Splinter in the Blood

by Ashley Dyer

  The restaurant was packed, but Helen had bagged a table outside. “Sorry,” she said. “Best I could do.”

  “No problem.” Ruth dipped in her pocket for an e-cigarette. “At least it’ll give me the chance to suck on one of these.”

  Helen smiled sheepishly, lifting three fingers of her gloved hand to reveal her own vape. “You’d think I would know better, doing what I do for a living—but what can I say? It’s an addiction.”

  “Oh, it is that,” Ruth said, taking a gentle draw on her e-cig.

  A moment later, a server appeared with two tall glasses.

  “I ordered coffee,” Helen said. “I hope you don’t mind?”

  “You’re kidding?” Ruth said, reaching for her glass with a smile of thanks. She took her first, welcome sip. “So, are you really heading to work, or was that just an excuse to get out of the house?”

  “No, I’m on my way in—I heard your voice in the hall and hit upon a plan to waylay you.” Helen took a breath. “Angela is lying through her teeth.”

  “I won’t argue with you on that. I’d like to speak to Lia and Jake—I get the feeling they would be more . . . amenable. I don’t suppose you’d happen to know where they are?”

  Helen smiled. “Why d’you think I lured you here? They’re guiding a ‘Haunted Liverpool’ tour around the Georgian Quarter. They should finish at St. James’s Cemetery at eight.”

  Ruth checked her watch. “Which gives me fifteen minutes to enjoy my coffee and a nicotine hit before I sprint over there.”

  It was almost a year to the day since the last time Ruth had visited St. James’s Cemetery, and as she approached the cathedral concourse, she slowed, remembering how they had found the body of Tali Tredwin on a table tomb at the base of the old quarry wall.

  The entrance to the cemetery lay on the left side of the cathedral concourse at the end of the spiked railings that protected the oratory building—a Greek temple in miniature. At the top of the escarpment, an access tunnel to the old quarry had been hewn out of the sandstone. Lined with gravestones lifted from the cemetery below, the tunnel curved left, sloping gently down into darkness. A faint light shimmered on the tunnel walls, and Ruth shivered, but kept going, her footsteps echoing dully from the stone floor. As she reached the sunken cemetery, she heard voices.

  The air was even colder at the bottom of the sandstone cliff, and a mist swirled around the exit, clinging to the ground, merging with pockets of snow. A short distance away the light source was revealed as a hurricane lamp, hanging from a lantern pole that was jammed into the ground. A group of around ten people huddled around its light.

  A clear, male voice declaimed in portentous Shakespearean tones: “For two hundred and fifty years, the rock was hewn from these ancient walls. Chronicles of those gone-by times speak of fairies, sprites, and hobgoblins, which nightly, and in diverse ways did perform their unseemly vigils on this very spot, to the great terror of every schoolboy and nursery-maid who had the temerity to venture through this darksome way.” The narrator paused.

  Could this be Jake? It didn’t sound like the mumbling, inarticulate youth Ruth had spoken to at the shared house, but she couldn’t see past the crowd of listeners.

  “But naught in this world is everlasting, and by 1825 the quarry was exhausted,” he went on. “The city corporation sought a new use for it, and the cemetery in which you stand this evening was consecrated in 1829. Since then, fifty-seven thousand souls have been lain to rest in this place.” Here, he lowered his voice, but it carried well on the thin night air.

  An owl screeched suddenly and, pale and luminous, swept low over their heads.

  Someone said, “Oh my God!”

  The speaker waited for the muttered exclamations and suppressed laughter to die down.

  “It is not owls alone that haunt these darkling paths,” he said. “Only a year after the cemetery opened, the Right Honorable William Huskisson, MP, attending the official opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway line, fell under the wheels of Mr. Stephenson’s steam engine, The Rocket, and died of his wounds, earning him the dubious honor of being the first person to be killed by a train. His remains are buried in the grand mausoleum yonder.”

