Sorrow Bound

by David Mark

  “That’s your new boss, yes? Serious and Organized Crime Unit, is that right? Yes, you mentioned her last time. You mention her quite a lot.”

  McAvoy manages a faint smile. “You sound like my wife.”

  Sabine cocks her head. “She means a lot to you?”

  “My wife? She’s everything—”

  “No. Your boss.”

  McAvoy’s leg starts jiggling again. “She’s a very good police officer. I think so, anyway. Maybe she isn’t. Maybe Doug Roper had it right. I don’t know. I don’t know anything very much. Somebody once told me that I would drive myself insane trying to understand what it’s all about. Justice, I mean. Goodness. Badness. Sometimes I think I’m halfway there. Other times I just feel like I’m only clever enough to realize how little I know.”

  “There’s a line in the report we have that says you take the rules very seriously. Can you tell me what you think that might mean?”

  McAvoy holds her gaze. Is she making fun of him? He doesn’t know what to say. Is there something in the file about his adherence to the rule book? He’s a man who completes his paperwork in triplicate in case the original is mislaid and who won’t requisition a new Biro from the supply closet until his last one is out of ink.

  He says nothing. Just listens to the tires on the bone-dry road and the sound of blood in his ears.

  “The report says you have lots of physical scars, Aector.”

  “I’m okay.”

  McAvoy tries to be an honest man, and so does not reproach himself for the answer. He is okay. He’s as well as can be expected. He’s getting by. Doing his bit. Making do. He has plenty of glib, meaningless ways to describe how he is, and knows that were he to sit here trying to explain it all properly, he would turn to ash. At home, he’s more than okay. He’s perfect. With his arms around his wife and children, he feels like he is glowing. It is only at work that he has no bloody clue how he feels. Whether he regrets his actions. What he really feels about the corrupt, pitiless detective superintendent whose tenure at the head of Humberside Police CID only ended when McAvoy tried to bring his crimes to light. Whether noble or naive, McAvoy’s actions cost him his reputation as a rising star. This gentle, humble, shy giant of a man was made a distrusted, despised pariah by many of his fellow officers. He was dumped on the Serious and Organized Crime Unit as little more than an accountant and mouthpiece, expected by all to be chewed up and spat out by the squad boss, Detective Superintendent Trish Pharaoh, with her biker boots, mascara, and truckloads of attitude. Instead, she had found a protégé. Almost a friend. And at her side, he has caught bad people.

  The burns on McAvoy’s back and the slash wound to the bone on his left breast are not the only scars he carries, but they have become almost medals of redemption. He has suffered for what he believes.

  Sabine puts down her pen and pulls her phone from her bag. She looks at the display and then up at McAvoy. “We have half an hour left. You must want to get some of this off your chest.”

  McAvoy pulls out his own phone to check that she is right, and sees that he has eight missed calls, all from the same number. He pulls an apologetic face, and before Sabine can object, calls back.

  Trish Pharaoh answers on the second ring.

  “Hector, thank fuck for that. We’ve got a body. Tell the shrink to tick your chart and let you go. You’re in fine shape. Let’s just hope your gag reflex isn’t. This one’s going to make you sick.”

  • • •

  Tick-tock, tick-tock, turn signal flashing right. A bluebottle buzzing fatly against the back window. Horns honking and the drone of a pneumatic drill. Shirtless workmen leaning back against the wall of the convenience store on the corner; egg-and-bacon sandwiches dripping from greasy paper bags onto dirty hands.

  The light turns green, but nobody moves. The traffic stays still. Two different radio stations blare from open windows. Lady Gaga fights for supremacy with the Mamas and the Papas . . .

  A city in the grip of a fever: irritable, agitated, raw.

  McAvoy checks his phone. Nothing new. Tries to read the sticker on the back windscreen of the Peugeot two cars in front, but gives up when the squinting makes his temples sweat.

  Looks right, at the Polish convenience store: its sign a jumble of angry consonants. Left, at the gym with its massive advert for pole-dancing fitness classes. Wonders if any of the immigrants in this part of town have become champion pole dancers . . .

