Blood and Ink

by Brett Adams

  Quite the opposite was true. I felt infused with power. Everything would bend to my will simply because all of their conventions had no hold on me anymore. I could lie and ignore because, at that time, I didn’t care for anything or anyone. Not even myself. It was as though I was a lump of iron that all its life had been held thrall to a magnetic force suddenly, at the flick of a switch, floating free. The fluxing fields of social convention, of habit, of morality were simply . . . gone. Had no hold on me.

  Realizing this was the turning of a corner on the road back to humanity.

  That and overhearing a snotty student refer to me as, “Just some sad shit.”

  It was a slap in the face far worse than, well, the fist to the face.

  There must have been a skerrick of pride lingering at the base of my soul after all.

  But the strongest tug back to the land of the living was the memory that came to me one morning, of the fifth and final murder sheet.

  I didn’t need to pull it out. I could recite it verbatim.

  How: Choice

  Where: A fun house

  When: An anniversary

  Who: The author

  Why: ?

  Hiero had told me to head for North America. In less than four weeks, at a fun house somewhere in the US, a choice would be made, and an author would die.

  51

  Marten didn’t know how long Benjamin’s hands had been on her hips before she realized. Her thoughts were sunk in the meaning of the curative wine. The wine that, had it been drunk, would have saved the life of Jane Worthington. It was haunting to think the wine’s bouquet would have been in her nostrils.

  Before Jack Griffen knocked it to the floor.

  She stood at the sink, glass in hand, which she had cleaned and dried ten times over with the tea towel in her other hand.

  “We getting you back any time soon?” Her husband’s voice in her ear was close enough that she felt his breath on her skin.

  She placed the glass upside down in the rack. It made a chink sound as it swayed against the next. She turned in his embrace and kissed him on the lips.

  “I’m sorry.”

  A smile tugged at his lips. “No you’re not.”

  He hugged her tighter, pulling her body into contact from hips to shoulders. “And we still love you. Poor saps.”

  He said it lightly, but Marten knew from experience that he joked about the true things he found hard to say.

  A question rose on her lips, but she pushed it down. It was about the woman and the wine. Compartmentalize. Don’t bring it home.

  She could feel the warmth of Benjamin’s six-foot five frame through her dress suit.

  Don’t bring it home. That was the received wisdom.

  Why the hell not? Wise men hadn’t done so well in her life.

  “Why would you poison someone, put the antidote in their hand, then remove it?”

  “I wouldn’t.” He said, keeping an expertly blank face.

  She swatted him on the arm.

  “Perhaps I meant to take the poison too, then take the antidote.”

  Marten pondered that.

  “Seems risky. What if she manages to take the antidote?”

  “Then I’d have to kill her another way.”

  What other way did Jack Griffen have? His bare hands? She remembered the look of him. The hand touching Jane’s had been an academic’s hand. Thin, nimble, not abused. It was a ridiculous thought, but they didn’t look like hands that could throttle a windpipe.

  The gun? He’d fired it once already, a deliberate attempted homicide.

  Who was she kidding. No he hadn’t. Trent’s story stank.

  Marten prized herself free of her husband’s embrace, and turned back to the sink. Keep the hands busy. Let the mind work.

  “Who else could it be?” he said.

  “What?”

  “You have more than one suspect?”

  Oh. She sighed. “We have a character sheet for a suspect.”

  He laughed. “I have no idea what that means.”

  “Jack Griffen, the man with the curative wine, claims he is the patsy”—she smirked at the quaint word—“of the dark and nefarious Hieronymus Beck, who, keeping one step ahead of the poor Griffen, is fitting him up for a series of crimes.”

  “The name sounds made-up.”

  “Doesn’t it,” Marten agreed.

  She paused, a dripping wine glass frozen in her grip above the cooling water.

  Doesn’t it, just.

  Without another word, Marten placed the still-wet glass on the sink, and left the kitchen.

  Benjamin reached for the tea towel and glass, smiling, confused. Since when did his OCD wife leave the dishes half done?

