Splinter in the Blood

by Ashley Dyer

  He addresses her conversationally: “A milestone, your first truth—your first open eye.” He rubs charcoal into the wound and she whimpers. “But miles to go before you sleep,” he adds.

  He pats her thigh. “Now, let’s get you properly compos mentis.”

  “Nnnn . . .” Ruth tries to struggle, but although she can feel the pain in her arm, she can’t make her limbs obey her.

  She feels the needle go into her thigh. Then: mercury-cold liquid, racing through her body. She feels it rush from her thigh into her groin; from her stomach into her chest. Her heart hammers, pushing the drug to her brain.

  He removes the micropore tape from her eyes.

  Light, so intense she’s sure it will blind her. And pain. Her flesh melting, her arm on fire. She screams, arches her back, hears the leather restraints creak as she strains against them, her entire mind and body focused on the agony in her arm.

  He pushes her down. “Shhhh . . . Relax . . .”

  Ruth wants to beg him to make it stop, but she will not give him that, so she screams again. “Fuck you!”

  “Tell you what,” he says. “If you’re forthcoming this time, we’ll see if you can do without the epinephrine for the next Q&A.”

  He sounds flustered. Is he afraid of me? Is he bargaining with me?

  “Fuck . . . you . . .” she says again, hearing her breath stutter in her throat. “You want the truth?” she says. “You’re weak. That’s why you hide. Because you’re weak, and afraid.”

  “Yet it’s you that’s trembling,” he says. “The pulse in your throat is astonishingly fast. The pain of the tattoo feels like third-degree burns. You’re in a cold sweat.”

  She grits her teeth. “Tell me . . . something I . . .” God, the pain! “. . . don’t . . . know.”

  “All right. Your heart rate will come down in a minute or two, but the biggest risk is vasoconstriction of the small blood vessels in your brain. You could have a stroke at any moment.”

  The pressure builds in her skull. She can’t stop shaking. She should be going into shock, her body shutting down, numbing the pain centers, but it just keeps intensifying.

  “Focus on my voice,” he says. “Answer me truthfully, I’ll give you something to ease the pain.”

  He waits until she is ready to beg him to ask the question.

  “You say you were disgusted, finding Carver that night. You thought he’d tried to kill himself.”

  “Mm-nn,” Ruth manages.

  “Then why did you destroy evidence of that? Why did you steal the gun from his apartment?”

  “P-protect.” Ruth forces the word out through clenched teeth.

  “Protect who? Carver? His reputation?”

  “Mmn.”

  “You must have known there would be repercussions. You’re a trained CSI and a detective.”

  “Not . . . then,” Ruth says, having to keep her answers short because her teeth are chattering, her entire body jangling against the restraints.

  “You panicked.”

  Ruth closes her eyes.

  “Is it really so different, going into a crime scene when you know the victim?” He sounds genuinely curious.

  “Yes.” She opens her eyes and stares into the bright disc of light surrounding the Thorn Killer’s face. She hears a grunt of satisfaction.

  Now make this stop.

  She feels a slight pressure in her right arm and a sudden flush of warmth. The burning is still there, but it doesn’t seem to matter as much. The shaking stops and she can breathe normally again.

  “Morphine,” he says. “Not too much—we’ll crack on, now we’ve started to make progress.”

  Chapter 57

  Carver risked switching his phone back on briefly so that he could Bluetooth the images to the taxi driver’s phone. He switched off again and opened up the downloads on the borrowed phone, magnifying each one, but didn’t find any more detail from the scrap of burned paper: only the three letters, “NSC,” and the stylized bird—a heron, maybe, or an exotic bird?

  Of all the papers littered around Gaines’s house, the killer had burned this—and he’d taken Gaines’s laptop. Gaines must have found something on the Web that could implicate the Thorn Killer.

  He searched the Web and found a security consultancy under NSC, also a computing specialist and a hi-tech composites manufacturer, but the logos were wrong: wrong color, wrong shape.

  He tapped on the driver’s window. “Pull over for a second, will you?”

