by David Mark
It is bank holiday Monday, just after 4 p.m. A bright spring day. Nap time for Lilah. Above them, the bluest of skies and a round, orange sun. Viewed as a photograph, the image would suggest darting swallows, fat bluebottles. In truth, this valley with its muddy, root-twisted footpath, its gorse bushes and cow parsley, its dandelions and wild garlic, channels a wind that cuts like steel. Even McAvoy, inured to the harshest of elements during a childhood battling hail and snow on his father’s Highland croft, suppresses a shiver as the wind tugs at his sweat-dampened fringe. Shivering, they retreat into the shadow of the small, squat church that stands to their rear to find comfort among the headstones and the lichen-covered memorials. Enjoy the distant haze of bluebells, curling around the trunks of adolescent trees like tendrils of cerulean smoke.
The trio hold one another in silence as a chilly gust, unimpeded in its rush from the North Sea, tumbles down the valley. It shakes loose a maelstrom of apple blossom from the overhanging branches. Petals cascade like snow, landing in Roisin’s jet-black hair and tickling her skin.
‘It’s pretty here,’ says Roisin. ‘I’ve always thought that if people are going to go missing or get murdered, they should do so in pretty places. It makes it much nicer for me and the bairns.’
‘Don’t,’ says McAvoy, shutting his eyes tight, like a child turning his face away from a spoonful of something unpleasant. ‘What if she’s here, Roisin? Under our feet, right now. What if we’ve already stepped on her face?’
Roisin shakes her head and reaches down to pick a daisy. He loves her ability to do something so simple and innocent. Loves that she indulges him his obsession. Has made space in their relationship for the missing girl.
‘There are worse places to be left alone,’ she says, and starts plucking petals from the flower. ‘He loves me, he loves the dead lass, he loves me, he loves the dead lass . . .’
McAvoy isn’t sure whether to chide her for insensitivity or kiss her for being so adorable. It is a dilemma he faces most days. Were he not a policeman he doubts he would care much either way. But McAvoy was a policeman in his soul long before he put on the uniform and even today, as acting senior officer on call, he cannot forget that at any moment his phone could ring and inform him of another horrible thing done in the name of passion, revenge or desire. He carries his job with him at all times. Feels the burden within him, and without, like a rucksack full of bricks whose weight only diminishes when he takes his wife and child into his embrace.
Beneath his grey woollen coat, McAvoy has squeezed his considerable bulk into a dark blue suit, complete with yellow shirt and old school tie. His suits are specially made, bought off the internet from a supplier specialising in men of stature. McAvoy has stature to spare. He is a conservative 6 foot 5 inches. He has a rugby-player physique and a handsome, scarred face topped with unruly ginger hair. Grey hairs have begun to speckle his beard and the darkness beneath his eyes betrays the things he has seen. He would look like a nightclub bouncer were it not for the gentleness around his cow-eyes and the freckles that spray across his pink-and-white cheeks.
Roisin, ten years his junior and made all the more elfin by her proximity to her towering husband, wears tight black jeans and a designer sweatshirt beneath the burgundy leather jacket she opened with such excitement on Christmas morning two years ago and has barely taken off since. McAvoy knows that despite the cold, Roisin would be wearing something more revealing were it not for her self-consciousness over the scarring on her legs. She used to love showing off her skin every time the sun pushed its face through the clouds. But an accident two years ago ripped holes in her shins. Left her perfect legs looking like somebody had carved their initials to the bone.
McAvoy looks around him. Marvels at the absence of company. He had not really expected to find an army of Japanese tourists in the grounds of St Ethelburga’s church but imagined there would be at least a couple of ramblers and a picnicker or two. Instead, he and his family have Great Givendale to themselves. It has a timeless quality, this place, in this moment. He fancies that he and Roisin could be plucked from their own time, transplanted to a different century and the view would remain unchanged. Reckons they would be unaware they had tumbled through the ages until the locals turned up and started jabbing him with pitchforks and suggesting that both the witch and the giant be burned without delay. In truth, the little church to McAvoy’s rear was only built in 1849 and in times gone by, the geese that are busy having a noisy argument down by the tear-shaped pond would be surrounded by onions and sitting in a pot.