  52

  I stood on the weathered planks of a jetty that stretched into a marina on the Hamble River, where it fed into the larger Solent, a few kilometers from Southampton.

  It had been three weeks since I’d tossed my phone into the Atlantic from a Portsmouth jetty, the next port east.

  Above me curved a full hemisphere of cold blue sky; my ears were filled with the suck and gurgle of water playing about the pilings, and the bloomp of mooring fenders buffeted by boats. In my hand I held a single sheet of paper. It was, by now, much creased, and fluttered in my grasp in the fresh onshore breeze like a caught gull.

  It was the memory of it days ago that had finally galvanized my will to action.

  Holding it close I read the words I was taking as a motto for the foreseeable future:

  How: Choice

  I had a choice. Doing nothing was a choice. Wallowing in self-pity and fear was a choice.

  So too was getting my arse into gear and trying to stop another murder.

  Every man has a choice.

  And I’d made mine.

  I carefully folded the sheet, Hiero’s last ‘research’ paper, and tucked it into my jeans.

  Yeah, I was back in jeans. I’d stolen one last time, but not at random. I’d aimed for a particular look—itinerant journalist, casual to the point of unconcern without being a punk, stick-it-to-the-man. It takes a certain kind of worm to bait a certain kind of fish.

  Looking at the fifty foot yacht moored to the jetty ahead of me, I just hoped I’d guessed this kind of fish right. If I hadn’t, I was back to square negative one thousand.

  Right on cue, the fish appeared, emerging from the marina office at the head of the jetty: a man, perhaps an inch under six feet—that inch the combined subsidence in his frame of fifty years post-puberty. His head was covered in hair that had probably been a thick corporate-fox grey, but was now beginning to thin, touched yellow by too much sun or salt. It flamed in the breeze like a halo. His upper body was swaddled in too many layers for the weather. His legs were bare to the breeze, poking from faded cargo shorts, and looking too thin to support his apparent bulk. But he didn’t totter. He strode, on those too-thin legs, with a stride that had once walked the earth as a kind of king.

  Trailing behind him, a lone little pilot fish, came a boy. He followed the man like an obedient dog, and from the moment he stepped onto the jetty his gaze was pinned to me.

  Between us, apart from the stretch of sun-bleached wood, lay the yacht. I waited until the man and the boy were nearly abreast of it before approaching them.

  The boy was the first to notice me move, his only reaction was to place a small hand upon the man’s hip.

  In that instant, the man looked at me, and I knew what so many books had tried to convey: the majesty of a king is in his gaze.

  It mattered not that this particular king had abdicated.

  “Morning,” he said. His American accent was at once out of place on those British planks, although it too sounded worn around the edges. He swapped a small tank he carried from one hand to the other, and made to lower it into the yacht.

  “Good morning,” I said, my eyes flicking a greeting to the boy who stood behind the man, observing. “Am I talking to Charles Longman?”

  At
this, the man stood straight, the tank in his hand seemingly forgotten.

  “Who’s asking?”

  “You don’t know me, but I’m after the owner of the Dawntreader.” I glanced at the yacht. Her name rippled with reflected light.

  The man’s eyes interrogated me. Was he looking for a camera? A notebook?

  “I’m here about the advertisement you didn’t put in the Daily Echo.”

  “I didn’t put. I like that.” The glimmer in his eye—the closest, I was to learn, he ever came to smiling—was there and gone in an instant. Only later would I come to know how rare that was.

  “I forget now,” he said. “What didn’t I advertise?”

  “An opening for a deckhand for this year’s Atlantic crossing.”

  His eyes narrowed. “This year’s?”

  I realized immediately I’d made a potentially fatal mistake. Backtracking fast, I said, “Not you personally. I meant the marina’s. Every year a group crosses to Florida in convoy—convoy, is that the right word?”

