Sorrow Bound

by David Mark

  “Guv? I’m with Maria Caneva . . .”

  “I know you are, Hector,” she says, and she sounds snappy and tired. “You can tell her that her brother has just abducted the surgeon who saved Sebastien Hoyer-Wood’s life. You can tell her he’s dropped off a rotting corpse at the fucking scene.”

  McAvoy presses his teeth together until he can taste blood, and he hears something pop in his ear.

  Another one.

  He listens for a few more moments then hangs up, telling her he’ll be as quick as he can. He turns back to Maria.

  “If you know where he is . . .”

  She shakes her head.

  “Who he might be with . . .”

  She shrugs.

  He feels like crying.

  “Please . . .”

  Impulsively, she reaches out her hand and takes his. She looks at the bruised knuckles. Up, past his blood-speckled shirt to his red-rimmed eyes.

  “It can’t be Angelo,” she says, though her voice quavers. It seems as if some part of her is waking up for the first time in years.

  “Please, Maria. Does he have friends? How did he leave when he left here? Was he in a car? And the baby? Whose was the baby?”

  Maria stares at the bruises on McAvoy’s skin. Then she stands and crosses to the fireplace. She pulls one of the slates from the ugly construction and pulls out a scrap of paper. She hands it to him.

  “That’s where he was staying a year ago. Some mate. I never rang it.”

  McAvoy turns the paper over in his hands. It’s a phone number with a Hull code.

  He holds the paper up to the light.

  Sees. Sees it all.

  He’s up and out the door before he can say thank you. Before he can express his gratitude to the strange, broken girl who took comfort in fantasizing about the deaths of those who saved a rapist’s life.

  The echo of the slamming door is still reverberating in the room when she reaches under the sofa and pulls out her phone. She punches a number.

  “Hi. Chamomile House? I was wondering whether . . .”

  NINETEEN

  The path is thick mud and dead leaves; a tangle of stinging nettles and brambles. Thorns whip at Helen Tremberg’s bare legs as she slips and slithers over the uneven ground; red welts and white spots appearing on her exposed skin.

  It’s just gone seven a.m. and she is a little over a mile from her home. She’s changed the route of her morning run and is regretting it. The path is almost impassable. The mud thrown up by her running shoes is halfway up her back and her ankle is starting to throb. Changing the route was a bad decision. She took a wrong turn, somewhere. Made a mistake. It’s becoming a habit.

  Helen focuses on her breathing and the music. Tries to inhale in time with the beat. Holds the oxygen in her lungs for two bars, then releases it.

  “And it feels just like . . .”

  In Helen’s earphones, Annie Lennox is screeching about walking on broken glass. As Helen loses her footing once more, she considers offering the singer a straight swap. She’d happily take the broken glass over the weeds and horse shit of Caistor’s Canada Lane.

  Helen used to walk up this overgrown bridleway with her granddad when she was a kid. They would pick elderberries in late summer. Pluck sloes from the hedgerows in early autumn. It’s an overgrown and boggy track where the treetops lean in to form a natural steeple at various points. The light is never the same two days in a row as the shifting branches and leaves flicker on the constant breeze. It leads up to the broad green pasture where Helen used to go sledding with her friends when the snows would fall and cut Caistor off from the rest of the world for a blissful few days each winter. It’s a place of happy memories where the rich, earthy scents of the countryside combine to form a deep perfume that feels almost healing as she gulps it down.

  But Helen did not fall asleep feeling proud of herself. She doubts she ever will again.

  Her thoughts keep returning to the man on the other end of the phone.

  To Roisin.

  To McAvoy.

  They were her first thoughts as she woke. She keeps telling herself not to be so silly. Tells herself that nobody would be fool enough to attack a policeman’s wife. Tells herself that Roisin knew what she was doing when she took that bloody money. Why the hell did she do it? She tries to harden her thoughts against her. But she cannot swallow her own lies. Cannot persuade herself there is anybody lower than herself.