  He handed the cabbie the phone with the image of the logo on-screen. “What does that look like to you?”

  “Not much, to be honest.” The driver screwed up his eyes. “Pair of hands around a wheel cog?”

  Carver took the phone back. He saw what the cabbie meant, but why would you symbolically cup hands either side of a wheel cog?

  He googled “cupped hands logos.” There were hundreds. Okay, so what did cupped hands signify, symbolically? Protection? Conservation? Again, the wheel cog didn’t make sense. He tried “bird conservation,” but that was a dead end. Okay . . . Three teardrop shapes, point in, forming an arc at the top of a line. Or a stem? Could it be a flower stem?

  He googled “NSC” and “plant conservation.” Six lines down was a national plant conservation society. He clicked the link, and there it was: the logo for National Society for the Conservation of British Plant Species. The cabbie was right about the cupped hands. The line through the center was, indeed, a plant stem, and the teardrops were petals. The “plant” rested on the letters NSCBPS. But why was that significant? What was the killer trying to hide?

  He clicked “In your area” on the drop-down menu, then selected “Merseyside.”

  Listed under “Collections Co-ordinator, Wirral” was a name he recognized.

  For a few moments, he stared at the screen, his fingers numb. Then he roused himself, gave the driver instructions to the address, switched his phone back on, and called up his contacts list. For a second, his thumb hovered over Parsons’s entry, but at the last instant he changed his mind and scrolled back to Ivey: he didn’t think Parsons would be in a listening mood.

  “Where are you?” Ivey demanded, but he kept his voice low, and Carver imagined him ducking out of the incident room. “Parsons is going apeshit. Jansen wants to hang you from the Liver Buildings by your balls.”

  “What did you get from the security videos?”

  “Nothing,” Ivey said.

  “Ruth was very specific,” Carver said. “A woman spoke to Kara.”

  “I found the woman all right, but she only talked to Kara for a few seconds. I took a screen grab, showed it to Kara’s flatmates and her teachers. No one knows her.”

  “I think I do,” Carver said. “Can you text me the image?”

  Seconds later, he was staring at the photograph.

  “Boss?” Ivey’s voice came to him faintly.

  “Listen carefully,” Carver said. “The woman in the picture is Dr. Laura Pendinning. She’s a coordinator for a plant conservation society. She has rare subspecies of Aconitum, Pulsatilla, and Buxus among her collections. They’re all highly toxic plants, and we know that the Thorn Killer used aconite on his victims.” He took a breath. “She has also been working on my rehab at the head injuries unit—she’s a clinical psychologist.”

  “Oh my God . . .”

  He gave Ivey the background and dictated Pendinning’s address. He left the phone on and made sure that the GPS was activated: as of now, he wanted to be traceable. He just had to hope that Ivey could convince Parsons. After all, Pendinning’s interest in plants could be entirely innocent, and anyway, Pendinning was with him when the Thorn Killer called him at the hospital.

  No, he remembered, she came into the room just after. And it was Pendinning who had gotten him the mobile phone in the first place.

  But she had tried to stop him leaving the hospital . . .

  “Come off it, Carver,” he muttered. Arguing against the very thing you want a person to d
o was a simple psychological ploy—and he fell for it.

  Pendinning did seem to know more than he’d told her: his brand of whisky, for one thing, and the significance of the photo he’d cherished of Emma on their honeymoon. Emma was contemptuous of him when he accused her of bringing the picture into the hospital. He’d convinced himself that Ruth was playing marriage counselor again. But what if it was neither of them? The day he’d smashed the frame, hurling the picture after Emma, what had Pendinning said? “Sometimes it’s good to be reminded of what matters to us. Even if it causes us pain.”

  He remembered the look on Pendinning’s face when he’d tried to barge out of the hospital in search of Ruth. After days of looking exhausted, Pendinning was flushed, excited.

  “There’s nothing you can do, Greg,” she’d said.

  He’d thought then that she was being rational, reasonable, but now he realized that she was taunting him.

  His phone buzzed a second before it rang, and he gave a violent start. Ivey. He slid the icon to answer.