  He’s at the bottom of Anlaby Road, already regretting his decision to turn right out of the doctor’s office. He’s driving the five-year-old minivan that he and Roisin had settled on a month ago. There are two child seats in the back, leaving McAvoy constantly worried about being asked to chauffeur any more than one colleague at a time.

  The light turns green again, and he noses the car forward, into the shadow of a boarded-up theme pub. He remembers when it opened. A local businessman spent more than a million on revamping the building, convinced there was a need for a sophisticated and luxurious nightspot in this part of town. It lasted a year. Its demise could serve as a mirror for so much of this area. The bottom end of Anlaby Road is all charity shops and pizza parlors, cash-for-gold centers, and pubs where the barman and the only customer take it in turns to go outside for a cigarette. The streets are a maze of small terraced houses with front rooms where a man of McAvoy’s size would struggle to lie down. Once upon a time, the people would have been called “poor but honest.” Perhaps even “working class.” There is no term in the official police guidance to describe the locals now. Just “people.” Ordinary people, with their faults and flaws and wishes and dreams. Hull folk, all tempers and pride.

  The light changes again, and McAvoy finally edges into Walliker Street.

  Second gear. Third.

  He is at the crime scene before he can get into fourth gear. There are three police cars blocking the road, and a white tent is being erected by two constables and a figure in a white suit. Pharaoh’s little red convertible is parked next to a forensics van, outside a house with brown-painted bay windows and dirty net curtains pulled tight shut. Next door, a woman in combat trousers and a Hull City shirt is talking to a man in a dressing gown in the front yard. McAvoy fancies they will have already solved the case.

  He abandons the car in the middle of the road and reaches into the backseat for his leather satchel. It was a gift a couple of years ago from his wife and is the source of endless amusement to his colleagues.

  “Hector. At last.”

  McAvoy bangs his head on the doorframe as he hears his boss’s voice. He looks up and sees Pharaoh making her way toward him. Despite the heat, she has refused to shed her biker boots, though she has made a few concessions to the weather. She’s wearing a red dress with white dots and has a cream linen scarf around her neck, which McAvoy presumes she has placed there to disguise her impressive cleavage. She is wearing large, expensive sunglasses, and her dark hair has a kink to it that suggests it dried naturally in the hot air, without the attentions of a brush.

  “Guv?”

  She looks at her sergeant for a moment too long, then nods. “No suit jacket, Hector?”

  McAvoy looks at himself, neat and pressed in designer suit trousers, waistcoat, shirt with top button done up, and his tie perfectly tied in a double Windsor. “I can pop home if—”

  Pharaoh laughs. “Christ, you must be boiling. Undo a button, for God’s sake.”

  McAvoy begins to color. Pharaoh can make any man blush, but has an ability to transform her sergeant into a lava lamp with nothing more than a sentence or a smile. He has refused to wear a white shirt since she told him she could see the outline of his nipples, and has yet to find a way of looking at her that doesn’t take in at least one of her many curves. He raises his hands to his throat but can’t bring himself to give in to slovenliness. “I’ll be fine.”

  Pharaoh sighs and shakes he
r head. “All okay at the shrink?”

  He spreads his hands. “She wants me to have more problems than I have.”

  “That’s what she’s paid for.”

  “Came as a relief to get your call.”

  “You haven’t seen the poor lass yet.”

  Together they cross the little street, passing a closed fish and chip shop that appears to have been built in the front room of one of the terraced houses. The row of houses stops abruptly and behind the wall of the last house is a large parking area; its concrete surface broken up and pitted, and the beads of broken glass on its surface testament to the fact that this is no safe place to leave your car.

  The forensics tent has been pitched on a patch of grass beyond the car park, behind a small copse of trees that stand in a dry, litter-strewn patch of dirt. Behind it is the railway bridge, which leads over the tracks to another estate.

  “Brace yourself,” says Pharaoh as she lifts the flap of the tent and steps inside.

