Splinter in the Blood

by Ashley Dyer

  “No . . .” He glanced over his shoulder. “The other thing.”

  “The look, you mean? Relax, Tom, he was just flirting.”

  The detective constable looked like a man who was terrified to speak in case he said the wrong thing.

  “You’re not ‘out’?” Ruth said.

  “I’m out—just not at work.”

  “Okay.”

  “So . . .”

  There was a question in his tone, and that did offend her.

  “Oh,” she said, and “You’re asking if I intend to out you?”

  “No,” he said, immediately flustered. “I mean—I just wouldn’t want it to become common knowledge.”

  “Your personal life is your own business.” The doors slid open and she stepped inside the lift. “Ask around—I’m not known for idle chitchat.”

  “I know,” he said, with a little smile that told her there was plenty of idle chitchat about her. It didn’t bother her—and even if it did, she would never have let it show.

  She hit the button. “Make those calls,” she said.

  On the ground floor, Ruth made her way through the foyer and found the fire escape stairs that opened onto the courtyard at the back of the building. The management had agreed to disable the door alarm to allow the crime scene guys unobtrusive access. She made a quick recce of the stairs to check there were no obstacles to get around and poked her head out at the second floor to establish which way they would have to turn to get to Adela Faraday’s room. Ivey was standing outside room 214. He had his back to her, but she could read tension in every muscle of his spine.

  As she ghosted down the fire escape on her way back downstairs, a member of the housekeeping team came through the door on the first floor. She looked startled, and Ruth said, “It’s okay, I’m just avoiding someone.”

  The girl smiled. “I know this feeling.”

  She should have left it at that, but couldn’t help herself. “I’m police,” she said, adding at the girl’s look of alarm, “We’re just checking out one of the rooms.”

  “Oh,” the girl said. “Is problem?”

  Her English was heavily accented, eastern European.

  “Not for you,” Ruth said, and the chambermaid relaxed a little.

  “This woman . . .” Ruth took the photo of Adela out and handed it to the girl. “Do you recognize her?”

  She nodded. “Anna.”

  Ruth took out her mobile phone and scrolled through to an image of Carver.

  “Yes,” the maid said. “Him—with her.” She held up the picture of Adela.

  “They were here together?” Another nod. “When?”

  The girl shrugged. “Five, six times?”

  Ruth took a couple of slow breaths before asking. “Which room?”

  “Two-one-four. Always same.” The room number where the CSIs would soon be making themselves busy. “Last time. Big argument.”

  “You saw them?”

  The girl held up the photograph. “She is very angry.” She mimed a throwing action.

  “She threw something at him?”

  “Shoe. Coat. Shirt. His things.” The girl mimed again.

  “She threw them on the floor?”

  “Outside room.”

  Ruth began to feel a little better. He left. They had argued, but Greg left.

  “Then he go . . .”

  “He left?” Ruth said, wanting to be absolutely certain.

  The girl frowned. “No, he went—back in room.”

  Ruth’s ears boomed. The girl smiled nervously and she realized she must have been staring. She hesitated, not sure if she wanted to know the answer to her next question. Still, it had to be asked. “What happened then?”

  “Security come.” The girl shrugged. “I go.”

  When the first of the CSIs arrived, Ruth should have left them to it. Her job was done. DC Ivey would explain how he’d seen Adela on the CCTV recording and decided to ask a few questions at the hotel. The last thing Ruth needed was DCI Jansen asking awkward questions about why she was hanging around. But standing at the bottom of the fire escape, her hands in her pockets and the cold seeping into her bones, she felt she had to do more. She needed straight answers from Carver, and she wasn’t going to get them unless she knew enough to work the detective’s bluff: a suspect would generally meet you halfway if you had a few key facts and spoke with confidence.

  A suspect? Is that what Greg is now?