  “That’s not what you meant.” He said it deadpan, and turned away, bending to set the tank in his hand onto a bench in the yacht. “And the group you’re talking about doesn’t depart for another three weeks.”

  The boy scampered over the railing. He too, apparently, thought I’d shot my wad.

  Speaking over his shoulder as he worked, the man said, “The website you’re after is crewmate-dot-com. Look it up. It’s your best bet.”

  In a split-second decision, I changed tack. Dropped the story I’d been about to feed this man, and tried another.

  “Look, Mr Longman. You’re right. I do know who you are, because I’ve been researching you.”

  A scowl appeared on his weathered brow, and was comically mirrored on the boy’s face.

  “I’ve been looking for an opportunity, any opportunity, to spend time with you. Get the great Chuck Longman’s story in his own words.”

  He grunted. “So you are a reporter.”

  “No, not a reporter. An author. I want to write your biography. What better place than the calm isolation of an Atlantic crossing?”

  This is how much this man did not smile. He listened to what I had just said—the calm isolation of an Atlantic crossing—and didn’t laugh so hard he sent snot flying. He just stared at me, with those eyes glittering from beneath his leathery brow.

  “They already wrote a biography.”

  “But not your biography, Mr Longman. Not your words. Not your account. That’s what this would be. You tell me, and I’ll ghost write.”

  This was it. My last opportunity. The countdown to the next murder was at three weeks and counting. And if I blew this chance, one I’d sunk so much effort into . . . well, I was shot.

  With difficulty, I returned his stare, not knowing what thoughts were passing behind those eyes. The kid was fidgeting, which despite my having first laid eyes on him minutes ago, seemed out of character.

  With another grunt, Longman heaved himself over the railing and back onto the jetty. He turned, and said over his shoulder. “I’m not a cruise liner. I don’t do passengers. And the biographers already got it right. I’m the depressed old crank who built an empire then blew it on a pair of thighs.”

  And with that he walked away, kid in tow.

  He’d barely gone three yards when his hand delved into a pocket to retrieve a handkerchief, and I saw something flutter free.

  It was a banknote—high denomination. In the breeze it spun and winged its way chaotically across the weathered wood toward the water. By instinct I leaped and clapped a boot at it. Miraculously, I trapped it by a corner. It fluttered angrily above the water. When I stooped to retrieve it, I discovered it was a fifty-pound note.

  Longman didn’t break step. Didn’t seem to have noticed.

  I felt a little thrill at the feel of the note; that new hunger for money my weeks of hand-to-mouth had ingrained.

  For a moment I battled the urge to thrust it into my pocket. Then, “Hey!” I hurried after Longman.

  He turned, and stretched out his hand for the note, which I returned to him.

  “You’re hired,” he said. Then, almost an afterthought. “Know anything about boats?”

  “Not a thing.”

  That glittering gaze again.

  “Well,” he sighed. “I can handle a know-nothing. But weeks cooped up with a greedy opportunist”—he shook the note—“is another matter.” But then he seemed to think again. “Really nothing?”

  I nodded.

  He swore.

  53

  Marten played a game with herself.

  It was a version of let’s pretend, and she only hoped she could silence her inner critic long enough to pretend until she had a breakthrough.

  The game went like this: let’s pretend that Hieronymus Beck is a living, breathing, flesh-and-blood human being. What’s more, let’s pretend that he is out there in the world, approaching the climax of a self-proclaimed inter-continental killing spree. What kind of a profile of him could Marten build? One good enough to put him in custody?

  Marten’s inner doubter, observing all this like an armchair movie critic, was content to allow: ‘This is rubbish. I’ll admit the potential usefulness of taking Hiero, for a moment, as a lens through which to better see Jack Griffen. Hiero being the fabrication of an unstable man might yet reveal the contours of that instability.’

  But the critic wasn’t known for her patience. The movie wouldn’t be allowed to play all night. Marten couldn’t wrestle with herself forever. She had to move fast.

  So working at her desk into the night in a fever of phone calls, and searches on the internet and in the databases of the City of London Police, she hunted for an insight that would shut the critic up.