  “Guv?”

  “Take a look.”

  A forensics officer in a white suit is crouching down over the body, but he stops taking photographs and backs away, crablike, as McAvoy enters the tent. Breathing slowly, he crosses to where the corpse lies.

  The victim is on her back. The first thing that strikes him is the angle of her head. She seems to be looking up, craning her neck so as not to see the ruination of what has happened to her body. Even so, her expression is one of anguish. The tendons in her neck seem to have stretched to breaking point and her face is locked midscream. Her mouth is open, and her blue eyes have rolled back in her head, as if trying to get away.

  McAvoy swallows. Forces himself to look at more than just the wounds.

  She is in her late fifties, with short brown hair, graying at the roots. She is wearing black leggings, and old strappy sandals that display bare toes with nails painted dark blue. Her fingers are short but not unsightly, with neatly clipped nails and a gold engagement ring and wedding band, third finger, left hand.

  Only now does he allow himself to consider her midsection.

  His bile rises. He swallows it down.

  The lady’s chest has been caved in. The bones of her ribs have been snapped, splintered, and pushed up and into her breasts and lungs. Her upper torso is a mass of flattened skin and tissue, black blood and mangled organs. Her white bra, together with what looks like the remains of her breasts, sit in the miasma of churned meat. For a hideous moment, McAvoy imagines the noise that will be made when the pathologist disentangles them for examination.

  He turns away. Takes a breath that is not as deeply scented with gore.

  He turns back to the horror, and flinches.

  Though it shames him to have considered it, McAvoy finds himself in mind of a spatchcocked chicken; split at the breast and flattened out to be roasted.

  He feels Pharaoh’s hand on his shoulder and looks up into her face. She nods, and they step outside the tent.

  “Bloody hell, guv,” says McAvoy breathlessly.

  “I know.”

  He breathes out slowly. Realizes that the world has been spinning a little, and waits for the dizziness to pass. Forces himself to be a policeman.

  “What sort of weapon does that?”

  Pharaoh shrugs. “I reckon we’re after a bloke on a horse, swinging a fucking mace.”

  “That can’t have been the cause of death, though, can it? There must be a head wound, or a stab somewhere under all that . . .”

  “Pathologist will get to all that. All I can say for certain is, it wasn’t suicide.”

  McAvoy looks up at the sky. It remains the color of dirty bathwater. He feels the perspiration at his lower back, and when he rubs a hand over his face it comes away soaking. Although he knows nothing about the life of the woman in the tent, the little he knows of her death makes him angry. Nobody should die like that.

  “Handbag? Purse?”

  Pharaoh nods. “The lot. Was only a few feet from the body.”

  “What time?”

  “She was found a couple of hours ago. Bloke on his way to get the morning papers. Saw her foot sticking out and phoned 999.”

  “Regular CID can’t have had a look, then . . .”

  “Came straight to us.”

  “Guv?”

  Pharaoh makes a blade of her fingers and waves them in front of her throat, suggesting he cut short his questions. As head of the Serious and Organized Crime Unit, Pharaoh is used to the infighting and internecine warfare that pollutes the upper strata of Humberside Police. Her unit was established as a murder squad, set apart from the main body of detectives, but budget cuts and personnel changes have left the team with no clearly defined role. At present, Pharaoh and her officers are loosely tasked with investigating a highly organized criminal outfit that appears to have taken over most of the drugs trafficking on the East Coast. Its emergence has coincided with a marked spike in the incidents of violent crime, and both McAvoy and Pharaoh know for certain that the gang’s foot soldiers are responsible for several deaths. Their methods are efficient and brutal. Their favored weapons are the nail gun and the blowtorch. Pharaoh’s unit has locked up three of the outfit’s significant players, but so far the information they have managed to glean about the chain of command has been pitiful. Ruthless, efficient, single-minded, and worryingly well-informed, each tier of the gang seems to be insulated from the next. The soldiers have little or no knowledge of who gives them their orders. It is an operation based on mobile phones and complex codes that has recruited a better class of muscle through a combination of high reward and justified fear.