  He certainly wasn’t blameless and remembered a hell of a lot more than he was saying. She was sure he knew Adela, but Carver knew every trick in the interrogation book, so it wouldn’t be easy, getting him to admit what he remembered—and she would need a lot more than she had right now to work the bluff.

  CSM John Hughes had attended Carver’s flat after the shooting, so he would probably stay away, manage the CSIs at this new scene from his office. Which meant that he wouldn’t be around for her to sidle alongside and wheedle information out of.

  A CSI, suited, but not yet booted, approached from the car park. He was fairly new, and she’d never supervised him as a crime scene manager herself, but he recognized her and nodded in thanks as she held the fire escape door for him while he hefted his crime scene bag and a UV “darklight” into the stairwell.

  “Looks like I’m doorwoman for the night,” she said, with a self-mocking smile.

  “We can’t have you mucking up the scene, Sarge,” he said, with a grin that said he knew he was being cheeky.

  “How’s the Faraday scene-processing going?” she asked. A different team would be working on Adela Faraday’s apartment, but a scene like that, word got around.

  “Looks like the killer dragged her out onto the terrace after he did her in,” the CSI said. “So it’s not a smelly one.”

  The body wasn’t in an advanced state of decomposition—that could be good news for Greg Carver.

  “She’d been buried in the snow,” he went on. “But when that started to melt, the seagulls got at her. Eyes were gone.” He shuddered. “God, I hate it when the eyes are gone.”

  Ruth felt a pulse throbbing in her neck: no decomp, and little predation by gulls. Adela can’t have been out there for long before the snowfall—and they’d had no fresh snow since the night she’d found Carver. Adela Faraday was probably murdered the same night.

  She listened to the CSI laboring up the stairwell with his heavy kit, and suddenly she couldn’t stand to be near the place any longer. She walked back to her car, parked in a bay on the main road, her limbs jerky, teeth chattering, sick with dread.

  Chapter 28

  It was late by the time DS Lake walked through the doors into the hospital, and the ward doors were locked. She pressed the buzzer, but nobody came. She pressed again. The third time, the intercom clicked, and a voice that sounded fifty miles away asked her to explain her business. The nurse listened to Ruth’s request in silent disapproval.

  Mr. Carver was resting, she said. She should come back in the morning.

  “He’ll see me,” she said.

  “Not tonight,” the disembodied voice said.

  “I know he’s there,” Ruth said. “Tell him he’ll see me, or he’ll see Detective Chief Inspector Jansen. His choice.”

  Seconds later, Greg Carver made his way unsteadily into the common area and looked at her through the reinforced glass of the ward doors. He said something; it was muffled by the thickness of the doors, but it sounded like, “Orange.”

  “I’ll see her,” he said.

  A nurse appeared from a room off to the left. “Patients are trying to rest,” the nurse said. “We can’t allow this disruption.”

  “It’s all right,” Carver said. “We’re going through to the family room.”

  The nurse sucked her teeth, eyeing Ruth with dislike, but Carver walked past her and pressed the door release, coming through the ward doors into the corridor.

  “Five minutes,” the nurse said.

  Ruth kept her eyes on Greg Carver. “If that.”


  He led the way to a room off the main corridor. He seemed to be making an effort to lift and place his feet, as if he was walking on uneven cobblestones, and when he gripped the door handle, he used it to steady himself. “Definitely your angry color,” he murmured, glancing into her face.

  “What?”

  “Orange,” he said. “It’s your angry color.” He opened the door and went ahead of her.

  A photographic print of cherry blossom covered a third of one wall. A few armchairs were placed around a coffee table. An empty sandwich wrapper, two coffee cups, and a box of tissues lay on its surface. The room smelled of bad digestion and stale coffee.

  “CSIs are processing room 214 at the Old Bank Hotel,” Ruth said.

  Carver was lowering himself into a chair as she said this and he didn’t look at her, but she thought she saw a slight jolt run though him. He eased himself back in the chair and gestured toward the one opposite, but Ruth remained standing.

