by David Mark
‘Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy.’
‘I know,’ says Chandler, grinning warmly. ‘I used to do a bit of work in your part of the world. Knew Tony Halthwaite pretty well. Doug Roper, too. All got shushed up, eh?’
McAvoy thinks, Does everybody bloody know?
‘I’d rather not …’
‘Don’t fret, mate. My lips are sealed. Unless you happen to have a bottle of whisky on you, in which case they’ll bloody open.’ He looks past McAvoy and grins at the receptionist. ‘Just kidding, sweetheart.’
In the doorway, the man in the running gear has upped the pace of his stationary sprinting. His knees are getting higher. He looks like he knows what he’s doing.
Chandler notices McAvoy staring and spins back to his companion. ‘You just get going, son. Usual route. Keep your arms up. We’ll see you by the bench.’
With barely more than a nod, the other man disappears from the doorway. McAvoy hears fast footsteps on the shingle. He looks at Chandler inquisitively.
‘Room-mate,’ he says, by way of explanation. ‘They put us in twos in here so there’s somebody there during the night to make sure we don’t top ourselves.’
‘This your game, is it? You a boxing man?’
‘I wrote a book a few years back. Chap from Scunthorpe who’d had something like 200 pro fights. Diary of a Journeyman sort of thing. Good read, actually. Got into it then. You like a fight?’
‘I boxed a bit at school. Bit more at university. Was hard getting people to get in the ring with me. I’ve always been the biggest in the gym.’
‘I can see that,’ smiles Chandler, without malice. ‘Anyway, what can I do for you?’
‘Is there somewhere we can talk, Mr Chandler? It’s regarding Fred Stein.’
Chandler sticks his lower lip out playfully and raises his eyebrows in a show of surprise. ‘Fred? I’m not sure …’
‘It won’t take long.’
Chandler nods, seemingly unfazed at the prospect. ‘You mind walking and talking? I’ve promised my young lad I’ll time him.’
McAvoy nods gratefully, happy that this is working out.
As they leave the foyer and trot down the stairs into the darkening air and billowing snow, McAvoy notices his companion is limping on his right leg. Remembers what Caroline told him. Glances down. Chandler turns and looks up at the bigger man as they walk. ‘Amputated,’ he says simply. ‘Price you pay for loving the ciggies and living on bacon. Got a falsie under these trousers. I’d recommend them to anybody who goes to Weight Watchers. You just slip your lower leg off and you’ve lost half a stone.’
McAvoy isn’t sure whether to pat him on the shoulder or give him an encouraging smile, so just brushes over it. ‘Fred Stein,’ he says, as they begin following a neatly tended gravel path towards a line of evergreens. ‘You heard what happened?’
‘Did indeed,’ he says, with a sigh that becomes a cough. It’s a hacking sound. Unhealthy. ‘Poor bugger.’
‘Caroline Wills told me that you were the one that managed to get him to talk. Tracked him down. Brokered the deal.’
‘Something like that.’
‘Was there anything in his manner when you met him that suggested he was thinking of taking his own life?’
Chandler stops. They’re perhaps 500 yards from the building. He cranes his neck to see if anybody’s poking their head out of the front door, then reaches down and hitches up his trouser leg. He takes hold of the limb at the knee and with a swift jerk, snaps off his leg just below the joint. Absent-mindedly, he reaches inside the false limb and pulls out a cigarette and lighter. He sparks up, and draws the smoke deep into his lungs. It seems an almost religious experience. Without saying another word, he leans down and fastens the leg back in place. He looks up with a grin that tries to be impish but instead looks strangely gruesome, splitting so unhealthy a face.
‘Frowned upon?’ asks McAvoy, smiling, despite himself.
‘You’ve got to sign an agreement when you check in,’ he says contemptuously. ‘No fags. No chocolate. No bloody sugar. All part of the programme, apparently. Can’t detox you when you’re still putting toxins in yourself.’
‘And you don’t think perhaps you should listen?’
‘Oh, there’s no doubt they’re right, Sergeant. But that’s the thing with addictions. Rather hard to drop.’
