by Ashley Dyer
Carver raised his shoulders and let them fall, a look of hopeless confusion on his face.
“You don’t remember having an argument with Ms. Faraday?” Jansen said. “A broken mirror? Security being called?”
“I wish I could . . .”
He’d just told them an outright lie.
Furious that she’d allowed herself to be dragged her into his mess, Ruth took a step toward the door. “Look, it’s been a hell of a long day,” she said. “I need to get some sleep.”
She slipped out of the unit as the ward sister came in search of her patient.
Parked at the curb across the street, the Thorn Killer watches Ruth Lake emerge from the rehabilitation unit.
So, now you know . . . about Carver’s sex dates with the Faraday woman, about his tryst with her the night he was shot. About the lies. His betrayal of Emma.
How do you feel about that, Sergeant Lake? Disgusted? Do you feel betrayed? It’s hard to tell. Three visits to Carver’s hospital bed in one day had to be significant, though. Right now, she looks thoughtful. She hides a lot behind that thoughtful look. But Sergeant Lake’s cool façade is like ice on a river: fragile—even brittle—and beneath it the waters are turbulent.
Chapter 29
Ruth Lake could not sleep. Tempting as it was to chug half a bottle of wine and suck on e-cigs till she passed out, she left the vape in her coat pocket and played Stellaris on her laptop. Ruth had been a gamer since her midteens: it helped her to relax, and it had given her confidence that order could be created from chaos at a time when her life seemed to be falling apart. But tonight her thoughts kept circling back to what Carver had told her that evening. His relationship with Adela could well be the reason he was shot, and the weapon she had secreted in her spare room might hold definitive proof of that fact—maybe even of the identity of the shooter. But she couldn’t introduce the gun into evidence without ending her career—perhaps even facing criminal charges.
What it came down to was could she trust Greg Carver? She really didn’t know. She thought he was telling the truth about not remembering the detail of what had happened at the hotel while he did remember being there. But why had he lied to Jansen? She groaned, trying again and again to keep her mind on the game. But Stellaris was a game of strategy; every move she made to influence events in its imaginary universe only reminded her that her real-life strategic decisions the night Carver was shot had been disastrous.
Finally, she gave up, took her laptop to the kitchen, and checked her e-mail while she brewed coffee. Lyall Gaines had sent something at just after midnight; the subject line was “Written on the Skin.” Did that pass for humor in Gaines’s world? she wondered.
She didn’t acknowledge receipt, but she did follow the links the anthropologist had provided, trying not to think too much about the man who had sent them. Gaines thought that the stylized flowers and vines inked on the victims’ skins looked similar to those seen in embroidered or cross-stitched samplers. He had provided a selection for her to look at, but as far as she could make out, they were only similar in the way that stylized trees and fruit and people always looked similar—because they had been stripped down to their most recognizable parts.
After an hour or two trawling the Web, the intricate needlework began to merge into one—until, browsing off-piste, a piece caught her eye that had no images, only small, neatly worked print. She clicked on the image to enlarge it and discovered what was described by the website as a “confessional” sampler.
The silk cloth it was embroidered on had yellowed and was spotted here and there with faint water stains, the embroidered red lettering fading to the color of old blood. But every word neatly picked out with needle and thread was still clearly legible after nearly two hundred years.
The sampler told the story of Elizabeth Parker, a virtuous girl placed in service. At the age of thirteen she had refused the sexual advances of the master of the house and was thrown downstairs for her obstinacy. She fled her cruel master, but “being young and foolish” she said, she did not tell her friends what had happened to her. In her new post, she became sullen and moody and had tried to commit suicide. The sampler was her confession, and atonement for her attempt at “that great sin of self destruction.”
Ruth considered her own foolishness at a similar age when she had cut through the alley at the back of their house and witnessed that fatal stabbing. It could just as easily have been a violent attack or a sexual assault she herself had been subjected to. And she recalled that she too had become moody and withdrawn after witnessing the killing.