  As she runs, she finds her mind filling with pictures of McAvoy. She remembers their first meeting. Remembers that agonizing walk from Queen’s Gardens to Hull Crown Court. It had rained the night before and the damp pavements were patterned with the crushed shells of snails that had not got out of the way as the city’s commuters began their walks to work. McAvoy had kept stopping every five or six steps to pick up any snail he thought was in harm’s way. He filled his pockets with them, then ran back to Queen’s Gardens to put them safely on the grass. Then he had run back to her, red-faced and embarrassed, while she had just stared up at him, openmouthed, and wondered whether she should write the incident down in her notebook to be used as evidence should he ever go off the rails and shoot up a school.

  The path begins to dip and the ground becomes more solid underfoot. Helen focuses on where she is placing her feet. Hears the music. Hears her own blood, pumping in her ears . . .

  Two terriers run out from the driveway of the only house that stands on this stretch of the bridleway. It’s a large, white property, with apple and pear trees standing invitingly in the center of an overgrown garden. Helen stumbles as a Jack Russell jumps at her legs. The shaggy-looking Yorkshire terrier barks loud enough to drown out the music, and Helen feels a sudden stabbing pain in her chest as she swallows her own shout of surprise. She starts to cough, and kicks out at the nearest dog as they jump excitedly up at her.

  “Sorry, sorry, they think the whole path belongs to them . . .”

  Helen whips off her earphones. A sixty-something woman with a healthy complexion and two too many teeth in the top row is crunching over the gravel. She’s smiling broadly, exposing so many incisors that her grin looks like it should be used by druids as a place of worship. Helen recognizes her from the pub. Helen tries to smile back, to say it’s okay, but can’t seem to remember how to do it. She just ends up waving both hands around her face as though warding off a wasp, and then she gets flustered and pushes herself off from the gatepost at a sprint.

  The dogs bark louder but are called to heel.

  Over Annie Lennox’s voice, Helen fancies she can hear herself being referred to as a “stroppy cow.”

  Helen staggers down the sloping path. She feels her ankle turn again as she slips on the old bricks that have been used to patch up the many gaps in the rubble and earth. She wants to be at home. Wants to shower the dirt and the shame from her skin. Wants to slip into her plain work clothes and hide herself away behind a computer monitor. Wants to pretend. Wants to be somebody else, or perhaps a different version of herself. She’s no good at this. No use at introspection and analysis. No good at thinking about right and wrong . . .

  The music in her ears switches unexpectedly. Her phone is ringing.

  Helen slows and pulls the phone from the clip on her running shorts.

  It’s from a withheld number.

  Helen feels her hands tremble, as if she needs sugar or sleep. She feels a sudden desire to throw the phone into the nearby field. To change her number. To just keep running.

  “Helen Tremberg,” she says, breathless and shaky, as she takes the call.

  “Good morning, Detective Constable. I trust you slept well?”

  Helen closes her eyes. Leans both arms against the trunk of a tree and waits for her breathing to slow down.

  “You said you wouldn’t call . . .”

  “Indeed, indeed. And for that, may I express
my sorrow and regret. You have been of considerable service to our organization, and to further impose ourselves upon you is not something I undertake lightly. However, I do believe that the information I am about to impart to you is of considerable importance.”

  Helen presses her hands to her eyes so hard that brightly colored spots of light seem to explode behind her eyelids.

  “Just tell me what you want,” she says, and her voice sounds childlike and weak.

  “Last night,” comes the reply. “The young gentleman whom you have had in custody. He made an error of judgment. He has caused great distress to your sergeant and his family. Distress we had not intended. For this reason, the young man in question is no longer under our protection. More than this, he is yours to do with as you will, should you find him before one of my associates does. However, I am advised that Mr. Downey has not taken kindly to the indignities he suffered. More so, he feels that the lady who took his money and embarrassed him is personally accountable for all of the inconveniences he has endured. I have every faith in my associates to locate him and bring this situation to resolution, but you may be well-advised to keep Mrs. McAvoy somewhere safe. I do not think her husband would respond to this communication in the same manner as you. Having done so, I feel a lightening of my conscience. For this reason alone, I am grateful to you, and can guarantee that there will be no further communications from myself or my associates. I thank you for your time, and hope that you enjoy the rest of your morning jog. Good-bye.”

