by David Mark
“I mean her family.”
“Yeah. Nice family. Close. Proper family, you know? Don was well happy with the way things worked out.”
“And your relationship with Philippa?”
Robb looks away, past McAvoy, to the slate sea and stone sky. “We were close. All those jokes about mother-in-laws? It wasn’t like that. We were mates. She was a laugh. I helped her with her work on the council. Computer stuff. Research. I typed up her speeches. Set up a spreadsheet for her expenses. She used to make ginger biscuits for me as a thanks. Proper ones, with stem ginger.” He gives a tiny smile at the memory. “It was all nice.”
“So what happened with you and Elaine?”
Robb blows air through his nostrils. Scratches at his throat. He seems to be about to stand up, to offer to make tea, to straighten a picture or move the rug, but he appears to see the actions for the distractions they are, and stays where he is. When he speaks, his voice is as soft as tears falling on wood.
“Philippa was at our place. I was showing her how to use a website. Might even have been that walking challenge website. I can’t remember. Anyway, I left her in my office for a bit. Went for a pee or a cup of tea or whatever. Next thing, she’s pulling on her coat and slamming the door behind her. I didn’t know what was going on until I went back into my office.” He looks at the wall, shame creeping up into his cheeks. “She’d clicked the wrong icon. Gone into my private files. Seen some of the things in there.”
Pharaoh gives a whistle. “Worst nightmare, eh?”
“It was nowt weird,” he says despairingly.
“Just good wholesome stuff, was it?” asks Pharaoh.
Robb doesn’t reply.
“Mr. Robb, I don’t want to be crass, but everybody in the world has the occasional glimpse at stuff like that. She’d be embarrassed, sure, but she’d hardly cut you off for that, would she? These days? Really?”
Robb looks at her quizzically, then his mouth opens wide as realization dawns.
“It was drawings!” he splutters. “Drawings I’d done. I like to draw.”
Pharaoh is getting frustrated. “What?”
“I’d done some drawings. Portraits, if you like. Sketches. Some still life. Some from memory. Other times, they’d sit for me . . .”
“Who?”
“The kids. Elaine’s kids.”
Pharaoh’s mouth drops open and she turns to McAvoy. “Are you hearing this? Can you get a straight answer out of this bloke for me please, Hector, because I’m starting to get angry.”
McAvoy takes three steps to the middle of the room and looms over Darren Robb. Were he here alone, he would never consider using his size, would never threaten or intimidate, but in Pharaoh’s presence he knows his role. He is both her enforcer and gentle poet. His job is to keep the suspect off-balance. To become his friend, and then step into his personal space with the softest of snarls. “Were they naked pictures, sir? The drawings you did of your girlfriend’s children?”
Robb stares up at the big man. “It’s art. Like Reubens. Cherubs and stuff. I like all that. I scanned them into the computer so I could use some art software. I wasn’t sending them to anyone. I wasn’t doing anything wrong! It’s just pictures.”
“Nothing that could be considered inappropriate?”
“Not unless there’s something wrong with you.”
“But Philippa didn’t like what she saw?”
“She wouldn’t answer her phone. Wouldn’t come to the door when I called for her. She just cut me off.”
“And Elaine?”
“She didn’t understand. Her mum sent her this message, telling her that her boyfriend was sick. Twisted. Disgusting.”
“Did you explain?”
“I deleted the pictures as soon as Philippa left.”
“Why?”
“I panicked.”
McAvoy runs his tongue around the inside of his mouth. “So when Philippa told her daughter that you had naked pictures of her children on your computer, you had no evidence to the contrary.”
Robb looks back at his feet.
“Elaine left you?”
He nods. “She wouldn’t listen.”
“Did you try and make her?”
Robb bites at his lip. “Over and over. I tried to get Don to talk to her, but he wouldn’t take my calls, either. I went to Elaine’s work, to the kids’ schools, I just wanted her to listen.”
McAvoy pushes a fist into his palm. “You must have been frustrated. Angry.”
