Dark Winter (9781101599891)

by Mark, David

  McAvoy looks away from the older man’s friendly, alert face. Suddenly, the silliness of it all hits him like a fist. He wants to be able to tell him something with substance. Something that justifies this man’s time. Justifies his own decision to drive into the middle of bloody nowhere.

  “Mr. Emms . . .”

  “Sparky,” he corrects.

  “About that . . .” he says, grateful for the reprieve.

  “Long story, told short. When I was a young officer I came up with a brilliant time-saving device ahead of a night out. Decided to dry my hair while still in the bath. One day, dropped the bloody hair-dryer. Danced like a bloody fish on dry land for about five minutes until a pal switched the thing off. Almost cooked myself. Been Sparky ever since.”

  McAvoy breathes out, impressed and appalled. “Ouch.”

  He starts his explanation again.

  “Anyway, as I’m sure Mr. Feasby said when he called, I’m involved in the investigation into Daphne Cotton’s death. Are you aware of the case?”

  “Bad business,” says Emms, closing his eyes. “Poor girl.”

  “Yes.”

  McAvoy pauses. Decides to plump for honesty.

  “I was there when it happened. I heard the screams. Got there a minute too late. Got knocked down by the man who did it.”

  Emms simply nods. His eyes speak volumes.

  “In the wake of that crime, I’ve been looking into several other incidents. Not obviously connected, but certainly with a link that bears examination.”

  “Oh, yes?” Emms looks interested.

  “The link between the victims is their survival,” says McAvoy. “Survival of an incident that killed everybody else. A former trawlerman who made it home alive when thirty-odd mates drowned was found dead in a lifeboat off the coast of Iceland just over a week ago. A bloke who set fire to his own house and killed his family was burned to death in a room at Hull Royal Infirmary. A woman who was almost butchered by a serial killer was attacked in exactly the same way in Grimsby.”

  McAvoy drops his head to his hands. “I just don’t want Anne Montrose to be another victim.”

  Emms says nothing for a while. He takes another slurp of his tea. Looks up at his photographs and then gives a nod.

  “I see where you’re coming from. Did I not hear they had somebody for that, though? Some writer bloke. Pissed off at the world, and whatnot.”

  “Russ Chandler has been charged, yes.”

  A slow smile spreads across Emms’s face. “But you’re not convinced.”

  “I believe there are still avenues to be explored.”

  “I bet you’re going to be popular.”

  “I don’t care about being popular. I want to make sure the right person is locked up. I want to make sure nobody else gets hurt.”

  “Very commendable,” says Emms. “Why Anne?”

  “She’s one of many,” says McAvoy, looking through the glass as the landscape darkens and the rain begins to billow like unfastened sails. “But it fits, I suppose. I don’t know how he’s choosing them. I don’t know why he’s doing it. But . . .”

  “But . . .”

  McAvoy balls his fists as he blurts out to this virtual stranger the one thought that makes him a better policeman than those around him. “Because if I was doing it, she’d be the one I’d do next.”

  “Method actor, are you?”

  “What?”

  “You know, De Niro and Pacino. Put yourself in the mind of the character, yeah? Live like them. Think like them. Get inside their heads, and whatnot.”

  “I don’t know if I—”

  “Makes sense,” says Emms. “Well, at least I can put your mind at rest.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Anne Montrose. If you’re right about this bastard, he’s out to get people who survived properly. Cheated death, or however you want to see it. Anne didn’t. Anne’s never woken up. She’s been in a coma since it happened. She’s not a survivor. She’s just got a pulse.”

  McAvoy nods, rubbing his face with his hands. He realizes how unshaven he is.

  “Could you at least tell me a little about the background? What happened. Your relationship. Why the bills come to you.”

  Emms raises his glasses from the chain around his neck and puts them on. Examines McAvoy with a collector’s gaze.

