught the substitution in time, stopped the demonstration, but Adam couldn’t accept it. It was terrible. Terrible,” he said with bitter self-reproach. “I should have given him more time to reflect; he was just overenthusiastic. He’d allowed himself to be seduced by the idea without thinking of the consequences. With guidance, I’m sure he could have experimented without transgressing ethical boundaries.”
“Did you tell him that?” Ruth asked, all the time wondering how many birds Adam had experimented on as he perfected his technique.
“Of course,” Milner said. “But I couldn’t persuade him to see it that way. In the end, it was taken out of my hands.”
“How so?”
“Since I couldn’t persuade him to modify his installation design, I was forced to take it to the college ethics committee. They had recently appointed a new chairman, and he was keen to make his mark. He called us to a meeting and asked Adam to account for his work. He was defiant—adamant he wouldn’t change a thing.”
That sounded like Adam, all right.
“He was given an ultimatum,” Milner went on: “Modify the design or face suspension. He walked out of the meeting, never came back.”
64
Ruth sat at her desk, googling the UK Street Art Awards. It was after hours, and Carver and most of the other members of the team had gone home. Drew Scanlon had been charged with fraudulent use of Steve Norris’s credit card and released on police bail. Carver had placed a watch on him, sanctioned reluctantly by Superintendent Wilshire; Karl Obrazki’s murder had given Carver enough leverage to win that argument. True to form, DC Ivey had volunteered for the first shift. Overspending on the case was reaching spectacular levels, so he was working alone, with instructions to follow at a discreet distance and radio for assistance immediately if he felt uneasy.
She clicked through the Street Art Awards gallery of prizewinners, and moments later she was staring at a photograph of Adam with a “screw you” look on his face. He was standing in front of a giant image of an antique bird cage, painted on a brick wall. Inside the cage, a white cockatoo lay dead. The cage door had been forced open from the inside, the bars around it pried apart, and a ghostly image of the bird seemed to rise, bursting triumphant from its cage.
Adam had painted the graffito artwork on a side wall of Fairfield College shortly after he quit, it seemed. A year later, it had won him the Young Talent award.
Cocky bastard. Now Ruth understood Milner’s cryptic remark, and his rueful smile.
She rang Adam’s mobile. It went straight to voice mail. After three attempts, she gave up.
The phantom itch of the ghost tattoo burned in the crease of her left arm, and she caught herself tearing at it as she brooded over Adam.
Time to go home, Ruth.
She looked up and saw Jason Parr watching her from across the room. He quickly glanced away and busied himself with some paperwork. She hadn’t seen him come in. But that was just like Parr: always creeping around, just out of eyeline, listening at doorways, earwigging canteen gossip. He’d kept his head down since the scuffle on the stairwell with Tom Ivey the day before, but the man was beginning to seriously bug her.
She kept her gaze on him till he finally got the hint and headed out of the office, with a murmured, “G’night, Sarge.”
When she was sure he was out of earshot, she rang Mick Driscoll, the shift sergeant responsible for the special volunteers. He picked up straightaway. Ruth heard a gabble of voices and laughter in the background.
“Hold on,” he said. “Can’t hear meself think with this row.” A second later he spoke again. “That’s better.”
“Sorry, Mick,” she said. “I hope I haven’t dragged you away from a family do.”
“Grandson’s ninth birthday party,” he said. “The wife volunteered our place ’cos we’ve got the room, apparently. We’ve already had two rope burns from the tug-of-war, one major strop over the Lego treasure hunt, and a falling-out over ‘Pass the Parcel.’ I was about to be roped in for a highly inappropriate game of ‘Murder in the Dark’—you might just have saved me from a fate worse than death.”
Ruth laughed. Driscoll wasn’t usually so expansive, and she guessed that he was secretly having rollicking good fun.
“So,” he said, “what can I do for you?”
Ruth checked she was alone. “I’m getting some bad vibes from one of the specials. I wanted to get your take on him.”
“Let me guess,” he said. “Parr.”
“He’s got a reputation?”
“Let’s say he doesn’t play well with others,” Driscoll said.
“I heard he’d applied to be regular police, but needed more experience.”
Driscoll snuffed. “He’s been a special for five years,” he said. “More likely they told him he needed a better attitude.”
“Meaning?”
“He’s a bighead. Likes to boss the others about. Bit shifty, too.”
