by Mark, David
“Really? It’s never bothered me,” she says, as the interview evolves into a chat between friends. “You couldn’t get me off the stage when I was a kid. I’ve never been the shy type.”
“I envy you,” says McAvoy, and means it.
“I didn’t think you could be a policeman if you were shy,” she says, crinkling her suddenly pretty eyes.
“You just have to learn how to hide it,” he says with a shrug. “How am I doing?”
“You had me fooled,” she whispers. “I won’t tell.”
McAvoy wonders if he is playing this right.
“So,” he says, trying to get them back on track. “Macbeth?”
“Well, long story short, I was asking some questions of the class. Something about evil. I wanted to know which of the characters in the play could be called truly good and which truly bad. All the other kids had Banquo and Macduff down as heroes. Daphne disagreed. She put just about everybody down the middle. She said you couldn’t be one thing or another. That good people did evil things. That evil people were capable of kindness. That people weren’t always one thing. She can’t have been more than twelve or thirteen when she was saying this, and the way she said it just intrigued me. I asked her to stay back after class and we just got talking. My contract with the school eventually became a six-month thing, so I got to know Daphne pretty well. Obviously, the other teachers knew she had been adopted and that she must have seen some hellish things, but how much was in her official record I couldn’t say.”
“So how and when did she tell you about her time in Sierra Leone? About what happened to her?”
“I think I just asked her one day,” says Vicki, turning in her seat to try to catch the waitress’s eye. Without thinking about it, McAvoy pushes his own glass across the table and, wordlessly, Vicki takes it in her palm. “Like I told you, I’ve done quite a lot of work in countries that have seen conflict and poverty. I was walking between classes with her and she just came out with it. Told me that all of her family had been killed. She was the only one who survived.”
For a whole minute they sit in silence. McAvoy’s mind is full of this murdered girl. He has investigated lost lives before. But there is something about the butchering of Daphne Cotton that smacks of futility. Of a cruel end to a life that had been unexpectedly reprieved, and which could perhaps have offered so much.
“Read it,” says Vicki eventually, nodding at the papers on the table in front of McAvoy. “She wrote that about three months ago. We’d been talking about drawing on your own experiences to become a better writer. Putting parts of yourself into your work. I’m not sure if she fully understood, but what she wrote just tore me up. Read it.”
McAvoy unfolds the pages. Looks at Daphne Cotton’s words.
They say that three years old is too young to form memories, so perhaps what follows is the product of what I have been told, and what I have read. I truly cannot say.
I cannot smell blood when I think of my family. I do not smell the bodies or remember the touch of their dead skin. I know it happened. I know I was plucked from the pile of bodies like a baby from a collapsed building. But I do not remember it. And yet I know that it happened.
I was three years old. I was the second youngest child in a large family. My oldest brother was fourteen. My oldest sister a year younger. My youngest brother was perhaps ten months old. I had two more brothers and one sister. My youngest brother was called Ishmael. I think we were a happy family. In the three photographs I have, we are all smiling. The photographs were gifts from the sisters as I left to meet my new parents. I do not know where they came from.
We lived in Freetown, where my father worked as a tailor. I was born into a time of violence and warfare, but my parents kept us cocooned from the troubles. They were God-fearing Christians, as were their parents, my grandparents. We lived together in a large apartment in the city, and I think I remember saying prayers of gratitude for our good fortune. From history books and the Internet, I know that people were dying in their thousands at a time when we were living a happy life, but my parents never allowed this horror to penetrate our lives.
In January of 1999, the fighting reached Freetown. When I ask my memory for pictures of our flight from the bloodshed and carnage of that day, there is nothing. Perhaps we left before the soldiers arrived. I know that we went north with a group of other families from our church. How we reached Songo, the region of my mother’s people, I cannot say.
