by Ashley Dyer
“Then I don’t get it,” Ruth says.
“Giving up so easily?” he says. “You get it all right. You interview witnesses all the time.”
He has engaged with you. With you—now, think! Ruth recalls her interview with Kara’s housemates. Angela, loud, abrasive, more than happy to talk about Kara’s faults; Lia, mouthing platitudes about Kara’s “reserve.” But she’d homed in on silent, troubled Jake—and hadn’t he provided the best intel?
“You chose the ones who held back, or couldn’t go on.”
She hears a harsh exhalation. “Those are secrets worth hearing.”
“How do you persuade them to talk to you?”
“And now, finally, we come to the question.” He seems to relish the moment. “All right, I’ll answer. All it takes is a discreet, sympathetic, professional approach—and a business card with a prestigious logo impressed upon it,” he adds with a roguish flourish.
“What logo?” she demands, thinking, Gaines. I know it’s you, Lyall Gaines.
Silence.
Abruptly, the lights go out and the door clangs shut.
“Wrong question, Ruth,” she murmurs. Or else he knows that I know who he is.
She waits, listening for him to return, her body cooling rapidly. Weirdly, without the heat of the spot lamps, she feels more exposed, vulnerable.
Experimentally, she calls out, but her voice is weakened, and anyway the sound seems deadened, as though the place is soundproofed—or underground.
Chapter 55
Out in the car park again, the cold air hit Carver like he’d downed a quart of whisky. He focused on the brick security hut at the barrier, feeling the eyes of the duty officer on him behind the mirrored glass.
On Liver Street, he flagged down a taxi and gave the driver Dr. Gaines’s address.
He must have dozed off, because the next he knew, the cabbie had slid back the glass and was calling through to him. “Wakey-wakey, Rip Van Winkle. This is where you get out.”
They were parked outside a well-kept house with a sandstone wall and hedging at the front. “Go up the drive, would you?” he said.
The driver gave him a look. “What’s up—legs not working or wha’?”
Carver handed him a ten-pound note for the fare and held up a second. “Another tenner in ten minutes—if you wait for me.”
The driver pocketed the cash and parked up in the driveway.
The side gate was open; it flapped in a slight breeze, juddering onto the latch, pausing, opening a few inches, then swinging shut again. The scent of wood smoke spiced the cold air.
Carver rang the front door bell. There were lights on in the hallway, and he peered in through the glass paneling on the front door, but couldn’t make out any detail. He tried again, then turned the door handle. The front door was unlocked, and the inner one stood wide. He stepped inside, called Gaines’s name. No answer.
The room immediately to the left was empty and cold. The one opposite was lit by table lamps, and the parquet floor glowed like sunlit honey in their mellow light. This room had been knocked through into the kitchen, but the glow of the lamplight did not penetrate far into the gloom.
Clusters of photographs on the walls were a horror show of heavily tattooed and scarred people. Alongside those, watercolors of plants: Digitalis; Aconitum; laurel; and Pulsatilla, the innocuous-looking pasque flower. After a year of working this case, he knew that every one of them was poisonous.
The coffee table, chairs, and floor were littered with sheets of paper. Celtic symbols, tattoos, sigils—pages and pages on symbolism. A laptop charger lead trailed off the coffee table. He scanned the room; no laptop. A reproduction black Bakelite phone squatted on the hearth next to an armchair, as if Gaines had been using it just minutes ago. Caught under one corner of the phone casing, a dozen sheets printed out from the Web showed a mummified body with what looked like tattoos at the wrists, on the arms, even on the rib cage. Notes, diagrams, and printouts of the symbols inked on the Thorn Killer’s victims spilled from the coffee table onto the floor. Among these were photographs of pyracantha, with close-ups of its thorns. And perched aslant an ashtray on a side table he found a twenty-centimeter pyracantha twig as thick as his thumb. Every side shoot and thorn had been sliced off, leaving only the terminal thorn, five centimeters long and wickedly sharp. No wonder Ruth had misgivings.
