by David Mark
He’s not her usual sort. She likes sporty, athletic types. She likes men bigger than her, who know their Grand Prix history and don’t shave on a weekend. Mark seems the complete opposite. He’s a lawyer with a local firm, dealing mainly in divorce cases and the occasional bit of blame-and-claim litigation. They got talking last month in the canteen at Hull Magistrates’ Court, where Helen was giving evidence in a youth offender case she had dealt with in her first plainclothes job. It had taken an age to come to court, and Helen had been sitting there struggling to remember which little bastard had punched which other little bastard. Her mood had been foul, as a man in tracksuit bottoms, shirt, tie, and baseball cap had discovered when he told his toddler son to shut the fuck up and cuffed him around the head. Helen, pretending to fall as she passed him, had found a way to tread on the man’s instep and knee him in the groin at the same time, all the while apologizing out loud—even as she nipped the skin beneath his armpit and whispered cold threats in his ear. If anybody saw what she had done, then they had the sense to keep quiet about it, but she was soon the only person sitting in the waiting area with an empty chair beside her. Despite the chaos of the court, nobody had wanted to sit next to her. Nobody except Mark. He sat down with a smile. Whispered, “Nice work,” and waited for her to meet his gaze. He smelled nice. Clean, but not soapy. No aftershave, but somehow fresh, like line-dried laundry. He was small and wiry, his physique putting her in mind of a cyclist’s. His sideburns were slightly too long for a man in his mid-thirties, but his frameless designer glasses and blue pin-striped suit went well together, while the Maori-patterned leather strap around his wrist made him seem just intriguing enough to warrant further investigation. She’d noticed, even then, that he wore no wedding band. Had it been mercenary? Predatory? Had she been eyeing him up as a potential mate? She didn’t know. But he did not run a mile when she told him she was a police officer, which was a hell of a good start, and when he gave her his business card, she had waited less than an hour before sending him an e-mail saying how much she had enjoyed their chat, even though not a word of it had stuck in her head. Since then, their correspondence has grown more constant and passionate. She looks forward to his words and spends time thinking up her own. She wants to tell him about her day. Her life. She wants to look at him over the lip of a wineglass and smile as she off-loads the dirt and sweat of the day. She wants to know whether his chest is hairy or smooth. Wants to look down on him as she moves . . .
Ask him. Make a date, girl . . .
Helen wishes she were brave enough to suggest a drink tonight. Hopes that in his next e-mail he takes the initiative and does so himself. Oh Christ, how she hopes . . .
“Now then, children!”
The door to the office is already open, but Trish Pharaoh still manages to make enough noise as she barges into the room to get everybody’s attention. Like worried meerkats, officers pop their heads above monitors, and phones are silenced. Ben Neilsen leans over and switches off the fan and a hush falls on the room. Helen sees them as canaries, their cage suddenly shrouded and silent. Pharaoh is rarely here. She has an office of her own, up another flight of stairs, where she does complicated and exasperating things with spreadsheets and budgets. She is one of CID’s most senior figures, having got to a position where she can do little actual police work, by being very good at police work.
Tremberg waits for McAvoy to come in as well, and is surprised by his absence. Pharaoh catches her looking at the door, and gives an indulgent smile. “He’s busy,” she mouths. “We’ll be okay without him.”
Helen nods. Joins the rest of the officers in watching Pharaoh stride to the far end of the room, where she starts rubbing Colin Ray’s scribblings off the whiteboard. She doesn’t even stop to read them.
“Right, you lot. I’m talking to the whole room here because I can’t remember which of you lot are still mine and which are Colin’s. So, if this is nowt to do with you, just be quiet. In a minute, some very efficient people are going to turn this part of the room into a murder suite. I’ve spoken to the brass and we’ve agreed that Philippa Longman’s death should be looked at by this unit. Regular CID are about as happy at that as you would expect, but it will be me that gets the earache and none of you, so don’t worry about that. More importantly, don’t go approaching any of this thinking that it’s got anything to do with bloody organized crime. It hasn’t. The gang we’re all looking for wouldn’t give a shit about some local community activist kicking up a stink about drugs. But by the time that information reaches the assistant chief constable, we’ll have found who did it and there will be champagne and cigars all round. Savvy?”
