A Bad Death: A DS McAvoy short story (Ds Aector Mcavoy)

by David Mark

  Trish Pharaoh swears.

  ‘Hector, get after him!’

  ‘Christ!’

  McAvoy steps into the road just as a security van turns left out of Parliament Street. The driver slams on his breaks and the slush thrown up by the tyres soaks McAvoy to the waist as he begins running down Parliament Street. To his left is the rear of the Guildhall; all old, rectangular stone and weather-beaten wooden doors. He can hear Trish barking orders in his ear, telling Ben Neilsen that she doesn’t give a damn if the arrest strategy hasn’t been approved. She tells him to put himself between Lenneville and freedom and to punch whoever he needs to.

  Ahead, Lenneville is throwing panicky glances over his shoulder as he puffs and pants his way towards the crossroads. In the distance is Hull Crown Court; to his right two pubs and a pool hall. The few shoppers who have ventured out on this grey day stop to watch the big man chase the fat man through the snow.

  ‘Sarge, I see him!’

  Lenneville disappears as he darts left towards the front of the Guildhall. McAvoy plunges forward and follows in the footsteps of the man he is starting to hate for making him run.

  ‘Fuck, watch it!’

  McAvoy careers into a figure in blue, sending it pinwheeling away in a flash of arms, legs and curses. The figure crashes into another and they tumble to the ground with a damp, painful splat. McAvoy’s head has struck a skull and he sees stars for a moment, but the shouting of his name clears his head. He looks up to find DC Ben Neilsen sitting on Michael Lenneville, one hand twisted up his back and his face pushed into the snow. McAvoy lets out a sigh and looks down at the two people who were unfortunate enough to get in his way.

  His face changes as he takes in the men before him. They are handcuffed together. One wears a blue prison uniform beneath a dirty raincoat. He’s rubbing his forehead with his free hand and there is blood coming from his nose. The second man is kneeling, almost as if in prayer. His face is thinner and the darkness beneath his eyes looks as though it was put there with a coal-smudged thumb.

  But there is no mistaking the man who once saved his life.

  The man looks up and recognition flashes in his eyes. A look of utter hatred disturbs the features of his face, like a rock thrown in a pond. And then he is being yanked to his feet by the prison officer.

  ‘Sarge, I could use a hand!’

  McAvoy feels as though his guts are full of snow. His mind fills with pictures he has not allowed himself to study in four years. He has a sudden memory of dead leaves and sideways rain and hands trying to stuff the blood back into his body as he dribbled on to nothing on the cold, hard ground.

  ‘Owen . . .’

  ‘The fuck you playing at, ya big bastard?’ snarls the prison officer, pushing himself so close to McAvoy that his angry words arrive in a hiss of spray.

  ‘Sarge . . .’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ begins McAvoy, though he isn’t sure who he’s apologising too.

  In his ear: ‘Hector, have you fucking got him or what?’

  ‘You could have broken my bloody skull!’

  ‘Guv, I’m not sure . . .’

  ‘Hector, what the hell is going on?’

  ‘Sarge!’

  ‘If I wasn’t in uniform I’d smash your face in, you ginger prick!’

  ‘Sarge?’

  McAvoy turns and sees that Lenneville is struggling in Ben’s grasp. Through the tangle of onlookers he sees Andy Daniells, even more portly than the suspect, waddling quickly through the snow.

  ‘I’m a policeman,’ says McAvoy, distractedly, trying to get the prison officer to stop shouting at him.

  In his ear: ‘I know you bloody are. But could you be a good policeman rather than a shit one and tell me what the fuck’s happening. I’ve got you on CCTV. Who’s the bloke with the cuffs? Hector!’

  McAvoy feels eyes upon him; eyes that seem to stare up at him from a dark, black place far beneath his feet.

  ‘Owen,’ says McAvoy, and the name feels alien on his tongue. ‘Why? What’s happening?’

  ‘Hector!’

  ‘Sarge!’

  McAvoy turns away from the cold eyes and sees his colleagues struggling with their prisoner. He can hear sirens and raised voices among the smokers and motorists who have paused their days to gawp.

  McAvoy runs towards the struggling figures and places a hand on the suspect’s back. Leans in with just enough pressure to let him know that, if he should choose, he could leave him looking like a fossil.

  Lenneville stops moving.