  Here, the speaker turned, raising one arm, and the group broke the circle to look toward the domed building at the center of the cemetery. Light from the hurricane lamp fell on one side of his face, and Ruth recognized the brooding features: it was, indeed, Jake—Kara’s housemate. He wore a dark frock coat and top hat and looked confident and poised.

  “But Mr. Huskisson’s soul does not lie easy. And oftentimes in the dead of night he is seen limping and groaning around the foundations of his monument.”

  A murmur of disconcerted delight rippled through the audience. Then a second person spoke: “Another spirit said to haunt this place is that of a Victorian lady, dressed all in black, who is seen gliding along the paths of the cemetery.”

  This was the nervous little waif, Lia; a tall wig constructed of elaborate curls was piled on top of her head. Pinned to her coiffure, a small, feathered hat. She was shivering in silk crinoline skirts and a velvet jacket. Her voice, high and piping, lacked the strength to carry far in the open.

  “The lady’s tomb was ransacked by grave robbers and it is said that she weeps as she searches the paths for her lost jewels. Often, she will move frantically from one end of the cemetery to the other, before vanishing in the tunnel, whence we, too, must make our way, for now our journey is ended.” She raised her forearm to the horizontal and swept it wide, turning one-eighty degrees to point toward the tunnel entrance, where Ruth stood.

  Lia gasped, seeing Ruth, and several of the group gave little yelps of frightened surprise. Laughter quickly followed, and the audience dispersed, couples clinging to each other, others talking excitedly, smiling at Ruth as they passed.

  Only the two actors remained. They were not smiling.

  “What are you doing here?” Jake asked. “How did you—”

  “I just called in at the house,” she said, leaving them to assume that Angela had told her where to find them. “I have a few more questions.”

  “What’s the matter with you? We don’t know anything,” Lia burst out. The feather in her cap quivered with indignation.

  “Something new has come to light,” Ruth said.

  She told them about the audition, and Lia’s shoulders slumped as though she felt another opportunity had slipped past her. Jake closed his eyes for a second as though he felt a physical pain.

  “The audition was today,” Ruth said. “Her agent was furious that she didn’t turn up.”

  Jake’s anguished expression told Ruth that he wanted to come clean, but Lia refused to meet her eye.

  “Let’s find somewhere where we can talk,” Ruth said.

  “I don’t want to talk to you.” Lia all but stamped her foot. “I won’t.”

  “Come on, Lia,” Ruth said. “It’s just a chat.”

  “No.” Lia lifted the hem of her dress and swept past Ruth. “I’m cold,” she said. “I’m going home.”

  She bustled off through the tunnel, her skirts whispering against the gravestones as she fled.

  “So it’s just you and me,” Ruth said. “Nice performance, by the way.”

  “It was crap. Lia doesn’t own the part. ‘It is said that she weeps.’ Seriously?” He gave a dismissive snort. “If she doesn’t believe it, why should the audience? ‘She will move frantically’—what the hell does that even mean?”

  Suddenly, Ruth understood. “This was yours and Kara’s tour, wasn’t it?”

  He frowned, seemed about to deny it, but changed his mind.

  “Kara had people looking over their shoulders, jumping at shadows,” he said. “I should never have carried on after . . . It’s—I dunno—it feels disrespectful.”

  “Well, at least you didn’t mention that Tali Tredwin was discovered here.”

  He sucked air through his teeth. “Angela’s bagged that. She’s
planning a Thorn Killer Murder Walk, visiting all the sites where victims were found.”

  “And how do you feel about that?”

  “Fucking horrible. Okay?”

  In fairness, he did look sick.

  Without another word, he unhooked the hurricane lamp and dragged the hook out of the ground. He made to walk past her, but she sidestepped, blocking him.

  “Okay, you feel terrible—good for you. But what’re you going to do about it?”

  “What can I do? It’s a free country.”

  “You could tell Angela what you think.”

  “And if I kick up a stink, she’ll call Daddy and tell him I’m being ‘beastly.’ I could end up on the streets, trying to find new digs during finals. I can’t handle that.” His voice broke, and in the lamplight, she saw that his eyes were filled with tears.