  “I barely knew Anne,” he says, and shrugs. “She was a nice woman, from what I’m told. Loved kids. Real sweetheart. Wouldn’t get out when it made sense to. Thought she could do some good. Wrong place, wrong time. Arranged a trip for the school where she was helping, and the bus blew up the second the driver turned the key. Anne was still in the open doorway, waving to the other teachers. The blast threw her clear but she hit her head. Never woke up.”

  “But why you? Why did your company get involved?”

  Emms blows a long, sustained sigh that turns into a raspberry on his wet lips. He stands up and crosses to his picture walls. Pulls down an image that has been pinned in the top right corner of the boards.

  “Him,” he says, showing McAvoy the picture.

  McAvoy looks at an image of two smiling men. One is stripped to the waist, sweat greasing a boxer’s torso, and one beefy arm thrown round the neck of a tall, rangy man in combat fatigues. McAvoy squints and turns to Emms.

  “That you?”

  Emms nods. “A younger version, anyway. Balkans. Ninety-five, maybe? I should really date these things.”

  “And the other man?”

  “Simeon Gibbons. Major, by the time he got his discharge. Trained as a chaplain but joined the front line.”

  McAvoy waits expectantly.

  Emms cocks an eyebrow. “Anne Montrose’s fiancé.”

  “And your relationship to Major Gibbons?”

  Emms gives a rueful laugh. “Call it brothers-in-arms. He was my best officer. Best friend, if such a thing can exist. I wanted him to come into the security business with me, but we had a difference of opinion over all that. Call it a clash of ideals. He said he wouldn’t be a mercenary. I told him that we were helping people. Building something special. Saving lives. He said Anne would do that for free. It was an argument neither of us was going to win. So he stayed in the army. I set up Magellan.”

  “And Anne?”

  “He met her in some godforsaken hole in Iraq. Fell head over heels. He’s not the sort to do that, Simeon. He’s a controlled sort of chap. Keeps it all in. Has his beliefs and won’t change them. Christian man. Fell for Anne like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “So when the explosion happened . . .”

  Emms shrugs. “I heard about it from another old pal. Thought the least I could do for an old mate was to keep the press away. Easily done, to be honest. Don’t expect me to feel bad for paying off a journalist, Sergeant.”

  McAvoy shakes his head. “I don’t. I understand.”

  “Gibbo lost his mind over it. Couldn’t reconcile it. It’s hard to describe to people who have never been there. To war, I mean. Over there. Under the sun. The remoteness. You start questioning everything. You start seeing the world differently. People find religion, or lose it. Happens to the best of us, and when he lost Anne, it kind of broke him open. I don’t know what filled him up. He wouldn’t speak to his old mates. Wouldn’t go home. Even when I had her flown back to the UK . . . even when I got her in the private facility, got her round-the-clock care . . .”

  Emms looks down at the photograph in his lap. Looks into the face of an old friend who lost his mind when his heart was broken.

  “Was he discharged?”

  “Didn’t get the chance,” says Emms, looking up. “Chunk of metal from a roadside bomb tore through his throat not long after. He bled to death on the side of the road in Basra. Should never have been cleared for active ser
vice in the first place.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It was such a waste. Such a beautiful man.” He reaches back. Picks up the pen-and-ink drawing from the desk. Holds it up to show McAvoy. “Talented, too.”

  He unclips the frame and pulls out a piece of an expensive, cream-colored card. It’s signed on the back. Emms closes his eyes as he regards it, and McAvoy suddenly feels intrusive and out of place.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You said.”

  Silence falls in the small room. It’s only mid-afternoon, but the darkness is sliding toward the floor like a blind.

  “And you still pay her bills?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  McAvoy doesn’t have to think about it. He knows he would bankrupt himself to care for a stranger.

  “I’ll put two of the boys on a guard detail at Anne’s bedside. Just to be on the safe side. Phone me when you think this is at an end.”

  To break the air of misery that’s fallen, Emms turns to the window. “Never stops,” he says.

  “Sorry?”