There are smiles and snorts of laughter at that. Tremberg finds herself turning around, half hoping that Colin Ray and Shaz Archer have returned from whatever errand they’re running and walk into the middle of the briefing.
“Colin and I will be having a chat about which officers stay on current cases and which assist me in the murder inquiry. For now, I’ve got uniforms doing door-to-door in the immediate vicinity. It’s bloody hot at the moment so people will be sleeping with the windows open and may well have heard something. You can’t do that much damage to a person without it waking somebody. I’ve insisted the forensics be fast-tracked and the postmortem will be done this evening. McAvoy and me have already interviewed a suspect—the former partner of Longman’s daughter. Document wallets will be going round when my secretary or whatever they’re supposed to be called these days finishes trying to turn my handwriting into English.”
There are a few mutters at McAvoy’s name. Some people are holding a grudge longer than others.
“We’ve got one lead that needs your immediate attention. Sophie, Andy, I’m thinking of you two.”
Helen lets the disappointment show on her face, but Pharaoh does not acknowledge it.
“We’ve got a footprint. Almost a perfect one. Size eight, big grips, heavy indent at the toe.”
“Work boots?” asks Helen, hoping to make herself noticed.
“Give that lass a gold star,” says Pharaoh. “Yes, work boots. We’ve got plaster casts on their way over, so you need to be hitting the warehouses, the building merchants, trying to find a match, and see how widespread those kind of shoes are.”
“It could be anybody’s boots, guv,” comes a dissenting voice. Helen traces it to Stan Lyons. He was a detective sergeant before his retirement and now works part-time for the unit as one of its complement of civilian officers. He’s a nice old boy in his early sixties who takes tablets for his blood pressure and, as such, is always cold. Even today, in this heat, he’s wearing an undershirt, shirt, and golfing jumper.
“It could indeed, Stan,” says Pharaoh, “but given that he’s trodden some of Philippa Longman’s blood into the grass, I reckon it’s worth thinking about, yes?”
“We got anything else?” asks Ben Neilsen optimistically.
“Early days, my boy, and given you haven’t read the paperwork yet, you’ll forgive me if I don’t hold your hand and baby-step you through every last detail.”
Ben smiles. “Sorry, boss.”
She looks at the expectant faces, then raises her hands to tell her team to get on with it. This is how she works. She doesn’t micromanage. Sometimes they go days without hearing from her. She handpicked most of the officers on the unit and trusts them to do their jobs. The only people she didn’t want, and still doesn’t, are Colin Ray and Sharon Archer, but she respects them enough to know they won’t make waves when it comes to a murder investigation.
Pharaoh heads for the door, stopping only briefly at Helen Tremberg’s desk.
“Sorry, Helen. I wanted you. It seems Colin can’t spare you. The ACC mentioned you by name.”
Helen looks confused. “Guv?”
“Seems you’re doing a good job. Keep it up.”
With a warm, motherly squeeze of Tremberg’s shoulder, Pharaoh bustles
away. For a brief moment, there is silence in the room. Then the fan is switched back on, and officers start to pick up phones. A middle-aged woman in a pleated skirt and round-neck T-shirt enters carrying a pile of folders, which she begins to distribute to the team members like a teacher handing back homework.
Helen scowls for a while, then decides to accentuate the positive. Whatever it is she’s doing, she’s doing it well. She’s essential to the ongoing investigation into a criminal gang responsible for countless deaths. That must be something to celebrate.
Quickly, before she can change her mind, she types Mark a new message.