On a bookshelf he saw a framed photograph of a younger Gaines, stripped to the waist, his arm draped over the shoulder of a smaller man, possibly Malay. Gaines’s free hand was curled around the hilt of a dagger, sheathed on his belt. He was laughing; he looked exhausted but happy, and he was sporting a fresh tattoo on his shoulder, the skin around the inking still red and inflamed.
Carver was hit by a sudden image of Gaines slicing a line with the dagger point through dark skin. Blue and orange colors formed a vortex around the photograph, sucking light into its center. Carver reeled, nausea twisting his stomach, and he snatched hold of a chair back to steady himself. He shut his eyes against the violence of the image, and mercifully, it vanished.
Hallucination, or insight? he wondered. He had pushed himself so hard today that it could be either. But one impression remained that he was certain he could trust: Gaines was a bloodsucking sadist.
Carver’s face and body were drenched in sweat, he tasted bile at the back of his throat, and his limbs were shaking. He wiped sweat from his face and looked around. The house was huge—did he have the strength to search every inch of it?
A breath of cold air shivered across the room, stirring the papers, raising gooseflesh on his arms and neck, and he realized that the French doors on the other side of the kitchen were open a crack. Swallowing hard against the nausea, he moved toward them, maneuvering past the kitchen island. A step farther and he stubbed his toe against something soft. He placed a hand flat on the granite surface to prevent a fall and, looking down, he saw a dark mass on the floor. A body.
Ruth?
His heart jumped; he felt the room tilt and had to wait a moment before slowly lowering himself to a crouch, sliding down the cupboard for support.
Not Ruth. Thank God . . . He flicked on his phone flashlight app to get a better look, saw a man with gray hair; he wore braided bracelets on his wrists. It was Lyall Gaines.
His skin had a bluish tinge, and he didn’t appear to be breathing.
Carver touched Gaines’s face with the back of his hand. It was cold. But it was a cold evening, the French windows were open and he knew better than to assume a person was dead just because they were cold. An oft-used phrase of Ruth’s came to him unbidden: You’re not dead till you’re warm and dead.
Carver saw a tiny bead of blood on the dead man’s throat, and moving around him crabwise, he saw an empty syringe on the floor on the other side of Gaines’s body.
The overexertion had caught up with him, and he wasn’t sure he could stand without crashing back to the floor, so he stayed put to make the call to emergency services.
Call ended, he gave himself a few moments, breathing slowly, waiting for the nausea and dizziness to subside.
Suddenly, the patio was flooded with light. Carver tensed, a fresh surge of adrenaline giving him new energy. A cat crouched in the light, its ears flattened, lips drawn back in a snarl. Seeing that no threat was imminent, it stalked on with one haughty glance in his direction, crossing the patio and disappearing into the deep shadows beyond.
Watching it go, Carver saw a black smut drift across his line of vision, then another. He eased to his feet and went to the French doors to look out onto the floodlit garden. Curls of burnt paper chased in circles around the patio.
Abruptly, the lights went out.
Blinking away the afterimage, he thought he saw a red point of light. He closed his eyes for a few seconds. It was still there when he opened them again; and another, and another. Three flickering red dots at the far end of the garden, near to the back wall. He stepped out, triggering the security lights, and phone flashli
ght at the ready for when they plunged him into darkness again, he made his way across the lawn. The scent of burning wood grew stronger; the source of the red glow seemed to be a large oil barrel standing on bricks amid piles of logs and sawn branches. As he drew closer, he realized he was looking at the glowing embers of a wood fire, seen through ventilation holes at the base of the barrel.
A second, smaller metal drum was inverted inside the barrel, the gap between them stuffed with twigs and sticks, most of which had burned down, leaving only a ten-centimeter layer at the base of the barrel. A few flakes of sooty paper rose from it, and shining the flashlight inside, he saw four or five sheets twisted and stuffed inside the drum. On this edge, the fire was almost out, but the metal was still hot, and he burned his knuckles trying to extract the papers.
