Blood and Ink

by Brett Adams

  “Tradewinds,” I said. He nodded.

  Something else occurred to me. “So if you don’t head straight for the US coast, where are we headed, exactly?”

  “If you’re a sailboat heading for the US, you head south until the butter melts, then ride the wind to the Caribbean.”

  Sweat began to cool on my neck.

  “And how much further than a beeline is that?”

  He leaned back, casting his eye over the empty sea. “Oh, about three thousand miles.” He looked at me then, and seemed to be reading my thoughts. “Give or take.”

  I swore out loud. Couldn’t help it. My back-of-the-napkin calculations had put me on US soil conservatively by the 7th of November. I hadn’t factored in a lazy cruise via the Caribbean. I felt stupid and angry.

  Longman said, “All the more time to plug me for my dirty secrets.”

  Desperate, I said, “Isn’t there some way to get there sooner?”

  “Sure,” he said equably. “We’re powered, full tank of fuel. We can head for Florida right now.”

  “We have to do it,” I spoke with more force than I intended. Longman’s eyes flashed, but he was no longer looking at me.

  A shadow fell over me, and I turned to find Scrub staring at me. His arms were outstretched before him.

  In his hands he grasped my gun.

  The shock of it drove me upward, but before I gained my feet, something caught me a blow behind my right ear, and I fell as if shot.

  59

  Criminal profiling, when it comes down to it—for all its technical complexity and nuance—reduces to answering one, simple question: who are you?

  Who are you, Hieronymus Beck?

  Everything else builds on the answer. Where he is. What he has done and why, and what he might do next.

  But how on earth could Marten answer that question sitting in the study of her flat in Wood Green? She had so little material to go on. Even an alchemist needed lead.

  She had spent so much time amassing and arranging the facts of Jack Griffen’s life and soul. At least she’d spoken to him—confirmed he was a living, breathing human being.

  But Hiero was an overheard story. A ghost. And that relentlessly skeptical part of her brain that was prerequisite for her line of work kept whispering doubt to her. Perhaps this was all the work of an exceedingly cunning mind, Li’s friend, Alexa, notwithstanding.

  Marten had seen the sincerity in Jack stooped over a dying woman, but psychopaths exceled at empathy. It was the lever that gave them such power over others—to think their thoughts and so manipulate them.

  Marten remembered reading about the experiment Elliot Barker conducted at Oak Ridge in 1968, called the ‘Total Encounter Capsule’. Barker treated Canadian spree killer, Matthew Charles Lamb. It turned out that if you stuck psychopaths naked in a lighted room for days, fed them through straws in the door, and dosed them on LSD, what you got was cleverer, more self-aware psychopaths. It had been, effectively, professional development rather than cure.

  She didn’t know why she so desperately wanted to believe that Jack was a good guy. Somehow she thought she owed it to him to try. She owed it to one mental image of him—she corrected.

  It wasn’t true she had nothing to go on. She had one thread. One small lump of lead that might transmute to gold.

  Riffling through the papers in her lap she found the transcript of her phone conversation with Alexa. Scanning the document, she at last found the detail, slim as it seemed, on which her hope now rested. She re-read it for the umpteenth time to make sure she had it right.

  Hiero claimed to be a descendent of the single surviving member of a family that was murdered at Christmas.

  Marten arranged her laptop in her lap and, feeling like a student cramming an essay, entered her first search in a web browser: Christmas mass murder.

  Of the results, Marten quickly dismissed the first, the Covina massacre of 2008 in Los Angeles—where a recently divorced man dressed as Santa had raided a party with a gift-wrapped flamethrower and killed nine. That was too recent to be the one Hiero meant.

  The second result was about Ronald Gene Simmons, and over this Marten had to pause. Simmons, an ex-serviceman, had begun killing on December 22nd 1987. After first killing his wife, son, and granddaughter, he waited for the rest of the family to arrive at his Arkansas home, and took them alone to the back of the house with the promise of a present, whereupon he strangled them one by one while holding their heads in a rain barrel. Simmons buried the dead in a cesspit dug by the children. He finished a week later, leaving sixteen dead—shot or strangled—including all of his family, and two strangers.

