by David Mark
“Roisin…”
He feels her fingers, cold and soft; her warm breath on the side of his face. He feels her press her forehead to his shoulder; rub her face against his arm as if blotting an impression onto the canvas of his skin. Slowly, his breathing slows. The dark room becomes familiar.
Here.
Hull.
Home.
The little semi-detached on the new-build estate at the north of the city. The half-finished bedroom: gaudy patterned wallpaper and fairy-lights: a big pink-and-white wardrobe groaning under the weight of sparkly shoe-boxes.
Her. His Roisin; the same way he is so very much her Aector. His wife. Stroking his skin. Whispering to him. Telling him that it’s okay, she’s here; that there’s nothing to be afraid of.
And then he is laying back down, his head on her stomach, her hands in his hair, and she’s singing, softly, in the voice that fills him with honey.
“In Dublin’s fair city, where the girls are so pretty...”
Movement, in the bed. Then Fin McAvoy, three-years-old and built like a bread-oven, is wriggling up to where Mummy and Daddy are snuggling, and he’s giggling to himself as he slithers up his mum’s small, warm frame and thuds against the enormity of his Dad: 6ft 6” of muscles; pale skin and red hair.
“Mammy singing?” he asks.
“Trying to,” says Roisin, softly. “Trying a few things, Sonny-Jim. Trying it on with your father, as it happens, but there’s no chance of that now you’ve stuck your oar in.”
“Me not got an oar.”
“Daddy has,” a giggle in her voice. “Daddy could row us home with it.”
“Mummy silly. We are home. This is home.”
“Yeah, Mummy silly. Mummy really fancies a giggle. Wants to lay on her back and laugh until she shakes.”
“Daddy would like that too.”
Fin McAvoy has only just turned three but he knows that Mammy sometimes says things that are funny, and rude, and that make Daddy blush. It’s too dark to tell if this is one of those times, but he knows that beneath the blankets, they’re holding each other close and that they smiling, brightly, into the dark.
“Daddy have nightmare?” he asks, gently.
McAvoy nods. Sits up. Reaches out and finds his son and pulls him closer, pressing their heads together as if transferring a thought. “Just a dream, son. They’re silly things, dreams.”
“I have dreams,” confides Fin. “Like Daddy.”
“Everybody dreams,” says McAvoy, and presses his head into his son’s curls, blocking out the last trace of the scent that plagues him. “Some people remember them perfectly. Others don’t. I don’t really remember mine. They fade away really quickly. I just get funny feelings for a while afterwards.”
Fin looks at his father solemnly, nodding his understanding. “Was it the lady?”
McAvoy freezes, his mind filling with pictures as the fading dream surges back to fill his vision. Suddenly his whole world is her: his nostrils clogged with the smell of spoiled meat; his vision nothing but torn silk and sticky blood. He wraps his arms around Fin. Holds his son until the moment passes.
They have been getting worse, these visions. As the court case has inched closer he has found himself thinking more and more of the dead girl he had so hoped to find alive. Has found himself thinking of Shane Cadbury; the plump, slow-witted sex-pest who had plunged a knife into her again and again and laid her out in his bed like a trophy. He has never truly felt clean since that day. He knows that scents are particular; that each aroma is made of tiny fragments of a source. Each time he smells Ella Butterworth, he remembers that she drifted inside him. She has done more than climb under his skin. She has made herself a part of him. Her body, corrupted, defiled, is within him. She is his responsibility.
Roisin rolls over and flicks on the bedside lamp. She looks at them both, sleepily. Her dark hair hangs in thick curtains across her tanned, delicate face. She’s still wearing her fake eyelashes and last night’s make-up and lip-gloss, making her look at once dishevelled and glamorous. McAvoy smiles, helplessly, as she stares into him; radiating a love and desire that finds its mirror image in the intensity of his own, doe-eyed gaze. They have been married for three years and still they take one another’s breath away.
“Mummy’s got no pyjamas on, Daddy.”
“I noticed that, son. That fact really did catch my attention.”
“We have breakfast?”
“I think it’s too early for breakfast, Fin.”