The wind was getting up; it buffeted him, sending leaves and burnt paper scurrying across the garden. He could feel the heat building; those last few remnants might flare and vanish any second. He grabbed a thickish section of sawn branch and used it to tilt the drum. Surprisingly light, it toppled easily, freeing the ash, which spiraled up in the breeze, rattling charcoal sticks from the inner drum onto the damp earth. Carver’s prize remained stubbornly inside the outer barrel, but shining the phone flashlight on the remnants of ash and sticks, he saw the fragments of paper were now within his grasp. As he reached inside, a gust of wind whipped ash and soot into his eyes and the fire flared. Singeing his hair and eyebrows, he grabbed what he could and fell backward, coughing. He wiped his eyes with his coat sleeve and carefully opened his fist. Ash, charred remains, a few bits of burnt twig.
And one tiny scrap of paper, no bigger than the corner of a postage stamp. He trapped it between finger and thumb and lifted it gingerly, tilting it to the light.
It was a logo of some kind. Green. Two letters at the bottom readable as “NS,” a third could be “C” or “G,” the rest was too charred to tell. A line down the center, between two thicker bands of green, pointed at the lower end. The one on the right was more complete; it was shaped like the head of a bird, its beak pointing downward. Or maybe a flame. But a green flame? That didn’t make sense. Okay, so a bird. Maybe. Three teardrop-shaped outlines radiated from the top of the center line.
Carver heard the emergency sirens approaching, at least two cars and an ambulance by the sound of it.
He returned to the kitchen, placed the scrap of paper on the kitchen work surface, and took a half-dozen pictures of it on his phone. Casting about for something suitable, he found a glass on the draining board and pinned the fragment under it. Then he returned to the taxi, still waiting outside, and told the driver to head toward Sefton Park.
The cabbie made the turn into Aigburth Drive just as the first police car flashed past in the opposite direction.
Carver called Parsons.
“Did you speak to Gaines when he postponed the interview this morning?”
“No—he e-mailed.” Parsons sounded distracted. “What has that to do with anything?”
“I don’t think he canceled at all,” Carver said. “I just found him on the floor of his kitchen. I think he’s dead.”
“Jesus—have you called for an ambulance?”
“They’re already at the scene. Look, there were some burned papers in the garden. I retrieved one piece that had some kind of logo on it; whoever got to Gaines tried to destroy it. You need to find out what it means.”
“I’m on my way,” Parsons said. “If there are fingerprints on the paper—”
“The only prints you’re likely to find are mine,” Carver interrupted. “I had to salvage it from the fire.”
“Shit. All right. Stay where you are.”
“I’m already gone,” Carver said.
“What? You can’t leave the scene of a crime!”
Parsons was right, but he couldn’t allow himself to get tied up for hours.
“You’ll find the paper under a tumbler on the kitchen island.” Carver heard a squawk of protest as he ended the call. He turned the phone off in case Parsons got it into his head to ping it and send someone out to arrest him.
He tapped on the window and the cabbie slid the screen back.
“Got a smartphone?” he said.
“Yeah . . .”
“How much to borrow it for an hour?”
Chapter 56
Ruth Lake slips in and out of consciousness with the smell of earth and rotting wood in her nostrils and dreams of her grandfather.
Mostly, when she visited their little house in Everton, he was too absorbed in reading the racing form or watching the races on TV for storytelling. Granddad was a betting man, had wagered on the horses every Saturday of his adult life. Grandma insisted that he watch the day’s races from their own home, where she could keep an eye on him. Put a stop to his gallop, in her words.
It was in this room that Ruth had begun discussing the chances of this horse or that as they warmed up in the paddock and learned to merit more than the glossy sheen on a horse’s flanks.
But Grandma wasn’t always able to put a stop to his betting gallop, and on these occasions Granddad would end up sleeping in the Anderson shelter in the backyard. A relic of World War II, the shelter was dug into the ground and lined with sheet corrugated iron, covered over with topsoil. Granddad discovered it, rust pitted and falling to bits, when they moved into that house. He had shored it up with wood planking and installed a couple of chairs and a primus stove under a makeshift chimney made from empty catering-size bean cans. Called it his “Inner Sanctum” when he was in a mellow mood, “The Doghouse” when he was evading Grandma’s wrath.
