by David Mark
She says it with a smile. Warm and friendly. McAvoy nods hopefully.
“Yes?”
She sighs. “I’m not sure you’ve really told me anything.”
McAvoy looks frustrated. He opens his mouth and makes gestures with his hands, then breathes out as if this is all too much. “What would you like to hear, Sabine? I’m fine. I’m investigating two murders. I’m doing my job.”
“But you feel better because you are investigating murders, Aector. What if there were no murders to investigate?”
He looks at her, perplexed. “I don’t think we need to worry about that. This is Hull. And people will always be horrible to each other.”
She persists. Sits forward in her chair. Adjusts the strap on her sensible sandals, then gives him her full attention. “How would you define yourself if not for your job. That’s what I mean.”
He doesn’t understand. “But I am a policeman.”
“And what does that mean?” she asks, probing deeper. “What does being a policeman mean to you?”
McAvoy wants to stand up. Wants to pace. “Is this about duty again, because we’ve talked about that . . .”
“What I want to know, Aector, is whether you are a policeman first and a human being second, or whether there is room inside you for both.”
McAvoy turns to her, wondering what she is trying to get him to say.
“You’ve broken the law, yes? You’ve hinted at doing something bad when you and Roisin met. You have been present when people have been killed. You can talk about these things in here, Aector. You’re safe.”
He looks at her, hard. Looks at this middle-aged woman in her cream dress and frizzy hair, her visible panty line and her untended nails. He does not see her as a safe repository for his secrets. Were he to meet her in the street he would not take it upon himself to tell her what he did to the men who attacked Roisin in her teens. And yet, she is right in what she says. This room is safe. Her report to his senior officers will only declare that he is not suffering from any mental illness and is fit for duty. Were he to unburden himself, he would not lose a friend. He does not mind if she judges him harshly. This is a confessional. A place to give voice to the thoughts and feelings of guilt that sometimes threaten to eat him up.
“Aector, you’re safe. I don’t want anything from you. I want to help you. This case you are investigating now must be taking its toll. You have so much to think about. You can’t rely on Roisin for everything.”
McAvoy looks away. She is right, of course. He expects too much of his wife, though she never fails to give him what he needs. She is his confessor. She is his sounding board. She is his whole soul. And yet he cannot tell her everything, for fear of reminding her of darker times. Cannot discuss how he feels about the day he found the farm boys raping a twelve-year-old traveler girl. Cannot tell her what he did to them, for fear of changing the way she views him.
He rubs a hand through his hair. Sabine has begun talking again but he is not listening. He finds his thoughts turning back to Friday’s meeting in The Wellington in Driffield. His chat over a couple of pints of real ale with the two security guards. The older man had introduced himself as Jimmy Forsythe. Taken a pickled egg from the jar on the bar and devoured it in a bite. Took his pint, found a table, and gave McAvoy and Pharaoh the lot. Told them what the lads at Tower Security knew about what happened at the facility. There had been no dazzling revelations, but Pharaoh considered the cost of a couple of pints to have been money well spent. They are building up a picture of Sebastien Hoyer-Wood and his friend, Lewis Caneva. It is becoming clear that the rapist was neither as injured nor as mentally ill as his old university friend claimed. He seemed to have lived with Caneva and his family more as a houseguest than as a patient at the neighboring asylum. And something had happened that had broken up this cozy arrangement and sent Caneva into a tailspin.
Caneva is the man they want next. Ben Neilsen has found an address for him, and McAvoy will be on his way as soon as he gets this last session with Sabine done. He’s going alone. Pharaoh is back at the station, fighting fires. ACC Everett is attempting to suspend DCI Colin Ray from duty for beating the shit out of Adam Downey in the cells. Downey has spent the weekend in Hull Royal Infirmary and has a bail hearing this morning. The top brass are doing their damnedest to keep quiet what happened, but Downey’s solicitor is threatening to mention the whole lot in his address to the court unless bail is agreed to. Ray has made an almighty balls-up and played into the hands of whoever pays Downey’s wages. The case is likely to collapse before it ever gets before a judge.
