Dark Winter (9781101599891)

by Mark, David

  “So, this is goldfish-bowl time,” concludes Pharaoh. “We need this solved quickly, but we need to remember we’re being watched. We’re talking national news. People don’t like having their Christmases ruined by murder, and they need us to make them feel safe again. This happened about eighteen hours ago, and that gives this murderous fucker a good head start. The public appeal will be on the news by nine, which means a lot of you will have the fun and games of answering the phones. The calls will be coming through to this room. And yes, the tech monkeys will be wiring them up within the next half hour. There’ll be no shortage of nutters, people, but every piece of information is important. Every name needs to be checked.”

  She stops her flow momentarily, and her eyes seek out McAvoy. She gives him a nod.

  “Now I know you’re all technical wizards, but on the off chance that you’re not, McAvoy here is going to show you how his brand-spanking-new database works.”

  There are groans. A chorus of swearwords.

  “Now now, children,” she says, smiling. “I’ve been on inquiries where the floor has caved in under the weight of paperwork, so if McAvoy’s system helps us keep a better track of what we’re doing, then it’s something we need to be using. Personally, I feel like I’ve got something of a head start, given that I once got to level three on Sonic the Hedgehog, but the rest of you might need a catch-up course.”

  McAvoy joins in the laughter. Looks up and gets a grin and the tiniest of winks from Pharaoh.

  “Don’t forget,” she adds, “McAvoy has seen this bloke. He could have been a victim himself, if he hadn’t used his forehead to block the blow.”

  There are more laughs, but they feel somehow more warm and inclusive, and McAvoy is almost tempted to take a bow and add a witticism of his own. Pharaoh interrupts before he can.

  “Right, you should all know what you’re doing for the next couple of hours. We need witness statements. We need CCTV footage of every inch of that square. Where did he go when he left the church? And most important, we need to know everything there is about Daphne Cotton. We need to unpick her life. We’ll have the PME results by lunchtime, toxicology by tonight. Just bring your A-game, people. None of us want to live in a city where you can chop up a girl in church and get away with it. It’s Christmas, after all.”

  She gives the troops a grin. And then she’s barging back out of the room, a dervish of perfume and jangling jewelry, her soft palms touching shoulders and forearms, investing faith and belief in her team.

  They sit in silence for a moment, each officer lost in his or her own thoughts.

  Eventually, DCI Colin Ray turns and opens the blinds. It’s nighttime black beyond the glass, and the window reflects a shambolic semicircle of squatting, lounging, disordered men and women, scratching heads and blowing through steepled palms.

  The officers get a glimpse of themselves, a sharp, unexpected vision of who and what they are. They see the truth of themselves: their imperfections, their one-dimensional, cold, crumpled actuality.

  Of all the men and women staring into their own faces, only Aector McAvoy feels no compulsion to look away.

  They have been answering phones for six hours now. Beyond the dusty, grime-encrusted windows, the sky has almost completed its subtle transition from deep gray to soft black. Above, the clouds continue to hang low and fat, but the worst of the snow is another few days away. They might get a white Christmas this year, though McAvoy, who experienced nothing else in his youth, is excited by the prospect only because he knows it will make his wife and child smile.

  He and Helen Tremberg are the only two actual police officers in the room. A community support officer is sitting at one of the spare desks, and Gemma Tang, the pretty Chinese press officer, is leaning over the large table by the window, crossing out large sections of a press release. She’s model-beautiful, with a backside that Ben Nielsen has frequently imagined bouncing coins off. McAvoy is giving himself eyestrain trying not to look.

  In ones and twos, the officers have drifted away from the major incident room. Trish Pharaoh and Ben Nielsen are at the morgue, witnessing the postmortem exam. The two most junior detectives are collecting witness statements from those members of the congregation too shaken up to speak coherently yesterday. Sophie Kirkland took a phone call just before lunch from a pub landlady whose security cameras had captured a fleeting image of a man in black roughly five minutes after the attack took place. She’s taken two uniformed officers with her to search the local area for clues.

  Colin Ray and Shaz Archer have gone to speak to an informant. A telephone call to his bedsit home has already produced one lead. One of the punters at the Kingston Hotel has been letting his mouth run away with him. According to the snout, the bloke has always had strong opinions about foreigners and incomers, but recently lost his wife to the attentions of an Iranian pizza chef, and has been talking more and more about making somebody pay. It would be dismissed as idle gossip, were it not for the fact that a quick check on the Police National Computer showed that he’d been nicked twice for possessing illegal weaponry, and once for wounding. Even though Colin Ray is supposed to be managing the office, he has decided that he’s best placed to follow this particular line of inquiry, and has made himself scarce. Inspector Archer, never far behind, has tagged along, leaving only McAvoy and Helen Tremberg to answer the phones.

  McAvoy looks back through his notes. He’s written pages of names, numbers, details, and theories on his lined pad. The script is unintelligible to anybody but him. He’s the only officer who knows Teeline shorthand. He learned it in his spare time while in training, after being impressed by the speed at which a journalist had taken down the quotes of the senior officer he’d been shadowing that day. It has proven a useful six months of his time, even if it has left him exposed to the occasional moment of open-mouthed scorn from colleagues who wonder if he’s having a mental breakdown and filling his notebook with hieroglyphics.