  As Helen stares at the phone, it returns to playing her music.

  Helen looks behind her, up the dirt track, through the tunnel of overhanging, interlocking branches. Her world seems to be narrowing. The scent in her nostrils is suddenly thick and overpowering. She can smell dead creatures in the hedgerows. Can hear the sound of spiders chewing on desiccated corpses in their webs. She can hear the screams of dragonflies and ladybirds and the crunch as sloes are squashed beneath careless feet.

  Helen is no longer jogging.

  She wants to run for her life.

  • • •

  The sky seems to be moving in a series of freeze-frames. As McAvoy looks up, the dragon he had previously spotted in the skies becomes a cliff face, then jerks, unsteadily, into a choir congregation.

  He turns back to the road. Watches as the first spots of rain begin to kiss the glass.

  Looks up again.

  Now the heavens are a snapshot of a storm-lashed ocean. The clouds broil as waves, curling and crashing in upon themselves in an explosion of black and gray.

  McAvoy looks at his phone. It may be due to the fall from his pocket or a consequence of the storm clouds that block out the light, but he is struggling to get a signal. He has managed to call Pharaoh and update her, but was halfway through a garbled conversation with Ben Neilsen when he lost his phone signal, and he cannot seem to get it back. Thankfully, he had already received most of the information he needed. Got the address. The name. The next piece of a puzzle that’s turning his brain to paste.

  The minivan comes to a lazy halt in a parking space on Rufforth Garth. He’s on the edge of Hull’s Bransholme estate. It used to be Europe’s biggest council estate, though nobody ever took the time to write that on the marketing materials or WELCOME TO BRANSHOLME signs. The area has had a lot of money spent on it in recent years, and while it has not exactly become an address to boast about, living on Bransholme is no longer a tick in the “against” column when applying for a job. It’s a sprawling community of small, near-identical houses. Most are crammed into cul-de-sacs that branch off from main roads sporting so many speed bumps they look corrugated.

  McAvoy takes a deep breath, steps from the vehicle.

  Wincing into the fine rain that has begun to blow in on a harsh wind from the east, McAvoy looks around at the nearby vehicles for one that matches the registration plate he has scrawled in his notebook. He can’t see it. Can’t see the van that screeched away from a hospital in Norfolk with Hoyer-Wood’s surgeon in the back, having just deposited a rotting corpse on the tarmac. It’s all Volkswagen Golfs and old BMWs—their suspensions lowered so they give off a pretty shower of sparks as they scrape the speed bumps.

  McAvoy rubs some color into his cheeks, then heads for the address Ben had shouted down the phone at him over the sound of static and rushing wind. He pushes open a metal garden gate and walks down a well-tended front path. He finds himself in front of an old-fashioned and single-glazed front door. The two panes of frosted glass at its center do not look particularly sturdy. Were he to lean on it he fancies it might fall down. He decides this could be useful, so files the information away without allowing himself to think too hard about it.

  Three raps on the glass: a policeman’s Morse code for “Open the fucking door.”

  No answer.

  Tries again, louder now.

  He opens the letter box and feels cold air against his face as he looks into an untidy kitchen and down at dirty linoleum. He wonders what he expects to see. Feels an urge to giggle as he imagines seeing Angelo Caneva standing over Dr. Pradesh with a scalpel and some surgical rib-spreaders. He wonders if he should have uniformed support. Whether he should wait for Pharaoh. Whether he has got the whole fucking thing completely wrong.

  “You won’t get him during the day, love.”

  McAvoy turns. A woman in her late thirties is standing by the front gate. She has a small child on her hip. The woman has a wrinkled, puckered mouth and features; her hair is long, lank, and bottle-black, and she has a leather jacket on over a small tank top and tight black jeans. She’s wearing a lot of makeup and has a vaguely Gothic look about her, though the effect is spoiled somewhat by the tiger-feet slippers.