“Everything was ruined, over a mistake. A misunderstanding. I’d never hurt those kids. I loved those kids.”
“But Elaine didn’t know you were drawing them naked, did she? If it was innocent, why not tell her?”
Robb is silent. He tries to find somewhere to direct his gaze, but finds nothing to his satisfaction. He gets up and adjusts one of the pictures on the wall. “It was just art,” he mutters to himself.
“And if we took away your computer, Mr. Robb, would we find more art?”
A look of horror passes over Darren Robb’s face, and McAvoy takes a step toward him, using his size to put the fat man almost into shadow.
“You’ve been stalking your ex, Mr. Robb. You’ve been following her on Facebook with a fake alias. You’ve been making a nuisance of yourself. You’ve made threats about a woman who is now dead.”
Robb’s lower lip trembles. He seems to be about to cry.
“Where were you last night?” asks Pharaoh from the sofa.
“I was here,” he says.
“Doing what?”
“I was on the computer. I’m often on the computer.”
“Doing what?”
Slowly, like a bouncy castle deflating, Darren Robb sinks to his knees. “Same as fucking always,” he says between sobs. “Reading her e-mails. Reading her messages.”
“You hack her e-mails?”
“Elaine’s. Don’s. Philippa’s. I just want to stay close to them. They were my family, too. It was just a misunderstanding.”
“You can show us your search history, then. You can show us that you were here all night, I presume.”
“I stopped about two a.m. Then I went to bed.”
“Alone?”
“Of course alone.”
Pharaoh turns to her sergeant. “We don’t know what time she was killed yet. Not for certain.”
“If he’s good enough with computers he could do his Internet browsing remotely and make it look like he was on his home terminal. But if he did that on his mobile, we can pinpoint the location from the signal. Will be easier once the forensics people have had their fun.”
“Aye, if he was there, we’ll probably have found a crisp packet in the vicinity.”
Robb looks at each of them in turn, as if they are passing his fate between them like a tennis ball.
“I can’t drive,” he blurts out, as if the admission is the most important thought he has ever had. “I haven’t got a car. I don’t have a license. I work from home. How the hell would I even get there?”
Pharaoh lets the annoyance show in her face. “You can’t drive? How did you bother Elaine then? See her at work? At the kids’ schools?”
“I took cabs. Buses. I’ve only moved back to Hornsea the past few weeks. I kept this place on when Elaine and me moved in together. I don’t go anywhere. I couldn’t.”
Pharaoh looks at the fat man on the floor. “Pathetic,” she says, and her sneer is an ugly, powerful thing.
McAvoy has been running his tongue around his mouth for the past few moments, his thoughts sliding into one another like coins inside a slot machine. “The e-mails,” he says at length. “You’ve been reading them for a while?”
Robb nods, seemingly unsure whether to stay on his knees or get up.
“Did Philippa ever receive any th
reats of any kind? And I advise you to think carefully about this, because at the moment, we’re staring very hard at you for the murder of Philippa Longman.”
Robb screws up his eyes, like a child pretending to concentrate. “Philippa’s was just council stuff. Vouchers. Special offers. Sometimes she’d get pictures from friends. There was some argy-bargy with a builder who’d bodged her railings, but that got sorted out. I used to search under my name in her correspondence and there wasn’t a thing. They’d just moved on. Cut me out like I was something disgusting.”
“And Elaine?”
“She mentioned me sometimes. After I’d been to see her, or sent her a letter or texted her or whatever, she’d message a friend about me. She never sounded cross with me, just sorry for me.”
“But you were cross with her. With Philippa, too.”
“I said things I shouldn’t have. I was just trying to shock Elaine into listening.”
“You said you would cut out her mum’s heart.”
Robb shifts his position, moving the fat around. “I’ve never hurt anybody in my life.”
Pharaoh clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth. She seems to be weighing things up.
“Hector?”
McAvoy looks at the morbidly obese specimen before him. He sees something pitiful, but he does not yet see a killer.
“Don’t go anywhere,” he says to Robb.