  “Two-one-four,” she said again. “That’s the room Adela Faraday was booked into on the night you were shot.”

  He didn’t reply.

  “It’s a crime scene, Greg—possibly even a murder scene. The CSIs will be thorough. Are they going to find your DNA?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m giving you a chance here, Greg.”

  He said nothing.

  “I spoke to one of the staff. She saw you in Adela’s room.”

  He shrugged.

  She stood in front of him. “Still playing the amnesia card?” He wouldn’t look at her and she shook her head in disgust. “I’m sick of your lies.”

  “I’m not lying—”

  “Jesus, Greg—will you stop?”

  He gripped one hand with the other, perhaps to steady a tremor, and stared at the fists clamped in his lap.

  “Look at me.”

  Reluctantly, he raised his eyes to her.

  “I know you were screwing Adela Faraday. I know about the argument—I know she dumped your stuff out in the corridor, kicked you out. I know that you went back in. A mirror was smashed in her room that night.”

  Something flickered in Carver’s face, but he was hard to read.

  “Is Adela’s blood in the room?” She waited. “Is yours?”

  He took a breath, hesitated.

  “Fine,” she said. “You don’t want to talk. But DCI Jansen already knows you were at that hotel on the same night as Adela. It took me less than an hour to find someone who saw you in her room; it won’t take Jansen much longer—and believe me when I say you really shouldn’t expect any second chances from that quarter.”

  Carver remained stubbornly silent, and with a gasp of exasperation she grabbed the door handle and swung the door wide.

  “Ruth, wait.”

  She was so angry with him, she almost kept walking.

  “We were dating,” he said.

  Ruth took a few seconds to steady herself before turning back to him. “Dating,” she said.

  “Sex.” A finger went to his eyebrow, a sure sign of embarrassment. “I didn’t even know her real name—her choice,” he added, as though it actually mattered to him what she thought. “She—Adela—said she wanted a ‘no strings’ relationship.”

  Ruth watched him closely. She believed him. It was hurting him too much for it to be a lie.

  “We made a pact never to talk about ourselves, only about ideas,” he went on. “‘Only small people talk about other people,’ she said.”

  “Ms. Faraday was quite the philosopher . . .”

  “Don’t Ruth, please.”

  She folded her arms. “All right, I’m listening.”

  “We had good conversation, great sex, and none of the responsibilities of a conventional relationship. I didn’t feel . . . I don’t know—compelled to talk about the Thorn Killer, and I never had to explain or apologize for my absences.”

  She stared at him and he said, “What?”

  “All those times you were with Adela—how many was it?” She already knew the answer, but wondered if he would be straight with her.

  “Five,” he said. “Maybe six.”

  He’d passed that test, but it didn’t make up for the rest of his lies.

  “Five or six times,” she said. “Did you even think how Emma was feeling?”

  “I wasn’t really thinking of anyone but myself back then,” he said.

  She gave a short bark of laughter.

  “I’m trying to be honest, Ruth.”

  “It never used to be an effort, Greg.”

  He bowed his head.

  “Didn’t you think we should know about this woman? That she might have had something to do with what happened to you?”

  “No,” he said. “We broke up the night of the argument.”

  So he was admitting that, too.

  “It was a ‘no strings’ relationship. Why did it get ugly—why didn’t you just walk away?”

  “She was in a rage, screaming at me,” he said. “I . . . said some things.”

  “They had to call security, Greg—that’s more than an exchange of words.”

  “Push came to shove, I suppose.”

  “You hit her?”

  “I . . .” He frowned, and she could see him struggling to remember. “I . . .” He stopped again, and this time he looked frightened. “Ruth, I truly don’t remember.”

  “So when Adela—whatever she called herself—didn’t get back in touch, didn’t come and see you after you were shot—what did you think?”

  “She’d said she never wanted to see me again.” He shrugged. “I thought she was just being as good as her word.”

  “Well, now you know different,” Ruth said quietly.