Granddad was seventy-six the year Ruth witnessed the stabbing in the alley. His quiet counsel, conducted in the stillness of his inner sanctum, had done more to heal her than the succession of counselors the courts had appointed for her well-being in the run-up to the trial.
Why am I thinking about this now? Ruth wonders. Even as the thought forms in her head she knows: it’s the smell. Earth and tree roots, the mulchy, autumnal odor of fungus and gently decomposing wood reminds her of Granddad’s man cave. She is underground.
She listens in the pitch dark to the sound of her own breathing. It is cool in here, but not freezing. She can feel a tingling in her fingers, and experimentally she tries to move them. Her pinkie finger twitches. The numbness is receding.
Half an hour later, she can feel the leather straps and can move her shoulders and legs, too. Perhaps there is a chance she will be able to fight back.
A sudden blast of cold air, the click of a switch, and powerful lights drench her skin again.
She deliberately relaxes her limbs, responding sluggishly, opening her eyes as if it’s an effort.
“The Medicis had a Poison Garden in Padua,” her captor begins. He’s still using the voice distorter, and he keeps out of her line of sight. “The current Duchess of Northumberland laid one out at Alnwick Castle. It’s gated and locked, and filled with toxic species; the gates have a skull and crossbones sculpted in metal and bear the legend ‘These plants can kill.’ She knew that people would be attracted by two things: secrecy and risk. She was right—they come in their thousands to see it.”
“‘All things are poison and nothing is without poison,’” Ruth quotes, consciously slurring her words.
“Paracelsus,” the killer says. “Brava. But it’s the dose makes the poison, Ruth.”
Patronizing bastard. Ruth allows her eyes to close, opens them again, as if it is a tremendous strain, then lets them droop again, feigning sleep.
A sharp, hot needle of pain in her thigh.
She gasps, feeling a rush of clarity and energy.
Energy becomes anxiety, the tingling in her fingers suddenly terrifying. The fear spikes and she bucks against the restraints, hears them creak.
“Your heart is racing,” he says. “Your blood pressure is raised.” He tosses an empty syringe onto her stomach and she flinches. “Epinephrine—adrenaline, if you will. Now, if you�
�re fully awake, it’s your turn to talk.”
Panting, Ruth struggles to regain control. “What—what do you want to know?”
“How did you feel when you saw Greg Carver slumped in his armchair, a bullet in his chest?”
“Shocked.”
“Liar.”
“I’m telling the truth.” She hears the panic in her voice and experiences a scrabbling panic in her chest. It’s not your fear, it’s the adrenaline. Ride with it. “It was horrible.”
“That’s nearer the truth. But it can’t have been a complete shock—you must have known something bad would happen, the way he’d been drinking, his reaction to Kara. I mean, he pretty much fell apart after that, didn’t he?”
Ruth hesitates. “Yes.”
“So . . . I’ll ask the question again: how . . . did you . . . feel?”
“Angry,” Ruth says, hating herself for betraying her friend.
“Only angry?”
Ruth can’t steady her nerves; the usual strategies that help her to disguise her feelings are not under her control. Her blood seems to hum through her arteries, and a high-pitched whine pierces her ears. “That’s what I said,” she says and hears the doubt in her own voice.
“Just now, the epinephrine is doing you no harm,” he says. “But repeated injections can cause a heart attack—even a stroke.” He removes the empty syringe and replaces it with an unused EpiPen. “‘The dose makes the poison,’ Ruth.”
She mutters the word that describes how she’d really felt, seeing Carver, slumped in his chair, reeking of booze.
“I can’t hear you,” he says. “Speak up.”
“I felt disgusted,” she admits. “Contemptuous.”
He sighs, the outrush of breath drawn out, tremulous with emotion. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
Ruth wakes, knowing that time has passed.
She had barely felt the sting of the hypodermic, wasn’t even aware of drifting into unconsciousness, but she knows he has been working on her, because her arm is shrieking with pain, and her eyes are taped shut. She can’t move.