‘I don’t mind,’ says Roisin, softly, as she settles back against the wooden bench and nods at his shirt pocket. ‘You can tell me again. I won’t snore. And if you argue, I’m hitting you.’
McAvoy considers protesting but his left bicep is already sore from the repeated punches she gave him while driving here, and he doesn’t think he can take another of her ‘love-taps’ without making a girlish noise. Roisin does not know her own strength.
McAvoy unfolds the rectangle of paper and waves it at a butterfly that seems to have taken a liking to Lilah’s brightly coloured summer dress. He looks again at the tangle of lines and smudges of forest that make up his satellite map of the area around Pocklington, on the road from Hull to York, where East Yorkshire becomes North Yorkshire and the house prices start to rise.
Lets himself think of her. Hannah. The missing girl. The young lassie who was just beginning to live . . .
The Serious and Organised Crime Unit of Humberside Police has been searching for Hannah Kelly since August of last year. Since that time, McAvoy has got to know this rural landscape pretty well. Has snagged his clothes on just about every briar and branch. He knows she’s here somewhere. He just doesn’t know where to dig. Doesn’t know whether it’s wrong to bring his family here for picnics. He shivers at the thought that he missed something while lost in a daydream about walking through these woods with his wife and children.
‘Make a nest,’ says Roisin, nodding at the damp grass.
McAvoy obliges, shrugging off his coat and laying it down. He folds Lilah into its soft, grey arms. He kisses her cheek; his nose touching the tiny plastic device that helps her hear her parents’ words and which she has grown adept at blaming for her occasional acts of disobedience.
‘Go on,’ says Roisin, putting her legs across McAvoy’s as he sits down on the bench. ‘You’ll feel better.’
McAvoy doesn’t need his notes. Knows the whole sequence of events off by heart.
‘At just after one p.m. on Sunday the twenty-ninth of August, Hannah phoned for a taxi. It picked her up from the back of the Bowman’s Tavern in Howden twelve minutes later. Hannah shared a house around three hundred metres away, on Bridgegate, with three friends. She had been invited with them to see a movie at the leisure park at Castleford but had declined, saying she had a migraine. When she ordered the cab, she told the operator she was heading to a village on the road to York but couldn’t remember the name. When he picked her up, she said it was Millington.’
‘That’s the place we had the ice cream, yes?’ asks Roisin. ‘Pretty little village. Top of the hill?’
McAvoy nods. ‘She told him to take her to the Gait Inn. We had a drink and a meal there just before Christmas, remember? Lilah drew on the table with her fork and you called the landlord a fecking eejit?’
Roisin grins at the memory. Encourages him to continue.
‘She talked a lot on the journey. Sat in the front and gabbled. Told the driver about her work.’
‘What did she do?’
‘Press Association in Howden. TV listings for the Radio Times. She did two years of an English degree at the University of Hull but didn’t finish it and took a job there on a recommendation from a friend. She was pretty good, apparently, though I’m not sure what qualifies as “good”. Anyhow, the driver asked her why she was heading out to the middle of nowhere. She said something about meeting an old school friend who was staying at the temple up the road.�
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‘That’s the big place? Looks like Downton Abbey?’
‘The Madhyamaka Kadampa Meditation Centre, yes,’ says McAvoy, stroking his wife’s leg and remembering the gales of laughter that his boss and friend, Trish Pharaoh, had thrown his way when he first read out the name – begging him to repeat it again and again. She makes him do the same with the word ‘purple’ when she’s bored. Apparently the Scots can’t say it, though that came as news to him.
‘Sounds exotic,’ says Roisin. ‘A good place to hide who you are.’
McAvoy shakes his head. ‘We’ve checked several times and none of the guests, staff or residents at the temple had any knowledge of her.’
McAvoy tails off. Scans the treeline. Spots his son, still happily beating a sycamore to death with a branch as he fights dragons and defends fair maidens in his mind’s eye. He reminds himself to teach the boy the Latin name for the tree when he comes back, sweating and excited and demanding to know where the next sandwich is coming from.