  The phone calls so far have been pretty weak. Despite the television appeal this morning, they’re suffering from Sunday syndrome. People are enjoying days out with their families or relaxing down at the pub, and the idea of ringing a police station with information about a murder feels much more like a nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday kind of activity, so the flurry of calls that the team had expected has not materialized. It’s barely proving worth the overtime.

  If nothing else, at least the incident room is taking shape; this is largely thanks to McAvoy and the relative inactivity the day has delivered. He’s brought a whiteboard in from another office and begun sketching a brief outline of the previous day’s sequence of events. His own description of the suspect has been written in the center of the board in red marker pen. Medium build. Medium height. Dark clothes. Balaclava. Wet, blue eyes. It’s not much to go on, and they all know it. And although there is nothing more McAvoy could have done, he feels achingly guilty that he did not glimpse more of his attacker.

  A map of the city has been stapled to another wall. On it, drawing pins of different colors denote the definite and possible sightings of the suspect as he made his escape from Trinity Square. It is a composite of witness statements, CCTV footage, and guesswork. With it, they can surmise that the suspect traveled east through the city and past the river, before disappearing from the map somewhere near Drypool Bridge. A team of uniformed officers have walked the route, but found nothing save a footprint in the snow that matched the location given by one of the more believable witnesses. There was no sign of the murder weapon. The uniforms’ best guess was that he’d ditched it in the Hull. When Pharaoh had heard that snippet of information, she had slammed her hands down so hard that one of her bangles had snapped.

  The phone on his desk begins to ring. He picks up the beige Bakelite receiver.

  “CID. Major Incident Room.”

  A woman’s voice is at the other end of the line. “I’d l
ike to speak to somebody about Daphne. About Daphne Cotton,” she says. And then, unnecessarily, even more shakily, she adds: “The girl who was killed.”

  “You can talk to me. My name is Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy—”

  “That’s fine,” she says, cutting him off. With the tremble in her voice, it’s hard to place her, but McAvoy would class the speaker as around his own age.

  “Do you have information . . . ?”

  She takes a breath, and McAvoy can tell she has been rehearsing this. She wants to get it out in one go. He lets her speak.

  “I’m a supply teacher. A year or so ago I did some shifts at Hessle High. Daphne’s school. We hit it off. She was a lovely girl. Very intelligent and thoughtful. She was a very keen writer, you know. That’s what I teach. English. She showed me some of her short stories. She had real talent.”

  She pauses. Her voice cracks.

  “Take your time,” says McAvoy softly.

  A breath. A sniff. A clearing of a throat blocked with tears.

  “I’ve done some voluntary work in the part of the world she’s from. Seen some of the things she’s seen. We got talking. I don’t know, but I suppose I became a sort of outlet for her. She told me things that she kept hidden. There were things in her stories. Things a young girl shouldn’t know about. She was very shy when I questioned her about it, so I started setting her writing assignments. Helping to get out the stuff that was inside her.”

  McAvoy waits for more. When nothing else is forthcoming, he clears his throat to speak.

  Then she blurts it out.

  “This has happened to her before.”

  7.

  He spots her as soon as he pushes open the glass doors of the trendy pub and steps into the warm blue-black light. She is seated on her own at a small round table by the radiator near the bar. There are empty sofas and loungers near by, but she seems to have chosen the seat nearest the heater, and is all but pressing herself against its white-painted surface. She is staring at the wall, ignoring the other customers. McAvoy cannot see her features, but there is something that makes her seated form seem burdened and sad.

  “Miss Mountford?” asks Aector, as he approaches her table.

  She looks up. Her deep brown eyes are framed with red and seem to float in darkness. The bags beneath her eyes are dark, almost bruised black by tiredness. There is a silver stud in her left nostril, but her other features do not match the mental picture McAvoy had painted when he had arranged to meet her here, in this most inappropriate setting. She is short and plump, with frizzy brown hair that has been inexpertly pushed behind her ears to leave two misshapen curls running down her cheeks. She is not wearing makeup, and her short, fat fingers end in nails that are bitten almost to nothing, while her clothes—a black cardigan over a white vest—speak of a need for comfort over style. She wears no rings, though a large, ethnic wooden bangle has been wedged onto a chunky freckled wrist.

  Vicki Mountford nods timidly and makes to stand, but McAvoy gestures that she should remain seated. He takes the chair opposite her and, with some ceremony, removes his coat. He notices her glass. It is a straight tumbler and contains the dwindling remains of half a dozen ice cubes, melted to the size and shape of sucked sweets.

  “Why here, Miss Mountford? Are you sure there’s nowhere more comfortable we could go?”

  She rubs a hand across her round features and looks at her glass and then toward the bar. Then she shrugs. “I share a house, like I said. My housemate’s got the living room tonight. I don’t like police stations. This is where I always am at this time on a Sunday. It doesn’t bother me.” She looks at her glass again. “I need a drink to talk about her,” she adds softly.