  “You’re after Nick, yeah?”

  McAvoy turns away from the closed door. Gives the woman his full attention.

  “When did you last see him?”

  She looks up, her eyes revolving unnaturally, as if she is examining the inside of her own skull.

  “You a copper?”

  McAvoy isn’t sure how to answer. He wants her to talk to him. Wants her to like him.

  “He’s a bright-looking lad,” says McAvoy at last, nodding at the child in her arms. “What’s his name?”

  The woman smiles, showing smoker’s teeth. “Reebok,” she says with a laugh.

  McAvoy doesn’t know what facial expression to pull. “That’s different.”

  She shrugs. “He’s not mine, don’t worry. I think it’s bloody daft, but if she wants to name her kid after a running shoe, who am I to judge? There’s a kid in my daughter’s class called Pebbles. Could be worse.”

  McAvoy walks toward her, ready to show her his warrant card. He is reaching into his pocket when the child fixes him with a piercing look and then bursts out laughing. McAvoy and the woman look at the boy, who is pointing at McAvoy and giggling hard.

  “Am I that funny?” asks McAvoy, trying to look offended.

  “Brave, Brave,” says the child, and sets off in another fit of hysterics.

  The woman shrugs good-naturedly. “He must think you look like someone from the film.”

  “Which film?”

  “Disney cartoon. Scottish princess, wants to be a warrior. Billy Connolly’s the voice of the dad . . .”

  She stops herself. Looks him up and down and appears to agree with the child. She sniggers a little, then uses her sleeve to wipe the rain from the child’s face.

  McAvoy gives in to a little laugh of his own and then closes his fingers around the warrant card. Holds it tight enough to hurt.

  “You’re a neighbor?”

  “Next door,” says the woman, jerking her head. “I’m Jen.”

  McAvoy shakes her hand. It’s cold and slim and the palm feels slightly clammy. He introduces himself.

  “I was hoping to talk to Nick.”

  “He works day
s. Some nights, too. Busy man, but you’ve got to go where the work is, don’t you?”

  As they talk, the rain begins to come down harder. There is a low rumble and the face in the clouds tears itself in two. The sky becomes an ocean; upended and draining onto the city below.

  “Jesus, look at this,” says Jen, huddling into her coat. “Do you want to come inside?”

  McAvoy pulls up his jacket collar and follows her into the neighboring property. In moments he is soaked to the bone; his hair stuck to his face, and shirt clinging to the muscles in his chest, arms, and back.

  McAvoy shakes himself like a damp dog. Looks up. He finds himself in a square kitchen. A small patio table and chairs sit next to a plain white door. The table supports a basket of unwashed laundry, which contains an unfeasible amount of leopard-print underwear and tracksuit trousers. The heat in the room comes from the far end, beside the metal sink which overflows with pots and pans soaking in a sea of cold water and dissolving bubbles. The door of the oven is wide open and heat emerges like dragon’s breath. Three small children and a dalmatian are sitting in front of it, eating biscuits and playing with blocks.

  “I’m a babysitter,” says Jen, filling the kettle. “That’s Pauline, Luke, and the little one’s Colin.”

  McAvoy looks at the toddler, who is sucking on a plastic brick and trying to get his hand into his nappy.

  “He looks a Colin,” he says, and then leans himself against the wall. He tries to order his thoughts.

  The phone number that Maria Caneva supplied him with is registered at the house next door to this one, on Rufforth Garth. The electoral register shows the occupier to be a Nick Peace. Before he lost the phone signal, McAvoy had instructed Ben Neilsen to dig up anything and everything on Peace, and to cross-reference those checks with Angelo Caneva. Like shapes in the clouds, McAvoy is starting to see fuller pictures.

  “Like I said, I was hoping to talk to your neighbor,” says McAvoy, as chattily as he can manage over the sound of the playing children and banging pots. “Well, his friend, more accurately. Angelo?”