‘But the money you’re spending to be here, surely it’s worth trying …’
‘I’m giving it my best shot,’ he says, looking away and blowing out a lungful of smoke. ‘I’ve been in places like this three times before. I come out full of hope and within a day I’m in a boozer, knocking back whisky. I know I’ll do it even before I’m out the gates. It’s the finality I struggle with. The idea of never having another cig. Never having another drink. What’s the bloody point?’
‘Your health, surely …’
‘Who am I staying healthy for? There’s just me, mate. No kids. No missus. No adoring fans desperate to sleep with me. Got to pay to publish my own bloody work.’ He says the last with a sudden rush of venom, and McAvoy notices the way his jaw locks around the cigarette.
McAvoy quickly runs through in his mind the brief details he had pulled off the internet about this man. He’d found his byline on several features on various special-interest websites and national newspapers, but the majority of hits had come from a Surrey-based publishing house. Russ Chandler had written several self-published books. Some were about the glory days of the fishing industry, others on local history and a couple of tomes on unsolved crimes in various Northern cities. They came with an author profile that revealed Russell Chandler was born in Chester in 1966 and spent some time in the army before becoming a full-time writer. He had worked as an insurance salesman and as office manager for a haulage firm. He had lived in Oxford, East Yorkshire and London, and now made his home in East Anglia. His last book had been published four years earlier, a biography of three of the RAF Bomber Command pilots who had taken part in the raid on Dresden in World War Two. McAvoy had read the extract. He’d been impressed.
‘I won’t tell,’ says McAvoy, watching the writer take a contented drag.
‘Thank you,’ he replies, making a small, theatrical bow. Then he offers him the packet. ‘You smoke?’
‘No,’ says McAvoy, shaking his head. Then, conversationally: ‘My wife does.’
Chandler looks at him with the faintest smirk on his lips. ‘You want to take one home for her?’
McAvoy wonders if he’s being laughed at. Feels the prickling of temper in his chest.
‘No thanks. She’s seven months pregnant. Got her down to three a day by way of compromise. One glass of wine …’ He stops. Looks at the ground.
‘She like a drink?’
McAvoy looks up to see Chandler staring at him hard. He tries to dismiss the moment with a wave of his hand, but Chandler is already intrigued.
‘The way you said that …’
McAvoy shrugs. Figures it can’t hurt. ‘We’ve lost babies before now,’ he says. ‘This will be our fourth attempt at a second child.’
Chandler reaches out. Puts a hand on McAvoy’s broad shoulder.
‘I’d pray for you, if I believed any of that bollocks. But I don’t. So I’ll just wish you the best.’
McAvoy finds himself half-smiling. He nods in appreciation, then feels his lips begin to tremble and his eyes fog like glass as he realises he has made Roisin sound as if she were to blame for the children that never were. ‘It wasn’t the smoking,’ he begins defensively. ‘And they’re just little glasses of wine. She knows her limits …’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ says Chandler quietly, and McAvoy wonders if he has just made this interview more difficult for himself than it need be.
‘My dad always said willpower was the way,’ says McAvoy hurriedly. ‘Decide whether you’re a smoker or a non-smoker, and just be that. I’m a non-smoker. My wife’s a smoker. Just one of those things.’
‘Sounds a bright chap.’<
br />
‘He was. Is.’
‘He a cop too?’
‘No,’ says McAvoy, looking away. ‘Crofter. Up near Loch Ewe. Western Highlands to you. His family have farmed the same patch of land for more than one hundred years.’
‘Yeah?’ Chandler sounds interested. ‘I’ve read about them, crofters. Hard life, from what I’ve heard.’
‘Oh aye,’ says McAvoy, now torn between talking more about his childhood, of testing the edges of that damp scab, and getting back to Fred Stein. ‘Dying way of life, too.’
‘So I hear. All the crofts being turned into tourist lodges nowadays, from what I read in The Times. Your dad not fancy that?’
‘He’d rather bite his own arms off,’ says McAvoy, more to himself than to his companion. ‘He and my brother work the land.’
‘Not you, though?’ Chandler’s voice is subtle. Soft. Inviting.
