by David Mark
‘Go on,’ says Roisin, putting her legs across McAvoy’s as he sits down on the bench. ‘You’ll feel better.’
McAvoy doesn’t need his notes. Knows the whole sequence of events off by heart.
‘At just after 1 p.m. on Sunday the 29th of August, Hannah phoned for a taxi. It picked her up from the back of the Bowman’s Tavern in Howden twelve minutes later. Hannah shared a house around 300 metres away, on Bridgegate, with three friends. She had been invited with them to see a movie at the leisure park at Castleford but had declined, saying she had a migraine. When she ordered the cab, she told the operator she was heading to a village on the road to York but couldn’t remember the name. When he picked her up, she said it was Millington.’
‘That’s the place we had the ice cream, yes?’ asks Roisin. ‘Pretty little village. Top of the hill?’
McAvoy nods. ‘She told him to take her to the Gait Inn. We had a drink and a meal there just before Christmas, remember? Lilah drew on the table with her fork and you called the landlord a fecking eejit?’
Roisin grins at the memory. Encourages him to continue.
‘She talked a lot on the journey. Sat in the front and gabbled. Told the driver about her work.’
‘What did she do?’
‘Press Association in Howden. TV listings for the Radio Times. She did two years of an English degree at the University of Hull but didn’t finish it and took a job there on a recommendation from a friend. She was pretty good, apparently, though I’m not sure what qualifies as “good”. Anyhow, the driver asked her why she was heading out to the middle of nowhere. She said something about meeting an old school friend who was staying at the temple up the road.’
‘That’s the big place? Looks like Downton Abbey?’
‘The Madhyamaka Kadampa Meditation Centre, yes,’ says McAvoy, stroking his wife’s leg and remembering the gales of laughter that his boss and friend, Trish Pharaoh, had thrown his way when he first read out the name – begging him to repeat it again and again. She makes him do the same with the word “purple” when she’s bored. Apparently the Scots can’t say it, though that came as news to him.
‘Sounds exotic,’ says Roisin. ‘A good place to hide who you are.’
McAvoy shakes his head. ‘We’ve checked several times and none of the guests, staff or residents at the temple had any knowledge of her.’
McAvoy tails off. Scans the treeline. Spots his son, still happily beating a sycamore to death with a branch as he fights dragons and defends fair maidens in his mind’s eye. He reminds himself to teach the boy the Latin name for the tree when he comes back, sweating and excited and demanding to know where the next sandwich is coming from.
McAvoy looks at his wife, and tries to keep it light as he proceeds.
‘So we presume that it was a cover story. The driver said she had a sports bag with her and was wearing jeans, a sweatshirt and trainers. He dropped her at the pub. There were a dozen drinkers outside, enjoying the sunshine and hating the ladybirds.’
‘A loveliness of ladybirds,’ whispers Roisin to her sleeping child, and looks at her husband proudly. He grins back.
‘Aye, the plague of last summer. Couldn’t pick up a glass of lemonade without finding a hundred ladybirds using it as a bubble-bath. But the ramblers outside the Gait were willing to put up with it. They saw her get out of the cab and go inside. She gave them this little wave. And not long after she came out again, dressed in a little white tennis dress and Doc Marten boots.’
‘Bit of a transformation,’ says Roisin, sneering slightly at the very idea of such a combination.
‘Not her usual sort of outfit either, according to her friends. Prudish. That was the word they used. Not much skin on show. They couldn’t even imagine her wearing something like that.’
‘Was her hair up or down?’ asks Roisin, chewing on her lip.
McAvoy has to fight the urge to grin. Detective Superintendent Trish Pharaoh had asked the same question.
‘Down,’ he says. ‘The drinkers outside said she looked a million dollars. At first they wouldn’t have recognised her as the same girl. Heavy eye make-up too. She gave them a smile. Same little wave. Hoisted her bag. Set off up the road.’
McAvoy turns his head in the direction of the road in question, Grimthorpe Hill. Fastest way from the middle of nowhere to the back of beyond.
‘Three different motorists have come forward to say they spotted her walking this way from Millington. The last of them was about a quarter of a mile from here. She was looking at her phone as she walked. Looked a little warm but not unhappy. Certainly not running from anything or anyone.’
‘And then?’
McAvoy rubs his face with his large, rough palm. ‘Her mobile phone disappeared from the network. There’s quite a good service up here, surprisingly. They could pinpoint pretty damn close to where the signal went dead. And that doesn’t mean switched off, Roisin. That means somebody taking the battery out. The tech wizards can still pinpoint a dead phone.’
Roisin nods. She knows.
‘Her friends didn’t report her missing until the next day, and even then it wasn’t to the police. She didn’t turn up for work and her boss asked one of her housemates where she was. She was as surprised as the boss that Hannah hadn’t shown up. Started ringing her and got no response, then realised her bed hadn’t been slept in. That night one of them spoke to their parents and they suggested calling the police. So they went to the local station. Got a PC who told them she was a grown woman and probably just with a bloke. It didn’t come to CID for four days.’
‘What was she like?’ asks Roisin, as she nibbles on a piece of hawthorn leaf she picked in the woods and which she said reminded her of being a kid. Why she wants to remember that time is beyond McAvoy, but he doesn’t like to make a fuss.
‘CID got in to her Facebook account and her emails,’ says McAvoy, looking away. ‘She had a blog. Nothing much to get excited about for months – it was all favourite films and why she liked cats and whether Toy Story was an analogy for life. Just the thoughts of a young girl. She was a romantic. Like a child, really. Used to buy wedding magazines even when she was single. Saw life like a Disney princess.’
McAvoy nods his head in the direction of the cornfield that runs parallel to the woods.