Roisin snuggles in to the two loves of her life. Whispers something in Fin’s ear that makes him giggle. Then he slithers out of bed and runs, heavy-footed, towards his bedroom, closing the door behind him.
“What did you offer him?” smiles McAvoy, as she climbs astride him, grinning; her sparkling fingernails forming a garnet necklace upon his chest.
“He gets an ice lolly for breakfast,” she murmurs, breathily.
“That’s a high price to pay,” says McAvoy, distractedly, as his world becomes Paradise. “Am I worth it…”
“Priceless,” whispers Roisin, closing her eyes.
An hour later, and McAvoy is sitting at the kitchen table, sipping tea from a mug the size of tankard. He’s wearing a battered rugby shirt with a pair pyjama trousers, and staring somewhat vacantly through the rain-spattered kitchen window towards the little garden at the back of the house. To McAvoy, a Highlander, this is the Kingswood estate. To Hull residents, it is North Bransholme – a continuation of what was once the biggest council estate in Europe and a name laden with negative connotations. It’s a typical new-build: small, near-identical properties lining a seemingly endless parade of cul-de-sacs and quiet roads. It’s not the sort of place that either McAvoy nor Roisin would call their forever home, but it suits them for now. They hope this year will finally give them the second child they have been yearning for. Roisin has endured a succession of miscarriages. The doctors cannot understand why and have tactfully suggested they celebrate their child and curtail their attempts for a larger family. Roisin won’t hear of it. She is from a Traveller family and has always imagined herself having lots of children, just like her own Mum and Dad. She has only just turned 21 and still entertains visions of having five or six kids running around her feet by the time she hits 30. McAvoy, a decade her senior, would give her the moon if she asked for it, but each new pregnancy terrifies him as much as he delights in his wife’s happiness. His instinct is to protect her – to do everything he can to spare her from any harm; to insist she go to bed and stay there, doing nothing, and to remove all potential harm from her life. But she will not hear of it. She is a strong, fierce, independent Traveller who won’t so much as allow her husband to dry the dishes or make himself a cup of tea, despite his protestations that he wants to do his share. She has her code and he respects it, even while beating himself up each day: feeling guilty right through to his bones that he is some unreconstructed Neanderthal, sitting with his feet up while his pretty, too-young wife vacuums under his feet and brings him home-baked cakes from the kitchen. He has voiced these concerns to Roisin, who habitually responds by laughing at him, calling him an idiot, and then kissing him hard enough to dislodge a tooth. She loves him fiercely. Loves him harder than he ever imagined himself being loved.
He drains his tea. Looks through the open kitchen door to where Fin, in his dressing gown, is sitting watching a wildlife programme while eating a Rocket lolly. McAvoy smiles. Remembers the bargain that Roisin struck with their son, and luxuriates for a moment in the memory of her. She’s upstairs, singing to herself in the shower. He can just make out the soft lullaby of her voice. He wonders whether Fin would be okay for a little while – whether she would appreciate him coming to soap her back, and knows at once that she would. They are addicted to one another.
“Daddy…”
McAvoy returns from his daydream to find Fin holding out his mobile phone. It’s the work one – the one that rarely rings. It has been charging in the living room.<
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McAvoy feels his cheeks begin to burn. He feels as though he has been caught out – interrupted doing something he shouldn’t have been. He has always blushed. He’s the only copper he knows whose face colours at the merest mention of naughtiness or impropriety. The beard covers the worst of it, but bare-cheeked he flushes scarlet. Roisin, who was only a child when they first met, is of the opinion that it is the sweetest thing she has ever seen. McAvoy, who has endured three decades of taunts, is less keen.