The clock over the kitchen sink read five past two, and the night stretched ahead like a long and tedious journey. Ruth yawned, ruffling her fingers through her hair, then crossed to the kettle to make a fresh mug of coffee. Five minutes later she was back at her task. During their meeting at the university, Dr. Gaines had focused on the eye motifs the killer had tattooed on both Tali and Kara.
Early representations of the Eye of Providence, was how he had described them.
The kitchen was cold and rain spattered against the window. Slipping out for a crafty vape was out of the question, and she knew that if she started using the thing indoors, she’d be back on the equivalent of a pack a day in no time at all. She considered turning on the heat, but inertia kept her at the table. The latest link she’d clicked on had taken her to a webpage with a series of images: line drawings, woodcuts, book illustrations, stained-glass windows—even a United States dollar bill. All depicted some version of the “Eye of Providence.” Some with clouds, some not, most bounded by a triangle—a symbol of the Holy Trinity, according to Dr. Gaines—and every one of them showed rays of light beaming from the eye. She went upstairs to the wardrobe in the spare bedroom and hefted down the box of files she had stolen from Greg Carver’s flat.
Back in the kitchen, she dug through the manila folders, lifting out Tali Tredwin’s and Kara Grogan’s. Carver’s duplicate files included numbered postmortem photographs. She selected a few close-ups of the tattoo details, setting the prints down on the kitchen table so that she could compare them with the images on her computer screen. She saw no rays of light, no triangles. She had never really examined the markings in any great detail before. If she was honest, she found the killer’s deliberate scarring of his victims harder to stomach than some of the bloodied murder victims she had seen in her former career as a CSI. But focusing on this one, small element in the pattern allowed her to gain the scientific objectivity she needed.
The eyes scored on Tali’s body were closed, or half closed. But those tattooed on Kara stared out of the picture like something from a horror movie, wide open. They had an exotic shape—Egyptian, or even Indian, maybe. Looking again at the tattoos on Kara’s body, the shape of the eyes reminded Ruth of depictions of the third eye of the Hindu god Shiva. She looked it up, skimming the webpages for the meaning of the third eye. In Hindu culture, she learned, Shiva was the possessor of all knowledge. “When his inner eye, or ‘chakra’ opens,” one blogger wrote, “it will destroy all that it sees.”
That seemed to fit with the end game the Thorn Killer had devised for his victims. Literal destruction.
Ruth scattered papers and photographs, finding her mobile phone under one of the folders, and thumbed through her contacts to Dr. Gaines. Waiting for the connection to complete, she glanced up at the clock over the kitchen sink; it was four thirty. Cursing, she ended the call before the first peal had finished. This was exactly the sort of thing she had criticized Carver for when the case had really gotten its hooks into him.
A second later she was startled by her phone vibrating in her hand. It rang out, and she checked the screen. Dr. Gaines. Almost like he’d been waiting for her call.
“Glad I’m not the only one burning the midnight oil.” He sounded almost jaunty. “Do you have the tattoo photographs to hand?”
“I do,” she said.
“I’ve been working on my theory that the inking has a pro
tective role,” he said. “Look for TT three-five.”
Each postmortem photograph was individually labeled; TT35 was one of the close-ups of Tali Tredwin. It was still in the folder, and she had to sift through to find it. “Okay,” she said. “I have it.”
“See the repeated circular images? They’re rather blurred, but you can make out that the lines are intertwined. The tattooists thought it was a crude attempt at some kind of snake. It isn’t—it’s a Celtic knot. Every Braveheart fan and New Age hippie knows them from their use in Celtic jewelry. But these knots go back to the fifth century, and possibly earlier.” He sounded excited.
“Okay . . .”
“Look closer. Can you see that it’s impossible to see a beginning or end to the knot?”
“It’s a symbol of the eternal cycle, and how everything is interconnected,” Ruth said, dredging up the fact from her hours of online research into symbolism.
“Not bad,” Gaines said. “But it can also represent an uninterrupted cycle of life—effectively warding off sickness or bad luck. Remember what I said about the Eye of Providence in our first meeting?”
“It’s protective,” she said.
