Original Skin

by David Mark

  “Do you remember faces? Dates?”

  “Of course not,” he says, incredulous. “Just blokes.”

  “So you were you aware that Simon was a homosexual.”

  Darren snorts. “Er, just a bit,” he says, sarcastically. “He couldn’t have been any gayer, really. Not that I’m bothered, like. Whatever, y’know.”

  “And you didn’t mind him entertaining people on your doorstep?”

  “I might have had something to say about it on my doorstep,” says Darren, attempting to stand up and then sitting back down again when he realizes he is only as tall as McAvoy’s chest. “I don’t give a shit what he did in his bedroom. What’s this got to do with me?”

  Pharaoh moves beside McAvoy. “Were you sad to hear he had died?”

  Darren looks appalled by the question. He leans over the arm of the sofa and picks up a glass ashtray that looks like it has been stolen from a pub. He pulls a cigarette from the packet on the floor and lights it, taking a breathless drag. “Whatever. Tough break, man.”

  “And you didn’t suspect foul play?”

  “I didn’t think about that side of it.”

  Pharaoh pulls a face. “A man dies next door and you don’t think about it?”

  “I thought it was a shame he had died,” says Darren, examining the end of his cigarette. “He seemed a nice enough fella. But, y’know . . .”

  McAvoy’s face is impassive. “I know what?”

  “People’s lifestyles,” he says, grasping around for a way to explain himself. “You don’t know what they get up to behind closed doors, do you? For all we know, he was into all that autoerotic stuff . . .”

  “Oh, so you do have one theory,” says Pharaoh acidly. “Any others?”

  “I don’t mean that,” he says, uncomfortable in the ferocity of her sudden glare. “I mean, what am I allowed to think, these days? I vote Liberal. I mean, I would do. If I voted. And if the Liberals were still liberal. I don’t mind what people do. I used to be in a band with a gay bassist.”

  There is silence for a moment. McAvoy looks at the young man and wonders how many years there are between them. How different their views of the world. Wonders how it would feel to look out on the world with such little interest.

  “I know that song,” begins Darren, as a Curtis Mayfield tune blares out from Pharaoh’s handbag.

  Pharaoh waves a hand at him, shushing him while reaching for her phone. “Did you think he could have been murdered?” she asks.

  Darren turns to McAvoy. Seems to think for a moment. He shrugs. “Maybe for a minute. I don’t know.”

  McAvoy sighs. “The time he died. Not the day, I know you can’t remember. Just vaguely around the time. Did he have any visitors that you can recall?”

  “There were always people coming and going.”

  McAvoy arches his back and his chest muscles strain against his shirt. He is getting tired of nobody giving a damn. “Mr. Woodmansey, I appreciate that it is a Sunday afternoon and that this was not what you were expecting when you answered the door . . .”

  “Bollocks to it,” says Pharaoh. Her phone stops vibrating before she can take the call. “McAvoy, leave the lad alone.”

  She turns on the youngster, suddenly a mum, furious with her son. “Did you, or did you bloody not see or hear anything that I might find even vaguely fucking interesting?”

  The young man backs himself into the sofa as though retreating from punches. He looks desperately up at McAvoy, and then appears to start thinking hard.

  “He had a friend,” he says. “A lass. Bit odd-looking. Smiley. She picked him up sometimes . . .”

  “Anything else? Ages of his visitors? Anything?”

  Darren gives up. Looks at the end of his cigarette. “I guess they didn’t look gay.”

  McAvoy’s shoulders sag. “What does gay look like?”

  “Like Simon! These were blokes. Like, just blokes.”

  For a moment there is silence. Wordlessly, Pharaoh takes back the twenty-pound note. “You haven’t done anything wrong,” she says quietly as McAvoy stomps from the room. “I just don’t like you.”

  She follows McAroy down the corridor and finds her sergeant leaning against the brick wall, shaking his head slightly and looking cross.

  “Nobody cares,” he says. “People die next door and their neighbors just think it’s none of their business.”

  “He helped him carry his oven,” she points out.