McAvoy looks at his wife, and tries to keep it light as he proceeds.
‘So we presume that it was a cover story. The driver said she had a sports bag with her and was wearing jeans, a sweatshirt and trainers. He dropped her at the pub. There were a dozen drinkers outside, enjoying the sunshine and hating the ladybirds.’
‘A loveliness of ladybirds,’ whispers Roisin to her sleeping child, and looks at her husband proudly. He grins back.
‘Aye, the plague of last summer. Couldn’t pick up a glass of lemonade without finding a hundred ladybirds using it as a bubble-bath. But the ramblers outside the Gait were willing to put up with it. They saw her get out of the cab and go inside. She gave them this little wave. And not long after she came out again, dressed in a little white tennis dress and Doc Marten boots.’
‘Bit of a transformation,’ says Roisin, sneering slightly at the very idea of such a combination.
‘Not her usual sort of outfit either, according to her friends. Prudish. That was the word they used. Not much skin on show. They couldn’t even imagine her wearing something like that.’
‘Was her hair up or down?’ asks Roisin, chewing on her lip.
McAvoy has to fight the urge to grin. Detective Superintendent Trish Pharaoh had asked the same question.
‘Down,’ he says. ‘The drinkers outside said she looked a million dollars. At first they wouldn’t have recognised her as the same girl. Heavy eye make-up too. She gave them a smile. Same little wave. Hoisted her bag. Set off up the road.’
McAvoy turns his head in the direction of the road in question, Grimthorpe Hill. Fastest way from the middle of nowhere to the back of beyond.
‘Three different motorists have come forward to say they spotted her walking this way from Millington. The last of them was about a quarter of a mile from here. She was looking at her phone as she walked. Looked a little warm but not unhappy. Certainly not running from anything or anyone.’
‘And then?’
McAvoy rubs his face with his large, rough palm. ‘Her mobile phone disappeared from the network. There’s quite a good service up here, surprisingly. They could pinpoint pretty damn close to where the signal went dead. And that doesn’t mean switched off, Roisin. That means somebody taking the battery out. The tech wizards can still pinpoint a dead phone.’
Roisin nods. She knows.
‘Her friends didn’t report her missing until the next day, and even then it wasn’t to the police. She didn’t turn up for work and her boss asked one of her housemates where she was. She was as surprised as the boss that Hannah hadn’t shown up. Started ringing her and got no response, then realised her bed hadn’t been slept in. That night one of them spoke to their parents and they suggested calling the police. So they went to the local station. Got a PC who told them she was a grown woman and probably just with a bloke. It didn’t come to CID for four days.’
‘What was she like?’ asks Roisin, as she nibbles on a piece of hawthorn leaf she picked in the woods and which she said reminded her of being a kid. Why she wants to remember that time is beyond McAvoy, but he doesn’t like to make a fuss.
‘CID got in to her Facebook account and her emails,’ says McAvoy, looking away. ‘She had a blog. Nothing much to get excited about for months – it was all favourite films and why she liked cats and whether Toy Story was an analogy for life. Just the thoughts of a young girl. She was a romantic. Like a child, really. Used to buy wedding magazines even though she was single. Saw life like a Disney princess.’
McAvoy nods his head in the direction of the cornfield that runs parallel to the woods.
‘The screensaver on her computer was a photograph taken in those woods,’ he says, looking down at his feet. ‘And on her work computer she’d searched Google Maps for the route from Millington to Great Givendale. We haven’t found her laptop. She hasn’t taken any money from her bank account since she vanished but she made no major withdrawals before her disappearance.’
‘Did she have much to withdraw?’
‘Not a lot, but a few hundred quid comes in handy when you’re planning a new life.’
‘And there was no sign of a man?’
McAvoy pushes his hair back from his face. ‘Yes and no. She had a boyfriend at university but it wasn’t really serious. And the lads she’d been out for drinks with at work were all adamant that she was an innocent.’
‘An innocent?’ asks Roisin, and enjoys McAvoy’s blush.