  “What are you hiding from me?” she said.

  “Nothing.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s something. It’s like a parcel you pass among you: you and Lia and Angela. You did something—you and the others.”

  His forehead creased, and she knew she was getting through.

  “Look, I know you’re not proud of it, and I’m pretty sure that given a second chance, you would do things differently.”

  He peered into her face and she saw how tortured he was.

  “Kara is gone—I’ll never be able to make it up to her,” he said.

  “But you can help find her killer.”

  “I don’t see how,” he said, and it sounded like a howl of anguish.

  “I need to understand what was going on in Kara’s life at that time. If something upset her—knocked her off her normal equilibrium—she might do something out of character, take a risk she wouldn’t usually take.” She could see that he was listening. “Knowing Kara’s state of mind could help us to uncover what she was doing in the last few days and hours before she vanished, and that could lead us to the person who killed her.”

  For a full ten seconds he looked past her into the mist and the shadows. Then he sighed. “All right,” he said. “All right. I’ll tell you. But not here.”

  They ended up at the Roscoe Head, only a short walk away, but where Jake was unlikely to be seen by fellow students. Ruth settled the student in a quiet corner and went to the bar. She knew the landlady, Carol Ross, from her days on the beat.

  “On duty or off?” Carol asked.

  “On,” Ruth said, with a wince of regret. Off duty, she would have a half of whatever guest beer Carol recommended. On duty, it was always tonic water, with ice and lemon.

  “What about Lord Snooty?”

  “Rum and Dr Pepper.” Carol rolled her eyes and Ruth said, “I try not to judge.” She looked over her shoulder at the scowling youth and added, “Better make that rum a double.”

  She sat at forty-five degrees to the student, which gave her the dual advantage of being able to read his face without making the interview feel confrontational.

  “Kara could be a bit full of herself,” he said.

  “Bragging?”

  “No . . . just . . . she knew she was good.”

  Ruth couldn’t equate the two, but she didn’t let it show in her face.

  “She was superorganized. I mean, pretty anal about it, actually.”

  Kara’s agent seemed to think she was doing what they should all be doing, but Ruth kept her eyes wide, and her body language interested and sympathetic, leaning in to him slightly, and nodding every now and then in encouragement.

  “When I first moved into Angela’s place, everyone got on fine,” Jake said. “It was good—the parties were fantastic . . .”

  “Until . . .” Ruth prompted.

  The corners of his mouth turned down for a fraction of a second. Sour taste, bitter memories.

  He sighed. “One time, we were playing ‘Truth or Dare’ with vodka shots. We all got totally wasted. Kara went for a ‘truth.’” He shook his head, staring into his drink as he remembered. “She told us she had terrible nightmares the night before a performance. Standard stuff—like going onstage and you haven’t learned your lines, or you don’t even know what play it is. That would’ve satisfied the rest of them, but she wasn’t used to drinking, and she said more than she should.”

  Ruth waited.

  “She should’ve just shut up,” he said. It sounded like a justification.

  “Was it so bad, what she told you?”

  “Not bad, just . . . dangerous.”

  He paused, and when she didn’t comment further, he sighed, and his shoulders slumped.

  “She said she would go looking for her rehearsal script—this is in her dream—and when she found it, her blocking notes, pencil marks, script analysis, highlighting—it was all gone.”

  He glanced quickly into Ruth’s face, and she realized the notion terrified him.

  “You saw the notes she made—how she marked everything up?”

  Ruth nodded.

  “Angela thought it would be a laugh to get hold of Kara’s script, change the order, replace it with an unmarked script.”

  “Tapping into Kara’s worst fears,” Ruth said.

  “Then they pretended they didn’t know what she was talking about.”

  “‘They’ being . . . ?”

  “Angela and Lia.”

  No surprises there. She recalled her first visit to the house; Angela had wished her luck in gaining entry to Kara’s room.

  “So Angela lied when she told me she didn’t have a key?” If she had, it could mean that she had tampered with evidence—and that could have serious repercussions.