  It soon emerged that no one at the source of this ‘outbreak’ had done due diligence on the claim of the existence of Hiero Beck. The work was shoddy and presumptuous.

  The cops in Perth Australia, whom Marten now nicknamed Detectives Fish & Chips, had latched onto Jack Griffen the moment he’d come sniffing around the home of the first victim, Rhianne Goldman—the pervert academic snuffling through the entrails of the assault. From that first meeting he became not the primary person-of-interest, but the only person-of-interest.

  Then Jack fled to Hong Kong, or raced to save Li, depending on whose version of events you believed. For Detectives Fish & Chips, if there had been any doubt as to Jack’s guilt, his flight banished it from their minds.

  Then a murder in Hong Kong, as predicted by Jack Griffen (as perpetrated by Jack Griffen, again, depending on your point of view), and all thought of ground zero, the University of WA, was forgotten.

  Next came Vienna (Annika Kreider was still touch and go), and finally . . . here, the UK, Oxford. And even Marten had gone with the flow for a time, accepting Collins’ account without scrutiny.

  But it was back there, in Australia where it began, that she quickly returned. A nagging sense there was a vital clue hiding in plain sight drove her.

  She viewed the official web site of the Arts faculty at the university, saw its glossy photos of happy students arranged in politically correct racial proportions, artistic shots of campus spaces, cafés and auditoriums. Bland and useless.

  Instead, she dipped into the faculty’s social media streams, and from there spidered out into the lives of its students. In the torrents of photos, status updates, and likes—what pundits were calling surveillance capitalism—the real pulse of the place could be felt, however faintly at this distance. Incredible what kids were happy to expose for all to see. But right now Marten didn’t lament this naïve over-sharing. She milked it hard.

  Rhianne Goldman’s facebook timeline was a one-way chat with the world. Up until the date of her assault there was a steady stream of image-shaping factoids. Photos of a university charity event. Breakfast with friends at a fancy-looking restaurant called Matilda Bay. Badges unlocked on a game called Cookie Jam. A new PB on a bridge-to-bridge run. Many
photos of sunsets and sunrises across the river, apparently taken mid-jog. (Marten wondered if the attacker had plotted using the photos.)

  After the date of the assault, a blackout. Until weeks later Rhianne posted a single update that said, ‘Time out for me.’

  At a loss, Marten foraged through the links to Rhianne’s friends. Some had active public pages, and these she pored over looking for the spore of a young American exchange student with—what was it?—chestnut fringe and James Dean eyes.

  When she found herself looping back onto searched paths more and more she pushed back from her desk and took a break. She knuckled her eyes, made a cup of organic rooibos tea, and sipped it, wondering for the nth time if the packaging was right, if you really were supposed to drink it with milk.

  Returning to her laptop, she decided it was time to jump out of Rhianne’s Facebook fraternity. Try someone else. She searched for the name of the first murder victim, Li Min, and was disappointed to find that no one matching that name had a public Facebook profile in Perth or Hong Kong.

  Grimacing at the pointlessness of it, Marten entered Li Min in a raw Google search, and was pleasantly surprised to find that Plus, Google’s own social network, not only had a Li Min, but that it was the right girl—there she was, smiling profile photo and all.

  The Google Plus stream proved to be empty, but Li’s profile was chock full of links to her virtual presence in specialized social sites—Twitter, Pinterest, Smashwords, Scribophile, Reddit, Flickr. The profile even listed a blog.

  Marten clicked the blog’s link, but quickly realized it wasn’t a personal journal. Li had followed the market-yourself advice of selecting a theme, and that theme was unfortunately not the inner life of an arts student, but book reviews and commentary on wood-turning.

  Wood turning. Marten nearly cried in frustration.

  What had seemed a wealth of information reduced to this: Goodreads simply hosted copies of her book reviews; Scribophile was an online writers critiquing forum; and the Reddit groups she participated in were all writing-related.