“Precisely. Now look at the latest victim. Image KG five-seven.”
Ruth found it in Kara’s file.
“You see the circle in the bottom left of the picture?”
“With four thorns pointing inward?” she said.
“Those aren’t thorns,” he said. “They’re swords. Poorly drawn, admittedly. Which is why it’s been difficult for your previous consultants to establish their significance.”
But not a problem for the great Dr. Gaines.
Aloud Ruth said, “And that significance is?”
“It’s a symbol used widely, across many cultures—the swords may represent the four directions, guardian angels, spirit clans. And they’re protective. In fact, I’ve identified five symbols that are used in sigils to banish evil spirits—and that’s aside from the repeated use of the Eye of Horus and the Eye of Providence in the tattoos.”
“I’ve been looking at the eye tattoos as well,” Ruth said.
“Have you?” He sounded simultaneously indulgent and patronizing.
“It’s the reason I called you. In Hindu culture, when the third eye opens, it destroys everything, yes?”
She heard a sharp sound at the other end of the line—a cough, or maybe a stifled laugh.
“And you infer . . . what, exactly, from that?” Gaines asked.
“Well, these women did end up dead. So I wondered—could the tattoos be some kind of punishment?”
“Oh, my dear . . .” He stifled a laugh. “I’m afraid you’ve taken a rather—forgive me—unsophisticated reading of the word ‘destruction.’ You see, the third eye, or ‘chakra’ is a symbol of knowledge, so when it opens, it destroys ignorance. The destruction you describe is symbolic. It leads to a higher consciousness—an uncovering of hidden truths.” He paused. “Are you with me?”
Ruth had her own Zenlike ability to distance herself from insults. This was about the doctor’s need to assert his authority rather than a shaming indictment of her own ignorance.
“Hidden truths? That’s really helpful, Doctor,” she said, and meant it.
“I’m very pleased to hear it,” Gaines said, sounding equally sincere, which confirmed Ruth’s assessment that flattery always went a long way with men like Dr. Gaines. “I can come over, talk you through my findings?” he added with disconcerting eagerness.
“Why don’t you put it in your report,” she said, with that instinctual queasiness she’d felt in her encounter with the anthropologist the previous day. “I’ll present it to the team just as soon as I have it in my inbox.”
“Or I could jot down a few notes, trot over to your headquarters, and give the investigative team the broad brushstrokes at your morning briefing.”
He just won’t take no for an answer. “Best to have it in writing.” She hung up, simultaneously reaching for her laptop.
She found the confessional sampler, thinking about what Dr. Gaines had said about hidden truths.
The pathologist at Tali Tredwin’s postmortem had noted signs of esophageal damage typical of bulimia. Evidence of bone breakages that they initially thought might be signs of spousal abuse were eventually put down to early-onset osteoporosis, which could be linked back to earlier anorexia. He had requested her full medical records, which revealed that she had a history of body dysmorphia. At the age of fifteen, Tali—known as Natalie back then—had overdosed on a cocktail of aspirin and vodka. She had never told her ex-husband or her children about the suicide bid.
“Hidden truths,” Ruth murmured. She dipped into Carver’s box. “Where are you, Jo . . . ?”
She extracted Jo Raincliffe’s file. Her husband had lost his job as a corporate accountant in the second wave of mass redundancies, three years after the 2008 banking crash. The Raincliffes had two children, both under six, and with the bank threatening to foreclose on the mortgage, Jo started a frantic search for jobs. Before she’d had the kids, she’d been in charge of four staff in the history department at the local Roman Catholic high school and had supervised Confirmation classes for the girls, but despite her qualifications and experience, she’d struggled to find work. At a time when councils were putting teaching assistants in charge of classes, the unspoken message was that she was too expensive to employ. She finally managed to secure a learning support post at a city center community college and supplemented her earnings teaching evening classes in family history research. At least that was what she’d told her husband.