  “No—by the time you came, only Kara had a key—I’m getting to that.”

  He took a deep breath, letting it go slowly, and Ruth knew that this was the part he’d been building up to.

  “We do a lot of community theater on one of the modules,” he said. “We’re supposed to show we can do stuff on our own—you know, organize a production, take it out to schools and community projects. Create our own ‘revenue streams’ if we can’t find proper acting jobs.”

  He sounded contemptuous, and Ruth guessed that he had his sights set much higher.

  “One of the challenges was to devise, improvise, script, and rehearse a piece all in one week, then perform it in a community setting—school, church hall, day care unit—whatever. It was all about teamwork—you know, the camaraderie of the touring companies of old—Nicholas Nickleby, ‘The Crummles Troupe,’ and all that bollocks.”

  “Sounds like you didn’t think much of it,” Ruth said.

  “I didn’t think I would, but”—he shrugged—“it was good—you know, fun. Kara was brilliant—as usual. We knew she would outshine us all, and I guess we were envious.” He gave a slight shake of his head, remembering, and she saw regret and self-disgust in his face.

  “So, on the last day of rehearsals, while Kara wasn’t around, Angela said she’d decided to change the script—not all of it—just one page. Kara wasn’t to be told. I didn’t want to, but the others said we’re supposed to throw challenges at each other, learn how to improvise when someone misses a cue, or skips a line, or dries in a performance.”

  “So you went along with it.”

  “I didn’t like it. But it was only a page—I mean about a minute of performance time—then we would go back to the script. It was a community fill-in, no big deal; it wasn’t even worth that many course credits. She could’ve just stood there, said nothing, picked up the next cue, nobody would’ve noticed. It was how she made us feel a lot of the time. You know—a bit useless, out of our depth. But when we started saying the new lines, taking up new positions—I thought she would have a heart attack. She started shaking, couldn’t breathe. We were at this place for kids in care. The audience was weirded out, one of the support workers asked Kara if she was all right. I went over and touched her shoulder, and she jumped like I’d burned her. She looked at me. I mean right into me.” He sighed. “Then she turned and walked out.”


  “What did you do?”

  “Well, we couldn’t just leave. We finished the performance—by the end of it, the audience thought it was part of the drama. She didn’t come home that night. When she did show up the next day, she changed the locks on her door, didn’t speak to any of us. Angela didn’t even dare complain to her dad.”

  “From what you said earlier, I would’ve expected Angela to tell her father.”

  He shrugged. “Kara could have made things very difficult for us if she’d reported what we did, but she didn’t. In some ways that made it worse. If she’d been angry, at least I could’ve reacted. But she blanked us. Didn’t eat meals with us, go out with us, wouldn’t watch TV with us . . . I tried to apologize, she said, ‘It’s okay, Jake. I’ve learned a valuable lesson.’ It was like she decided she was on her own, and she was going to deal with it, no matter what it took. She changed workshop groups, started going out at night on her own. The only person she would even talk to was Helen.”

  “And Helen was the only person who didn’t know what was going on.” Ruth kept any judgment out of her tone. “Those nights she went out—do you have any idea where she was going?”

  “No. Is it important?”

  “Her agent thinks she was seeing someone to help her with stage fright.”

  Jake loosened his scarf and opened his coat, his skin flushed with emotion. “We did that to her. Jesus—I am such a fucking shit.” He stopped, the color drained from his face, the self-pity and self-justification replaced by a look of horror.

  “Do you think we shoved her into the path of the psycho who killed her?”

  Chapter 21

  Day 8

  The next morning, directly after the briefing, Ruth Lake drove to the university’s anthropology museum, where she had arranged to meet with Dr. Lyall Gaines, their new forensic adviser. The museum was housed in a Georgian terrace on Abercromby Square. Most of the square was pedestrian access only, and the roadway near the museum only accessible via card-access barriers. She circled for ten minutes, then gave up and parked down the hill on Mount Pleasant.