Taking Pity

by David Mark

  McAvoy’s steps take him toward the far end of the park. A squat, rectangular building looms to his left. It’s an ugly construction, at odds with the faded Victorian splendor of its surroundings. It looks like it was built in the 1960s and designed by an architect on a tight deadline. It’s been John Glass’s home for the past twelve years. He’s lived alone since his wife died.

  McAvoy presses the buzzer on the outside door. Waits until a dry voice crackles through the intercom.

  “You the copper?”

  “Yes, sir. Detective Sergeant—”

  McAvoy is buzzed in before he can finish the sentence. Makes his way to apartment two. The door wings open as he approaches.

  Glass is still tall, for his age. He’s withered a little but still stands with a straight back. He has one knobbly and liver-spotted hand on the doorjamb. His thin wrist protrudes from a wool cardigan with a harlequin pattern, which he wears over a plain shirt and vest. He’s wearing gray trousers with a neat seam and comfy Velcro sneakers. He still has some hair on top, but it is thin and perfectly white and looks as though it will stand up on a light breeze. He’s not smiling, but his expression is far from aggressive.

  “John Glass,” he says as McAvoy approaches. “Christ, you’re a big bugger.”

  McAvoy takes the man’s hand in his. He’s careful not to crush it. Enfolds it like he would a frightened mouse. He’s surprised to feel Glass’s grip is harder than his own. Feels strength in those old, bony fingers.

  “Come away in, then. I’ll get the kettle on.”

  McAvoy follows him down a short corridor and past the entrance to a neat and tidy kitchen. Glass shows him into the living room and tells him to make himself comfortable.

  “Have a snoop, if you like. I know I would.”

  As Glass disappears into the kitchen, McAvoy crosses to the window. The view is mostly of the hedge at the bottom of the garden, though he can see a little of the circular road that rings the park. The view back into the room is better. It’s a comfy, homely place. Blue cord carpet and cream walls. There’s an imitation log fire against the far wall and a soft, suede-effect sofa against the other. A rocking chair, complete with a doughnut-shaped cushion, is angled to face the boxy TV that sits on a glass unit beneath a large framed print of a racehorse. The other decorations in the room are pastoral in theme. Landscapes and haystacks, tumbledown farmhouses and ducks on a rippling pond. There are no photos on the walls, but a stack of leather-bound albums are at the side of the rocking chair. McAvoy considers picking them up but decides it would be too invasive. Better to wait.

  “Mug okay?” asks Glass, handing him a tea brewed strong. “Not really a cup-and-saucer person, me. And you couldn’t get thon big fingers into a cup handle, could you?”

  McAvoy sips his tea. It’s got sugar in it. The old man guessed right.

  “Is that a hint of Geordie in your voice, Mr. Glass?” asks McAvoy, sitting down on the sofa as Glass lowers himself onto the rocking chair.

  “Aye. Longbenton was the old stomping ground. Haven’t been back up for years, but you can’t shake an accent, can you? Listen to yours! You sound like that fella. The one that used to sing about the bonny, bonny banks of Loch Lomond. You’re further from home than I am, I’d say.”

  McAvoy finds himself liking John Glass. He’s got character. Seems to still have more than a trace of copper about him in the way he controls the conversation.

  “Mr. Glass, as I explained on the phone, I’m here to talk to you about—”

  Glass shushes him with a wave of the hand. He sips his tea and looks at McAvoy with blue eyes that swim on rheumy, yellowed lenses.

  “I’ve not been a copper since 1983,” he says conversationally. “That’s a long time to get used to being a civilian. You know how many times a detective has been to see me about some old case I worked on? None, that’s how many. I left the job without any unfinished business. Nobody could say I left loose ends.”

  “Nobody’s suggesting that, Mr. Glass . . .” begins McAvoy.

  “Shush, lad. Let me speak. I’m saying that it was always a surprise to me that nobody came asking about Peter Coles. I always expected a judicial review or some charity busybody stirring up the press. I always thought it would come back and cause me a headache. But it never did. Thirty years since I retired. Fifty years since it happened, near as dammit. It was almost a relief when you called. Another couple of years, I’ll be struggling to remember my own name. Or dead, like as not.”