  He looked at her. “I should have told you earlier. But there’s so much I can’t make sense of.”

  “I want to help you,” Ruth said. “But you need to be honest with me.”

  He sighed. “Okay.”

  He didn’t begin immediately, but she sensed this was not the time to rush him, so she waited, and after a while he began.

  “I keep having flashbacks to that night. There’s . . . a shadow—a darkness—it’s in my dreams. Sometimes . . .” He seemed to struggle for a moment. “Sometimes it’s there when I’m awake, too.”

  She moved to the chair opposite him and sat down. “We talked about this,” she said. “That was me.”

  “I don’t think so,” Carver said. “I do remember you being there. But this other presence. It felt . . . I don’t know how to describe it. It felt like it wanted to destroy me. I know that sounds overdramatic.”

  “You’d just been shot, Greg, a bit of drama is allowable. But look—I was there, and I was beyond angry. I thought you’d tried to kill yourself—I was furious with you. Maybe you picked up on that . . .”

  He shook his head, staring into a darkness she couldn’t see.

  “If not me, then who? Adela?”

  “Not Adela. It feels too strong. Powerful . . . Like . . .” He cast about as if trying to see the word that evaded him. “Like . . .” He gave up. “I don’t know.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Take me through what you do remember about that night.”

  “It’s confused,” Carver said. “I remember calling her, setting up the date. I hung around reception when she checked in, followed her into the lift. She got out at the second floor, I went up to the next floor, came down the fire escape. It was a game we played—if I got to the room before her door closed, we were on for the night. If I didn’t—well, it depended on her mood.” He couldn’t meet her eye.

  “How did it go that night?”

  “I got there in time. We had sex, a few drinks. I went to the bathroom to shower, and when I got back, she was watching the news on TV. Saw me, talking about the murders. She said I should have told her, but our entire relationship was built on neither of us knowing anything about the other’s life. I said she was being unreasonable. We argued. She threw me out.”

  He sto
pped, and it seemed like he was trying to conjure up an image. “But I don’t remember leaving. I don’t remember going back into the room.” His eyes darted left and right. “And I don’t remember breaking the mirror. I swear that’s the truth.”

  Ruth felt something loosen in her chest, like a spiral of tightly wound wire had released its hold and she could breathe freely again. Finally, he was telling her the truth—as much as he remembered of it.

  Distracted by the sound of footsteps and voices in the corridor outside, Ruth delayed answering. Through the glass panel of the door, she got a fleeting glimpse of DCI Jansen.

  “You have visitors,” she said softly, and a moment later Jansen backtracked and opened the door into the family room without knocking.

  “Well, this saves me the trouble of trying to get past the gatekeepers on the ward.” He stepped into the room, revealing that the man with him was DC Tom Ivey.

  It was as well Jansen had his back to the young detective: Ivey looked a bit wild-eyed at finding her with Carver.

  “I’ll get out of your way, sir,” Ruth said.

  “Don’t leave on our account, Sergeant,” Jansen said.

  He was blocking the way out, anyway, and didn’t look willing to move, so Ruth calmed herself and waited.

  “We’re here to share some news about DCI Carver’s whereabouts on the night he was shot,” Jansen said, his tone cool, his tall, imposing presence an implied threat.

  Ruth arranged her features into a look of quiet interest.

  “Does the name Adela Faraday mean anything to you, Chief Inspector?” Jansen asked.

  “She’s been on the news all evening,” Carver said.

  Evasive tactics.

  “Doesn’t answer the question,” Jansen said. But Carver maintained a weary, slightly muddled look, watching the other man’s face as though trying to read his lips. Ruth recognized it as one of her own tricks.

  “You shared a room with her.” Jansen paused. “Not ringing any bells?”

  Carver shook his head slowly, faking an effort to remember.

  “That night’s still hazy,” he said, again avoiding an outright lie. Why doesn’t he tell them? Ruth glared at him, but he ignored her.

  “So you didn’t arrange to meet her?”