  “It’s hardly the same.”

  “McAvoy, people don’t want to think about it. That lad could barely afford decent fags. He sure as hell couldn’t afford to move. He’s not going to want to let himself think his neighbor’s been killed.”

  “You were as hard on him as I was,” he says defensively.

  “I’d have happily been harder.” She smiles. “I got bitten by a dog this week. I’m not in a happy place.”

  McAvoy leans his head back. Closes his eyes. “I’m not sure if I should ever have started this. I feel like a bloody amateur . . .”

  Pharaoh is about to offer some words of comfort when her phone begins to ring again. She answers, and listens for a moment.

  “Right,” she says into the mobile. “Send me the number.” She takes the phone from her ear. Looks at the screen. “Got it. You sure? Right.”

  She hangs up. McAvoy looks at her expectantly.

  “Dan’s managed to unlock some of the mobile’s call history,” she says. “Knows his stuff, that lad, even if the kisses on his e-mails are in capitals. And the specialist lab he sent it off to reckons there are two different types of dirt present in the phone’s insides. Silt and sand, as you would expect, but also mud. Seeds that have no business in a tidal river. It looks like it was buried twice.”

  McAvoy says nothing. Takes it in. “The call history,” he says at last. “Tell me.”

  “It called a taxi firm the day Simon died. Made no calls afterward. And it belonged to Simon.”

  Pharaoh is already dialing the taxi firm. Introduces herself and asks for the manager. Explains what she needs. Uses the right amount of sweetness and snarl. Hangs up and motions for McAvoy to follow her back to the car. She leans against the bonnet, waiting for another call, and breathes out with a whistle.

  “Exciting, police work, isn’t it?”

  McAvoy, despite himself, manages a little grin. He watches as she unlocks the car, removes his Tupperware box from the passenger seat, and starts eating the cold roast lamb and gravy. “If you want this, you’re going to have to fight me for it,” she says, licking her fingers. “And be warned—I bite.”

  Her phone rings. Between mouthfuls, she answers. McAvoy hands her his notepad and pen. She scrawls down the address and says thanks.

  “The taxi company says according to their records they received two calls at that time, on that day. One was a cab between the Empress in town and the Tiger in Cottingham,” she says, one half of her mouth curling up and the other still chewing a roast potato. “The other was a pickup from Morrison’s going to Beck Lane. Welton.”

  “Near the Dale?”

  “Near enough.”

  “Address?”

  She nods. Swallows. Pulls her police radio from her handbag and contacts the control room.

  “This is Trish Pharaoh,” she says. “I need you to check an address for me. Beck Lane, Welton. Thanks.”

  They stand in silence. It feels like waiting for a diagnosis.

  McAvoy frowns. “He wouldn’t get a taxi home, would he? You don’t kill somebody and then call a cab . . .”

  Pharaoh shrugs. “Morrison’s is a minute from here. Could have bumped Simon off and walked it. Ordered a cab, dumped the phone when they got near home. Would never have expected anybody to find out. Nothing sinister in getting a cab home with your shopping.”

  “Did the passenger have
shopping? Did we get a description?”

  “Driver’s in Marbella, apparently. They’re trying to rustle him up on the mobile.”

  Moments pass. McAvoy, for something to do, plucks a leaf from a privet hedge and folds it into quarters. Pharaoh presses her knuckles into her forehead.

  Both police officers jump as her radio crackles. “This is control, guv. We’ve got the details you asked for. That property belongs to a Peter Tressider. Councillor, it says here . . .”

  Pharaoh and McAvoy stare at each other. After a moment, Pharaoh switches off the radio.

  “It could be nothing to do with all this,” says McAvoy instinctively, but even as he speaks, his mind is soaring back to the riverbank: to the two stick figures in the distance, and the phone, winking up at him, from the mud.

  “No,” says his boss, quietly. “But.”

  “Yeah. But.”

  Pharaoh drops her head to the car bonnet. Wonders if her injuries are sufficiently well healed to remove her bandages.