  McAvoy turns back to where he left the two men.

  Sees only empty air, and melting snow.

  Chapter Three

  Lights flashing, sirens blaring, ambulance and police van pulling up as close to the Guildhall as the driver can manage: its crew leaping out in green overalls, dragging equipment, barking instructions, questions, cursing the snow . . .

  Police cars. Pharaoh’s little convertible, abandoned at the centre of Hull’s busiest T-junction, wedged in among the bigger vehicles like a comma between words.

  The press. Satellite dishes on roofs. Journalists tucking shirts into their trousers and pulling wellingtons from car boots.

  ‘Could have been worse,’ says Pharaoh, sipping coffee from a mug that declares her the World’s Best Dad.

  She and McAvoy are staring out of the window of one of the more attractive function rooms on the ground floor of the Guildhall. McAvoy thinks he may have been at a wedding here.

  He raises his own mug to his lips. It has a picture of a squirrel on it. He doesn’t know where the uniformed officer rustled up the hot drinks, but he’s grateful. He’s soaked to the bone.

  ‘West Mercia are happy enough,’ continues Pharaoh, giving him a nudge that suggests he cheer up.

  ‘It didn’t go quite according to plan,’ mutters McAvoy, turning away from the chaos beyond the leaded glass and giving a sigh that blows Pharaoh’s dark hair back from her face and makes her dangly earrings rattle.

  ‘They were hoping he would lead them to whoever he’d been planning on taking next. They wanted to catch him in the act so there would be no loopholes come the court case. But it doesn’t matter now. He was already confessing when they led him away.’

  McAvoy sucks his lower lip. ‘He was definitely guilty, then.’

  Pharaoh gives a little grin and exposes the shiny tooth in her top set. It’s whiter than the others. She’s still waiting for a permanent replacement for the incisor that was kicked out by a drug dealer on Flamborough Head. The Police Federation’s insurers are playing silly beggars over who should foot the bill since she wasn’t officially on duty when she sustained the injury.

  ‘You don’t seem thrilled,’ says Pharaoh, slapping him on the chest with the back of her hand. ‘I saw what happened on the monitors. Don’t be embarrassed, you didn’t even fall over. I couldn’t have run five yards in that slush.’

  McAvoy shakes his head.

  ‘Is it Roisin?’ asks Pharaoh, cocking her head, like a bird that has heard a worm beneath the ground. ‘Everything’s OK, yeah? She’s pleased to be home? You’re still love’s young dream?’

  McAvoy gives a tired laugh. The look on Pharaoh’s face when she mentions his wife is the same one that Roisin wears when she mentions his boss.

  ‘The prisoner,’ says McAvoy, at last. ‘The one I knocked over. I knew him. Know him. However you want to put it.’

  Pharaoh drains her drink and puts the mug down on an ugly wooden table, which she perches herself upon. She crosses her arms and gives him her full attention, tucking her sunglasses into her cleavage and staring at him with eyes that he can never allow himself to look into for long.

  ‘You sent him down?’ she asks.

  McAvoy licks his teeth and feels momentarily angry. Tells himself to breathe. Closes his eyes.

  ‘You know when I got hurt . . .’

  ‘Which time?’ asks Pharaoh, smiling.

  ‘The first time, I suppose you’d call it. Humber Bridge.’


  Pharaoh’s smile fades. She knows. Everybody knows. ‘When you caught Tony Halthwaite,’ she says.

  McAvoy takes two steps to his left and leans against one of the columns.

  ‘There was a bloke in the dock for the murder of a local girl called Ella Butterworth,’ he says, and in his soft Scottish accent, her name sounds strangely lyrical. ‘Shane Cadbury, he was called. Ella’s body was found at his flat. She was wearing her wedding dress. She’d been stabbed so many times that when they moved the body, the pathologist said it was like picking up a spider web.’

  ‘Christ,’ breathes Pharaoh. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Doug Roper was leading the investigation . . .’

  ‘Prick,’ says Pharaoh, automatically.

  ‘. . . and it was his idea to search all the houses in the area near where she was last seen. She’d been trying on her dress, you see. Some red wine got spilled. She ran to her mum’s house, two streets away. Never got there. Missing for three weeks. Roper leaned on everybody he could and got nowhere. The search was an act of desperation. But somehow it worked. We found her.’

