by David Mark
McAvoy is standing by the door. It smells damp inside, like wet hay; like the vegetable drawer in a student house.
‘No light?’
‘No electrics,’ says Prince.
McAvoy nods and steps inside. He looks at the rotted floor. Above, exposed roof beams stick out from the pitch-dark shadows like the ribs of long-sunk ships. He wonders whether one of the lighter patches on the mottled floor represents the spot where the auger used to stand.
‘Here,’ says Prince, nodding at the floor. ‘Poor lad was skewered. I’ll never forget it. Owen was holding his hand but he was already gone.’
‘Owen?’ asks McAvoy, squatting down and moving the wooden planks away. ‘Thought you didn’t want to know names.’
‘He introduced himself.’ Prince shrugs. ‘You don’t get many prisoners with good manners. He and Will both shook my hand the first day they came here. Said thanks for the opportunity. Owen was standing behind Will, making sure he didn’t let himself down. It was like watching a kid with their dad.’
McAvoy presses his hand to the damp ground. A young man died here. His blood soaked into the soft earth. He cannot help wondering whether it sits there among the strata of different rocks; a layer of gore among the ancient stone.
‘Did the prisoners ever try and get the other workers to bring them things they could take back inside?’ asks McAvoy, standing up and sweeping the light from his phone around the bare walls. Old, rusted bits of machinery gather in the corners like metal skeletons.
‘Every bloody day,’ says Prince. ‘We tried to police it but it’s hard on a site this big. We couldn’t be blamed if some of our casual workers brought them the odd bit of weed or a pay-as-you-go phone, or whatever. People look for an angle.’
‘And Will? Did he ever try and persuade anybody to bring him something?’
In the light of the phone, Prince’s face is all hollows and shadows, but McAvoy can see that he is working out the merits of truth over deceit. He nods.
‘Lad was into herbal stuff. He was good at it. Knew what all the herbs were meant for. I had a terrible kidney infection last summer and he told me what to take. Said he’d make it for me if I brought him the stuff.’
‘And did you?’
‘It was only a bit of cumin and parsley and a bit of vegetable glycerine, though that were a bugger to find. Seemed to work too. He brewed it up in my Thermos while he was on his break. Tasted bloody horrible. Lads called him “Witchy” but he seemed to like that.’
McAvoy digests this. Swings his torch around once more and forces himself to do what he must. He squats down and lifts the floorboards. It takes an effort of will to keep his movements nonchalant when he see the ugly trench beneath. He stands. Breathes out. Kicks at a stone by his feet. He is about to switch the light off and return to the open air when he sees the scratches on the inside of the door. Dozens of names have been scored into the old wood. He crosses over and considers them. Wonders how many different farmhands have sat in the cool gloom of this place and eaten their lunch and drunk their ale and left their mark. He looks for Owen’s name first. Fails to find it among the overlapping, misspelled chaos of graffiti. He sees two initials and a date. FW, 43. Finds himself strangely emotional at the thought of touching a carving left there seventy years before. So many names. Lewis. Gaz. Nigel T. Bam. GED 91. Danny East. HKR. Fuck United. He traces the words with his finger. Follows them upwards with the light of the torch. Beside the top hinges is something oddly familiar. He would not be able to say whether it puts him in mind of Hebrew or Arabic or something else from a textbook, but it is a group of curls and twisted letters; somehow more intricate and expertly placed than the sea of jumbled letters amid which it sits. McAvoy steps back and switches on the camera function on his phone. His eyes fill with white light as he takes a picture of the letters and then the remainder of the door. He turns and takes several more of the rest of the barn, managing to capture Prince in profile in one of the shots. He snaps at random, trying to look as if he knows what he is doing. After a few moments he thanks Prince for his time and returns to the bike, waiting for the foreman to lock up. McAvoy is surprised to see that he does not bother to reattach the padlock.
‘Get what you needed?’
McAvoy’s reply is lost to the sound of the throttle and the grind of rubber on wet mud.
He doesn’t know the answer to the question. Doesn’t know why he is investigating or whether Owen wants him to. All he knows is that the only way the auger could have pushed that deep into the soil is if somebody was holding it by the handles and forcing it through the blood and bones of a screaming William Blaylock.