  She wants to look her best when she goes to question the new chairman of the Police Authority in connection with murder.

  ON SUNNY DAYS all roads lead to the Country Park Inn. It sits no more than a few hundred yards from where the Humber Bridge stitches Yorkshire to Lincolnshire, and offers the best view in the county of the towering road and its metal harp strings, albeit from virtually underneath. Mole’s-eye view, McAvoy had said when he brought Roisin here. She had been good enough to laugh.

  The tables and chairs on the patio area at the front are constantly occupied, families and friends sipping iced cider and flicking cigarette butts onto the shingle beach that leads down to the coffee-colored waters. Across the water is another strip of mud leading up to Barton. There’s a wildlife sanctuary over there that McAvoy has yet to get around to visiting. An art gallery that was once the longest tiled building in Europe, and which used to be a rope-making factory before it fell to ruin. McAvoy read once that they made the ropes for Hillary’s conquest of Everest. It is a snippet of information that refuses to leave his brain.

  Could be another country, thinks McAvoy, staring across the water. North Lincolnshire remains somehow “over there.”

  The river that separates the two counties is the same stretch of mud and swirling currents that, centuries earlier, halted the Romans in their march north. Today it is still a barrier. “Humberside” was reviled on both sides when the government tried to create a new county that included towns north and south of the water.

  Yellow-bellies. That’s what the Yorkshiremen call people from Lincolnshire. Miserable, tight-arsed bastards is the rather less poetic riposte from across the water.

  There had been rejoicing all around when the boundary lines were put right. Hull became Yorkshire again. Humberside Police have yet to change its name to something more popular. It still polices both banks.

  McAvoy likes it here. So do plenty of others. Although the wind still whips in cold from the east, the glimpse of blue sky has been enough to persuade the county’s drinkers that they should be outside, and there are perhaps fifty people thronging the outside of the pub, wrapped up warm and holding glasses and bottles, as McAvoy and Pharaoh cross the car park.

  “Bloody mad,” says Pharaoh, nodding at a girl in her late teens who appears to have dressed for a tropical beach, and who is turning a shade of blue that matches her bottle of WKD.

  “Inside, yes?”

  “Too right.”

  They enter the large, brightly lit bar. On the walls are posters advertising tribute acts and local singers. They sit uncomfortably next to mass-produced abstracts on canvas and blackboards advertising the daily restaurant specials.

  Pharaoh orders herself a double vodka with lemonade and lime, and McAvoy decides that half a pint of bitter would be a welcome anesthetic. They take their drinks to a corner booth circled by glass, and sit opposite each other.

  “Cheers.”

  They clink glasses.

  “Here’s to following your nose.”

  McAvoy looks down, ashamed to be the victim of the sarcastic toast.

  Eventually Pharaoh gives a snort of laughter, then shakes her head. “They don’t like me anyway.”

  “Who?”

  “Top brass.”

  “Oh.” McAvoy looks out of the windows. Watches the green channel marker bobbing on the swollen waters of the estuary. “I’m sure they respect you.”

  She shrugs. “I don’t know. No black-and-whites, are there? They like it when I catch villains. Don’t like it when I don’t.”

  “Your cleanup record is top-drawer,” points out McAvoy, gulping half of his drink and then surreptitiously spitting some of it back in the glass. He has no more change in his pocket. He has to make his drink last.

  “My predecessor’s cleanup was nigh on a hundred percent,” she says.

  McAvoy bites both lips. Any mention of Doug Roper makes his scars hurt. “It was all lies,” he says.

  “Yeah.” She pouts. “Wish I could tell some.”

  They drink their drinks. Watch the channel marker. Think their thoughts.

  “You going to tell me what’s happening in there?” asks Pharaoh, making a gun of her forefinger and thumb and pointing it at her sergeant’s forehead.

  McAvoy rubs his hands together. Wonders if he should just keep his trap shut. Realizes that he can’t.