  Pharaoh holds up her hand and shakes her head. ‘You found her, Hector. Everybody knows it was you, what you saw.’

  McAvoy looks away. Stops himself remembering.

  ‘Roper charged Cadbury with her murder in no time. But Cadbury said something to me that wouldn’t go away. He said he’d found her, laid out and gift-wrapped. He never elaborated on it. Never got much of a chance to. He had convictions for sex offences and he abused her body enough to leave plenty of DNA.’

  ‘But you had doubts?’

  ‘I just wanted to be sure,’ says McAvoy, and shivers as he remembers what it was to be the new boy on the team of Humberside Police’s brightest star. Doug Roper was handsome, charming and utterly merciless in his pursuit of convictions. His clean-up rate was the envy of every CID team in the UK, and while some questioned his methods, he was ruthlessly efficient. He hadn’t wanted McAvoy on his close-knit team, but an opening came up and Roper was short-handed. He accepted the earnest sergeant with bad grace and treated him as little more than a gopher. McAvoy felt a duty to Ella. He endured the jibes and the pointless assignments. Put up with it all to help catch a killer.

  ‘I probably shouldn’t have done it but I’d put together this kind of computerised Venn diagram system,’ he says, lost in memory. ‘It was a basic prototype but it was designed to pick out similarities between cases and extrapolate a list of connected crimes, solved or unsolved. I’d linked it to all the existing databases. There was a pattern to Ella’s wounds. They were inflicted with something that might have been a kukri – the knife used by Gurkhas. And there were several cases from up and down the country where such a weapon had been used. I did some digging and read some articles about the victims. In two separate locations, I recognised the byline of a reporter. I thought they might know more than they printed so I requested their details. It turned out the byline was a pseudonym of the same freelance who was working for the Hull Mail and covering the Ella Butterworth case. Tony Halthwaite.’

  ‘Good police work,’ says Pharaoh. ‘Roper should have done it.’

  ‘I didn’t know it but a local reporter was putting the same pieces together. His name was Owen Swainson. Trouble was, he approached Roper with his findings. Roper had him arrested. He got some girl to say Swainson’d stuck a gun in her face and sexually assaulted her. Roper had one of his junior officers put a beating on him. I broke it up.’

  Pharaoh gives a quick smile. ‘I bet you did.’

  ‘After he was bailed, we compared notes. I didn’t know what the hell to do. Roper was everything I hated in a police officer. He didn’t give a damn about the truth, he just wanted the result. Thing is, Owen was Tony’s alibi. Tony’s car was in the area when Ella disappeared, but he said that it was taken for a joyride while he was drinking with Owen. Owen was too drunk to remember differently.’

  ‘You decided to take Tony down yourself,’ says Pharaoh. McAvoy knows she’s wanted this conversation ever since she first took him under her wing. She seems like she wants to put her hand on his arm.

  ‘I was still deciding what to do when Owen lost his mind. He arranged to meet Tony at the country park. It was a place they used to go and drink and put the world to rights of an evening. It all went wrong. I got hurt.’

  Pharaoh nods.

  ‘While I was in hospital, Owen was charged and put on trial. It was all rushed through. He was advised to plead guilty to possessing an offensive weapon. That was true – he did own a gun. He’d bought it at the docks while doing an article on how easy it is to get a gun into the country. I don’t know who Roper leaned on, but by the time I was fit to do anything other than bleed, Owen had been given nine years and sent to Wayland Prison. Roper quit before it came out that he nearly sent an innocent man to prison. Tony Halthwaite was declared mentally unfit and has been in Rampton ever since.’

  ‘And you?’

  McAvoy gives a snort of contempt. ‘Doing better than Owen.’

  ‘You feel guilty?’ asks Pharaoh, as kindly as she can.

  ‘Every moment of every day.’

  ‘And that’s who you bumped into today?’

  McAvoy nods. ‘What was he doing here?’

  Pharaoh manoeuvres her head until she is in his eyeline. Then she gives him her best smile. ‘I can tell you if you want.’

  McAvoy waits for his boss and friend to explain herself.

  ‘I checked him out as soon as I saw a bloke in cuffs on the monitor. I’m a detective superintendent. I think things like that are important.’

  McAvoy is unsure whether to smile or scowl.

  ‘It was only a couple of phone calls,’ she says, shrugging. ‘And I’ve been waiting for you to tell me about that night for bloody years.’