‘I gave it ten years,’ he says. ‘Then went to live with my mother. City life. Or at least, as much of a city life as you can get in Inverness. Gave that a year. Then off to boarding school, paid for by my stepdad. Bit of a culture shock. University in Edinburgh. Three years of a five-year degree. Then this. Policeman. Yorkshire. Hull. Husband and father. I wouldn’t be any use to my dad up there now. Don’t think I ever really was.’
‘Shame,’ says Chandler, and seems to mean it.
McAvoy nods. Wishes he were capable of thinking about his old life, his old family, with anything other than sadness.
They stand in silence for a moment, until they remember what has brought them together.
‘So?’
‘Yeah, Fred. Was big news in his day. Before my time, of course. Was just a baby when it happened. But I did a bit of work in Hull and it was impossible not to hear about the Black Winter. Anyways, I heard the story about Fred Stein years ago. The Yorkshire Post used to have an office on Ferensway and they had framed front pages on the wall. I was in there one day, having a can of ale with an old boy from the Sun who used to share an office with them, and I started reading this front page from the sixties. All about this one bloke who survived. Made it to the lifeboats with two of his crewmates and drifted to some remote bloody hell-hole in Iceland. Tramped cross-country until some local farmer found him. Media frenzy, there was, when it turned out he was alive. Everybody had given him up for dead, see? I just logged the info in the back of my brain. It’s getting cramped back there, like.’
‘Did you know him personally at this point?’
‘No, no. He was just a story. I had it in my mind that one day I might try and get him to talk about it. There might be a book in it. That’s what I do, see? I publish at least a book a year. You can buy them in the bookshops under local interest or get them from the publishing house website. Sell pretty well, considering. Fred seemed ideal, but I never really got round to it.’
‘Until?’
‘Well, that Caroline, from Wagtail. Met her during the Dunbar inquiry. Nice girl, if a bit fond of herself. Didn’t know a damn thing about the fishing industry and was willing to pay for background. That’s my line. Did her chapter and verse on the history of the local fleet; the characters, the names. Theories, contacts. She was made up with it. That’s when Fred Stein came back into my mind. I told her about it, thought no more, and then last year she got back in touch and said she thought there could be a documentary in it.’
They’ve reached the tree line now and the darkness suddenly becomes harder to penetrate. Chandler points to a wrought-iron bench and they both take a seat. McAvoy is hunched up inside his coat but the wind is still bitter on the few inches of exposed skin. He wonders how Chandler, just skin and bone in a shirt and vest, can stand it. He seems so fragile, and there’s a pestilence about him, a suggestion that even without cigarettes, his breath would be a plume of grey smoke.
‘So where do you start with something like that? Tracking him down?’
‘It’s not difficult,’ he says dismissively. ‘Start with a last known address and just start working the phones and writing letters. Fishing community’s a small one with a long memory. Found him in Southampton within a week. Put the phone down on me the first three times, so wrote him a nice letter with my details and he got in touch. Gave him the spiel. Chance to close that chapter in his life. To honour his crewmates. Say goodbye. Tell his side of the story. I really don’t think he was that interested, to be honest, but when I mentioned what they were willing to pay, he changed his tune. I’m not saying he was mercenary or anything. There’s nothing wrong with greed. He wanted a few quid in his old age, that was all.’
‘And you met in person?’
‘Just the once. Caroline was in the US and she needed the deal signed, sealed and delivered. I went down there on expenses and we had a few beers down his local. Nice old boy, really. Would have made a better book than a TV programme but my pockets aren’t deep enough. That’s the way of the world now. You try getting a book deal and you’ll see nobody gives a damn. It’s all celebrity biographies and misery fucking memoirs.’
The venom is back in Chandler’s voice. McAvoy notices that he has started rooting about beneath the bench with his left hand, and he suddenly pulls out a bottle of single malt.
‘Good lad,’ he says, as he unplugs the bottle and takes a giant swig.
McAvoy watches Chandler in the gathering gloom, wide-eyed and strangely impressed. Sees the smaller man’s silhouette change shape as the bottle tips up and stays there at the end of a long, bony arm.
‘Website said it costs five thousand a week to stay here,’ says McAvoy, shaking his head. ‘Money well spent, eh?’
‘I don’t know if I get more pleasure from the drink, or from being naughty,’ he says, smiling.
