Dark Winter (9781101599891)

by Mark, David

  Tremberg looks across from the driver’s seat at McAvoy.

  She finds herself examining the back of his hand. It’s all she can see of him, gripping the mobile phone, which he is pressing too hard to the side of his skull. The knuckles look as though they’ve been broken several times. They seem to represent the sum total of what she knows about him. That he has inflicted harm, and taken it. That the warm, protective palm and fingers in which she pictures him cradling his handsome son and beautiful wife can be turned over and balled to create a fist capable of extraordinary self-destructive damage.

  “Kick the door in,” he’s yelling. Then: “I don’t care. Trust me.”

  Why should they? she thinks. They don’t know you. I barely knew you until this morning. I barely know you now.

  McAvoy slams the phone down. “No answer at her flat,” he says, looking up at her from under a cowlick of damp ginger hair, with eyes that are veined red and shining. “They’ve tried the neighbors and no answer. Won’t kick the door in without permission . . .”

  He tails off. To Tremberg, it looks as though he is fighting with himself. Trying not to acknowledge that, throughout his career, he, too, has done things the right way. Waited for the order. Done as he was asked.

  “So, where?” she asks, her eyes back on the road.

  McAvoy says nothing. He appears to be biting the skin on his wrist, gnawing distractedly at it like a dog with a bone.

  It’s getting dark beyond the glass. There are flakes of snow in the air.

  She asks again: “Where first?”

  They are approaching the industrial estate that marks the Grimsby boundary. The area smells of fish and industry, and the concrete road beneath the tires is almost soporific in its brain-rattling vibration.

  McAvoy lowers his arm back to his lap. Appears to make a decision.

  “The uniformed officer says one of the neighbors reckons she’s usually down Freeman Street from lunchtime. One of the pubs. Couldn’t say which . . .”

  “Freemo?”

  “If that’s what you call it. This is your part of the world, not mine.”

  Somehow, Tremberg persuades the hatchback to give her a little more, taking the needle to eighty as she screeches around the first roundabout on two wheels and roars up the flyover past the docks. She knows this area. Was a beat constable here.

  “What do we know about her?” she yells, cruising past the fish-processing plant with her right foot hard to the floor. “What does she drink?”

  McAvoy looks at her as if she’s insane, then gives a flustered shrug and picks up his notepad from his lap. He looks at the unfinished sentences and cryptic keywords he scrawled in shorthand during his hasty chat with the desk sergeant at Grimsby Central, as well as the vague details that Sergeant Linus found on the database and telephoned across within ten minutes of Tremberg and McAvoy running for the car park and spinning the wheel hard in the direction of the bridge.

  “She’s on benefits,” he reads out. “Eligible after the accident. Admitted to Diana, Princess of Wales Hospital for a drunk-and-disorderly incident outside the Fathom Five . . .”

  “Fathom Five? Closed down last year.”

  “There’s nothing else here!” shouts McAvoy, rereading his notes in the hope that he’ll see something new. A clue. An indication of what to bloody do next.

  Tremberg bites her lip, swinging the car hard to the right at the latest in a seemingly endless chain of roundabouts that leads into the town center. “Call Sharon at the Bear,” she says triumphantly. “If Angela drinks down Freemo, she’ll know her.”

  Grateful for something to do, McAvoy dials the first of the directory inquiries numbers that he can remember. Listens for what seems like an age as the Asian voice at the other end of the line reads off the welcome script. “The Bear,” he yells. “Freeman Street. Grimsby.”

  Tremberg winces as she hears him repeat it.

  “No,” he’s bellowing. “Just put me through. Put me through.”

  A moment later he gives her a nod. It’s ringing.

  “Hello? Is that the landlady? Ms. . . . ? Sharon? I’m ringing from Humberside Police. I urgently need to contact a lady who might be one of your regulars. Angela Martindale . . .”

  Tremberg takes her eyes off the road for a full ten seconds, watching McAvoy’s face drift through different stages of anger and frustration. She can imagine what the woman at the other end of the line is saying. Knows full well that she thinks she’s doing Angie a good turn. That she’s sticking by her regulars. Telling the Old Bill where to get off.

