by David Mark
ALSO BY DAVID MARK
Original Skin
The Dark Winter
Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright © 2014 by David Mark
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mark, David John, date.
Sorrow bound / David Mark.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-698-14842-0
1. Detectives—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6113.A7527S68 2014 2013050353
823'.92—dc23
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living and dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
CONTENTS
ALSO BY DAVID MARK
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
PROLOGUE
PART ONE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
PART TWO
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
PART THREE
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
PART FOUR
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
For my children, George and Elora.
I hope you never stop being seriously frigging odd.
Oft have I heard that grief softens the mind,
And makes it fearful and degenerate;
Think therefore on revenge, and cease to weep.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Henry VI, Part 2 (4.4.1–3)
PROLOGUE
Keep going, keep going, it’s only pain, just breathe and run, breathe, and fucking run!
He skids. Slips on blood and ice. Tumbles into the snow and hears the sound of paper tearing. Feels the flap of burned skin that was hanging, sail-like, across his chest being torn away on unforgiving stone.
His scream is an inhuman thing; primal, untamed.
Get up, run, run . . .
Sobbing, he bites into the fat of his hand. Tastes his own roasted flesh. Spits blood and skin and bile. Petrol. Somebody else’s hair.
Not like this. Not now . . .
He tries to pull himself upright, but his naked, frozen toes fail to respond to his commands. He thrusts his ruined hands into the snow and pushes his body up, but slips again and feels his head hit the pavement.
Stay awake. Stay alive.
His vision is blurring. From nowhere, he finds himself remembering the television in his old student flat—the way the picture disappeared down a dwindling circle of color in the center of the screen, creating a miniature whirlpool of swirling patterns and pictures. That is what he sees now, his whole world diminishing. His senses, his understanding, are turning in a shrinking kaleidoscope of crimsons and darks.
Half undone, almost broken, he raises his head and looks back at the grisly path his feet have punched in the snow. Miniature ink bombs of blue-black blood, scattered haphazardly among ragged craters.
“There! There he is! Stop him. Stop!”
The voices force him upright, boost his vision, his perception, and for a blessed moment he gathers himself and takes in his surroundings. Looks up at the Victorian terraces with their big front windows and bare hanging baskets: their VACANCIES signs and joyless rainbows of unlit colored bulbs.
His own voice: “Bitch, bitch.”
He realizes he can hear the sea; a crackle of static and sliding stones, slapping onto the mud and sand beyond the harbor wall.
And suddenly he is adrift in a symphony of senses.
Sounds.
Scents.
Flavors.
He smells the salt and vinegar of the chip shop; the stale ale of a pub cellar. Hears the scream of gulls and the wet kisses of rotting timbers knocking against one another as bobbing fishing boats softly collide. Doors opening. Sash windows sliding up. Glasses on varnished wood. Faintly, the triumphant song of a slot machine as it pays out. A cheer. The rattle of coins . . .
Up. Run!
He has taken no more than a dozen steps when his strength leaves him. He slides onto his belly. Feels the snow become a blanket. Deliriously tries to pull it around himself. To make a pillow of the curb.
Running feet. Voices.
Up. Up!
A hand around his throat, hauling him to his feet. An impact to the side of his head. Perhaps a fist, perhaps a knee.
“Bastard. Bastard!”
His teeth slam together: the impact like a blade biting into wood.
Stars and mud, snow and cloud, boots and fists and the curb against his skull, again, again, again . . .
He is drifting into the tunnel of shapes now. Disappearing. Everything is getting smaller. Darker.
All over. All gone . . .
The snow so soft. The dark so welcoming.
Fresh hands upon him. Hands, not fists. Soft. Firm, but tender. Flesh on flesh.
A face, looming over him.
“Look what you’ve done to him.”
A moment’s clarity, before the black ocean pulls him under . . .
“Let him die. Please, let him fucking die.”
ONE
Monday morning. 9:16 a.m.
A small and airless room above the health center on Cottingham Road.
Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy, uncomfortable and ridiculous on a plastic school chair, knees halfway up to his ears.
“Aector?”
He notices that his left leg is jiggling up and down. Damn! The shrink must have seen it, too. He decides to keep jiggling it so she doesn’t read anything into his decision to stop.
He catches her eye.
Looks away.
Stops jiggling his leg.
“Aector, I’m not trying to trick you. You don’t need to second-guess yourself all the time.”