  “It’s a sex thing,” he says, looking away, and realizing as he does so just how feeble and prudish it makes him look. “Simon Appleyard has been meeting men off the Internet for sex. One of those men killed him. They set him up to be lying on the floor of his living room when they arrived. Even made him pick his own noose. Strangled him to death. Made it look like suicide. Took his phone and his laptop. Dumped them.”

  Pharaoh is nodding thoughtfully. She clinks the ice in her glass. Runs a short, jeweled finger around the rim.

  “Were they killing Simon specifically, or just anyone they could get their hands on?”

  McAvoy picks up a beer mat. Starts spinning it on its end as he thinks. “They wanted to kill Simon,” he says, and hearing it out loud makes it seem more real. “He knew something. Saw something . . .”

  “Based on what?”

  McAvoy gestures with his hands, casting around as if trying to pluck the right answer from the air.

  “So far, three councillors’ names have come up in connection with this. I wish one of them hadn’t, but it has. Fuck, just saying that makes me need to pee. Why did it have to be Tressider’s place? Anyway, fucking hell. So . . . yeah . . . three councillors. And that’s just with my tiny bit of digging. None of them would want their secrets coming out.”

  “Hepburn got himself elected by playing the gay card,” says Pharaoh, warming to her role of devil’s advocate. “He wouldn’t care.”

  “And Cabourne looks like he wouldn’t say boo to a goose.”

  “So.”

  They meet each other’s eyes.

  “Tressider,” says McAvoy.

  “Bloody hell,” says Pharaoh.

  They sit in silence. McAvoy’s mind turns to the day by the river. Himself, damp to the bone, the smell of horses on his hands, and two stick figures talking by the water. Could one have been Tressider? Could the big, bearded future MP really have come straight from the Police Authority meeting and then thrown Simon Appleyard’s phone into the mud of the River Hull?

  Pharaoh finishes her drink. Looks at McAvoy’s. “Drink it, you girl.”

  He does so. She goes to the bar and comes back with the same again for both of them.

  “So if he’s just got himself a high-profile job and he’s on the fast track to Westminster . . .”

  “Then maybe he has reasons to make sure all the skeletons in his closet are very much dead.”

  They look at each other. “We’re being harsh on him,” says Ph
araoh at last. “He’s a big lovable bugger, after all. Likes you. All we have is the fact that somebody took a cab from Morrison’s to his house on the day Simon Appleyard was murdered. Called the cab on a mobile that was very likely used to set up the murder of a practicing homosexual . . .”

  McAvoy finishes his first drink and starts on the next. “It’s not exactly damning.”

  “No. Nor does it look good.”

  After a moment, Pharaoh starts tapping her fingers on her teeth. “Show me the website.”

  “Guv?”

  “This Playmatez thingy he was on. Where all these people seem to meet to get their kicks. Cabourne was on it, yeah? And I bet Hepburn’s no stranger. Let’s see how it all works.”

  McAvoy looks around him. The pub is almost deserted. He pulls his laptop from his bag and opens it up. Searches for the website.

  “Come round this side,” says Pharaoh. “We’re not playing Battleship.”

  McAvoy slips in beside his boss on the other side of the table and spins the laptop to face him. The desktop wallpaper is a photo of Roisin, laughing, as a baby Fin closes his pudgy fingers around one of her gold necklaces.

  “You take that?”

  He nods.

  “Pretty. She looks young.”

  “Eighteen,” he says.

  “And you were?”

  “Twenty-seven,” he says, not looking at her.

  “Girls mature quicker than boys,” says Pharaoh, looking at the side of his head as if willing him to glance in her direction.

  He says nothing. Intends saying nothing more.

  “Go on, then,” says Pharaoh, sighing, and pointing at the screen. “Show me some bummers.”

  He finds the website. Blue background with toned bodies and lustful glances superimposed.

  “Women, too?” asks Pharaoh, looking at the images.

  “You click your preferences,” says McAvoy. “Tell them whether you want a man, a woman, or you’re not particular.”

  “And they say romance is dead. Show me something.”

  McAvoy gives her a quick guide around the site. Shows her how to create a personal profile and where to post messages.