I remember dry grass and a white building. I think I remember songs and prayers. I remember Ishmael’s cough. We may have been there for days or weeks. I sometimes feel I have let my family down by not remembering. I pray to God the Father that I remedy this sin. I ask for the memories, no matter how much they will hurt.
When I was old enough, the sisters at the orphanage told me that the rebels had come. That it had been a bright, sunny day. That the fighting was beginning to die down elsewhere in the country, and that the men who passed our church were fleeing defeat. They were drunk and they were angry.
They herded my family and their friends into the church. Nobody else came out alive, so nobody can say what happened. Some of the bodies had bullet holes in the backs of their heads. Others had died from the cuts of machetes.
I do not know why I was spared. I was found among the bodies. I was bleeding from a cut to my shoulder. I think I remember white people in blue uniforms, but this could be my imaginings.
I tell myself that I have forgiven these men for what they did. I know that I am lying. I pray to God each day that this lie becomes truth. He has granted me a new family. I have a good life, now. I feared at first that the city with which Freetown is twinned would be its mirror image. That the pages of its history would be written in blood. But this city has welcomed me. My new parents never ask me to forget. And I have never felt as close to God. His temple embraces me. Holy Trinity has become His warm and loving arms. I felt content in its embrace. I pray that I will find the strength to please Him and be worthy of His love . . .
There is a lump in McAvoy’s throat and cold grit in his eyes. When he looks up, Vicki’s eyes are waiting to meet his.
“See what I mean?” she says, biting her lip. “The waste.”
McAvoy nods slowly.
“You spoke to her about it?” he asks, his voice hoarse and gravelly.
“Of course. She never knew much about what happened. Just what the nuns at the orphanage told her. She’d been rounded up with her family and shepherded into the church. Some were hacked down with machetes. Others shot. Some raped. Daphne was found by a United Nations force, in among the bodies. She’d been hacked with a machete but survived.”
McAvoy balls his fists. He is struggling to take this in.
“Who else knew about this?”
“The details? Not many. I don’t even know how much she told her adoptive parents. They know her family were killed, but as for what happened to Daphne . . .”
“Have you shown this to anybody else?”
Vicki purses her lips and breathes out. “Maybe one or two,” she says, and her eyes dart away again. It is the first time that she has looked as if she has something to hide.
McAvoy nods. His thoughts are a storm.
“Do you think it’s connected?” asks Vicki. “I mean, it’s too big a coincidence, isn’t it? A church. A knife. It was a machete, wasn’t it?”
Without thinking, McAvoy nods. He realizes he does not know if the information has been made available to the public, and then backpedals. “It could be,” he says.
Vicki looks torn between the desires to cry and to spit. She is enraged and grief-stricken. “Bastard,” she says.
Again, McAvoy nods. He’s unsure what to do next. He wants to ring Trish Pharaoh and tell her, as procedure dictates. But procedure dictated he stay in the office and man the phones, and he had
sidestepped that the second he had answered Vicki’s call.
“It’s like somebody was trying to finish off what was started all those years ago,” says Vicki, peering into her latest empty glass. She glances up and stares at him, hard. “Who would do that?”
In her eyes, he is a policeman. A man who can offer explanations. To make sense of it.
He wishes he were worthy of such respect.
His thoughts are consumed by Daphne Cotton’s words. By the simple, beautiful, untouched innocence of a mind that had not been contorted by the indignities witnessed by her body.
Suddenly, he wants to hurt whoever did this. He hates himself immediately, but he knows it to be true. That this crime is unforgivable. He takes comfort in the acknowledgment. The acceptance that if he is hunting evil, he must be on the side of good.
8.
About three car lengths away, on the opposite side of the car park, Trish Pharaoh is leaning on the bonnet of a silver Mercedes, her face cupped in her hands. She looks like a teenage girl watching TV. Her face is set in a playful smirk, and despite the harsh weather, her makeup is perfect.