McAvoy nods, and feels a fresh bead of sweat run down the back of his shirt collar. It’s too hot in here. The walls, with their putty-colored wallpaper, seem to be perspiring, and the painted-shut windows are misting up.
She’s talking again. Words, words, words . . .
“I have apologized, haven’t I? About the room? I tried to get another one but there’s nothing available. I think
if we gave that window a good shove we could get it open but then you have the sound of the road to contend with.”
McAvoy raises his hands to tell her not to worry, though in truth he is so hot and uncomfortable he’s considering diving headfirst through the glass. McAvoy was dripping before he even walked through the door. For two weeks it has felt as though a great wet dog has been lying on the city, but it is a heat wave that has brought no blue skies. Instead, Hull has sweated beneath heavens the color of damp concrete. It is weather that frays tempers, induces lethargy, and makes life an ongoing torture for big, flame-haired men like Detective McAvoy, who has felt damp, cross, and self-conscious for days. It’s a feverish heat; a pestilent, buzzing cloak. To McAvoy, even walking a few steps feels like fighting through laundry lines of damp linen. Everybody agrees that the city needs a good storm to clear the air, but lightning has yet to split the sky.
“I thought you had enjoyed the last session. You seemed to warm up as we went along.” She looks at her notes. “We were talking about your father . . .”
McAvoy closes his eyes. He doesn’t want to appear rude, so bites his tongue. As far as he can recall, he hadn’t been talking about his father at all. She had.
“Okay, how about we try something a bit less personal? Your career, perhaps? Your ambitions?”
McAvoy looks longingly at the window. The scene it frames could be a photograph. The leaves and branches of the rowan tree are lifeless, unmoving, blocking out the view of the university across the busy road, but he can picture it in his imagination clearly enough. Can see the female students with their bare midriffs and tiny denim shorts, their kneesocks and back-combed hair. He closes his eyes and sees nothing but victims. The girls will hit the beer gardens this afternoon. They will drink more than they should. They will catch the eye, and emboldened by alcohol, some will smile and flirt and revel in the sensation of exposed skin. They will make mistakes. There will be confusion and heat and desire and fear. By morning, detectives will be investigating assaults. Maybe a stabbing. Parents will be grieving and innocence will be lost.
He shakes it away. Curses himself. Hears Roisin’s voice, as always, telling him to stop being silly and just enjoy the sunshine. Pictures her, bikini-clad and feet bare, soaking up the heat as she basks, uncaring, on their small patch of brown front lawn.
Had he been asked a question? Oh, yeah . . .
“I’m not being evasive,” he says at last. “I know for some people there are real benefits to what you do. I studied some psychology at university. I admire your profession immensely. I’m just not sure what I can tell you that will be of any benefit to either of us. I don’t bottle things up. I talk to my wife. I have outlets for my dark feelings, as you call them. I’m okay. I wish my brain didn’t do some things and I’m grateful it does others. I’m pretty normal, really.”
The psychologist puts her head to one side, like a Labrador delicately broaching the subject of a walk.
“Aector, these sessions are for whatever you want them to be. I’ve told you this. If you want to discuss police work, you can. If you want to talk about things in your personal life, that’s fine, too. I want to help. If you sit here in silence, that’s what I have to put in my report.”
McAvoy drops his head and stares at the carpet for a moment. He’s bone-tired. The hot weather has made his baby daughter irritable, and she is refusing to sleep anywhere other than on Daddy. He spent last night in a deck chair in the backyard, wrapped in a blanket and holding her little body against his chest, her fingers gripping the collar of his rugby shirt as she grizzled and sniffled in her sleep.
“The rowan tree,” says McAvoy suddenly, and points at the window. “They used to plant them in churchyards to keep away witches. Did you know that? I did a project on trees when I was eight. Sorbus aucuparia, it’s called, in Latin. I know the names of about twenty different trees in Latin. Don’t know why they stayed in my mind but they did. Don’t really know why I’m telling you this, to be honest. It just came to me. I suppose it’s nice to be able to say something without worrying that people will think I’m being a smart-arse.”
The psychologist steeples her fingers. “But you’re not worried about that at this moment? That’s interesting in itself . . .”
McAvoy sighs, exasperated at being analyzed by anybody other than himself. He knows what makes him tick. He doesn’t want to be deconstructed in case the pieces don’t fit back together.
“Aector? Look, is there somewhere else you would rather be?”