  “The rain. I bought this house for Ellen. She always wanted to be lady of the manor. Grew up reading the Brontë sisters and fancying Heathcliff. Had this romantic notion about windswept moors and rain-lashed hillsides. And she’s got ’em. Just bloody depressing, if you ask me. She’s wanting a horse next. I think she’s got a fancy for meeting some dusky chap in riding breeches out on a hillside. She’s got a lovely mind for that kind of thing.”

  McAvoy gives a smile and enjoys the feeling. “My Roisin’s like that. Head full of lovely pictures.”

  “Hard to measure up, isn’t it?”

  McAvoy nods, and both men share a moment of something that feels uncannily like friendship.

  “Armstrong will be shivering,” says McAvoy.

  “He’s been through worse. We’ll work him hard, but there’s good money in it if you play it right.”

  “And you think his mind is right? After what happened?”

  “He won’t be in the firing line, so to speak. He’ll be overseeing one of our freight contracts. Going to meetings. Providing a bit of muscly reassurance for building contractors. Once he gets in with the lads, he’ll lose himself in the banter. Your mates are what matters, places like that.”

  In the way he says it, McAvoy catches a need for something he recognizes. Perhaps better than anybody else, understands the need to be told that he’s done the right thing.

  23.

  The snow that fell in Grimsby earlier in the week has melted away. Somehow, it has endeavored to clean the streets with its departure, and the town has a scrubbed appearance that puts McAvoy in mind of a dog emerging, blinking and bewildered, from a bath it has unwillingly taken.

  The evening air is infused with the kind of subtle rain that can soak a man to the skin before he’s even realized he should put on a coat.

  McAvoy didn’t expect to be back here so soon. Not back on the street where so recently he wrestled with a killer, and saved a life.

  Perhaps to spare him the sight of that bloody and painful struggle, or perhaps just to tuck her beloved vehicle away somewhere slightly better protected, Pharaoh parks the sports car several streets away from the Bear.

  “Cheer up,” she says, opening the door and filling the car with a gust of chilly, greasy air. “We’re on expenses.”

  McAvoy pulls his collar up as he extricates himself with difficulty from the compact two-seater. His head is reeling.

  Suddenly, as he wanted all along, the investigation is being done the right way.

  He focuses on the barrage of new information that Pharaoh has poured into his ear on the half-hour journey from Hull.

  “They speak bloody good English,” she says, impressed. “Very respectful people. Actually wanted to help. Very refreshing.”

  She is suddenly a fan of the Icelandic State Police, having spent a pleasant fifteen minutes charming the pants off a couple of young detectives in a rural station—massaging their egos and explaining that their information could help catch a serial killer.

  They were only too happy to help. And the information they divulged was going to make Colin Ray very unhappy.

  One of the containers on the cargo ship which had been chartered for Fred Stein’s documentary had indeed been tampered with. When the vessel docked and the missing man was reported, two officers from a small-town police station had interviewed the captain and first mate. The police officers had taken photographs of Fred Stein’s cabin. They had interviewed the TV crew and requested copies of their film. And they had taken a brief look around the cargo bay. Even to their somewhat inexpert eyes, it was clear that one of the containers at the bottom of the stack was not in the same condition as the scores of others that towered above and around it. A ragged hole, perhaps four feet by three, had been carved into the metal door. A torchlit examination of the interior showed it to be empty, save for a dirty sleeping bag and three empty bottles of water. They questioned the captain again. Asked what could have caused the damage. Whether it looked to him, as it did to them, as if it had been made using an oxyacetylene torch. He had shrugged. Said that stowaways were a problem. There was a serial number on the side of the container that Tom Spink had managed to trace to a haulage company based in Southampton. The woman who answered the hauler’s phone was the same person who had, a little over a week before, taken the initial freight order that booked the container’s passage.

  “Sometimes it’s just joining the dots,” says Pharaoh, as they begin walking up Freeman Street, pressed close enough together to be mistaken for a mismatched couple. “Sometimes you just get lucky. Sometimes, it really is that bloody easy.”