  McAvoy waits a moment to see if it is his turn to speak. Gets a tiny nod from the old man.

  “You do remember that night, then, Mr. Glass? I have your original statement here. It would be very helpful if you could run me through your events of that night to see if they still tally with the written record after all this time.”

  Glass sucks in a mouthful of breath. Seems to be thinking. Taps his hands on the arms of the chair and jiggles his left leg.

  “I said I was home, didn’t I? That’s crap for a start.”

  McAvoy sits back in the sofa. Decides to just let the old man talk.

  “We had a new boss, you see. Stickler for the rules. Made up a few of his own as well. Ran us like it was the army, and plenty of the lads responded to it well. For me, I reckon he lost sight of what we were really there to do. Got caught up in worrying about how shiny our shoes were. But he had the power to make our lives miserable if we didn’t do what he wanted, so a fair few statements got a little bit of a polish. I’m sure you understand.”

  McAvoy nods. Smiles. Doesn’t endorse the policy but it doesn’t cause him offense either.

  “I weren’t at home when I heard about the shots being fired at the church. I were in the pub. Having a few jars. Don’t ask me how many because I don’t remember. I know the last thing I wanted was to have to go out on another call, but that’s a rural copper’s life. Wasn’t easy, fitting in out there. Not with an accent. You’d know all about that. Marks you out as an incomer every time you opened your gob. But I reckon they warmed to me and the missus. And people knew where to find me if I wasn’t in the police house.”

  “You were in one of the pubs in Patrington?”

  “Aye, usual routine. Was always the same faces and a few strangers. People would come to see the church or visit the air base or stop in on their way to a caravan in Withernsea or whatever. It wasn’t the Wild West. We didn’t stop playing the piano when an out-of-towner came in. That’s what the bloke was. Definitely an out-of-towner.”

  “The bloke?”

  “Big man. Good-looking. I reckon he was from the same part of the world as me, though I couldn’t tell you the exact words he used. Just asked me if I was the local bobby and apologized for interrupting me. Said he’d heard shots fired out at Winestead. Knew it was a rural community and it probably didn’t mean anything, but he felt it was his duty to pass it on.”

  “I don’t think I saw a statement from that person in the file,” says McAvoy, reaching down for the bag at his feet.

  “We never got one,” says Glass. “I went home to get changed into uniform. Got Big Davey to give me a lift out to the church. That’s when we found them. And after that it went crazy. By the time I had my wits about me and we were doing things properly, he’d moved on.”

  “Were efforts made to find him?”

  Glass puts his head to one side, a little pityingly. “We didn’t have CCTV and traces on people’s phones in those days, lad. It would have been nice to have a statement, but we already had a man in custody and the four dead bodies were the priority. And after the first night, I was pretty much excess baggage anyways. Len Duchess oozed his way in and my job was little more than fetching and carrying and apologizing to the locals for the fact he was a dickhead.”

  McAvoy pulls his notes from his bag. Finds what he’s looking for.

  “Len Duchess was the detective inspector who led the
investigation, yes? I saw his name on several statements. I’ve requested his personnel file and run some checks to see if he’s still on the scene, but nothing’s come back.”

  “It won’t have,” says Glass with a dry little laugh. “Wasn’t exactly a poster boy for policing after the crackdowns in the seventies. Always was a slick bastard and it caught up with him in the end.”

  McAvoy puffs out his checks. He realizes his knowledge has gaping holes in it and gestures to the old man that he is willing to be led by the hand until the situation is remedied.

  Glass takes a final sip of his tea, wetting his mouth to talk.