  My God

  Simmons was executed in 1990, his death warrant signed by Arkansas governor, Bill Clinton. That family was extinguished; Hiero was too young to be connected to Simmons.

  Finally, the Lawson family.

  A week before Christmas Day, 1929, Charlie Lawson took his family from their tobacco sharecropping farm into Germanton, North Carolina. He bid them buy new clothes—whatever you want, knock yourselves out—then visited the local photographer for a family portrait.

  Then on Christmas Day, he shot them all with a 12-gauge shotgun, before turning the gun on himself.

  Another family extinguished from the earth in one stroke.

  All? No. All but one—the eldest son escaped.

  A tingling sensation crept up from the base of Marten’s neck. She read on.

  She leaned in closer to look at the family portrait, which was front-and-center on the Wikipedia page. Marten scanned the faces, looking into the eyes of each for an inkling of the fate that awaited them. She settled on the father. Those eyes knew, didn’t they.

  The son, the sole survivor, stood next to his father in the portrait. He had escaped by virtue of being sent on an errand to town. (Had the father meant for him to escape?) What had become of him on hearing his entire family had been killed, and his home become a museum to murder? Had he lived to father his own children?

  Another internet search yielded the answer: he had died just years later in an automobile accident. Marten mused. The son died, apparently childless, but how could one be sure?

  The faces of the doomed stared out at Marten across eighty-six years, and she felt a pang of pity that surprised her.

  Every man, every moment, stands at the brink of eternity—and for some the plunge is swift and unexpected.

  Pushing herself back from the laptop, Marten tried to assess her night’s work. Had she made any progress? She had found one story of murder that might fit with what thereeldeel, Alexa, had related to her of Hiero’s secret. Maybe. But she felt way out on a limb here. Even if it were true, of what good was the knowledge that Hiero had a psychotic ancestor? If Hiero were indeed responsible for the murders of Li Min and Jane Worthington, his sanity stocks had already tanked. No need for further confirmation.

  Feeling like the fisherman at the end of a fruitless night casting the line one more time, Marten pulled the laptop close and entered a search. She searched for mentions of the Lawson murder.

  The first page of results was about the murder itself—newspaper articles on special anniversaries of the murder; a Rolling Stone magazine mention of the most creepy songs, including a bluegrass ballad recorded a year after the murder.

  She clicked past one page of this, then another. On the verge of giving up at the fourth page of results, her eye was hooked by a photograph.

  There, peering through a window of 320 by 240 pixels, was the face of a younger Hieronymus Beck.

  Breathless, she leaned close to read the summary: Teen author draws on family skeletons for inspiration. The article appeared to be a local publication, the Winston-Salem Journal. Beneath the photo, a caption in small font said: Randall Todd.

  “Got you,” breathed Marten. With a twist of her lips, she added, “Randy.”

  60

  “I can explain,” I panted.

  My vision squirmed from the blow that had sent me t
o the deck, but I was pretty sure the blur to my left was the boy, Scrub, and he still had the gun trained on me. All it would take would be a twitch and he would spread my brains over the polished hardwood.

  Longman laughed without humor. “Just once, one of you squibs is going to say, ‘You know what? I can’t explain.’”

  I chewed my lip. “I can’t explain?” I said, hopefully.

  He stopped laughing.

  “No, you’re going to explain, alright. To a jury of two—me and Scrub here. And if we don’t like what we hear, well . . .” He glanced at the ocean that spread in every direction to the limit of vision. “Quick execution. No one knows you’re here, right?”

  The appalling truth of what he’d said sank into my stomach like a stone.

  “You wouldn’t.”

  His gaze pierced the fog. “You’ve got no idea what I would or wouldn’t do.”

  “So tell me,” I said, grabbing at the self-disclosure like a drowning man a passing plank.