  Without thinking, she reaches across and takes the phone from her sergeant. “Sharon,” she barks into the receiver. “This is Helen Tremberg. I arrested Barry the Bailiff when he cracked Johnno with his car-lock. Remember? Right, we need to find Angie Martindale now. I swear to God, if you find out we’ve nicked her for anything on the back of what you’ve told us, I’ll pay for your beer order from my own pocket for the next twelve months. Right.” She nods. “Good, love. Good.”

  She hands the phone back to McAvoy. “One of her regulars said he was nattering with her in Wilson’s an hour or so back. Top of Freeman Street. Serves Bass.”

  “Does she have a means of contacting—”

  “Freemo,” says Tremberg, as she turns sharply right past the Grimsby Telegraph building and onto a rundown shopping street strung with dismally outdated Christmas lights. “The place where dreams are made.”

  In a blossoming darkness punctuated by neon signs and winking headlights, the boarded-up shop fronts and graffiti-covered corrugated shutters strike McAvoy as something transplanted from the Eastern bloc. He is used to this misery in Hull. This is a new town. A new imagining of recession and poverty, of apathy and pained acceptance. It hurts him to his heart.

  “Top of the street,” says Tremberg again.

  They see the swinging signs and ruined façades of three different pubs on their right as they pass the yawning entrance to the fish market. McAvoy tastes the air, expecting cod, haddock, perhaps turbot. Finds nothing. Not the salt of the sea. He can smell nothing but chips and petrol fumes. See nothing but snow and darkness, streetlights and shadowy shop doorways.

  “That’s Sharon’s place,” says Tremberg as they pass a bar with a whitewashed front and black-painted double doors, inside which huddle half a dozen smokers, stamping feet, hand-rolling cigarettes, watching the traffic, and spitting as far as the curb.

  “Lights are on,” says Tremberg, motioning ahead at a building on their right, sandwiched between a charity shop and a bakery. “Good sign.”

  She slows the car and pulls into a parking bay outside the bar. Closes her eyes for a second before killing the engine. Looks up and slowly turns her head. McAvoy is staring over her shoulder at the closed front door.

  “She might not be here,” says McAvoy.

  “No.”

  “Might be anywhere. Having a drink somewhere else. Met a bloke. Gone to do her Christmas shopping . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “The chances of her being in there now . . .”

  “Slim.”

  “Almost nonexistent.”

  “May as well get a drink while we’re here, though . . .”

  “Pint of Bass?”

  “Pint of Bass, yeah.”

  A look passes between them as they both tell themselves they believe their lies. And then McAvoy nods.

  The wind grabs the door as McAvoy tries to disentangle himself from the too small vehicle, and he feels a shooting pain in his arm as he battles with the wind to pull it shut. By the time McAvoy has got both feet on the road and slammed the door closed, Tremberg is already trying the front door, rattling the rusted handle, knocking with her boots.

  “It’s locked,” she says breathlessly, over the sound of the wind. She locate
s the letterbox and pushes her fingers in, pressing her face to the gap through which a sliver of yellow light emerges. “Police!” she yells. “Police!”

  She looks through the letterbox again. Presses her ear to it.

  “Anything?” asks McAvoy.

  Tremberg’s face is full of excitement and fear as she turns to him. Her cheeks are red on white, as if she has been slapped.

  “Helen,” he demands. “Anything?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” Distractedly, she waves her hand at the wind, as if motioning for it to be quiet. “I can’t hear. You try.”

  She moves aside and McAvoy presses his ear to the gap. Angles his head and shouts, “Angela Martindale! Are you in there? Police. Open up.”

  There is no mistaking the sound. It is human. Afraid. A guttural, animal roar of timeless, faceless terror.

  Tremberg has heard it, too, but her attention is distracted by sounds from down the road. The smokers from the Bear are pouring out into the street, drawn to drama like flies to shit.

  She looks back at McAvoy, about to tell him to break the door in, but he is already running at the entrance.