He looks up at the psychologist. Sabine Keane, she’s called. McAvoy reckons she’s divorced. She wears no ring, but it’s unlikely she’d been saddled with a rhyming name from birth. She’s in her early forties and very slim, with longish hair tied back in a mess of straw and gray strands. She’s dressed for the hot weather, in sandals, linen skirt, and a plain black T-shirt that exposes arms that sag a little underneath. She wears no makeup and there is a blob of something that may be jam halfway up her right arm. She has one of those singsong, storytelling voices that are intended to comfort, but often grate. McAvoy has nothing against her and would love to be able to tell her something worthwhile, but is struggling to see the point of these sessions. He’s grateful that she learned to pronounce his name the Celtic way, and she has a friendly enough smile, but there are doors in his head he doesn’t want to unlock. It doesn’t help that they got off to such an inauspicious start. On his way to the first session, he had witnessed her involvement in a minor incident of cycle rage. It’s hard to believe in somebody’s power to heal your soul when you have seen them pedaling furiously down a bus lane and screaming obscenities at a Volvo.
McAvoy tries again.
“Look, the people at occupational health have insisted I come for six sessions with a police-approved counselor. I’m doing that. I’m here. I’ll answer your questions, and I’m at great pains not to be rude to you, but it’s hot and I’m tired and I have work to do, and yes, there are lots of places I would rather be. I’m sure you would, too.”
There is silence for a second. McAvoy hears the beep of an appointment being announced in the waiting room for the main doctor’s office downstairs. He pictures the scene. The waiting room full of sick students and chattering foreigners; of middle-class bohemians waiting for their malaria pills and yellow-fever jabs before they jet off to Goa with their little Jeremiahs and Hermiones.
Eventually Sabine tries again. “You have three children, is that right?”
“Two,” says McAvoy.
“Youngest keeping you up?”
“Comes with the job.”
“It’s your duty, yes?”
“Of course.”
“Tell me about duty, Aector. Tell me what it means to you.”
McAvoy makes fists. Thinks about it. “It’s what’s expected.”
“By whom?”
“By everyone. By yourself. It’s the right thing.”
Sabine says nothing for a moment, then reaches down and pulls a notepad from her handbag. She writes something on the open page, but whether it is some clinical insight or a reminder to pick up toilet paper on the way home, McAvoy cannot tell.
“You’ve picked a job that is all about duty, haven’t you? Did you always want to be a policeman?”
McAvoy rubs a hand across his forehead. Straightens his green-and-gold tie. Rolls back the cuffs on his black shirt, then rolls them down again.
“It wasn’t like that,” he says eventually. “Where I grew up. The setup at home. The script was kind of written.”
Sabine looks at her notepad again, and shuffles through the pages to find something. She looks up. “You grew up in the Highlands, yes? On a croft? A little farm, I believe . . .”
“Until I was ten.”
“And that’s when you went to boarding school?”
McAvoy looks away. He straightens the crease in his gray suit trousers
and fiddles with the pocket of the matching waistcoat. “After a while.”
“Expensive, for a crofter, I presume.” Her voice is soft but probing.
“Mam’s new partner was quite well-off.”
The psychologist makes another note. “And you and your mother are close?”
McAvoy looks away.
“How about you and your father?”
“Off and on.”
“How does he feel about your success?”
McAvoy gives in to a smile. “What success?”
Sabine gestures at her notes and to the cardboard file on the floor at her feet. “The cases you have solved.”
He shakes his head. “It doesn’t work like that. I didn’t solve anything.” He stops. Considers it properly, and shrugs. “Maybe I did. Maybe I was just, well, there. And when it was just me, on my own, when nobody else gave a damn, I ended up thinking I shouldn’t have bothered. Or maybe I should have bothered more.”
There is silence in the room. McAvoy rocks the small plastic chair back on two legs, then puts it down again when he feels it lurch.
After a moment, Sabine nods, as if making up her mind.
“Tell me about Doug Roper,” she says without looking at her pad.
Involuntarily, McAvoy clenches his jaw. He feels the insides of his cheeks go dry. He says nothing, for fear his tongue will be too fat and useless to make any sense.
“We only get the most basic details in the reports, Aector. But I can read between the lines.”
“He was my first detective chief superintendent in CID,” says McAvoy softly.
“And?”
“And what? You’ve probably heard of him.”
Sabine gives a little shrug. “I Googled him. Bit of a celebrity policeman, I see.”
“He’s retired now.”
“And you had something to do with that?”
McAvoy runs his tongue around his mouth. “Some people think so.”
“And that made you unpopular?”
“It’s getting better now. Trish Pharaoh has been very helpful.”