  He grimaced in annoyance, then spoke to Scrub. “Into the cabin.” Scrub stepped closer, close enough for me to see a speck of pocket lint snagged on the head of the Glock’s recoil spring. He held the gun outstretched in his hand, pointed at me. A vision of the last time it had been pointed at me filled my mind—a toilet in St Pancras station, and above the gun, the fearful, hungry eyes of a young police officer. I heard again the impossibly loud crash of its discharge. I jumped up as if stung, and bent to enter the cabin.

  Darkness pressed at the edges of my vision like a pathogen fighting my body. Nausea tickled the underside of my jaw. I hoped the blow hadn’t knocked anything permanently loose. In the cabin, I groped for the raised lip of its small table, and half-fell onto the couch that stretched in an L-shape around it.

  Longman followed me and sat on the perpendicular segment. The boy swiveled the captain’s chair to face us and clambered onto it. He trained the gun on me. Behind him, the electric glow of a depth map limned his small frame. The sea was so calm I could hear the thrum of the AC unit laboring under the couch.

  Longman placed his hands palm up and spread them briefly in a gesture of expectancy.

  My mind worked furiously. What came out of my mouth in the next moments held the power of life or death, unless this was all a bluff. Looking into the eyes of Longman, who returned my gaze with grey steel, I didn’t believe he was bluffing. There was a hardness there.

  Okay. Let it all out. “I’m wanted for murder.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “You know?”

  He flicked his gaze at the boy. “Scrub.”

  Scrub shifted the gun to his left hand, leaned over and from a stowage compartment next to the console retrieved a laptop. With an expert twitch of one hand he flipped it open. Light from its screen lit his face, and he turned it toward me.

  Staring back at me was my university Faculty of Arts staff photo. Scrub had found it in the international news section of the Telegraph.

  All the air went out of me. I slumped in my seat and buried my head in my hands.

  “You know what,” I said. “I can’t explain it. Any of it. I barely understand it myself. But I can tell you one thing, and you can believe it or not. I haven’t murdered anybody.” Not yet, anyway.

  “Boy,” said Longman, and it took me a moment to realize he was addressing me. “You’re on a boat in the middle of the Atlantic, wanted for murder, carrying a gun, maybe thinking to add a couple more to your tally, and we have the power to disappear you”—said with a Jamaican accent. “So, it might not be poetry, but you better bloody well have a go at explaining. Give it your best shot. You’ve got nothing to lose.”

  So I gave it my best shot. Recounted everything I could remember from the night I first found Hiero’s folder in the green half-dark of the corridor outside my office, of seeing the assault on Rhianne Goldman in the paper the next day—the kyoketsu-shoge—of my flight to Hong Kong, and the first dead body I’d ever seen.

  I told them about my race to find Annika Kreider in Vienna, only to arrive minutes late, to hear her shoved in front of a train.

  I recounted how I’d made it to the UK, and reached Jane, talked to her, only to watch her die in front of me.

  Skipping over how I wallowed in a slough of self pity after Jane, I told of my plan to crew Longman’s yacht, and of meeting him and Scrub on the jetty just days prior.

  Longman listened with an unnatural stillness, face betraying nothing of his thoughts.

  As I approached my narrative’s conclusion, to that moment there in the cabin, spilling my guts to the inscrutable Longman, while Scrub watched me over the Glock’s sight, swiveling his seat back and forth ever so slightly, I strained to think of the most powerful supplication for life I could construct. What might move this man?

  I failed. My monologue petered out with a pathetic, “And the gun, I never . . .”

  Silence and the slap of water on the hull.

  Longman just gazed at me. Charles the Inscrutable. Sounded like a character from a Sixties fantasy adventure.

  Longman glanced at Scrub. I turned, an arm rising involuntarily in useless defense.

  The boy simply stared at me with his gaze like lightning, then, with a motion almost too slight to see, nodded.

  “Well,” said Longman, and he slapped his thighs and rose. “I need a beer.”

  “What about me?” I said, rising.

  He looked me over. “You need a beer, too.”

  Something prodded my back. I turned to find Scrub holding the gun toward me, butt first. I took it. For the first time since I’d met him, he smiled.