LET’S STOP MESSING AROUND. DRINK. TONIGHT. I HAVE SO MUCH I WANT TO TELL YOU. XXX
• • •
McAvoy pushes his hair back from his face and looks in disgust at the sweat on his palm. He feels like he’s melting. His insides feel wrong. He’s hungry, but the heat of the day is making him feel sick. He wants something sweet and cooling but thinks it would probably be unseemly if he conducted his section of the murder inquiry while licking an ice lolly. He resigns himself to stopping in at a newsagents for a bar of chocolate on his way back to Arthur Street, where he has another twenty-five houses to doorstep before his section of the house-to-house is completed. People are cooperating, as much as they can. Police are tolerated around here. It’s not a bad neighborhood, all told, and nobody wants to live in an area where the nice lady from the convenience store can have her chest kicked in on her walk home. The trouble is, nobody saw anything. Nobody heard anything. And while everybody whom he and the uniformed officers have spoken to have been only too willing to take his business card and to promise to call if anything comes back to them, they have yet to find a witness.
McAvoy puffs out his cheeks and lets out a sigh. In front of him, the traffic is still moving at a crawl. Horns are honking. Drivers are revving their engines and the music from competing stereos blends with the sound of a distant pneumatic drill. The whole scene throbs with grinding noise. He stares straight ahead, not really seeing, jolting slightly as he realizes his gaze is fixed on a group of preteens who are making a nuisance of themselves on the single-decker bus in front of him. They see him looking, and mouth a variety of insults, punctuated by fulsome use of mid-finger salutes. Banging on the window, they laugh as if they have just committed the century’s greatest act of social disobedience, then sit down as the driver turns around and threatens to let his fraying temper snap.
McAvoy gives a little nod. Fair enough, he supposes. Makes a one-fingered salute of his own in the pocket of his trousers and wishes that the rule book allowed him to show it. He pushes off from the wall, feeling his shirt sticking to his back. He’s sick of this heat. Sick of the oppressive gray skies, and the fact that his palms are sweaty every time he proffers one to a potential witness. He knows his hair looks nearly black at the temples, slick with perspiration, and while he is wearing enough antiperspirant to ensure he doesn’t embarrass himself, he wishes he had listened this morning when Roisin suggested he use some of the powder she had knocked up from cornstarch and oatmeal, and which she swears by when it comes to avoiding heat rashes anywhere too painful. “Too late for that now,” he mutters as he crosses between two barely moving vehicles and jogs painfully back to the other side of Anlaby Road.
As he reaches into his pocket for the change to buy a bar of chocolate, he grips nothing but empty cloth. He’s out of money. Shit. It’s nothing new. Buying the new car cleaned out his savings, while every spare penny he can muster is going to the new house. He qualified for the mortgage without any problems. On paper, he owns a small croft near Gairloch in the western Highlands, five or six miles from his father’s, though he has only visited it a couple of times and sublets to an arty English couple who make their living doing complicated things with seashells. As a crofter’s son, he qualified for government subsidy and bought the place for a steal while still a young man. The bank had considered the property a sufficient guarantee to give him a larger-than-usual mortgage, and he will be moving the family into the new house on Hessle Foreshore next weekend. He’s paying for a moving company to do some of the hard work. Paying for a proper wooden summerhouse for the back garden. Paying out too much, truth be told, but each purchase is making Roisin squeal, and if there is a better sound in the universe, he has yet to hear it.
Over the noise of the road, McAvoy hears his radio crackle. The uniformed officers still prefer to use radios, while he and his CID colleagues have made the transition to mobile phones, but McAvoy has no issue with doing things the way the uniformed sergeant coordinating the majority of the house-to-house prefers, and had taken the radio without argument. The team knows who to contact if they come up with anything useful.
“McAvoy,” he says into the radio.
“Sarge, this might be nothing, but I think we have somebody for you to come talk to . . .”
Five minutes later, McAvoy arrives back on Granville Street. He ran the first five hundred yards, then slowed when he came in sight of one of the patrol cars so he could catch his breath.
PC Joseph Pearl is waiting by the door. He’s a tall, strikingly handsome black man whom McAvoy has only met briefly, but whom he seems to remember as coming from somewhere over Lancashire way. When he had briefed the officers, McAvoy had felt like warning PC Pearl that his color would barely provoke a comment in this relatively multicultural area, but that he should keep his Lancashire accent under wraps for fear of abuse. Yorkshire folk have complicated prejudices.