“Aector?”
McAvoy sighs. Closes his eyes and tries to keep his breathing steady.
“She thinks I killed them,” he says, and is surprised to hear himself speaking. “Thinks I put them in the ground.”
Sabine’s eyes widen.
“And did you?”
McAvoy looks at the floor. Gives the slightest shake of his head.
Confesses his greatest sin and is surprised to discover that he still has tears to fall.
• • •
It’s just before one o’clock, and on Hull’s Princes Avenue, a blue Peugeot 306 is sitting in stationary traffic, waiting to turn left. On its roof is a large sign advertising the services of the man at the wheel. It boasts of a 90 percent first-time pass rate, and promises that the first two lessons are free. Godber Driving School is written in a sporty-looking font, but to call the company a “school” may be an overstatement. Allan Godber has no colleagues, though he has plenty of students. Allowing himself this hour for lunch is a luxury.
As he sits waiting for a gap in the traffic, Allan hits himself in the chest with the flat of his hand. He swallows hard: neck bulging like a bullfrog’s. He makes his hand into a fist, and strikes himself in the rib cage. Manages half a belch. He screws up his face at the taste and spits like a baby trying solids for the first time. He reaches into the pocket of his jeans and finds a loose antacid tablet among the coins. He takes his eyes off the road for a moment, checks the chalky pill for any obvious fluff, then pops it in his mouth. He chews it up and swallows, wishing he had a glass of milk to chase it down with. Then the weight settles back on his chest.
During his last visit to his doctor, Allan had been told he was suffering with gastroesophageal reflux disorder. It was a more satisfying title for the condition than the “heartburn” that his wife had diagnosed him with. Allan also discovered that he more than likely has something called a hiatus hernia as well. They won’t know until next month, when he goes to Castle Hill Hospital for an endoscopy. He’s not looking forward to the procedure. He still knows a lot of the staff at the hospital, and doesn’t want to know which of his mates will be knocking him out and sticking a tube down his gullet. He knows them too well to believe that they won’t take a liberty or two while he is unconscious. He imagines himself coming round from the procedure to find himself naked in a corridor with the name of his least favorite football team scrawled in permanent marker on his chest.
Allan misses his old job. Misses the camaraderie and his mates. He gave seventeen years to the ambulance service, but when the last voluntary redundancy scheme was announced, he saw a chance to get out and retrain in something that didn’t involve quite so much blood and guts, and night shifts. He’s been a driving instructor for four years now and doesn’t hate it. The money’s okay, he’s patient enough to tolerate the pupils, and he hasn’t had to pick up any body parts or restart anybody’s heart in an age. The only downside is the rather sedentary nature of his job. He spends all day sitting down. He’s put on forty pounds since quitting the service, and the gastric problems are clearly linked to his increasing waistline. Still, he’s not a bad-looking guy. Despite being bigger than he was, he’s not noticeably fat, and has most of his hair, which he keeps in a short and fashionable style. He wears T-shirts with the right logos and buys the kind of jeans
that his two teenage sons don’t sneer at. He’s in okay condition, and smells of an aftershave that his female students have admired from time to time, while his prescription sunglasses carry the same designer emblem as his underpants. He looks like he’s doing all right, generally speaking, though he does not see himself as any kind of catch or Romeo. It’s hard to woo women or charm your way into somebody’s pants when there is a risk of you burping vomit every thirty seconds.
Allan turns the car onto Park Avenue, his back to Pearson Park. On a hot, muggy day like this, the park will be full of foreigners playing football and students lying on towels, drinking bottles of pear cider and trying to feign interest in textbooks. Kids will be taking it in turns to laugh and cry in the playground, grazing their knees on rocks, coming off the slide too quickly and spraining their ankles, bumping heads or falling from railings onto the wood-chip floor. As a paramedic, he had been called to that park too many times to think of it fondly. He once had to pop a three-year-old girl’s shoulder back into place after she grabbed hold of a spinning merry-go-round. He’d tried to be as gentle as he could but she had still screamed. Her dad had still stood there crying in front of him and saying it hadn’t been his fault, it was just an accident, these things happen . . .