“Get in the car,” she says. She pulls open the passenger door and then walks the long way round to the driver’s side. She climbs inside, flashing fleshy thigh and a toned calf that disappears into tight biker boots.
For a moment, McAvoy doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know why she’s here. Was she checking up on him? Is he going to get booted off the case? He rubs a hand over his face and crosses the car park with the most dignified walk he can muster.
He slips inside the Mercedes, and the scent of expensive perfume takes him in a claustrophobic embrace. He smells mandarin oranges and lavender.
“Comfy?” she asks, but he detects no malice.
He catches sight of himself in the darkened glass of the driver’s door and realizes how ridiculous he looks, crammed into this tiny car.
“I got your message,” she says, pulling down the vanity mirror above the steering wheel so she can check her eye makeup as she talks. “Gave Helen Tremberg a ring. She said you were meeting the informant here. I thought I’d tag along.”
McAvoy has to work hard to stop himself from pushing all the air out of his lungs. Relief floods him.
“I, I just concluded the interview, actually, ma’am,” he says apologetically. “She’s at a jazz night inside and will still be there—”
She waves a hand to stop him, gives a shrug. “I love that accent,” she says, half to herself. “I did a stint in Edinburgh, you know. Best Practice initiative or some such nonsense. Some idea my old boss had about a prostitute tolerance area. Never got off the ground. Maybe ten years ago now. I was a detective sergeant. That your era?”
McAvoy scratches his forehead, miming thinking. “Erm . . .”
“My son does that,” says Pharaoh laughing, looking at him. “Or he strokes his chin. It’s so sweet.”
An unexpected blush explodes in McAvoy’s cheeks. “How old is he?”
“Ten,” she says, and takes her eyes off the mirror. She stares into the middle distance, looking at nothing.
“I’ve still got the terrible teens ahead,” says Pharaoh, picking a piece of fluff off her tights and blowing it off her palm with pursed, wet lips. “The things we see in this job, they’re going to have a hard time getting out of the house, let alone getting into trouble. Can’t wait.”
“I’m sure it won’t be that bad,” he replies, uncertain what else to say. He doesn’t know whether she has any help from a husband. Finds himself marveling at the way she has juggled life and career. “My boy’s a few years away from all that.”
She turns her head and looks at him. “You’ve got another on the way, haven’t you?”
He can’t help but let the smile split his face. “Two months to go,” he says. “She’s bigger than she was with Fin, but the pregnancy hasn’t been so hard. It was hellish before . . .” He stops himself, sensing a trap ahead. “I won’t be taking any paternity time, ma’am. If this looks like being a lengthy investigation, you’ve got me for as long as you need.”
She rolls her eyes and shakes her head.
“Hector,” she says, and then gives a soft laugh. “Sorry. It’s Aector, isn’t it? With a cough in the middle? I’m not sure I’ve got the slaver to be able to say it the Gaelic way every day. Can you handle Hector?”
“It’s fine,” he says.
“Hector, if you don’t take paternity leave I’ll wring your bloody neck. You’re entitled to it—you take it.”
“But—”
“But nothing, you wally.” She laughs again. “Hector, can I ask you a question?”
“Of course, ma’am.”
She squeezes his thigh in a friendly, comforting way as she looks up into his eyes. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Ma’am?”
“McAvoy, we like a gentle giant, but there’s a fine line between not using your size to take advantage and being a complete bloody pansy.”
McAvoy blinks a few times.
“A pansy?”
“Say it,” she says.
He looks away, trying to keep his voice even. “Say what?”
“Tell me what you’ve been itching to tell us all since we got here.”
He forces himself to look into her eyes.
“I don’t know . . .”
“Yes you do, Hector. You want to tell me to read your file. To ask around. To find out what you did.”
“I . . .”
“Hector, I’ve known you for, what, six months? Maybe a bit longer? How many conversations have we had?”
He shrugs.