“Nice lady,” says PC Pearl, nodding into the open door. “Hard to shut her up.”
McAvoy steps inside the nondescript terrace, two minutes from where Philippa Longman lost her life. He had intended to make this row of properties part of his own house-to-house, but for fear of being accused of cherry-picking, he had left it to the uniforms.
The nice lady in question is Lavinia Mantell. She’s sitting with her feet drawn up in the corner of a large, squashy, three-seater sofa, which dominates the small living room. On the walls are framed posters of various local theater nights, and the carpet is a maddening swirl of purples and golds. McAvoy takes a quick look around and decides it must be rented. Lavinia has put her stamp on the place but has not gone to the trouble of replacing the vile soft furnishings, or the peeling wallpaper. On the table in front of her is a laptop and a pile of papers, held in place by a biscuit tin, which stops the halfhearted breeze from the open window from making a mess. McAvoy recognizes the salmon-pink color of Hull City Council Scrutiny Committee reports.
“Miss Mantell,” he says, edging his way around the huge sofa and coming to stand in front of the TV. He introduces himself. “My colleague tells me you may have some information that would help us.”
She holds up her hands as if urging him to wait. She is chewing on a biscuit. She reaches down beside her and takes a swig from the mug of coffee on the floor.
“Sorry, you caught me.”
He smiles. “The day biscuits are a crime, I’ll be doing life.”
She’s in her late thirties, and attractive in a bookish and careworn kind of way. She has brown hair that was probably cut into a sleek and sophisticated bob a couple of months ago but which looks a little wilder now. She’s wearing designer glasses and has the sort of figure that men are perfectly at ease with but women would like to tighten up.
“I presume you work for the local authority,” says McAvoy, indicating the paperwork.
Lavinia pulls a face. “I’m freelance. I work for whoever.”
“Journalist?”
She shakes her head and laughs. “Chance would be a fine thing! No, my spelling’s terrible. Good enough for marketing, though.”
“Ah, right. Press officer?”
“That’s what they used to be called. I’m a communications consultant, I’ll have you know.” She adopts a haughty tone as she says it, and makes herself giggle. She abruptly raises a hand to her mouth,
as if deciding that she is being overly jolly, given the circumstances, and takes on a solemn expression to make up for it.
“I presume you’ve been told about the events of last night,” says McAvoy, sitting down in the center cushion of the sofa. “Did you know Philippa Longman?”
“Not personally. Not really. I knew her face when your mate showed me the photo, and I’d seen her in the convenience store.”
“Did you ever speak?”
Lavinia rubs at the tip of her nose with an index finger, trying to be helpful. “Well, only in the shop. I think she once said the wine I was buying was nice. Something like that.”
“Anything else?”
“I think this was her walk home. I sometimes have a cigarette if I’ve had a really shit day, and the landlord doesn’t like me smoking indoors. I’ll sit on the front step with a coffee and a fag and I’ve said hello to her once or twice like that.”
“And last night?”
Lavinia opens her mouth and sits forward, nodding even before she speaks. “Sort of. I wasn’t on the doorstep last night, I was having a fag out of the window upstairs. I hardly ever do that, but it was so bloody hot I couldn’t sleep, and sometimes a cigarette calms me down. I was sitting on the windowsill.”
“And what time was this?”
“Oh, sometime around midnight. Maybe a little earlier. I was reading a book on my phone. There’s just enough light from the streetlamp for me not to have to put the bedroom light on, you see. I’m on an electricity meter . . .”
“And you saw Mrs. Longman?” asks McAvoy, moving forward on the sofa cushion so he can maintain eye contact with her as she wriggles around on the edge of the seat.
“Definitely. She was walking that way.”
She points in the direction the murdered woman would have had to walk to get home, and where, a few yards farther on, she was torn to pieces.
“Was she alone?”
“At first,” says Lavinia, reaching forward for a piece of paper from the coffee table, then discarding it distractedly. “As she came past the house she was. I’d looked up to drop some ash out the window and saw her walking by. Then the next time I was dropping the ash, she was with somebody else.”