Allan burps again. Grimaces. Rubs his chest.
It’s been a normal morning. He’s given three hour-long lessons and navigated his way through the traffic from one side of the city to the other without messing up his schedule by more than a couple of minutes.
The car glides past the shabbily grand houses on the wide, tree-lined street. The Avenues is the Hull address that everybody wants if they choose to remain inside the city boundary and not head for the suburbs. The parking’s a bloody nightmare and a few too many of the three-story dwellings have been converted into flats, but these are still mightily impressive homes and he is proud to call one his own. Allan lives on Ella Street, which is not, technically speaking, an Avenue. But it’s close enough for him to share a postcode with those in the slightly larger properties that run parallel to his own.
There are no other vehicles around, but Allan indicates his intentions anyway. He checks his mirror and his blind spot, then slowly turns, in first gear, past a large detached house and into a row of lock-up garages. On foot, he is three minutes from home, and believes the lock-up is well worth the tenner a week he pays by direct debit to a landlord he has never met. His car is his livelihood, and while there is on-street parking on Ella Street, there is also the occasional gang of on-street teenage wankers to worry about. He can’t relax worrying that somebody will rip the wing mirrors off or write “Knobhead” on his advertising boards.
Allan swallows again and gives another little shudder. He’s sick of tasting his own insides. He had always presumed that the condition was a result of stress, but his current job is considerably easier than the one he did for seventeen years. He has a pretty easy life. He only has another nine years to go on the mortgage, his children are doing okay at school, he gets a fortnight in Kefalonia every August, and he doesn’t dislike his wife. They’ll still get away at Christmas, too, having recently earned a minor windfall. The money they had been saving up to repoint the brickwork at the back of the house had turned out to be far more than was necessary after Allan found a contractor who would do the job for next to nothing, cash in hand. If Liverpool would buy a decent center forward and Cheryl Cole could be persuaded to send him a picture of her in her knickers, he would have everything he could ask for.
The row of garages is deserted, as ever. There are half a dozen on either side of the central area, all with rusty blue gates and their numbers spray-painted freehand in their center. Allan pulls up next to his own garage. He looks out through the glass and decides, once again, that the tenner a week is worth it. Sure, there are a few potholes in the tarmac and somebody has dumped a mattress on top of the dumpster at the far end, but it’s nice to have a little space to call his own and where he knows the car is safe. Sometimes, when the kids have friends over and the noise is too much, he’ll come and sit here and read the paper, alone in the cool and the dark.
He steps out of the car, giving a grunt of exertion as he moves his right leg for the first time since he got in the vehicle at eight-thirty a.m. He crosses the small patch of tarmac, pulling the garage key from his pocket. Puts it in the padlock and turns. Unhooks it from the rusted metal loop. He raises the garage door, up and over, then reaches inside to pull the cord that brings the bare bulb on the far wall to life.
As he turns to head back to his vehicle, there is a movement in the periphery of his vision. A crunch of boot on broken stone. There is a moment in which he feels unbalanced, half turning, feet in opposite directions, knee twisted, hands flailing. And then he feels a blow to the back of his head.
Allan pitches forward, into the empty garage. For a moment, he wonders if the door has come down and struck him, but he cannot remember hearing the metallic clang. He wonders why he is considering this. Why here, now, he is giving it any thought at all.
There is another blow, and instantly Allan is not thinking about much anymore. He is on his face on a cement floor, smelling dust and diesel. Over the rushing of blood in his ears, he hears the distinctive grating of the garage door closing. He tries to right himself, but his limbs don’t seem to be responding to his commands. He feels fingers in his hair, then hands upon his shoulders. Feels himself being turned over onto his back. His eyes flutter open, but then a fist closes around his short hair and his head is cracked back onto the floor. After that he keeps his eyes closed.