‘The screensaver on her computer was a photograph taken in those woods,’ he says, looking down at his feet. ‘And on her work computer she’d searched Google Maps for the route from Millington to Great Givendale. We haven’t found her laptop. She hasn’t taken any money from her bank account since she vanished but she made no major withdrawals before her disappearance.’
‘Did she have much to withdraw?’
‘Not a lot, but a few hundred quid comes in handy when you’re planning a new life.’
‘And there was no sign of a man?’
McAvoy pushes his hair back from his face. ‘Yes and no. She had a boyfriend at university but it wasn’t really serious. And the lads she’d been out for drinks with at work were all adamant that she was an innocent.’
‘An innocent?’ asks Roisin, and enjoys McAvoy’s blush.
‘She’d still wear white at her wedding, is what I mean,’ says McAvoy. ‘And not all young men think that’s a virtue. I’ve spoken to a lot of her friends. They were pretty clear that for a long time she was a lot of hassle for not much reward. She was a good girl, Roisin, whatever that might mean. Then things changed.’
‘Changed how?’
‘I just get the sense that she found somebody. Little things. Her friends said she was acting a different kind of giddy. She was always giggly and happy but she had that little swagger in her step. And the entries on her blog seemed a bit more worldly.’
‘You think she lost her virginity,’ says Roisin, and this time, she doesn’t make fun.
‘I think she was preparing to. And she visited peculiar websites on the work computer. Nothing dirty, just interesting essays on different kinds of arousal. And spells,
too.’
Roisin gives in to a grin. ‘I like this bit. You always go red.’
McAvoy obliges. ‘She visited a site about love potions. Ways to get a man to fall in love with you. How to trap them and keep them.’
‘Did she never consider good cooking and lots of baby oil?’ asks Roisin.
‘This was dark stuff. All about scents and using your bodily fluids to create a potion. There was one that talked about getting somebody to drink a coffee laced with your, erm, monthlies . . .’
Roisin pulls a face. ‘Not my idea of a Bloody Mary,’ she says. ‘There are definitely better ways to get a man’s attention.’
‘She had her eye on somebody. Her phone records don’t show much in the way of unusual activity but she did receive a lengthy video message about a month before her disappearance from an unregistered mobile phone. We traced the phone from the distributor. It was sold through a market stall in Goole. The owner kept good records. Remembered the lad who bought it because he was always coming back to complain and whine. He contacted uniform the second the kid came back. It was David Hogg.’
‘Who?’ asks Roisin..
‘The hit and run, a mile down the road from here,’ says McAvoy. ‘Teenage girl out with her horse on a country lane and a fool in a stolen sports car comes around the corner at 90 mph and takes out horse and rider. Leaves them to die. The girl won’t walk again. The horse had to be destroyed at the scene. A nearby farmer heard it screaming. Said the sound will never leave him.’
‘Oh yes. Bastard,’ says Roisin, remembering the story. McAvoy knows her pity is shared equally between human and horse.
‘CID have no doubt the driver was David Hogg. Lives in Market Weighton. His uncle’s a hard case and tidied things up. By the time David was arrested the car had been scrapped and there was nothing to link him to the accident. He laughed his way through the interviews. Even answered a few of the questions with neighs and whinnies. Got away with it.’
‘And Hannah knew him?’
‘We don’t know; he wouldn’t talk to us. We’ve found no link between them. Just the video, and we’ve no way of viewing that. Hogg’s phone can’t be traced and he mumbles “no comment” no matter how hard you lean on him.’
Roisin smiles, remembering the first time McAvoy told her this story. ‘Jaw wired shut?’
‘He’ll be having his food mashed for years to come. His ankles and wrists were smashed and his face pummelled. Looked like he’d been kicked by a horse, then run over. His uncle had the cheek to demand what we were going to do about it. He put the word around that whoever did it was a dead man. We’ve had no leads. We’ve had no indications that the uncle’s made any progress either.’
‘So what’s the connection?’ asks Roisin, giving a little yawn.
‘I don’t know yet. Too many coincidences. Too many unanswered questions. I just can’t seem to get past it. I want to hear that she’s alive. I don’t believe that she is. I can feel her, Roisin. You know I’m not like that. I don’t hear voices or believe in clairvoyants. I’ve never read my horoscope. It’s not like that. It’s just . . .’
‘An obsession?’
He looks at his feet, chastened and ashamed.
Roisin changes her position and snuggles into his chest, poking a finger through the buttons of his shirt to tickle his hair. ‘She might be having the time of her life somewhere,’ she says. ‘You don’t have to think the worst.’
He reaches down and kisses the top of her head. Wishes he could convince himself that Hannah is just a missing girl and not a murder victim. It feels like when he was eleven – still trying to persuade himself of the existence of Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy and God.
They sit in silence for a while, only rousing themselves when Lilah wakes and uses Daddy’s leg to right herself and starts bumbling off down the slope to where her brother is running towards them, holding a branch as long as himself. From this distance, he’s a kilted Highlander, charging through the heather and the thistles with a claymore in his hand: a miniature of his father.
McAvoy is about to stand up and charge towards the boy, pretending to be an English invader dead set on having his innards sliced open by the noble Scotsman’s blade. He knows Fin will like that. Wishes only that the boy wasn’t spoiling the overall effect by wearing a Ross County football shirt and a pair of Bermuda shorts.
‘Your phone,’ says Roisin, nodding at his pocket as she hears it ring. ‘The work one.’
He answers with his name, rank and unit, briefly recalling the days when a call from work would set his heart racing with excitement. Here, now, he simply knows that something bad has happened and it is about to interrupt his day.
He nods into the phone. His eyes darken. The colour seems to leach from his skin. He looks up at the sky, at the blue overhead, and the grey to the east.
He takes his keys from his pocket and starts walking up the hill to the car.
Towards Hull.
And an appointment with another dead girl.
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