Pharaoh scoffs. “He can’t drive, remember?”
“Let’s check that, eh?”
“And we’d better tell the boys in the tech unit to remotely access his hard drive. Make sure nothing gets deleted in the next few days.”
McAvoy manages to keep the look of confusion off his face. Pharaoh knows nothing about computers, but has a quality poker face and knows how to scare a suspect.
They turn away from the sniveling man on the floor and head for the door. Halfway across the living room, McAvoy turns back.
“Are you sorry she’s dead?”
Robb raises his head. There is nothing but sorrow in his face, though most of that seems to be for himself.
“Did she suffer?” he asks at length.
“More than anybody should.”
Robb drops his head. The only sound in the room is the soft snuffling of a fat man crying into his T-shirt, and the distant peal of children laughing beneath the crashing of the waves.
FIVE
3:28 p.m. Courtland Road Police Station. Hull.
A three-story building, all bare brick and dirty windows, painted the color of storm clouds, shielded from the estate it watches over by bent silver railings and untended grass.
Second floor. Home of the Serious and Organized Crime Unit.
Flickering monitors, overstuffed folders, and cardboard boxes cluttering the pathways between desks. Home Office posters on the walls and every window pushed open as far as it will go. Phones, answered with coughs and grunts; fingers bashing inexpertly on keyboards that are missing letters and patterned with crumbs. Bluebottles buzzing helplessly on dirty windowsills that are varnished in coffee stains and smudges of printer ink.
Helen Tremberg, wrist-deep in a packet of crisps, salt sticking to her damp fingers and chipped nails, sweat on her upper lip, fringe twisting in knots every time the fan turns in her direction and the edges of her paperwork lift their skirts.
She types, one-handed, on a keyboard that sits in front of a monitor garlanded with Post-it notes. They contain reminders. Phone numbers. Her passwords.
She’s hunched. Furtive. Trying to stay below the plastic barrier that divides her desk from DC Ben Neilsen’s. There is a tiny smile on her face.
Helen has been officially single for three years. She had two serious relationships before that, with men she was pretty sure she loved. Each ended within a year of them moving in together. In both cases, it was the men who made the decision to go, and Helen who had done nothing to change their minds. She enjoyed cohabiting. Liked the intimacy of it all: the foot rubs during the movie; the unexpected cups of tea; the feeling of slipping on a man’s big cozy jumper to pad downstairs in the middle of the night; and having somebody warm to spoon up beside when she worked a late shift. It was the other side of it that caused the rifts. Bills. Sensible stuff. Which electricity supplier to use. Getting the broadband to work properly. Whether to do a big shop once a month for freezable stuff, or pop out every night for perishables. Them, forgetting to keep the shower curtain inside the bathtub and soaking the floor. Her, with her stubbornness. Her refusal to compromise. Even to be guided. Steered. Told. Sitting there with her fingers digging into the leather of the sofa as some great interloper held the remote control for her TV and decided what they should watch. Both of her failed relationships were so similar in their pattern and makeup that sometimes she forgets which was which, and has to consider the length of her hair in each snapshot of memory to know which lover she went where with, and when.
While she has enjoyed the company of a few blokes over the last few months, she has lacked any real enthusiasm for taking things further. She likes her own space. Likes her own company. Has a few mates, both inside and outside the police service, and has years left before her biological clock starts trying to get her attention. She even has the odd Friday night out on Cleethorpes seafront. Has some fancy sequined dresses and painful strappy shoes. Knows how to do her makeup and ruffle her short hair in a way that takes the attention away from her broad shoulders and weight-lifter thighs. She’s okay with herself.
So why are you so giddy, you silly girl?
