by Ashley Dyer
“Concussion is only part of the picture,” the doctor said. “You also suffered serious bodily trauma when you were shot, and even before that happened, you were suffering from acute alcoholic poisoning.”
Carver bowed his head.
“Would you describe yourself as a heavy drinker in general?” The doctor waited until Carver established eye contact with him. “I’m not judging you, Mr. Carver—it just helps to give a more accurate prognosis if we have good information.”
Carver passed a hand over his face. “Since this case started I’ve been having trouble sleeping,” he said, approaching the question crabwise.
“How much trouble?”
“Two, maybe three hours on a good night.” Once or twice, he had even experienced hallucinations.
“Okay . . . sleep deprivation could be another factor affecting your brain function. And you’ve been drinking to help you sleep?”
“Yeah.”
“And waking at three in the morning in a cold sweat, I should think.”
Carver nodded. He had lost count of the number of times he’d woken halfway through the night, with a burning thirst and racing heart, having drunk himself into a stupor only a few hours earlier.
“The good news is that, although your liver function tests are elevated, your liver seems relatively healthy,” the doctor said. “And it will recover with time. But long-term alcohol abuse can affect memory. So we’re still looking at a complex picture here.” The doctor set his tablet down on the bedside table and took a seat, turning the chair to face Carver. “Medicine is very much like a police investigation,” he said. “The more intelligence you can gather, the clearer the picture becomes. Medics, like detectives, follow the evidence to identify the culprit—but too often people aren’t honest about what they know. That slows things down and can even result in greater harm.”
Carver exhaled.
The doctor waited for him and slowly, as though cranking the truth up from a deep well, Carver began. “You asked about hallucinations,” Carver said. “I keep smelling gun smoke, and I get an acrid, metallic taste in my mouth. Sometimes I wake up and I see . . . shadows.” He looked for the doctor’s reaction, but the surgeon only cocked his head to show he was listening.
“It feels like”—Carver swallowed—“like there’s someone in the room, and I know they’re there, but I can’t see them. They’re there but not there. And—this is really weird—when my colleague Ruth is talking, I see colored lights around her. I know, it’s crazy.” He stopped talking.
“The smell of gun smoke could be a flashback to the night you were injured,” the neurosurgeon said. “As for the rest, you’re describing ‘auras’—a common side effect of neurological damage, usually associated with headaches. Some patients have auditory disturbances, too—hearing sounds or voices—but visual disturbances are more typical.”
“What’s causing them?” Carver said, trying to recall if the lights were linked with headaches.
“The brain misfiring,” the doctor said. “Making odd connections as it reroutes information through undamaged tissues. So you smell something that isn’t there, see odd lights, experience strange sensations—like the shadow that is, but isn’t. It can be disturbing, but it is part of the recovery process.”
“So it will get better?”
“It might. Just to be sure, I’ll ask for a new panel of tests. We’ll do repeat CT and MRI scans, and an EEG to check the electrical activity in your brain. I’ve asked a neuropsychologist to come and have a chat with you, too, so that you can discuss the way forward.”
“But I will be able to work?”
“It’s a real help that you’ve been open with me,” the surgeon said. “As I said earlier, the signs are positive, but I’m afraid it’s too early to make that call.”
Carver wondered if the doctor would think the signs were as positive if he knew that the shadows had paid a visit just before his arrival. This time, one of the shadows had flickered and coalesced into something—someone—he recognized. It exploded in a supernova of light an instant later, but left an afterimage in his mind of Ruth, and she was holding a gun.
Chapter 17
DS Ruth Lake was sitting at her office desk, watching a “psychic” perform on YouTube. John Hughes had been quick to get back to her—Kara Grogan had signed up with an acting agent—there was a history going back to the beginning of the previous November. And she did have an audition—timed for four thirty that very afternoon, at a studio in London.
Ruth had tried the agent’s number a couple of times, unsuccessfully; she had left messages but was still waiting for a reply. It was now four o’clock.
Kara had also downloaded or bookmarked a lot of programs, both reality TV and drama, onto her DVR and did a lot of online searches on mediums, psychics, and cold reading. Hughes had sent Ruth a number of links to search items cached on Kara’s computer, and she had already trawled through a few of them. Printouts of documents from Kara’s computer files entitled “Mentalism,” “Nonverbal Cues,” and “Body Language” lay on her desk. The websites Kara had accessed included blogs and YouTube presentations tagged: “How to Spot a Liar,” “Reading Body Language,” “Cold Reading Techniques,” and “Tricks of the Psychic Trade”—that one was an article in Psychology Today.
Good to know that Kara was looking at both sides of psychic phenomena, Ruth thought. It was just a pity all that knowledge didn’t save her. It did mean, though, that Kara would probably have been more on her guard than most. The killer had to be a good liar. For a microsecond, Ruth felt a spark of optimism, but when you came right down to it, all that told them was what they already knew: they were looking for a psychopath—a flat-out, natural-born liar.
She sighed, made a note, and moved on to the next video.
Partway through a James Randi exposé of yet another fake, she got a call from John Hughes.