  “It must have been very difficult,” says McAvoy, as tenderly as he can over the hubbub of the half-full bar. “We break the news to family, but people sometimes forget about the friends. To hear something so terrible on the radio. To read it in the newspapers. I can’t imagine.”

  Vicki nods, and McAvoy sees gratitude in the gesture. Then her eyes fall to the glass again. He is wondering whether he should offer to buy her a drink when a waitress, clad in black T-shirt and leggings, approaches the table.

  “Double vodka and tonic,” says Vicki gratefully, then raises her eyebrows at McAvoy. “And you?”

  McAvoy doesn’t know what to ask for. He should perhaps order coffee or a soft drink, but to do so might alienate a potential lead, who so clearly has a taste for something stronger.

  “Same for me,” he says.

  They do not speak until the waitress returns. She is back inside a minute, placing the drinks on neat white napkins on the black-varnished table. Vicki drains half of hers in one swallow. McAvoy takes only the merest sip before placing the drink back on the surface. He wishes he’d ordered a pint.

  “I forgot it was Sunday,” says McAvoy. “Was expecting office workers and people in designer suits.”

  Vicki manages a smile. “I only come in on Sundays. You can’t get a table on a weeknight and people look at you strangely when you’re on your own. It’s music night in here on a Sunday. There’ll be a jazz band on in an hour or two.”

  “Any good? I don’t mind a bit of jazz.”

  “Different ones each week. They’ve got a South American group on tonight. All right, apparently.”

  McAvoy sticks out his lower lip—his own elaborate gesture of interest. He had policed the Beverley Jazz Festival during his last days as a uniformed constable and had been blown away by some of the ethnic jazz groups that had made their way to the East Yorkshire town to play a dozen intermingling tunes for drunk students and the occasional true aficionado.

  “Expensive, is it?”

  “If you’re here before six, it’s free. A fiver after that, I think. I’ve never paid.”

  “No? Must save you a bob or two.”

  “On a supply-teacher’s wages, every penny counts.”

  Her words seem to steer them back to the reason for their meeting. McAvoy positions himself straighter in his chair. Looks pointedly at his notebook. Softens his face as he prepares to let her tell the story in her own words.

  “She must have meant a great deal to you,” he says encouragingly.

  Vicki nods. Then gives what is little more than a shrug. “It’s just the wastefulness of it all,” she says, and it seems as though some of the anguish leaves her voice, to be replaced by a weary resignation. “For her to go through all that and to get her life in some kind of order . . .”

  “Yes?”

  She stops. Tips the empty glass to her mouth and inserts her tongue, draining it of the last dribbles of watery alcohol. Closing her eyes, she appears to make a decision, and then ducks down below the level of the table. McAvoy hears a bag being unzipped, and a moment later she is handing him a folded sheet of white paper.

  “That’s what she wrote,” she says. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  “And this is?”

  “It’s her story. A bit of it, anyway. A snippet of how it felt to be her. Like I said, she had a talent. I would have liked to have taught her all the time, but there was no permanent position at the school. We just got chatting. I’ve done some voluntary work in Sierra Leone. Building schools, a bit of teaching here and there. I knew some of the places she was familiar with. It was enough for us to become friends.”

  McAvoy cocks his head. A fourteen-year-old girl at the time, and a woman perhaps two decades her senior?

  “She had friends her own age, of course,” says Vicki, as if reading his thoughts. She moves her empty glass in slow, steady circles. “She was an ordinary girl, inasmuch as there is such a thing. She liked pop music. Watched Skins and Big Brother, like they all do. I never saw her room, but I don’t doubt there were some Take That posters on the wall. It was her writing that set her apart. That and her faith, alt
hough that wasn’t something we ever really discussed. I’m not really that way inclined. I put ‘creature of light’ on official forms when they ask my religion. That or ‘Jedi.’”

  McAvoy smiles. Without thinking, he takes a large swallow of his drink and feels the pleasing warmth of its passage down his throat.

  “I just leave it blank.”

  “Not a believer?”

  “Nobody’s business,” he says, and hopes she will leave it at that.

  “You’re probably right. Daphne certainly never shoved it down anybody’s throat. She wore a crucifix, but she was quite literally a buttoned-up sort of girl in her school uniform, so she couldn’t be accused of flaunting her beliefs. We only got talking because I’d been intrigued by some of the answers she’d given in class. It must have been about a year ago. I was on a three-week posting at the school. We were doing Macbeth.”

  McAvoy presses his knuckles to his temples and tries to remember the passage that he had memorized for performance day at school. “And oftentimes, to win us to our harm, / The instruments of darkness tell us truths, / Win us with honest trifles, to betray, / in deepest consequence—” He stops, embarrassed.

  “I’m impressed,” says Vicki, and as her face breaks into a grin, McAvoy is dazzled by the transformation that the simple act of smiling has upon her looks. She is casually cool enough to sit alone in a jazz club, rather than too unremarkable to attract a companion.

  “I did it when I was thirteen,” says McAvoy. “I had to recite that in front of a room full of parents and teachers. I still shudder when I think about it. I don’t think I’ve ever been as scared.”