  “This is down as gang-related?” asks McAvoy incredulously. It is the only way the crime would have come straight to Pharaoh.

  Pharaoh gives a rueful smile. “She runs a residents group. Spoke out at a recent public meeting about street dealers ruining the neighborhood.”

  McAvoy closes his eyes. “So what do we know?”

  Pharaoh doesn’t need to consult her notes. She has already committed the details to memory.

  “Philippa Longman. Fifty-three. Lives up Conway Close. Past Boulevard, near the playing fields. There’s a uniformed inspector from Gordon Street with the family now. Philippa worked at the convenience store that you passed driving in. Was working last night, before you ask. And this would have been on her way home. Somebody grabbed her. Pulled her behind the trees. Did this.”

  “Family?”

  “Our next stop, my boy.”

  “Bloke who found her?”

  “Still shaking. Hasn’t got the taste of vomit out of his mouth yet.”

  “And we’re taking it, yes? There won’t be a stink from CID?”

  Pharaoh looks at him over the top of her sunglasses. “Of course there will. There’ll be a stink whatever happens.”

  McAvoy takes a deep breath. “I’m supposed to be prepping for court. Ronan Gill’s trial is only a month away and the witnesses are getting jumpy—”

  Without changing her facial expression, Pharaoh reaches up and puts a warm palm across McAvoy’s mouth. He smiles, his stubble making a soft rasp against her skin.

  “I have a hand free for a kidney punch if you need it,” she says sweetly.

  McAvoy looks back at the tent. Sees in his mind’s eye the devastation within. He wants to know who did it. Why. Wants to stop it happening again. Wants to ensure that whoever loved this woman is at least given a face to hate.

  He wishes the bloody psychologist was here now. It would be the only way she could ever understand what makes him do a job he hates. Wants to tell her that this is what he is. What he forces himself to be. Here, at the place between sorrow and good-bye.

  “Okay.”

  TWO

  Poor lass.”

  “Aye.”

  “You can hear it, can’t you? When it goes from pani
c, to something else . . .”

  “Bloody terrifying is what it is. They should play that to anybody who thinks about leaving the house without a pit bull terrier and a spear.”

  McAvoy is holding Philippa Longman’s mobile phone to his ear, still inside the plastic evidence bag. He is listening to her voicemails. There are ten of them, starting with a gentle inquiry from a man with a West Yorkshire accent, wondering if she is on her way home, and progressing through an assortment of sons and daughters, increasingly desperate, asking where she is, if she’s okay, to please call, just please call . . .

  “Out of character, least we know that,” says McAvoy, switching off the phone and putting it back in Pharaoh’s red leather handbag, which he is holding between his knees in the passenger seat of the convertible.

  “Getting murdered? Yeah, it definitely hasn’t happened to her before.”

  “No, I mean . . .”

  “I know what you mean.”

  McAvoy looks out of the window. He doesn’t really know this part of Hull. They are on an estate toward the back end of Hessle Road, where those who made their living from the fishing industry used to make their homes. It’s pretty run-down, but in this gray light, nothing would look pretty.

  “Tenner for the first person to spot an up-to-date car registration,” mutters Pharaoh.

  None of the cars that are parked on the curbs and grass shoulders look younger than ten years old, and Pharaoh’s convertible draws stares as they pass a group of people lounging by a low wall that leads to a fenced-off storage yard. They are of mixed ages. Two youngsters, shirtless with buzz cuts, lounging over the frames of BMX bikes. Three men, tattoos on their necks and hand-rolled cigarettes in their fingers. A woman in her late sixties, with gray hair and tracksuit bottoms, sipping from a can of lager and telling a story. One of them says something, but the convertible’s roof is up, and the words are lost in the sound of tires on bone-dry road.

  He passes a sign declaring that he is on Woodcock Street, and vaguely remembers reading that the army had used this neighborhood to practice their tank maneuvers before being deployed to Afghanistan. He wonders if that were true.