  None of this went a long way toward convincing me of my sanity. I rode a ship of fools.

  Just visible through the cabin portal was the high white slash of an airliner contrail. I wondered if anyone looking down from the plane at its tip would be able to see us, a tiny bobbing cork in a vast ocean.

  61

  We’re unaccustomed to mystery.

  Somehow the success of science at harnessing the natural world has diffused the idea that the human mind can crack all mysteries. All we need is time, and the universe will yield like stone to a hammer.

  “Well,” Marten mused, “more people should try unpicking the human heart. That would cure them of that delusion.”

  And where the hell was Jack Griffen? What she wouldn’t give to talk to him right now. She glanced through a window at the Atlantic Ocean spread thirty-thousand feet below in a glittering, swell-wrought texture, and idly wondered if he was somewhere down there.

  Just another mystery.

  His destination, though, was clear: the US. Randy Todd was a US citizen. And the most recent post in the blog simply said, ‘Nearly done. Time to book my unicorn to New York.’

  Add to that the odd email she had received from Jack, relayed by the university IT employee, Matt Price. It implied Jack was headed to the US. He’d signed off the email with some nonsense about a poop-deck, and ‘Arr!’, which Marten took to indicate he was at sea or losing his marbles.

  On the strength of it, Marten had booked a flight. Collins didn’t argue. He wanted her to disappear for a few weeks, until the smoke from the botched Oxford operation cleared.

  But New York didn’t narrow her search all that much. The tri-state area held 17 million people. Enough to hide a gaggle of serial killers.

  With a sigh, Marten retrieved the sheet of paper on which she had bullet-pointed her itinerary, and glanced over it again, as if it were not etched on her brain already.

  The first item on her list she anticipated being the most difficult. It said, get Grover Jackson, Assistant Director of the FBI’s New York Field Office, on side. Somehow she had to parlay what small cache of intercontinental good will remained between London’s Police and the FBI—still a tension fifty years after the Cambridge Five, somehow baked into the FBI’s DNA by the irascible J Edgar Hoover—into transport and provincial authority to find one Hieronymus Beck.

  This was problema
tic, given that the last time she had set foot in New Jersey, she had been marched out, accused with killing the state’s case. The memory made Marten frown. Nine years and the injustice still stung.

  The case had revolved around the death of a young girl—and it was right there that Marten had underestimated the depth of emotional charge she was dealing with. Years later, now equipped with the experience of motherhood, it was clear she should have trodden more carefully.

  But, she’d been right, dammit.

  The accused, Cory Wayne, a factory worker for a BioPharma company, had matched the half-remembered sightings of a few key witnesses. He’d had no alibi for the time of the assault. For opportunity, the presence of the girl alone near the woods had been judged sufficient for the state to bring a case.

  And motive? That was anchored to records obtained from Wayne’s internet provider, which included a torrent of pre-pubescent porn. Mr Wayne had simply crossed the line from voyeur to participant—or would have, had the girl not run and fallen.

  The case fell under the purview of the FBI by virtue of being both a violent crime and a crime against children. The discovered child pornography sparked its own investigation, but it was the murder case that saw Marten attached—a soft ball for a recent graduate from the FBI’s profiling program. They’d found the murderer; just needed to confirm the fit so there were no ‘accidents’ when it went to trial. No one counted on their star pupil up-ending the case.

  Marten’s crime was to assert that porn did not a murderer make. It could, of course. God knew, it did plenty of harm—reduced sex to recreation, and the female body to the recreational equipment par-excellence. It wrecked marriages, and was busy twisting up the self-worth of a generation of girls by removing the inner life from the concept of beauty.

  But it didn’t prove murder precisely because of its ubiquity.

  The closer she looked at the evidence against Wayne, the flimsier it appeared.

  For starters, the girl had run almost a mile into densely forested Appalachian foothills pursued by her attacker. Mr Wayne, when brought into custody, was three hundred pounds with the VO2 aerobic score of a seventy-year-old. Her pursuer had to have kept on her heels to not lose her as she tick-tacked through the dense woods.