‘She’d still wear white at her wedding, is what I mean,’ says McAvoy. ‘And not all young men think that’s a virtue. I’ve spoken to a lot of her friends. They were pretty clear that for a long time she was a lot of hassle for not much reward. She was a good girl, Roisin, whatever that might mean. Then things changed.’
‘Changed how?’
‘I just get the sense that she found somebody. Little things. Her friends said she was acting a different kind of giddy. She was always giggly and happy but she had that little swagger in her step. And the entries on her blog seemed a bit more worldly.’
‘You think she lost her virginity,’ says Roisin, and this time, she doesn’t make fun.
‘I think she was preparing to. And she visited peculiar websites on the work computer. Nothing dirty, just interesting essays on different kinds of arousal. And spells, too.’
Roisin gives in to a grin. ‘I like this bit. You always go red.’
McAvoy obliges. ‘She visited a site about love potions. Ways to get a man to fall in love with you. How to trap them and keep them.’
‘Did she never consider good cooking and lots of baby oil?’ asks Roisin.
‘This was dark stuff. All about scents and using your bodily fluids to create a potion. There was one that talked about getting somebody to drink a coffee laced with your, erm, monthlies . . .’
Roisin pulls a face. ‘Not my idea of a Bloody Mary,’ she says. ‘There are definitely better ways to get a man’s attention.’
‘She had her eye on somebody. Her phone records don’t show much in the way of unusual activity but she did receive a lengthy video message about a month before her disappearance from an unregistered mobile phone. We traced the phone from the distributor. It was sold through a market stall in Goole. The owner kept good records. Remembered the lad who bought it because he was always coming back to complain and whine. He contacted uniform the second the kid came back. It was David Hogg.’
‘Who?’ asks Roisin.
‘The hit and run, a mile down the road from here,’ says McAvoy. ‘Teenage girl out with her horse on a country lane and a fool in a stolen sports car comes around the corner at ninety mph and takes out horse and rider. Leaves them to die. The girl won’t walk again. The horse had to be destroyed at the scene. A nearby farmer heard it screaming. Said the sound will never leave him.’
‘Oh yes. Bastard,’ says Roisin, remembering the story. McAvoy knows her pity is shared equally between human and horse.
‘CID have no doubt the driver was David Hogg. Li
ves in Market Weighton. His uncle’s a hard case and tidied things up. By the time David was arrested the car had been scrapped and there was nothing to link him to the accident. He laughed his way through the interviews. Even answered a few of the questions with neighs and whinnies. Got away with it.’
‘And Hannah knew him?’
‘We don’t know; he wouldn’t talk to us. We’ve found no link between them. Just the video, and we’ve no way of viewing that. Hogg’s phone can’t be traced and he mumbles “no comment” no matter how hard you lean on him.’
Roisin smiles, remembering the first time McAvoy told her this story. ‘Jaw wired shut?’
‘He’ll be having his food mashed for years to come. His ankles and wrists were smashed and his face pummelled. Looked like he’d been kicked by a horse, then run over. His uncle had the cheek to demand what we were going to do about it. He put the word around that whoever did it was a dead man. We’ve had no leads. We’ve had no indications that the uncle’s made any progress either.’
‘So what’s the connection?’ asks Roisin, giving a little yawn.
‘I don’t know yet. Too many coincidences. Too many unanswered questions. I just can’t seem to get past it. I want to hear that she’s alive. I don’t believe that she is. I can feel her, Roisin. You know I’m not like that. I don’t hear voices or believe in clairvoyants. I’ve never read my horoscope. It’s not like that. It’s just . . .’
‘An obsession?’
He looks at his feet, chastened and ashamed.
Roisin changes her position and snuggles into his chest, poking a finger through the buttons of his shirt to tickle his hair. ‘She might be having the time of her life somewhere,’ she says. ‘You don’t have to think the worst.’
He reaches down and kisses the top of her head. Wishes he could convince himself that Hannah is just a missing girl and not a murder victim. It feels like when he was eleven – still trying to persuade himself of the existence of Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy and God.