  McAvoy gives in to a smile. It fades as he finds himself wondering what he is about to learn.

  ‘He’s not in Wayland any more,’ says Pharaoh, pulling her notebook from the recesses of her large, fake designer handbag and peering at it. ‘He’s much closer to home. HMP Bull Sands. Category D, open prison. The sort that the Daily Mail calls a holiday camp, as if that makes it any less vile. Been there eight months. He was here giving evidence at an inquest into the death of a prisoner out on day release at a farm out towards Howden. He had to be here in case the solicitor acting for the farmer wanted to cross-examine him. Turned out he didn’t. It was all pretty open and shut. Accidental death and nobody’s fault. Owen will be halfway back down to Mablethorpe by now.’

  McAvoy realises he is standing too still. He has his hand across his mouth, one finger touching his nose and the others curved around his chin. He is staring at Pharaoh too intently. She catches his eye as she glances up from her notes and they both look down again. McAvoy colours and Pharaoh starts patting pockets for her cigarettes.

  ‘Who died?’ asks McAvoy, pointing at the left-hand side of Pharaoh’s coat to remind her where she keeps her smokes.

  ‘William Blaylock,’ says Pharaoh, pulling out the packet and holding one of the cigarettes beneath her nose to inhale it. ‘Swainson’s cellmate, according to what I could get. Accident with farm machinery. Bloody great drill, right through the chest.’

  ‘The chest?’ asks McAvoy, keeping a careful eye on his boss to make sure she doesn’t light the cigarette indoors. ‘How’s that an accident? What kind of drill?’

  ‘Petrol-powered auger,’ reads Pharaoh. ‘Sounds like it would sting a bit. He was a dealer but low-rung.’

  ‘Poor lad.’

  ‘Aye.’

  McAvoy looks past her at the darkened windows. Realises that the lights of the ambulance are still flashing and that he has been bathed in blue light.

  ‘Just noticed that, have you?’ asks Pharaoh. ‘You look like a cross between a jelly baby and an Avatar. Very fetching.’

  McAvoy knows she is trying to shunt the great locomotive of his mind away from dwelling on his encounter with Owen. Roisin apart
, she knows him better than anybody. Sometimes she seems to know him better than he does himself.

  ‘I should have visited him,’ he says.

  ‘Nobody could blame you for avoiding it,’ says Pharaoh. ‘You nearly died.’

  ‘I would have died if he hadn’t saved me.’

  ‘The way I read it, he would have died if you hadn’t saved him.’

  ‘But he’s in prison for lies,’ says McAvoy, suddenly angry. ‘Roper set the whole thing up.’

  Pharaoh looks sceptical. ‘He was a prick, Hector, and he cut corners, but he wouldn’t have had the power to send somebody to prison for nothing. And like you say, there was the gun crime. Sometimes shit happens to people. He’ll probably write a book about it when he gets out and make a fortune. You’ve done him a favour. Give yourself a break.’

  McAvoy would usually smile in thanks but there is a tightness in his chest and he feels wet across his back. He realises how many walls he has built around the memory of that night in the woods. He has faced death more often than any person should but he has never come closer to losing everything than when he lay bleeding on that forest floor. Suddenly, McAvoy has a strong vision of Owen cradling his young cellmate. Imagines tears in his eyes as the young man in his arms puddles into claret and flesh upon the floor of a dirty barn.

  ‘Did you get a chance to ask about the post-mortem?’ asks McAvoy, quietly. ‘Any suggestion of other injuries? I mean, I don’t want to cause him any more problems. Just turning up, like . . .’

  Pharaoh holds the cigarette to her nose again and breathes in. She looks as if she would be willing to bite off at least one limb to be allowed to light it indoors.

  ‘It’s Lincolnshire’s patch,’ she warns. ‘Inquest is done. Nothing to do with us.’

  McAvoy looks affronted. ‘I didn’t say anything!’

  ‘Shush,’ she says, smiling. ‘I was going to suggest it anyway. Sounds like you’ve been waiting for an opportunity.’

  McAvoy feels an overwhelming desire to start the day over again. Wishes he had never seen the face from his past. But now he has, he knows that he cannot close down the memories that are suddenly seeping into every corner of his mind, flooding cracks and crevices like red wine running over marble.