  The woman at the haulage company remembered the booking. It had been made by a man she knew well. Used to drive the cherry picker that loaded the containers onto the cargo ships at Southampton docks. Lost his arm when a stack toppled over in high winds and crushed him under enough cargo to kill most people. Had moved up north, last she heard. Was nice to hear from him again. Apparently, he was working as a stevedore up on the Humber somewhere. They’d been asked for a reference and been happy to oblige, and he sounded pretty well when he said his hellos and booked passage for the container which, bizarrely, he had insisted be stowed toward the bottom of the stack. She put it down to a peculiarity caused by his accident. Perhaps she’d misheard what he’d said. It was sometimes difficult, due to the thick Russian accent . . .

  Pharaoh nods at the open front doors of a dark-painted, old-fashioned bar that takes up the space of three shops in a small arcade that faces onto the main street.

  A bouncer, mug of tea in his hand and earpiece trailing down, a thick bullish neck, lounges against the brick front wall. He glances at Pharaoh’s breasts, impressively visible despite her leather jacket, and then gives McAvoy his attention. He appears to straighten slightly, as if suddenly realizing that for the first time in a long time, he is looking at a bigger man.

  “Evening,” he says. “Last orders in fifteen minutes so you better sup quick.”

  Pharaoh reaches into her cleavage and pulls out her warrant card.

  “Oh, fuck,” says the bouncer with a sigh.

  “It’s nothing heavy,” she says, putting her hand on his arm. “I need to talk to somebody who drinks in here. And I think you would like to help me. A big chap like you has ‘protector’ written all over him. And I know you want to spare me the bother of walking the streets on a night like this.”

  The bouncer gives a scowl, but it’s a token gesture. He still seems keen to be in Pharaoh’s good graces.

  “Who?”

  “Russian chap,” she says, moving close enough to him that McAvoy has no doubt his nostrils are filled with her scent, and the warmth from her body will be permeating his jacket and resolve. “One arm.”

  The
bouncer raises his eyes. “Zorro, you mean?”

  “Eh?”

  “One time he went on a fishing trip with some of the lads,” he says, by way of explanation. “When he was casting a line the wind caught his rod. It was like he was carving a load of letter Zs in the air. Like Zorro. Y’know?”

  “So? Where might I find him on a cold winter evening on Freeman Street?”

  “He was in earlier,” says the bouncer with a shrug. “Left around eightish with a couple of the lads. Heading into Top Town, I think.”

  “And where would you suggest I start looking?”

  The bouncer eyes her again. Weighs up his options, and decides he’s not doing his acquaintance that much of a disservice by exchanging a small piece of information for the affections of this nicely rounded and very sexy older woman.

  “Lives over the tanning salon down by Riby Square,” he says, nodding in the direction from which the police officers have just come. “Won’t be back until late, I wouldn’t have thought.”

  “And if I wanted him now?”

  The bouncer smiles and Pharaoh holds his gaze.

  “I could phone him for you.”

  Pharaoh smiles, reaches up and gives him a kiss on the cheek, as though he is a good boy who has just done a really lifelike drawing of a dog. He gives a grin in return that is more childlike than lustful, and appears to correct himself by giving a leer.

  “People can be so friendly,” she says to McAvoy, and then threads her arm through his. “Come on. You can buy me a drink.”

  Pharaoh is almost at the bottom of her second round of vodka and Diet Cokes.

  They are sitting at a round mahogany-colored table. To McAvoy, the pub is grotesque, a pastiche of somewhere better. A broken mirror gleams grubbily from behind a long dogleg of a bar stocked with own-label spirits and cheap beer.

  “You take me to the most glamorous places,” says Pharaoh, draining her glass. Then adds: “We’re on.”

  McAvoy looks up and sees the bouncer pointing them out to a tall, wiry man with flat, clearly Eastern European features and an empty sleeve in his leather jacket. He approaches, looking less than delighted.