‘I don’t suppose you just found that bottle by accident?’
‘My young room-mate,’ he laughs. ‘He’ll do anything for me.’
‘I’ll bloody bet.’
They sit for another twenty minutes. The afternoon dusk turns midnight black. The snow lays half-heartedly on the wet gravel, then disappears into nothingness. They talk about Hull. McAvoy shivers and puts his hands in his pockets.
Eventually, the conversation returns to Stein.
‘You haven’t asked why this is a Hull CID matter,’ says McAvoy as he watches Chandler finish off the last of the whisky and notes that he hasn’t been offered a drop.
‘His sister’s got a husband on the Police Authority,’ Chandler says with a wave of his hand. ‘I’d imagine you’re doing somebody a favour.’
McAvoy looks at his feet, wishing he were as shrewd or well-informed as an alcoholic hack.
‘So what do I tell her?’ he asks.
‘Tell her that Fred was a good bloke. A nice chap full of stories. That he didn’t mind talking about what happened to him when he had a pint in his hand, and that he was shit-scared of going on that bloody great cargo ship with a TV crew who wanted to make him dance like a monkey.’
The irritation is there again. The bitterness. It might almost be called rage.
‘You don’t seem to have a great deal of time for TV journalism.’
‘Get that, did you?’ Chandler spits. Lights his final cigarette. ‘Vultures with cheque books.’
‘You’ve worked for them, though,’ points out McAvoy, as diplomatically as he dares.
‘What fucking choice have I got? I was born with one bloody talent, son. I can write. Two, if you count getting people to talk. I should be on every bloody bookshelf in the land. But I’m not. I’ve got a bedsit in East Anglia and even if I still had my licence, I couldn’t afford a car. I use what little royalties I get from one book to pay for the publishing run on the next.’
‘Mr Chandler, I—’
‘No, son, you’ve hit the nail on the head. I’m a fucking failure as a writer. I’ve had more rejection letters from publishers than I can fucking stomach. But put Caroline Wills in front of the camera and put a fat cheque in an old boy’s hand and you get TV bloody gold. My graft. My idea!’
>
McAvoy waves his hands, urging Chandler to slow down. ‘Your idea? I though Miss Wills contacted you …’
Chandler dismisses him with an angry grunt. ‘I have a million bloody ideas. I’ve got a notebook full of them. If I come up with enough outlines, maybe one day a publishing house will like one of them. Fred was in there. An idea I had. A book about people who survived. The ones that got away. The individuals who escaped when nobody else got out alive. I hadn’t even started looking for him, nor for any of the others, by the time the rejection letters hit the doormat. That’s my life, son. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I’m fucking here!’
Chandler is standing now. In the darkness, McAvoy can see the glowing tip of his cigarette moving from side to side, up and down, rolling around his mouth as if wedged in the lips of a cow chewing grass.
‘Mr Chandler, if you would just calm down a moment …’
Chandler extinguishes his cigarette on the palm of his hand. He places the stub in his pocket. ‘Are we done?’
McAvoy, red-faced, bewildered, angry and confused, doesn’t know what to say. He just nods. Dismisses Chandler by turning his away and sits back down on the bench. He listens to his footsteps limp away. His brain hurts. His mind is a fog of good intentions, guilt and an intuition he doesn’t fully trust.
Why did I come here? he asks himself. What have I bloody learned?
As he walks back to his car, he feels a hundred years old. He wants to upload his mind into the database and delete the bits that aren’t important. Look for connections. See what it is that his subconscious is telling him.
He closes the door on the swirling, angry snow. Closes his eyes.
Switches on his mobile phone.
Listens to his messages.
The bollocking from Pharaoh.
The instruction to call Helen Tremberg as soon as he can.
CHAPTER 12
McAvoy plays with the car radio.
6.58 p.m. Two minutes to the next news bulletin.
Outside lane on the A15, downhill to approaching the harp strings and tangled metal of the Humber Bridge. It was an impressive sight the first few times he’d driven across this mile and a half of rigid tarmac and pristine steel that stitches Yorkshire to Lincolnshire, but the novelty has worn off, and he simply resents the £3 it costs for the privilege of not having to drive through Goole.