Chapter Eight
Hessle Foreshore, 8.32 p.m.
A half-moon is being sliced into thirds by the strings of the Humber Bridge, so the yellow light it throws on the black waters of the river and the neighbouring woodland looks to have been somehow trapped behind bars.
Set back a little way from the rippling water is a row of houses, painted white. One is covered in scaffold and green mesh. It is dark within. Almost sad. It has the air of a lifeless mannequin, a gaily painted cadaver amid a tangle of strings.
At the rear of the property, an old-fashioned caravan has been wedged into the tiny garden. Warm light spills out. It is filled with the sound of children giggling; of glasses and crockery clinking together; of soft voices and quiet lullabies. It is a cosy space, all floral curtains and laminate floor, built-in wardrobes and an L-shaped sofa. The only jarring note is the slow slurp-slurp-slurp of Trish Pharaoh trying to get the last of the meat off a chicken.
‘This is amazing,’ says Pharaoh, gesturing at the leg she holds in her left hand like a conductor’s baton. ‘Seriously, if this chicken had known what you were going to do to it, it would have danced on its ways to the gallows.’
Roisin turns from the sink, suds dripping from her polished fingertips all the way down her tanned arms. She smiles, pleased at the compliment.
‘My head is now completely full of the idea of a chicken being hanged,’ she says, the Irish lilt to her voice rich around the sibilant ‘s’. ‘I can see its family crying and there’s an awful moment when they open the trapdoor.’
Pharaoh takes another bite and makes the kind of noise that Roisin normally reserves for foreplay. ‘Don’t care,’ she says. ‘If you told me that you’d cook it like this, I’d gladly kick a chicken to death.’
Roisin starts laughing and turns back to the washing up. She finished her own meal a couple of hours ago but has got into the habit of making Pharaoh a plate in case she suddenly turns up and starts making noises that suggest she is peckish. On the evenings when she doesn’t turn up, Aector is happy to eat two dinners.
‘I’m still waiting,’ sings Pharaoh into the mobile phone she holds at her ear. ‘Oh, bloody hell, Ben, just phone me back.’
She terminates the call and huffs a strand of loose hair out of her eyes. Roisin can feel her eyes upon her back. She’s pleased she’s looking good. It’s a little after 8.30 p.m. and she was tempted to change into her nightclothes and dressing gown as soon as Aector got home, but both kids had been excitable and Roisin hadn’t had time to change. Pharaoh has been here for over an hour now and Roisin thinks it would be impolite or somehow suggestive if she went and slipped into her baseball shirt, loose shorts and leopard-print dressing gown. She’s happy as she is, in her velour jogging suit and vest, hooped earrings and hair piled up on top of her head in a loose beehive.
Roisin has stopped remarking upon the irony that she and her family are living in a caravan. Roisin is a traveller, and until she was seventeen such places were home. For the past eight years she has lived with Aector, first in his comfortable apartment and then a nice two-bedroomed semi-detached house on the Kingswood estate. Last year she moved into her dream home on Hessle Foreshore. It was partially destroyed when bad men came after her and her family. While the building is being made structurally sound, she and the family are living in a caravan in the back garden. Sh
e’s quite enjoying being back in familiar surroundings and the kids are treating every day like a holiday. Only Aector is struggling. He keeps apologising for their situation. Neither Aector nor Roisin is convinced they truly want to move back into the house when the work is done. It feels tainted, somehow, as though somebody has drawn a great black line through their dreams.
‘What’s he telling them in there, War and Peace?’
For the past half an hour, Aector has been telling Fin and Lilah their bedtime story. It’s a long-running saga involving imps, goblins, spaceships and an elephant on roller skates. It started out as a Scottish folk tale he remembered from his youth but Fin had interfered like the worst kind of Hollywood producer and he’s had to make accommodations.
‘He’s supposed to be settling them down,’ says Roisin, smiling. ‘By the time I get in there Lilah will be bouncing off the walls.’
As if on cue, there is a great trill of laughter from behind the flimsy bedroom door. Roisin angles herself away from Pharaoh to hide the look of pure delight that crosses her face.
‘Snoring like walruses,’ says Aector, ducking through the door frame.
‘We’re not,’ comes the response from the bedroom, followed by more giggles.