“Kara just got a stinking e-mail from a theatrical agent, ripped her to shreds for missing an audition.”
Ruth checked her watch; it was after five p.m. “And she isn’t returning my calls. How could she not know what happened to Kara?”
“Beats me,” he said. “Anyway, she says she’s taken Kara off her client list, tells her not to bother getting in touch. I’ve just forwarded it to you.”
Ruth checked her inbox. “Okay,” she said. “I’ve got it.”
The subject line read, “Audition No Show—are you effing kidding me?”
She skimmed the body of the text.
“I stuck my neck out. A student, not even graduated, given a chance in something that could give her a rocket-powered ride to stardom and you don’t show up? Get this in your head: you are the bottom of a very big sugar mountain of potential talent, and you just blew the best chance you will have this year—possibly in your entire fricking career. So, buckle up, baby, you are in for a bumpy ride, and you’re going to have to do it without this agent holding your sweaty little hand.”
“She’s really pissed off,” Ruth said. “Thanks, John—I’ll get on it.”
She copied the agent’s e-mail address and pasted it into the “to” line of a new e-mail and began composing, keeping the tone neutral, merely stating that she needed to speak with Ms. Frinton about her client, Kara Grogan. This done, she phoned the agent’s office again. The first two times, the line was engaged; the third time, she heard the telltale change of ring tone that said her call was being rerouted, and she was put through to Hayley, Ms. Frinton’s assistant.
“Ms. Frinton is away,” a young voice told her.
“Away, where?”
“All over—she’s interviewing new talent.”
“Well, Hayley, tell her to call me—it’s urgent.” Ruth gave her contact details without much hope of a return call.
She barely had time to take her hand off the receiver when her phone rang again.
It was Carver. “Ruth,” he said. “We need to talk.”
“About what?” she said, keeping her tone e
ven.
“The lies I’ve told you.”
“Okay . . .” she said. “I’m listening.”
“Not over the phone,” Carver said. “I want to talk face-to-face; you need to come here.”
Angry as she was with Carver, she was bound to him by the year they had worked together, and by her own actions in his apartment that terrible night.
She checked her inbox one last time to be sure there was nothing from Kara’s agent. “All right,” she said. “I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”
Chapter 18
Carver was working through a memory exercise on an e-tablet, and trying not to panic that a task that would have been child’s play a few weeks ago was taking all his concentration. He had been moved to the rehab unit, a block a short distance across the hospital campus and was allocated a private room—a relief, as it shielded him from curious looks from visitors to the unit.
“Greg.”
He looked up. Ruth Lake was standing in the doorway, her right hand grazing the seam of her trouser leg. For a splinter of time, the light changed to bitter orange, and it looked like she was holding something hard and metallic loosely in her grip.
Then a sharp whiff of gun smoke, and the light shifted back to the cold white of the low-energy LEDs.
She looked tired. Carver knew DCI Parsons as a box ticker and approval seeker, so he guessed that Ruth would be carrying most of the weight in the ongoing investigation.
“You seem a lot better,” she said.
Carver was sitting on a chair at the side of his bed; Emma had brought him a pair of pajamas and a dressing gown, which at least allowed him the illusion of a return to normality.
“I am—much better, thanks.” He set aside the tablet and took a breath. “Look, I don’t like the way we left it last time.”
“You said you wanted to talk about the lies you told me.”
As usual, her tone didn’t give away much, but a faint afterglow of orange seemed to shimmer around her and he thought, She’s angry.
“The lies, yes.” He didn’t add, And the lies you’ve been telling me, but maybe he would get to that later.
“So . . .” she said.
“DCI Jansen came in to see me—I should say ‘to question me.’ You were right, he really doesn’t like me.” He tried a smile, but Ruth remained neutral.
“What did you tell him?”
“What I told you.”
“You told me nothing.”
“I told you I don’t remember.”
“Which was a lie.”
He felt her close scrutiny as a bright light. The orange glow came and went, blurring her features a little. He hesitated before admitting, “It was partly true.”
“And partly a lie.” He saw a flicker of a smile, but there was no humor in it.
“Don’t be such a smart arse, Ruth. I remember some of what happened, but I don’t know what’s real, and what is . . . I don’t know—a dream? A fantasy?”
He thought he saw something—nothing so visible as a wince or a frown; this was something far more subtle, as though a gray membrane had slipped across her corneas. He had seen her do this a few times before, in interviews with particularly thuggish criminals, and also when she was lying to the senior ranks.
“For instance?” she said.
“Shadows,” he said. “A smell, like gun smoke—hallucinations, the doctor calls them—but . . . they do seem real.”
“So what are these shadows?” she asked.
“People,” he said, looking straight at her. “A person. I want to look at them—I can’t move, but I know they’re there.”
A flash of purple around her eyes, there and gone in less than a second, but unmistakable.
“You . . . don’t know who . . . ?”
“It’s still fuzzy.”
“Well, can you remember the start of the day?” she said. “Getting up, going to work, and so on?” It felt like she was changing the subject.