  “An armed Matrix team is on its way to Dr. Pendinning’s house,” Ivey told him.

  Chapter 58

  A faint, percussive sound penetrates the walls of Ruth’s prison, and the Thorn Killer turns. Her senses hyperalert after the first warm flush of morphine, Ruth hears his shoes slither on the clay floor. He runs to the far end of the space and for a few seconds it is filled with the wail of a police siren, and farther away, Ruth hears the drumming pulse of a phaser siren.

  He whispers, “No . . .”

  He’s afraid. Ruth experiences a rush of exhilaration.

  “They’re here,” Ruth says. “They’ve found you.”

  “Shut up.” He slams the door, shutting out the clamor, and the only sound is his ragged breathing, distorted by the voice changer.

  “Give it up,” Ruth says. “It’s finished.”

  “I said shut up!” He snatches up the EpiPen. “It’s finished when I say it is.”

  Pendinning’s house was swarming with police when Carver arrived. A Matrix Mercedes Sprinter van and two marked pursuit cars had torn past them at the Mersey Tunnel entrance ten minutes earlier.

  The cabbie pulled up at the curbside and the driver turned around. “Bloody hell, mate. You sure you wanna go in there?”

  “I don’t have a choice.” Carver handed the driver his phone and a wodge of cash.

  Pendinning’s house was on a quiet lane, backing onto fields in Upton. They were still setting up the outer cordon and he slipped by without any trouble, but the scene log officer stopped him at the front door.

  Carver flashed his ID.

  “I know who you are, sir,” the officer said. “But I can’t let you in.”

  “Have you found DS Lake?” Carver asked. “Is she okay?”

  The officer looked past him, his mouth set in a grim line.

  “For God’s sake, man . . .” Carver’s head was throbbing so hard that the ground seemed to advance and retreat, pulsing in time with the pain in his head.

  One of the Matrix team came out of the house and trotted down the front steps. “It’s like a chuffing horror show in there,” he said to the guy on the door. He noticed Carver, and with an apologetic nod, hurried on.

  Carver leaned against the wall and willed the dizziness to pass.

  A CSU van arrived a few minutes later and a team began kitting up. It started snowing as Crime Scene Manager John Hughes led the team toward the house.

  Carver straightened up, tensing his muscles to control the shaking in his limbs.

  “Greg.” Hughes looked shocked. “You look terrible. Have they—?”

  “I don’t know, John. They won’t tell me anything,” Carver said.

  “Okay. Go and sit in the van,” Hughes said. “I’ll see what I can find out.”

  He returned ten minutes later, peeling off his gloves and scene coveralls and bagging them before climbing into the driving seat.

  “The house is empty,” he said. “But it looks like you were right—she took trophies—hair and jewelry. And there are photographs—stage by stage as she tattooed the five victims.”

  “Jesus . . .” Carver wiped a hand over his face. “Ruth?”

  “No.”

  Carver looked at his trembling hands.

  “Greg, are you listening? There’s nothing of Ruth’s in the place.” Hughes waited for Carver to look at him.

  “Okay,” Carver said. “I heard you.”

  “She kept newspaper clippings about the murders. And . . .” Hughes hesitated.

  Carver looked up. “What?”

  “There’s a cabinet display with sections of tattooed skin—it’s too early to say if they’re human.”

  “Fuck. Have they checked the loft space and cellar?”

  “The Matrix team have searched every room, cupboard, cubbyhole, and crack in the place. They’re about to clear out so we can process it. And I promise you, we will find anything that’s here to be found. But as of this moment, there’s no sign that Ruth was here.”

  Carver nodded, acknowledging Hughes’s reassurance, but thinking ahead: “Computers, phones, tablets. If Pendinning stored information about the location where she—”

  “Parsons has already given orders to have all e-devices seized,” Hughes said. “Look, I know he’s a shiny arse who never leaves the office, but he’s here today, and does know what he’s doing.”

  Carver opened the passenger door.

  “Hey—where are you going?” Hughes demanded. “You’re in no fit state—”

  “Need some air,” Carver mumbled.