Roisin shakes her head at him. ‘You’re an eejit,’ she says.
He bends down to kiss her cheek. As he straightens up, he bangs his head on the ceiling light and gives the sigh of a man who has reconciled himself to spending the rest of his life saying ‘ouch’.
‘You’re nothing but lumps and bruises,’ says Pharaoh, putting the chicken leg back on the plate and wearing the face of somebody far from happy about the continued absence of rosemary-and-thyme roast potatoes.
‘You should see him with his shirt off,’ says Roisin, with a little glance at Aector. He colours at once.
McAvoy crosses the small living area and manages to fold himself in at the round kitchen table. It is covered in loose sheets of paper, scribbled notes, photographs and official reports.
‘Any joy with Ben?’ asks McAvoy.
‘Bloody system’s down again,’ says Pharaoh, taking a black cigarette from the case in her handbag and lighting up. She catches McAvoy’s disapproving glare and sticks out her tongue. ‘Five a day, man. I’m down to five. And don’t go on about going outside. This is a caravan. We are outside.’
Roisin brings her an ashtray, wiping her hands on a fluffy cream towel. She exposes dainty fingers, rich with gold, silver and platinum; bangles on her wrists and tiger-stripes on her fingernails.
‘You said there was nail polish in the wheelbarrow,’ says Pharaoh, her memory jogged. ‘What was the other stuff?’
‘Looked like anti-bac.’
‘And they said they’d been cleaning out the Ponderosa?’
‘Aye. They were flustered. Looked like they wished they hadn’t spoken.’
Pharaoh breathes out smoke and looks at her phone. Her favourite detective constable, Ben Neilsen, is currently working his magic on the various databases the Serious and Organised Unit has access to. As ever, the system is playing up and Pharaoh’s patience is fraying. She picks up the photo of William Blaylock’s corpse skewered to the floor in the outbuilding. She tuts.
‘How can anybody look at that and say it was an accident?’
‘Health and Safety said it wasn’t impossible.’
‘But “not impossible” doesn’t mean likely.’
‘It was good enough for the coroner.’
‘It’s not good enough for me.’
‘His arms,’ says McAvoy. ‘That’s what Owen said.’
Pharaoh peers at the picture. Puts it down and rummages through her paperwork until she finds the post-mortem report. She skims through the descriptions of his injuries and starts reading aloud.
‘. . . extensive tattoos on his forearms and across his chest.’
McAvoy picks up the discarded photo. He squints. Retrieves his reading glasses from his shirt pocket and puts them on. Shakes his head.
‘Roisin, your eyes are better than mine, can you make this out?’
Pharaoh grins across the table, seeming to enjoy the naughtiness of letting a civilian view the paperwork. She would be hypocritical to criticise. She allows her eldest daughter to type up her reports in exchange for exemption from tidying.
Roisin peers at the photo, untroubled by the injuries to Blaylock’s torso. Focuses, as asked, on the ink on William’s arms. She glances at McAvoy, puzzled.
‘Is this a test?’ she asks, half serious. ‘You’re not making fun?’
McAvoy looks a little hurt. ‘I never make fun.’
Roisin picks up a pen and a loose sheet of paper from the tabletop. She doodles a quick symbol and shows it to McAvoy. He considers it for a moment and then sits back in his chair. He takes the pen and sketches another symbol.
‘That’s an “O”,’ says Roisin.
McAvoy smiles. ‘Owen was wearing that as a pendant. Looked like it had been made from a paper clip. Show me more.’
Roisin grins, clearly pleased to be involved, and draws a longer symbol. It looks like a succession of swirls with tails; like a language made up of the number ‘9’.
‘That’s my name,’ she says. ‘Do you want me to do yours?’
McAvoy is scrolling through his phone. He shows the screen to Roisin, who squints and starts copying it down.
‘Would you like to fill me in?’ asks Pharaoh, sitting forward and feeling a little left out.
‘This is the Wiccan alphabet,’ says Roisin, sticking her tongue out in concentration as she turns the crude scratches from the back of the wooden door into something elegant and strangely otherworldly. ‘He’s got it on his left arm, see. Those letters you can see in the picture, they’re m, n, o, p and q. Give me a second, I’ll work out what the graffiti says. I haven’t looked at this stuff in years. My mam would be better.’