  The door comes off its hinges, smashing backwards as if ram-raided, and McAvoy spills into the foyer of the bar. There is a pain in his shoulder and he tastes blood where his teeth collided too hard on impact, but he pushes such sensations from his mind, shaking his head to clear his thoughts.

  He drags himself upright, pushing down on the broken door, feeling a long, jagged splinter slide under his skin.

  “Sarge!”

  Tremberg takes his arm and hauls him upright. They stand on the muddy wooden floor, blinking in the light. The bar is empty. Some abandoned shopping bags stand by a barstool. There are dirty glasses on the bar top.

  “Hello.”

  The word sounds comical in the abandoned space. Then the scream comes again.

  McAvoy whirls round, searching the near wall for a doorway. Finds none. Begins running for the far end of the bar. He puts a hand out and grabs the brass rail that runs along the varnished wooden top. Without thinking, he picks up a dirty glass. Almost stops as he sees the body behind the bar.

  “Helen!” he yells, spotting the entrance to the toilets. “Behind the bar!”

  Without drawing breath he bursts through the swing door and clatters into a plaster wall. To his right are the entrances to the ladies’ and gents’ facilities. With the glass in his right hand, he kicks out at the door to the ladies’ and throws himself inside.

  The room is bathed in blue neon, emanating from a single strip light in the ceiling. There is a broken mirror on the far wall and two cubicles, both with half-open doors.

  Angie Martindale is wriggling on her back on the floor. Her skirt has been pushed up to her waist. Her leggings rolled down to her ankles. In the unnatural light, the mess of blood around her pubic region looks tar-black and already clotted. Her hands cover her face, and gasping sobs escape between her fingers.

  McAvoy stands immobile. The scene feels unreal, somehow. As though it is happening to somebody else. He feels suddenly cold and clammy, as if he has woken from a nightmarish sleep to find himself bathed in sweat.

  “In . . . in there . . .”

  Angie Martindale is raising a blood-soaked finger, ghoulish and spectral, pointing at the door to the nearest cubicle.

  Instinctively, McAvoy bends to lean forward, to put his ear closer to her mouth, to hear her words and make sense of them.

  A figure leaps over the cubicle door, black-clad and balaclava’d, body ducked low, leg protruding, like a steeplechaser clearing a hurdle. McAvoy looks up. Feels his world slow down, minimize and become this moment. This now. This boot, with its caterpillar tread, crashing towards his face.

  At the last possible moment he jerks his head back. The boot whistles past his jaw, but the figure that comes behind the kick is too bulky to avoid, and McAvoy feels all the air leave his body as the man crashes into his chest and slams him back into the wall.

  The impact with the brick is sickening, and for a moment McAvoy feels himself beginning to slip and sink into a black treacle of unconsciousness. The glass falls from his hand. Smashes on the tiles. His head is ringing. He can smell blood. Exploding lights dance on his vision.

  And then he realizes there is a figure in his arms. That in his arms a black-clad man is struggling and kicking, ramming elbows in his ribs and aiming kicks at his shins, trying to extricate himself from a bear hug McAvoy did not know he had applied.

  The moment of realization, the returning to his skin, causes him briefly to relax his grip, and in an instant he feels a strong forearm against his jaw, pushing his head back against the wall as a fist slams into his ribs.

  McAvoy drops his hands, pain shooting up his spine to explode in a concussive headache, and he barely gets his hands up in time to stop the next right hand that impacts with his cheekbone and forces him back against the wall.

  There is no room to fight. He cannot draw his hands back to swing a punch. Cannot step forward for fear of treading on Angie Martindale.

  He takes another punch to the chest.

  Lashes out with a boot. Misses. Lashes out a right hand and slaps the place where his attacker’s head had been a moment before.

  Christ! he thinks, through the pain and the fog. This guy can fight.

  He’s angry, suddenly. Fucking furious. Feels himself galvanized by a rage terrible and raw.