  He staggered to the garden wall dividing Pendinning’s property from the next and perched there, half sitting, fighting nausea and dread.

  He had brought Ruth into this. His selfish, cowardly retreat into drink, his meaningless affair with Adela Faraday. If he’d done his job, Ruth would never have become a target.

  Two Matrix officers walked out of the house, then another; within a minute they were all in the van, ready to leave. Parsons was the next out. Carver couldn’t face talking to him, so as John Hughes walked over to the house, he edged off into the shadow at the side of the building.

  A spike of fear shoots pain through Ruth’s heart, sends crackling shocks through her stomach and lower abdomen. Stupid, she thinks. “Finished” was a stupid, stupid word to use. Ruth has seen the victims; she knows what he does to them when he’s finished with them.

  DO something. Say something. He wants your secrets. Taunt him. Deny him.

  “I know who you are,” she says.

  “You think you know.”

  “Lyall Gaines,” Ruth says.

  A curt laugh. “That’s what I wanted you to think. But DCI Carver has discovered that is not the case, and I do hate anyone taking credit for my work, so here it is: Gaines was a foolish man whose ability did not match his inflated ego.”

  Reeling inside, Ruth tries to present an unshakable calm. “Are you going to just sit here—wait for them to come for you?” she says. “You know they’ll tear this place apart to find me.”

  “Why are you so concerned—wouldn’t you want me to be caught?”

  You will never know how much. But if he moves her, he’ll have to free her hands and she will be in with a chance. If they stay, he might decide to take the easy way out, bring her along for company. And if he isn’t already thinking along those lines, she doesn’t want to put the idea in his head.

  “If not Gaines, then who?”

  “Oh, you know it’s not going to be that easy. ‘You have to give to get.’”

  Give him something—but make him want more.

  “The smell in this place,” Ruth says. “Reminds me of the Anderson Shelter in my granddad’s backyard.”

  His breathing is hushed. He’s listening.

  “It was his bolthole when he was in trouble with Gran. Didn’t even know it was there till he decided to dig it over and plant a vegetable patch.”

  “Is that why you planted up your l
ittle garden, Ruth?”

  It’s the first time he’s called her by her given name. The psych texts say it’s a good sign if they give you your name. But Ruth isn’t so sure. The Thorn Killer is unlike any serial killer she’s ever read about: most killers do not want to think of their victims as people, couldn’t be less interested in them as human beings.

  The Thorn Killer needs to discover everything there is to know about his victims. And when he’s harvested all that he can, he murders them.

  So make sure he knows this is just a teaser—make him hungry for more.

  “Granddad always wanted a garden,” she says. “All he got was a hole in the ground. When I was sixteen, I planted the backyard at my parents’ house for him—to thank him, after . . .” She falters, hoping he won’t see that she is exaggerating her emotion.

  “After?” he demands. For a microsecond she sees a flash of that amorphous face as he breaks through the veil of blinding light, then he retreats.

  “After something bad happened to me,” she says. “He loved to sit in our backyard, smell the flowers, listen to the buzz of the insects.”

  “The stabbing you witnessed as a child.”

  “Yes.”

  “But I already know about that. There are other, far more interesting possibilities in your secret scrapbook.”

  “You’ve read it,” she says, trying to sound casual. “You know everything there is to know.”

  “Oh, I doubt that. I’ve read the press cuttings, but you didn’t annotate them—and you do love to make notes, don’t you, Ruth? So either the marginal notes are burned into your memory. Or you’re hiding something much bigger—and, knowing what’s actually in the album, I’d say it would have to be something momentous.”

  Ruth doesn’t answer.

  “Well, I didn’t expect you to give up your secrets so easily. Let’s start with an easier question: Do you take it from its hidey-hole and pore over it from time to time?”

  What would he want to hear? “Yes,” she lies.

  “Hm, now that was a lie. You see, if it were true, it would be harder for you to admit to.” He presses the tips of his index and median fingers into the groove to the side of her windpipe and for a second she thinks he’s going to choke her.