Allan feels as though he is swimming inside his own skin; oblivious and helpless. He feels his shirt being torn away, ripping from the buttons through the expensive logo. There is a pause. Nothing. No sound, no sensation, and then he feels a tightening of the skin on his chest. He wants to raise his head. Wants to see what is happening to him, but he can taste blood and his head feels too heavy and his body is not his own anymore.
Suddenly, in the darkness, there is a voice. A robotic, inhuman thing. He cannot make out the words, but they seem familiar somehow. He struggles up. Raises himself on his elbows. Sees a figure, crouching at his side, an open plastic box beside him. The figure is raising its arms, frustrated and angry. The metallic voice is calling for medical assistance. It is refusing to help.
Allan tries to speak, and the bubbling sounds that come from his lips cause the figure to raise its head. For an instant, the merest fraction of a second, Allan sees a familiar face. Sees features he knows, twisted into anger and madness.
Then words, bestial and screeching, echoing off the bare brick walls.
And the figure is upon him, the strange object gripped in its hands, the weight and the cold and the tight sensation still upon Allan’s skin.
Allan looks up, and sees the figure raise the object over its head. For a second, he sees an image from a movie, playing in his mind. Sees an ape, holding a club in front of a blue sky, smashing a skull against uneven rocks.
The impact of the first blow breaks his nose and fills his eyes with blood.
After that, he is not really Allan anymore.
TWELVE
It started raining as McAvoy crossed the Pennines; a sudden downpour hitting the glass a mile before the Lancashire border. He passed into the storm as if driving into a waterfall, watching in his rearview mirror as Yorkshire’s green-and-brown slopes were abruptly snatched away.
The rain felt wonderful. It was good to open the window and let the droplets run in. He has baked in oppressive heat for weeks and the cool breeze and damp air had felt both cooling and healing as they touched his flesh and drenched his clothes. By the time he reached the Chester city limits, the novelty had worn off. The car was steaming up, he was shivering inside clothes soaked with both sweat and rain, and he had the beginnings of a headache from squinting through the wall of water at the brake lights of the car in front.
; He rubs his temples. Kneads his forehead. Pinches the bridge of his nose. He looks like a Plasticine man trying to disguise his identity.
On the passenger seat, his mobile phone is barking out lefts and rights, and he is grateful for its help. With the windscreen made opaque by the deluge, he would have no chance of spotting the road signs without the metallic tones of the GPS. He’s only been to Chester once before. Fin was still in a stroller and he and Roisin had thought he might like to see the elephants at the impressive city zoo. The boy had slept the entire time. Roisin and McAvoy had enjoyed it just the same. They’d had a picnic in the bat cave and gone home owning one more okapi than they did when they woke up. Roisin had fallen in love with the curious striped creature. Half giraffe, half zebra. She’d felt compelled to adopt one, and still receives monthly updates on its well-being. All in all, it had been a nice day.
“In a hundred yards, turn left . . .”
The row of shops is a jumble of damp colors and swirled shapes. He glimpses a convenience store and a takeaway, then turns the car abruptly into a quiet side road. He cruises past a school at less than five miles per hour, nosing the minivan over a speed bump, then turns right twice more. He finds himself edging down a quiet street of semi-detached homes. It’s early afternoon, so most of the homeowners are at work, their empty driveways and unlit front rooms testament to the emptiness of each property. McAvoy squints and makes out a house number on the brick wall by a white-painted front door. Consults his notes and follows the curving road another hundred yards. He pulls in outside number 17 and leans across the passenger seat, opening the electric window as he does so. He stares through the rain at Lewis Caneva’s home.
It’s an unremarkable property. Three bedrooms, a small front garden screened by tall green trees, and a boxy Fiat on the brick drive.
Craning his neck, he sees a face appear at the downstairs window.