“Yeah,” s
he said. “He’s keen, though.”
“There’s keen,” Driscoll said, “and then there’s officious. Take that hoo-ha over the scene log the other day—you know, when he let that poor lad Karl slip past him with all those photos.”
“I’d call that incompetent, not officious,” Ruth said.
“Except he wasn’t supposed to be doing that job. In fact—till it came up at the debrief, I didn’t know he was there at all.”
Ruth’s scalp prickled.
“I’d put one of the younger volunteers on the door,” Driscoll explained. “Good lad. Studying for a degree, he is, wants to be a cop when he graduates—he’ll be a good one an’ all, if he ever learns to stand up for himself. But Parr shows up, and the silly bugger let himself get bullied into handing over the scene log. So what’s he been up to now?”
“I caught him trying to lean on a detective constable yesterday,” she said. “And he’s always in places he shouldn’t be, always with a glib excuse—”
Driscoll chuckled. “I tell you—that lad can get in places olive oil can’t.”
A few moments later, the party spilled into the hallway. Driscoll apologized—he was wanted.
Stiff from a day of office work and interview rooms, Ruth decided to run. It was only three miles, and she’d brought her running gear in a backpack that morning and stowed it in her locker. She logged out of her account and trotted down the stairs to the changing room.
The bag clunked against the metal of the cabinet as she lifted it out, and she set it down on the bench seat while she made up her mind what to do next.
After a minute, she took a steadying breath, then removed the sports gear and running jacket from the bag. Packed neatly under them was an evidence box, tape-sealed and further protected inside a ziplock bag. There was no evidence label on the bag or the box—because inside was one of the beer bottles Adam had been drinking from the night before—and it would not be admissible as evidence.
She placed the box on the bench, changed into her sweats, and began her warm-up routine, still undecided. The bottle would certainly have Adam’s DNA around the rim, but even if she could sneak it by John Hughes, an undocumented DNA check would raise questions. There were latent fingerprints on the bottle. She was sure John would’ve had the Ferryman’s fingermark scanned into the system by now, but even fingerprint checks required paperwork.
As she finished tying her shoelaces, Ruth realized that she really didn’t need to go through IDENT1, or the DNA database. She scrolled through her contacts to John Hughes.
“Hey, John. I know it’s late, but those slides you showed us earlier of the fingermark—”
“From the disk,” he said. “What about it?”
“You couldn’t just zap them across to me, could you?”
“I could do, but . . .”
“I think it’d be good to show the rest of the team—give them a bit of a boost. I might give ’em the pep talk about small details . . .”
He huffed a laugh. Ruth had delivered the same spiel as a CSM and an instructor, guest lecturing at Liverpool JMU, when Hughes was a late-entry student, studying forensic science.
“I’m at home right now,” he said. “But I’ll send it over first thing.”
“Thanks,” she said, as if it was nothing.
The outer door of the changing room thumped open, and Ruth swiped the box up and pushed it out of sight inside her locker.
Whoever it was disappeared into one of the toilet cubicles, and Ruth stuffed her work clothes into the backpack, locked up, and left. She would take lifts of the latent prints from the bottle tomorrow and do a physical comparison with the print John Hughes had found in the plexiglass.
Just one more task to complete, and then she could go home.
There weren’t many pay phones left in Liverpool, but Ruth knew where there was a bank of them. She jogged to the city’s mainline railway station on Lime Street, avoiding the main drag, dodging into a late-opening shop to use their changing rooms, where she took off her running top and replaced it with the suit jacket. You couldn’t sneeze in this part of the city without it being recorded on CCTV, so as an extra precaution, she donned a baseball cap for the last leg, tucking her hair under it and keeping her head down, mingling with the crowds. It was dark by now, and that would help, but in the station, she would be visible to a dozen cameras.
Thankfully, the concourse was busy, and she allowed herself to be caught up with a gang of tourists being shepherded from one end to the other. Ruth peeled off at the phone bank and fed coins into the slot.
She was put straight through to Dave Ryan.
“I thought we were quits,” she said.
“I’m not with you,” he said, his tone inviting further explanation.
“A solicitor from Felix Welsh’s firm turned up at work today.”
“Busy legal practice, that,” he said. “Keeping the law fair and equitable in this city’s a full-time job.”