McAvoy and Pharaoh exchange a look. Pharaoh shrugs.
‘This was scrawled on the door of the barn where William died,’ says McAvoy, putting his hands behind his head and thumping his knuckles on the beige wall. ‘I only photographed it because it seemed familiar.’
‘Oh, this was on a door, was it? Any lemongrass?’ asks Roisin, brightly.
McAvoy laughs excitedly. He looks startled. ‘There was an incident at the prison,’ he says. ‘Owen took the blame when William nabbed some spices from the kitchen. Lemongrass. Dill. He mentioned another one. Salt, pepper and vinegar.’
‘Sounds like a skipping chant,’ mutters Pharaoh.
‘Salt, pepper and vinegar as a paste,’ says Roisin, still drawing. ‘You rub it on doors and windows and it protects you from people who want to harm you.’
Pharaoh makes a face. ‘Does it?’
Roisin shrugs. ‘It’s a very basic spell. Not even a spell, to be honest. More like a superstition. The lemongrass is more interesting. If you want to make somebody fall in love with you, you write their name or take a picture of them and wrap it in three twists of lemongrass. It’s the sort of thing teenage girls do when they buy a Wiccan book. It’s quite sweet.’
Pharaoh knows she looks as though somebody has just cracked an egg down the back of her blouse. ‘How do you know this stuff?’
‘It’s not a big leap from making poultices and ointments and putting the right herbs in a chicken dinner to knowing which plants and flowers have different powers. And when you’re a teenager and don’t know much about the world, doing a spell makes as much sense as praying, though you’d never say that out loud. I did the lemongrass charm myself when I was about thirteen. Wrote the name of this big, burly copper on it. Still got it somewhere . . .’
McAvoy blushes instantly.
‘We know Will was into this stuff,’ he says, after clearing his throat. ‘He made stuff for other prisoners. Read their alternative horoscopes. I wonder how it helps.’
Roisin finishes her drawing and is about to speak when Pharaoh’s phone rings. It’s a call from Ben Neilsen’s personal
mobile phone and the ringtone is ‘Sexy Back’ by Justin Timberlake. Her ringtone for McAvoy used to be set to ‘I Would Walk 500 Miles’ by the Proclaimers but she had to change it to a basic ring when it went off during a post-mortem and reduced the pathologist to fits of giggles.
‘Ben, my sweet. Tell me what you’ve got for me.’
Roisin and McAvoy look at one another while Pharaoh talks. He is glowing with pride and she is beaming in return.
‘Ben, you are a bloody diamond. Keep your phone on. And your trousers. See you later.’
Pharaoh hangs up, pleased. She’s been writing on the first piece of paper she could find and winces a little as she realises it’s a report into Blaylock’s injuries.
‘It says here he had soft palette damage,’ she says, distracted. ‘A cut to the roof of his mouth. Any ideas?’
McAvoy shakes his head. Nods at the phone, as if to encourage her to fill him in.
‘The car you saw at the farm is registered to an Alison Gresswell. DOB 23.07.79. Lives on Plimsoll Way. That’s Victoria Dock. Three points on her licence and . . .’ she beats her hands on the table, theatrically ‘. . . received a suspended sentence in 2011 for perjury. She provided a false alibi for her partner, Michael Bee, as in Bumble. Hang on a second . . .’ She turns the phone around to show a mugshot of a man with a tattoo of a demon on his neck. ‘This your friend?’
McAvoy nods, looking at the doodle Roisin has created on the page.
‘We’ve run Erskine and Prince through the PNC. Both squeaky clean, though Erskine is behind on his VAT payments. Ben has gone through Blaylock’s personal prison file. Only visitors he ever got were his mum and an uncle. He lost privileges along with a dozen other inmates when they were found in the greenhouses at Bull Sands with a mobile phone. The phone was seized. Ben’s put in a request for the SIM card to be couriered over from the evidence store. Apparently it’s with Lincolnshire Police. What else? Your friend, Michael Bee. He’s done two stretches, one for armed robbery. Last did a year in Lincoln, released in 2012. Was monitored by Probation Services for twelve months upon release and they were satisfied. He had a job at a certain Shepton Farm at Gilberdyke. I think it’s fair to say he doesn’t work there any more.’