“Hector, every time I give you a job to do you look at me with this expression somewhere between an eager-to-please puppy and a bloody serial killer. You look at me like you’ll do whatever I ask, and you’ll do it better than everybody else. And that’s a very endearing quality. But there’s this other bit peering out from behind all that which says, Don’t you know who I am? Don’t you know what I did?”
“I’m sorry if that’s the impression I give, ma’am, but—”
“I met Doug Roper, Hector.”
McAvoy visibly flinches at the name.
“He was a sexist, vicious bastard, and for every hanger-on who wanted to be part of his gang or ride his coattails, there were a dozen more who thought he was a total prick.”
“I’m not allowed . . .”
“. . . to talk about it? I know, Hector. We all know. We know that Doug did something very bad, and that you were the one who found out about it. We know that you took it to the brass. That you were promised the earth, and that Roper would swing. And we know that they lost their nerve, let him swan off without a stink, and that you were left as the poor bastard in the middle, in a CID team that was disintegrating faster than a snowball in a microwave. How am I doing so far?”
McAvoy stays silent.
“I don’t know what they promised you, Hector. I very much doubt it’s what you’ve got. It must be hard, eh? Must eat away at you, people knowing, but not knowing.” She makes a claw of her hand and presses it to her heart. “Must get you here.”
“You’ve no idea,” he says softly, and when he looks up, her face is close to his. He sees his own reflection swim on her eyes. Overcome by this moment, he finds himself leaning in . . .
She pulls back abruptly and looks back up at the mirror, withdrawing her hand from McAvoy’s thigh to flick away an invisible eyelash from her cheek.
“So,” she says, smiling brightly. “That’s about enough of that. I was going to have this chat with you a few months ago, but you know how it is, finding the time . . .”
“Well I appreciate it, ma’am.” His heart is thundering.
She eases down the electric window, and a pleasing co
ld draft fills the car. She closes her eyes and seems to enjoy its sensation on her skin as she angles her face toward the fresh, cool air.
McAvoy does the same with his own window. Feels his damp fringe flutter on the breeze.
They sit in silence for a moment. McAvoy tries to find something to do with his hands. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his phone. Realizes it’s been switched off since before he interviewed Vicki Mountford. He turns it on, and the tinkling sound that accompanies its welcome screen sounds irritatingly loud in the confines of the car. Immediately, the voice mail begins to ring. He holds it to his ear. Two messages. One from Helen Tremberg, warning him that Trish Pharaoh has been asking about his whereabouts and might be tagging along on the Mountford interview. And one from Barbara Stein-Collinson. The sister of the dead trawlerman:
Hello, Sergeant. I’m sorry to ring you on a Sunday. I just thought you should be aware that I’ve heard from the TV people who were with Fred when he died. It all seems, I don’t know. A bit wrong, somehow. Maybe it’s nothing. Could you perhaps give me a call, if you find a moment? Many thanks.
McAvoy closes his phone. He knows he’ll call her back. Will listen to her concerns. Make the right noises. Tell her he’ll do what he can.
“Anything?” asks Pharaoh.
“Maybe,” he says, and truly isn’t sure. “The favor I did for the ACC. Wife of one of the Police Authority faces. Her brother’s been found dead. Old trawlerman. Was busy making a documentary about the trawler tragedies of 1968. Looks like he chucked himself over the side, seventy miles off Iceland. They found him in a lifeboat. I had to break the news.”
“Poor bugger,” she says thoughtfully. It’s the police officer’s mantra.
“I’ll follow it up in my own time . . .”
“Oh, McAvoy, give it a rest.” Her voice has absorbed a touch of steel.
“Ma’am?”
“Look, McAvoy,” she says, and she seems suddenly short-tempered. “People don’t know what to make of you. You’re either going to be a future chief constable or end up under a bridge drinking Special Brew. They can’t read you. They just know you’re a big softie who could break them in half and who cost Humberside’s most notorious copper his job. Those are facts that require some qualification—do you understand?”