  He puts one of his boots against the wall to his rear and pushes himself forward, managing to grab one of his attacker’s flailing arms. He propels himself and the other man across the tiled floor, slick with blood, cluttered with entangled limbs, and feels a satisfying thud as they slam back into the cubicle door. McAvoy grunts and slams his opponent again into the hard wood. Feels him weaken. Takes the man’s head in his hands. Feels the wool of the balaclava. Slams his head into the door. Takes him by the throat in his left hand and slams a right into his guts. Feels him double over. Brings back his right hand to drop a haymaker from on high.

  The door bursts open.

  Helen Tremberg stands in the doorway. Her extendable baton is clutched in her left hand. She is holding her right up as if she is directing traffic.

  She opens her mouth to speak. To tell the black-clad man that this is over? To tell Angie Martindale that she will live? The words never make it to the air.

  In one fluid motion, the man in black produces a blade. Whether it was from a pocket or a sleeve, McAvoy could not later say, but one moment the man is doubled over, falling to the ground, fingers in fists, and the next he is swinging a blood-drenched blade in a great sweeping backhand arc that slices across Helen Tremberg’s arm.

  McAvoy’s shout of anguish comes before Tremberg’s scream, but in an instant the tiny space is ringing with roars of pain and despair.

  The man in black lunges forward and grabs Tremberg by the neck. Spins and hurls her into McAvoy’s path as he slithers and tries to find purchase on the slick floor. She hits him hard in the middle, and both officers fall, landing heavily on Angie Martindale’s legs.

  By the time McAvoy has dragged himself back to his feet, the door is swinging closed. He staggers forward and yanks it open, running into the bar, only for a forest of arms and legs to grab him at the knees, waist, and shoulders. He clatters down hard on the wooden floor and spins onto his back, lashing out with angry kicks and bitter yells at the men standing above him, trying to pin him back to the floor.

  He tries to find his feet, but an arm fastens around his throat and he pushes himself backwards against the brass rail, feeling the man on his back gag as the air shoots from his lungs.

  “Police . . .” gasps McAvoy. “I’m police.”

  The pressure on his neck eases in a second. McAvoy looks at the people around him. Half a dozen assorted drinkers. The regu
lars from the Bear. Two short, fat men, a middle-aged guy in shorts, a petite woman with too many earrings, an old man with graying Elvis hair, and a tall, cadaverous man in a white shirt who looks to be missing an arm.

  “We thought . . .” says one.

  McAvoy pushes past them. Clambers over the wreckage of the broken front door and emerges, gasping, in the street.

  Frantically, he looks both ways. Left. Right. Back into the belly of the bar.

  Then up to the sky, as he realizes he’s gone. That he had him in his hands, and let him go.

  He opens his eyes wide and stares deep into the snow-filled swirling black clouds, and screams the only word that does the situation justice.

  “FUCK!”

  17.

  Don’t say a word,” says Pharaoh. “Don’t fucking breathe.”

  She walks behind the bar and reaches up to the top shelf for a half-pint glass. She holds the glass under the optic and pours herself a double vodka, which she downs in one.

  The investigation team is assembled in the front bar of Wilson’s. Colin Ray is lounging in a hard-backed chair, his tie unfastened almost to his navel. He’s chewing nicotine gum and looking pleased with himself. Sharon Archer, as ever, is at his side. She’s got a packet of crisps open on the table in front of her, and is eating them as quietly as she can.

  Sophie Kirkland and Ben Nielsen are standing at the bar, watching Pharaoh. They arrived together a few minutes ago, grumbling about the parking and shaking snow from their hair onto a floor thick with muddy boot prints.

  McAvoy is resting against the fruit machine by the side entrance. Through the frosted glass he can see the fluorescent yellow jacket of the officer guarding the entrance. Two other constables are stationed at the front doors. The road has been cordoned off, but the crowd outside is still close enough to be a cause for concern. Some of the faces in the crowd had been snarling the last time McAvoy had poked his head out of the front door. He wonders whether it’s even worth trying to tell them that he feels worse about Angie Martindale than they do. And he’s the one who saved her life.