“I had a meeting with you, talked about Kara. I said I didn’t think she was meant as a threat to me, or Emma. You agreed.”
She nodded. “That’s how it went. Which is good, isn’t it—that you’re getting clear on that?”
He didn’t comment, wanting to keep his own lies to a minimum.
“So when do things start to get fuzzy?”
“Uh, around the time I left the office.” That was an outright lie.
He saw a fizz of orange light around her again. Angry, he thought. It means she’s angry.
“You left the office at around eight p.m.,” she said, her voice hardening, and he knew he was right about the anger. “That would be just after you’d called the mystery burner phone number on your mobile.”
Well, he wasn’t the only one who was lying. He pushed back: “One of the shadows is holding a gun.”
The angry flare of color faded.
“Who?” she said.
“I don’t know. Like I said, it was a shadow.”
She stared at him and she was just Ruth again, no pyrotechnics, no lights, and completely unreadable.
“Where are my files?” he asked.
“Don’t you remember? I told you, they’re gone.”
“Gone where?”
“The only signs they were ever in your apartment are a few Blu Tack stains on the walls of your bedroom, and a box-shaped imprint in the carpet.”
He was tiring now, but he thought he caught a gleam of green light from the corner of his eye.
“You’re being evasive again,” he said.
“Back atcha,” she said.
“What happened to the gun?” He asked the question with no expectation of a straight answer, just to see her reaction.
“The most likely explanation is the shooter took it with him.” The air around her seemed to luminesce green.
“You said you don’t believe the Thorn Killer shot me.”
“I don’t.”
“Then who? And who would take my files?” Carver said, circling back to the earlier question, testing her. “Why would they be of any interest to anyone other than the Thorn Killer?”
She went on the offensive. “I thought you asked me here to tell me the truth.”
“I can’t understand why you’re so sure it wasn’t the Thorn Killer who shot me,” he countered. “There must be something in the files—otherwise, why did he take them?”
She groaned. “What makes you so sure he did anything? You could’ve hidden them somewhere—or burned them.” She hardened her voice. “Or put them back where they belonged—under lock and key with the rest of the case notes.”
“Great theories,” he said. “Except I was reading those files at home the night I was shot.”
“I’m surprised you’re so sure,” she said. “Have you been holding out on me all along?”
“If the Thorn Killer didn’t steal the files, then who did?” he countered.
“Whoever shot you.” The purple swirl of color returned.
“I’ve been focused on this case for a year—who else but the Thorn Killer would hate me enough to take a gun and shoot me?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and the purple color morphed to bile-green luminescence.
The color of lies, he thought.
“You do know,” he said, feeling sick and weak with exhaustion, “or you think you do.”
“What are you, now?” she said, going on the attack again. “Some kind of mentalist?”
“I know a lie when I see one.”
“You mean when you hear one.”
“Nonverbal cues,” he said. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”
She shrugged. “Looks like we’re both keeping secrets, doesn’t it, Greg?”
After she’d gone, Carver slumped in his chair.
“Nonverbal cues”? I can’t believe you fed Ruth that crap. She of all people deserved honesty. But he couldn’t shake the memory he’d had when the neurologist last spoke to him: the supernova of light; the afterimage of Rut
h, holding a gun. Ruth standing at the entrance to his hospital room, the dull gleam of something metallic held loosely in her hand. Was this another example of his healing brain misfiring? Nerve impulses zigging when they should be zagging, making connections that were never there, trying to make sense of what happened and ending up with the equivalent of a circuit meltdown? Maybe. But he couldn’t deny the lights, auras—or whatever he should call them—when she spoke. He had seen it as plainly as if she had confessed it: Ruth was lying to him.
Chapter 19
Back at HQ, Ruth Lake drove past a cluster of reporters loitering near the front entrance and continued around to the car park, letting herself in the back way to avoid questions. Inside, she ran up four flights of stairs, partly to run off some of her anger, and partly to bypass DCI Parsons, who was stepping into one of the lifts as she entered the building.
She yanked the fire door open on the second floor as DC Ivey pushed it from the other side. He tipped forward, but righted himself with nifty agility.
“Sorry, Sarge,” he said, standing back to let her through.
“My fault,” she said. “Tom, isn’t it?”
He nodded, flushing slightly. His delicate complexion must make it hell for him in the dating stakes.
“How’s it going?” she asked.
“No joy on the hotel meeting,” he said. “Or with the throwaway mobie.”
Tell me about it.
“How’s DCI Carver?” the young detective asked.
“He’s . . . fine.” She had only just managed to avoid saying, He’s full of it, which was what was really in her mind. “Getting there, anyway.”
“From what the boss says, his memory’s still off,” Ivey said.
“Only to be expected,” she said, clamping down, remembering who Tom Ivey’s boss was.
“How’s your case going?”
“Slow,” she said. “Thanks for asking, though.”
Leaving it at that, she walked back to her own Major Incident Room feeling a little calmer. It was getting late, and most of the detectives on the case had gone home, but Ruth was still too fired up to think about packing up for the night. She checked her e-mails and voice mail; there was still nothing from Kara’s agent.