Helen tries to focus on the half of the computer screen she gets paid to give a damn about. She’s cross-referencing between two databases, trying to spot any familiar names among the owners of white, 2003-registered Land Rovers. Such a vehicle was captured on blurry CCTV, heading away at speed from a petrol bombing on the Preston Road estate. The target was an empty liquor store, and the motive was most likely insurance or boredom. It comes under Helen’s purview because she is attached to Colin Ray’s investigation into the spike in organized crime, and because there had once been a Drugs Squad raid on the shop amid accusations it was being used as a halfway house for cocaine coming off the nearby docks. That raid had proven fruitless, but with the top brass happy to throw resources at making the drugs problem go away before the end-of-year figures are collated, anything with even a sniff of organized criminality about it comes to Colin Ray, and anything he doesn’t think is worth his time goes to Shaz Archer, who dutifully passes it on to the people she likes least.
Having already wasted a morning on the entertaining but fruitless trip to Hull Prison, Helen is resigned to a day of futility and irritation, made worse by the buzzing flies and oppressive heat. She had been gutted to hear that Pharaoh was looking into the murder off Anlaby Road. Tremberg is an ambitious woman, hoping to be put forward for the sergeant examination, and had cautiously celebrated when placed on Colin Ray’s side of the squad not so long ago. That joy has faded now. She is on a unit that is making no progress, led by a man who is at best tenacious, and at worst, dangerous. Her immediate superior is a tart who doesn’t rate her, and the last bit of work Helen did that in any way helped make the East Coast a safer place was when she put Colin Ray in the back of a taxi before he made good on his promise to cut DC Andy Daniells’s head off with a glass bottle at the last CID quiz night.
Her computer beeps and Helen takes a deep breath in. Her left leg bounces up and down.
Stop it, you silly girl . . .
She opens the e-mail. It’s him. Mark. The one she can’t get out of her bloody head.
COULDN’T WAIT ANOTHER MINUTE TO HEAR FROM YOU. I HAVE NO EXCUSE. ARE WE NOT PAST THAT? DO I NEED TO PRETEND I HAVE SOMETHING WORK-RELATED TO DISCUSS? I JUST WANTED TO SEND YOU A MESSAGE. HONESTLY, HELEN, EVEN SEEING YOUR NAME WRITTEN DOWN MAKES ME EXCITED. WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO ME? TELL ME SOMETHING PERSONAL. CAN’T WAIT. XX
&nb
sp; Helen smiles and exhales at the same time. She rubs the back of her hand across her face and prepares to compose a reply. She’s no poet. She wishes she’d read the Philip Larkin collection McAvoy had sent her when she was in the hospital a few months back. Wishes, even more, that McAvoy himself were here. There are few moments when she is not second-guessing herself in his voice, wondering whether he would approve of her decisions, her police work, her heart. He has somehow become her conscience.
Her thoughts drift to his wife. Helen knows what McAvoy did for Roisin. Remembers that day in the greasy-spoon café when her senior officer opened up. Told her about the men who hurt Roisin when she was not yet a teen. McAvoy was just a constable then. A young man in uniform, called to a traveler camp. A man who heard screams and went to investigate. Who carried the crying girl from a burning building and did things to her attackers that scarred his soul. Helen has never asked him what he did to those men. Never asked how he and the child he saved came to be lovers as adults. She has not made up her mind whether she truly wants to know. Whether she wants to unpick the perfection of the image she carries of the McAvoys. She just knows his love for his family is a palpable, magical thing. When he talks of Roisin and his children, the air around him is thick enough to be scooped up with a ladle. She wants some of that. Some of that honesty. That perfect, powerful thing he carries inside him.
YOU DON’T NEED EXCUSES. MESSAGE ME WHENEVER YOU WANT. I WON’T EVER BE DISAPPOINTED TO HEAR FROM YOU. XX
It’s the best she can do. She makes sure the number of kisses she types is no more or less than the number he placed on his. She runs a quick spell-check, just to make sure she hasn’t embarrassed herself, then sends it on, hoping she will not have to wait too long for a reply. She is using her personal e-mail account on the work computer, which is strictly against the rules. She has heard of other forces where viruses have been uploaded simply by opening an unvetted file, but she is so eager to hear from the man that she is willing to take the risk.
Sort yourself out, Helen.