  “Len Duchess was a southerner. London lad. Not exactly Mr. Popular with the lads who worked for him, but very much a star in the eyes of the men at the top. Strictly speaking, he should never have been anywhere near the investigation. The inspector from Beverley CID should have got the nod. But Len Duchess happened to be having a drink with the assistant chief constable when the calls started coming through about what had happened and the ACC graciously told Beverley they could borrow the expertise of his specialist murder squad detective. Len was on the scene before the Winn family was cold. Stamped his mark on it and took over. Until then, Peter Coles was playing nicely. Wasn’t saying much that made any sense, but he was sitting quietly and willing to give us what we wanted. Len steamed in and wound the kid up. We were sitting in one of the cottages on Clarence Winn’s estate at that time. Can’t remember who it belonged to. I still had the lad tied up with my tie. I’d forgotten my cuffs, you see. Silly of me, I know, and believe me I paid for it. But it was all I could think of to do at the time. Len came in like a bloody demon and started screaming in the lad’s face. Pushing him about. Scaring him half to death. Peter just clammed up. Didn’t speak again. Len was always one of those coppers who leaned on people. He did it to everybody. Was the same with every witness he went to see. They signed their statements just to get him out of their houses.”

  “Do you think anybody signed anything they would no longer consider to be entirely truthful?”

  Glass broods and rubs one hand with the other. “They’d have sworn they had two heads if he was looming over them. He wasn’t a big guy but he had that look. Even the farmhands and men like Big Davey were a bit intimidated by him.”

  McAvoy looks at his notes and the statements poking from his bag. He’s beginning to wonder how he should start his letter to the Home Office. Dear sirs, following detailed investigation I have concluded that the sixties was a great time to be a criminal . . .

  “Are there any statements or particular witnesses who suggested to you they had given false information? Anybody you think may have been in two minds about the guilt of Peter Coles?”

  Glass falls silent and squints out the window at the damp hedgerows and miserable sky.

  “Len ended up on Nipper Read’s squad. Did you know that?”

  McAvoy mulls this over. “The man who took down the Kray twins?”

  “Very same. They went in hard, did Nipper’s boys. Len was a perfect fit.”

  “But you mentioned the seventies . . .”

  Glass nods. “Anticorruption purges. A lot of high performers were put to the sword. Stings all over the place, and all the boys who had been accepting envelopes for favors were rounded up and booted out.”

  “Len Duchess was among them.”

  Glass looks like he wants to spit. “Should have been, from what I’d heard. But he saw the writing on the wall and fled before anybody could put the cuffs on him.”

  “And now?”

  Another shrug. “Happy ending to the story is that he’s living in a nice little villa in Spain with some fat lass feeding him paella. That’s not the version of the story I believe. I reckon he ended up in somebody’s fried breakfast.”

  McAvoy gives a quizzical look.

  “Was a favored disposal method, lad. One particular firm in London. Had a pig farmer on their payroll. They got rid of unwanted personnel for them. You seen what a pig can do to a human body? Can munch the whole lot down. Bones and teeth and everything else. I’ve never seen it happen but I wouldn’t want to neither.”

  McAvoy swallows. Tries not to let his thoughts stray or let the pictures in his head become too clear. He looks out the window, breathing slowly.

  “They’ve given you a right shitty job here, ain’t they, lad?”

  McAvoy turns back and gives a sigh that turns into a smile as he catches Glass’s eye. “It’s proving a little awkward to get specifics,” he says as tactfully as he can. “The one thing that seems certain is the culprit. Nobody has suggested anything to the contrary, which is almost a relief. But in terms of building a viable case . . .”

  “What do they expect, eh? They should have looked into this years ago. I was the one who found the poor bastards and even I don’t think somebody should have been locked up without a trial for half a century. And that night cost me a lot. I wasn’t in Patrington for more than a couple of months after that. When the merger came through, I ended up in a police box on Myton Bridge in Hull. Spent my days dealing with drunks and scrubbing puke off the door. Dragging people out of that mud by the River Hull. Breaking up fights in the Old Town. Was a bloody treat to retire. And I’m pleased to say I’ve had more years on a police pension than I gave to the job. Feels like a victory, that.”

  McAvoy is looking at the floor, brooding. He’s wondering about Len Duchess. Trying not to imagine the sound of pig teeth crunching through a shinbone. Wondering whether he will have to paint John Glass’s actions in a negative light when he writes his report for the Home Office.