But Jo had massively overinflated the hours she worked. In fact, she did ten hours as a learning support assistant and two hours of actual teaching. But she left the house at five every evening, five days a week, and didn’t return home some nights until after eleven. Her bank account statements, kept under lock and key, provided the clue: she’d made monthly payments to an upmarket agency providing a shopfront to venues looking to hire exotic dancers. The agency was helpful: in exchange for a monthly fee from their clients, they vetted venues and provided photos to events organizers. Jo’s portfolio was only circulated to people looking to hire, it couldn’t be accessed freely online, which at least partly explained why she’d been able to keep the truth from her family for so long. For years, Jo—stage name “Joline”—had been a regular at strip clubs and “secret parties” in Liverpool, Wigan, and Manchester. The cash payments she earned from stripping were undocumented, but the mortgage had been paid on time every month, and there was always food on the table.
Evie Dodd and Hayley Evans didn’t seem to have any buried secrets or hidden shame, but then neither had Kara Grogan, until Ruth had started digging deeper into her circumstances and found out about her secret audition—and, of course, her stage fright.
Ruth picked up one of the PM photos of Kara and looked again at the open eyes tattooed on the young woman’s flesh. They stared out of the picture like something from a horror movie, eyes wide open. A symbol of wakefulness—awareness, maybe. Is the killer demonstrating that he sees her as she really is? Or could it symbolize Kara’s awakening—that she saw others as they really were?
What had Kara said to Jake? “I’ve learned a valuable lesson.”
Shiva’s third eye stared back at Ruth from the photo. The chakra, symbol of knowledge; destroyer of ignorance. But what kind of knowledge? That you couldn’t trust anyone—not even your friends? Knowledge of that kind didn’t just destroy ignorance, it shattered faith in the goodness of others and ground hope to dust.
Chapter 30
Day 9
Early next morning, Greg Carver was watching the TV news. The leader of the council hurried across the cobbles of Exchange Flags toward the rear of the Town Hall in the rain. A reporter followed him, asking him for a comment on the murder of Adela Faraday. He scuttled on, his coat collar turned up, rain driven by the wind off the Mersey, battering his hair flat. Another journo joined the
first, thrusting a microphone under his nose. Two more appeared in shot, and now the councillor was beginning to look beleaguered as he pushed through the cluster of bodies and cameras. Finally, he stopped, raised his hands in a placatory gesture, and said, “I’ll give you a statement—in ten minutes. But first I must address my colleagues in the chamber.”
Nice touch, Carver thought—putting the concerns of the Council Chamber before the needs of the press.
The broadcast returned to the studio, and the presenter rehashed the story of the discovery of Adela Faraday’s body, her background in finance, the fact that she hadn’t been seen since just before New Year’s. “Mr. Hill emerged fifteen minutes later to make a statement,” he finished.
The footage switched back to outside broadcast; Exchange Flags again, the cobbles shimmering with rainwater. Mr. Hill had shed his overcoat, appearing in a charcoal gray suit, white shirt, and dusty pink silk tie. His hair looked freshly styled: thick and black and glossy. He strode out to a podium, placed to use the north face of the Town Hall and the gray stone of Nelson’s monument as a backdrop. The rain had stopped, and sunshine sparkled on the four figures in chains arranged around the base of the monument.
Councillor Hill approached the podium like an elder statesman and waited for silence. Reporters clustered around him: local press, cable TV and radio, BBC and ITV news, as well as reporters from Channels 4 and 5.
The council leader was in his midforties, an energetic poster boy for the new guard seeking imaginative ways to generate income for a cash-strapped city. Councillor Hill, businessman and entrepreneur, had brought some hope to a city that in the words of its former mayor had been “staring into the abyss” after seeing its government grants cut by two-thirds since the recession. But Hill had made enemies, particularly on the left.
“I’ll keep this brief, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “First, let me extend my condolences, and those of all council members, to Ms. Faraday’s family and friends. Our thoughts and prayers are with them at this difficult time.” He left a respectful pause. “Ms. Faraday was a highly valued adviser to the council and we are shocked and horrified to hear of her death. Naturally, we will do everything in our power to assist the police in bringing the guilty party to justice.”