“Hello, Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy, Major Crime Unit…”
Saying it aloud makes him feel rather proud and a total fraud all at once. For the past few months he has been a member of the elite unit led by Detective Superintendent Doug Roper. It is a position he requested, cashing in his one favour with the Divisional Commander, earned by virtue of finding the body of Ella Butterworth and detaining the man who killed her. He had been under the impression that Roper was the best of the best, and wanted to learn from somebody with one of the most impressive clearance rates in the service. But Roper has sidelined him with a series of secondments; loaning him out to other departments or lumbering him with dispiriting admin tasks. McAvoy is by no means too proud to do what he is asked and has taken to filling in his worksheets in triplicate in case the originals are lost, but he is beginning to feel paranoid that Roper is doing more than teaching him the importance of due diligence. He feels deliberately excluded. Roper didn’t pick him, and Roper doesn’t want him. These past months he has been ping-ponging between departments – cyber-crime, domestic violence; fraud. He has become a master at databases and spreadsheets and has felt more like an accountant than a police officer. He hasn’t complained; has just got his head down and done his best, but this is not the job he hoped to do when he quit university and applied to join Cumbria Constabulary at the age of 22.
“Hello? Are you the big chap? Scottish? Came to visit us when we had the break-in? You left a card. Sorry, sorry, should have said. Sharon Menzies. I run the tea room at the Humber Bridge. You came and gave us some leaflets...”
McAvoy remembers her. Forties. Brunette. A warm sort: welcoming; kind – the sort who fosters troubled kids and manages to get them through their GCSEs and doesn’t let people say she’s an angel because she’s got no time for that sort of touchy-feely nonsense. He’d been sent by the Assistant Chief Constable to give a talk on crime prevention after a couple of scallywags broke in to one of the units at the Country Park. She’d refused his offers to pay for his own cup of tea and slice of lemon-drizzle cake. Shit, he’d known that would come back to haunt him …
“Mrs Menzies, yes. This is DS McAvoy. How are you? I recall you saying your husband hadn’t been well. Sciatica, was it? Hope he’s doing better...”
He glances up as Roisin enters the kitchen, wrapped up snug in a leopard-print dressing gown and Ugg boots. She’s towelling her hair dry, smiling at him. She smiles well; a dazzle in her eyes that outshines her bright white teeth. She always seems pleased to see him. He has to look away. She looks so young. Too young, he thinks. He has never reconciled himself to their age-difference. She was 17 when she climbed into his bed. He was 26, and had just broken up with a woman ten years his own senior. He has spent endless hours analysing what it all means. Roisin, always able to put him back together again, has told him time and time again that he has nothing to reproach himself for. She wanted him and she made it happen. She’d loved him from day one, and wasn’t going to wait another moment. He proposed the minute she told him she was expecting their son. Trudged onto a halting site on the outskirts of Doncaster and asked Papa Teague for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Him. A copper. A fucking copper! The wedding had been small. Papa Teague had given his blessing to the union but he was damned if he was going to show off about it.
“Look, Sergeant, this is probably just my lad being silly – our Kieran, he’s not gone in today – teacher training, or something, so he’s with me, and he gets bored the second you switch off his Nintendo, so he went for a bit of a walk in the woods while I was opening up, and...”
McAvoy hears something in her voice. Something like fear.
“Carry on, Mrs Menzies...”
“Well, he’s all for calling 999, but that seems a bit over the top for something that’s probably nothing, but I remembered you and I had your card and you were so nice to talk to...”
McAvoy rubs his hand over his face, smoothing his beard. He should tell her to call 999, he thinks. Should do things properly…
“It’s just, our Kieran, he’s really adamant. Is that the right word? Adamant.”
“Adamant about what, Mrs Menzies?”
Her words come out in a rush: bats gushing from a cave. “He says he’s found a body. In the woods. There’s a shoe sticking out of a bush. I asked him what he was talking about. A shoe’s a shoe – not a body. And he told me I was daft and explained himself, like. Said that the shoe was attached to a leg, and the leg was half buried under some leaves. He swears blind, Sergeant. And he would have stopped me, wouldn’t he If he were just being silly? I told him – I said I was ringing you, and he said that was good. He’s got a face like a ghost, Sergeant. Have I done right? I don’t want to go down there. Is this your sort of thing? Have I done right?”