  “There’s no real chain of evidence,” says McAvoy, gesturing at his paperwork. “Half of the crime scene photos are missing. I don’t have a single image of the bodies in situ. The postmortem is completely missing and I don’t know where to start looking for that. And all I really have is a list of people saying they thought Daft Pete was a bit of an oddball but not really capable of murder. I think this needs more than just me, Mr. Glass. Or it needs nobody at all.”

  Glass nods. Slowly, he reaches down beside him and retrieves one of the photo albums. He opens it at a page marked with a Post-it note and hands it to McAvoy, who takes it with a puzzled expression.

  “Dug it out when you rang,” he says. “Winter, 1963. Coldest for fifty years. That’s the Winn family. And that daft bastard’s Peter Coles.”

  McAvoy peers at the black-and-white image. A young, slim-hipped man is in the foreground, shoveling thick snow from one pile onto another. Behind him, a tall, broad-shouldered man in an expensive wool coat is standing up to straighten his back. A middle-aged woman in furs is wincing into the cold as she steps across a newly cleared path, carrying a tray on which a teapot and six cups sit alongside a silver milk jug and sugar bowl. And in the far right of the picture, an adolescent male in blue overalls and a flat cap is talking to a dark-haired lad in a Harris tweed overcoat and a pretty girl wrapped up against the chill in pale fur.

  “Clarence,” says Glass, leaning forward and touching his finger to the older man in the foreground. “His missus. His youngest, Stephen. Vaughn, Anastasia, and Peter. Wouldn’t credit it, would you?”

  McAvoy looks closely at the picture. There is nothing sinister within the image. Nothing to suggest that the lad with the dungarees would kill the other four people the camera caught that day.

  “You took this?” asks McAvoy.

  “The wife. We were new to the village. Trying to make friends. She took photos of everything, she did. Was like a human camera. Cost me a fortune in film. She’d love those new digital cameras. Died before they were invented, poor lass.”

  McAvoy would normally offer condolences but is too lost in the image to make any comment.

  “Clarence Winn looks a strong man,” he says speculatively.

  “He was. Hard worker. Good man, if it’s possible to be such a thing w
hen you’re rich.”

  “That’s what I find hard to understand,” says McAvoy, locking his hands and tapping his thumbs together. “Without the postmortem report I can’t know whether he fought back. And Coles must have reloaded. So how come nobody tackled him? I know it must have been terrifying, but if he just stumbled into their paths in the woods and killed them so he wouldn’t get into trouble . . .”

  “Then how did he get them all? I know. I asked.”

  “And?”

  “Coles hasn’t spoken much at all since Len Duchess slapped him about. You should ask him yourself.”

  “Coles?” McAvoy looks instantly unsure. “I don’t know how that would be received . . .”

  “I can imagine,” says Glass sympathetically. “Have yourself a look through the albums if you like. I’ve got no others of the family, but you might find something interesting. Wish I had a better one of Vaughn for you. Did you say you’d spoken to him? Give him my best if you speak to him again. Doubt our paths will ever cross, but he was always a charmer and he’s done well for himself. Nothing if not deserved. Anyway, I’m going for a piss.”

  Glass hauls himself from the chair and makes his way toward the living room door. McAvoy is left alone in the silent room. He drops his head to his hands. Finds himself thinking not terribly charitable thoughts about Trish Pharaoh for landing him with all this, and instantly chides himself for disloyalty.

  He begins to absentmindedly leaf through the album. Sees pictures of a young John Glass with wife and child. Holidays on Bournemouth Beach interspersed with candid snapshots of Patrington village life. McAvoy wonders what happened to the child in the photos. Whether she’s still in touch with her dad. Whether she ever heard him whimper in the night as he suffered nightmarish recollections of what he found in the grounds of the church that snow-filled night in 1966.

  McAvoy examines faces and changing fashions; Crombie coats and colorful flares. Watches heels shorten and hemlines lengthen. Watches a couple grow old.