“The solicitor in question was sent to provide legal representation to my brother.”
“Sorry to hear he’s in trouble,” he said, sounding bored now. “But what’s this got to do with me?”
“Ryan, I’m warning you,” she said. “Lay off.”
“I take it he’s out now?”
She didn’t answer.
“You’re welcome,” he said. “Like I said, one good turn deserves another.”
The Tannoy loudspeaker boomed and the crowds around her seemed to slow; for one full second, her heart stopped. Then it began a rapid, jittery beat. Stay cool. All he has is suspicions. But suspicion was more than enough to finish a policing career.
When the announcement was finished, she said, “Are you there?”
But the line was dead.
65
Drew Scanlon gave me the slip in the city center, shortly after the police let him go. Never trust a scall to do a job right: he was supposed to give the cops the runaround. I’d assumed he’d know how to use a stolen card without getting himself arrested. And the thing is, the little shit saw me. Arrived early to the bedsit, eager to stick his nose in the trough. We passed on the stairs; he looked away—presumably not wanting to be identifiable. But that cuts both ways—and he saw me.
It crossed my mind that I might use my network of hoodie fans to locate him but I didn’t want to take the chance that they’d decide to stick around. I do not need any more witnesses.
As it turned out, it wasn’t hard to track down his address. So here I am, three hours later, freezing my balls off, waiting for him to show up.
And here he is. Finally. He’s drifting a little, which is a good sign. No doubt he’s been the toast of the alehouse, impressing his cronies with tales of his brush with the Ferryman.
Here we go . . .
I slip out of the shadows and fall in step behind him. He’s fumbling in his pocket for his keys as I reach the perimeter wall. Staggers two steps backward, pulls his pocket lining inside out, and steps forward again, all his limited brainpower concentrated on finding the key slot.
I have the knife ready, swing it out and up in an arc.
A yell. Footsteps pounding down the street.
Drew turns. He shouts, bringing his arm up to protect himself.
SEARING PAIN. My elbow!
The knife clatters to the concrete.
I turn, grabbing the assailant with my good arm, dragging him to the ground.
Drew is sprawled nearby, swearing, his heels scraping the ground as he tries to get up. The other man is stronger than he looks. He wrestles one arm free and tries to take another swing at me. Police baton. DC Ivey. Bastard.
I hit him in the face, scramble for the knife.
I have it! I slash wildly, but the cop rolls out of reach, boosts himself to his feet just as Drew scrambles to his knees. Drew’s coordination is off and he pitches forward, knocking the cop sideways. I try one more swing, make contact, hear the cop grunt in pain.
Drew is staring stupidly at the cop as he bleeds
. A police car screams around the corner, lights blazing. He hits the siren, accelerating toward me, and I’m off, running.
66
“What do we know?” Carver said.
He was in a fleet car; Ruth Lake was driving—at slightly over the limit—toward Canning Place. Ruth had roused Carver from an exhausted sleep, but now he was buzzing with energy and eager for the chase.
“The flats where Drew Scanlon lives have security cameras in the public areas,” Ruth said. “They’ve given us full access.”
“Tell me they got the bastard on camera.”
Ruth scooted around a cab dropping off a fare on Princes Boulevard, maneuvering smoothly back into the inside lane, ready for the turn left toward the riverside.
“They got him,” she said. “But he was wearing a balaclava as well as a coat and scarf.”
“Anything we can use?” he asked.
“Scientific Support have someone working on the drive now, we’ll see when we get to the office.”
“What about Scanlon—did he recognize the attacker?”
“He’s drunk as a skunk—says it was all a blur—and he still swears he doesn’t know the Ferryman’s identity.”
“D’you believe him?”
“He’s terrified. I think if he knew, he’d say.”
Carver thought through the sequence, as he understood it: a knife attack; external factors the Ferryman could not control; no social media links; no “exhibit.”
“Has Instagram picked up on this yet?” he asked.
“Not a whisper.” Ruth sped along Upper Parliament Street, lighting up hoodie graffiti on walls and street cabinets.
“This seems way off-whack for the Ferryman,” Carver said. “Impulsive, badly planned.”
“Yeah,” Ruth agreed. “There’s signs all around the building: ‘Smile, you’re entering a CCTV area’—he usually knows his locations literally inside and out before he makes a move.”
“We could do with Dr. Yi’s opinion on that.”