McAvoy breathes out, slowly. Glances at the clock. It’s 7.58am. he’s on-call this week, primed to go to Hull Crown Court to deliver his evidence if the case against Shane Cadbury goes that far. Chances are, he’ll plead guilty long before that. If he were to phone this one in: deliver it up to Roper on a plate, perhaps he’d get a chance to be involved. To prove himself. He despises himself at once for the thought. If there is a body, it means somebody has suffered. It means grief. Bereavement. Pain. To think of it as an opportunity for advancement is grotesque. He looks down at the floor, ashamed of himself. Feels Roisin move close to him and put her hands in his thick red hair.
“You did right,” he says, softly. Then: “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
3
Me.
Awake … wide awake, eyes like peeled pears … taking stock …remembering, remembering….
And I’m fumbling in yesterday’s muddied, bloodied trousers for my phone.
Finger like a knife, stabbing at the numbers
Humberside Police Voicebank.
Two rings, then a click.
Recorded message.
Usually handbag snatches and indecent assaults. Enough for a 60-word news-in-brief on a slow news day. Occasional gem. Maybe the odd grandfather scaring off burglars with a bedside lamp. Once in a while an update on a stalled murder case, a re-appeal for witnesses, an excuse to drag better stories from the archives and give them a polish. New intro, new quote, 10 pars of background.
Always Dave’s voice on the line. Inspector Dave Simmonds, 28-year force veteran. Skinny lad. Family man. Good mate. Good contact. Always gives me first question at the press conferences. No dress sense. Sponsored by Jack Wolfskin and Gore-Tex. Likes hiking. Yorkshire accent, always friendly. Playing the game.
“This is Inspector Dave Simmons in the Humberside Police press office. Good morning. The time is 8.17 on the morning of the 8th of February. If you keep listening I’ve put a few incidents on the media-line for the North Bank. Quiet night on the South. We have a sex attack in Bridlington, an entry by deception in Driffield and a theft of a pedal cycle on Greenwood Avenue in Hull. On a general note I would like to warn yourselves and the public that the roads are exceedingly icy today and already we’ve had reports of people driving too fast for the conditions. Five cars came off the A15 northbound between Barnetby Top and the Humber Bridge before 7am. Nobody injured, thank goodness. I would suggest people only go out in their cars if they absolutely have to. Inspector Pinkney from our road safety division is available for interview. On another note, most of you will be aware that the trial of Shane Cadbury stars today at Hull Crown Court. I have been informed that the entire Butterworth family are going to be there, supported by our family liai
son officers. Detective Superintendent Roper intends to be at court for the duration of the trial and either myself or press officer Gemma Tang will also be in attendance. As per usual, we will not be commenting on the case until after the verdict is returned, at which time, photographs of the defendant will be made available. We’re expecting a lot of national press interest so I would suggest local press get there early if you want to guarantee a seat.....”
No mention of bodies in the woods. Too early. People still too dozy at this hour. Not me. I’m wide awake and buzzing. My eyes are bullet holes.
I pull my shirt off the back of the radiator and slip it on, enjoying the warmth. Patterned black tie still in a noose. Slip it over my head and pull it closed, two buttons down from my collar. Black trousers. Italian leather shoes. Gold chain and chunky identity bracelet. Sovereign ring on my right hand. Quick once over with the electric razor, careful not to touch the sideburns. Brush my short hair with my hand. I always look more like I should be standing in the dock than sitting at the Press bench.
Step back…
Crunch.
I’ve stepped on crushed glass. I’m standing on a picture. Jess and me, grinning at the camera from the top of Mount Vesuvius, toasting our engagement with a half-bottle of red plonk. Sunny day. Faces gleaming with the exertion of the climb and the heat of the Neapolitan summer. I’m smiling wider than she is. I look good with cut-off jeans and a muscle-shirt, sun-tan and a henna tattoo on my arm. She’s got a bare mid-riff, a blouse tied beneath her little boobs, and shorts to match mine. Doc Marten boots and a bandana over her black hair. There’s a wisp of smoke climbing up from the volcano’s crater behind us. A German guy with a walking stick took the picture, just after I got up off my knees. We got a round of applause from the other tourists. Jess was embarrassed. I loved it.