The Dark Winter

by David Mark

  McAvoy closes his eyes for five whole seconds. Imagines the correspondence being read out in court. Pictures Chandler’s defence barrister telling him to change his plea to guilty and take the prosecution’s offer of a reduced sentence. Sees Ray smiling as his mates slap his back.

  ‘Open and shut,’ says Archer, and for once, her words don’t seem designed to pummel him. They merely state fact.

  ‘What was the upshot?’ asks McAvoy, in little more than a croak.

  ‘Publisher threatened to go to the police and the agent dropped him,’ says Archer, taking the folder from his hands and putting it under her arm. ‘The agent’s had plenty of emails from him as well. All in a similar tone. Totally obsessive. Sage said he’s never met anybody so desperate. Somebody who would kill to see their name on a bookshelf.’

  McAvoy frowns. It makes no sense. He’s seen nothing in Chandler’s eyes to make any of this believable.

  ‘His eyes,’ he remembers suddenly. ‘The man I fought with had blue eyes. Chandler doesn’t.’

  ‘Fucking hell, McAvoy,’ says Archer angrily. ‘Maybe he wore contacts. That’s all just detail. We’ve got murders, and we’ve got a guy with “murderer” written through him like a stick of Blackpool rock.’

  ‘But if it’s not …’

  ‘Then he won’t confess.’

  McAvoy reaches into his coat and pulls out pages he’d printed off the internet moments after Spink sent him the message. ‘Look at these,’ he says pleadingly. ‘There are other people at risk. Look at this woman. A charity worker blown up in Iraq. Still alive but she’s the only one who made it. We can’t get this wrong. The next victim could be here …’

  McAvoy turns to Spink, but the older man is facing away from him, staring down the corridor, as if unable to meet his eyes.

  The door opens and Colin Ray pokes his head out of the crack. His face is covered in sweat. The neck of his jumper is ragged and twisted. He looks at McAvoy for less than a heartbeat and then turns his gaze to Archer.

  ‘Come in, Shaz,’ he says quietly. ‘Peg-leg wants to confess.’

  She takes the printed pages from McAvoy’s unresisting hand and walks back into the interview room.

  CHAPTER 20

  8.43 a.m. Queen’s Gardens. Ten days before Christmas.

  A sunken area of parkland overlaid with a quilt of untouched snow, criss-crossed with hidden paths and peppered with dead rose bushes and rubbish-filled flower-beds.

  One set of footprints punched deep in the ground.

  A bench, missing its backrest.

  Aector McAvoy. Elbows on knees. Hat pulled down low. Eyes closed.

  Pulls his phone from his pocket. Eighteen missed calls.

  He’s hiding. He’s stomped off into the snow and the solitude because it hurts too much to see somebody else shaking the Chief Constable’s hand and drinking whisky surrounded by laughing uniforms and grinning suits.

  Russ Chandler.

  Charged with two counts of murder at 6.51 a.m.

  Russ Chandler.

  The man who butchered Daphne Cotton in view of the congregation at Holy Trinity Church.

  Who set fire to Trevor Jefferson, then did it again in his hospital bed.

  Russ Chandler. The man who answered ‘no comment’ for four hours, then told enough lies to get himself charged with murder.

  In three hours he’ll be remanded into custody pending trial. It will be months before the prosecutors begin spotting the holes in the case.

  By then, the unit will probably have imploded, or been given over to Ray, and McAvoy will probably be driving a desk in some remote community nick where a man who’s a dab hand with a database is a vaguely useful tool.

  He puts the mobile away. Reaches down and picks up the litre bottle of fizzy pop that stands between his feet. Unscrews the cap and takes a swig. He’s guzzling orangeade like a tramp downs cider. He’s eaten three chocolate bars and a bag of jelly sweets. The sugar’s making him feel a bit manic, and he’s craving something beefy and deep.

  He uncrosses his legs. Sits forward. Rubs his cold thighs. Sits back. Takes another swig. Wonders if he could just stay here for good. Make this bench his permanent home. Here, in the snow-covered isolation of Queen’s Gardens; huddled inside his jacket, chocolate on his tongue, cold pain in his bones, and a feeling not unlike toothache boring into his brain, as if deliberately trying to make his thoughts hollow and painful.

  It’s quiet, here in the park. At this hour, this time of year, it’s empty. Hull’s empty. The sudden snowfall after days of frost has turned the city’s network of pot-holed B-roads and winding dual carriageways into so many ice rinks and snow banks, and McAvoy fancies that the thousands of commuters who usually make their way into the city centre will be ringing in and suggesting they start their Christmas holidays early. Others will chance it. Take their old cars with their bald tyres and their too-small engines, and drive too fast on glassy tarmac. People will grieve today. Families will lose loved ones. By nightfall, forensics officers will be disentangling broken limbs from crushed cars. Uniformed officers will have broken bad news to sobbing relatives. A detective will have been assigned. A press release will have been circulated. The cycle will go on.

  He wonders briefly whether anybody really gives a fuck about anything.

  ‘Feeding the penguins, McAvoy?’

  He looks up and sees the slender, elegant figure of Tom Spink crunching through the snow towards him.

  ‘Sir, I …’

  McAvoy begins to speak and stops again.

  ‘Can’t say I blame you,’ says Spink airily. ‘Does you good. Clears the head. Clears the lungs too, if you’re a smoker. Mind if I join you?’

  McAvoy nods at the space on the wrought-iron bench.

  ‘It’s wet,’ he says, in case Spink hasn’t noticed the two inches of snow icing the green-painted bench.

  ‘It’ll do,’ says Spink, sitting down.

  ‘Nippy,’ he adds, as he makes himself vaguely comfortable. He’s wearing a thin leather coat over his collarless shirt and soft cords. ‘Suppose this is nowt where you’re from, eh?’

  McAvoy turns away.

  ‘Pharaoh got as far as the Humber Bridge,’ he says. ‘Managed to get across despite the weather warnings. She was at the top of Boothferry Road when her mobile went and the brass told her not to risk it. To take a few days off. Colin Ray’s got things under control.’

  ‘She take any notice?’

  ‘Yes and no. She’s not going to crash the party. Diverted to Priory Road.’

  ‘How’s she taking it?’

  ‘About as well as you’d expect. Managed to bite her tongue, but she’s got to be careful how she plays this. If she keeps her head down, it could all work out fine. She’ll have been lead detective on a successful hunt for a killer. If she starts shouting the odds and kicking up a stink, her card will be marked.’

  McAvoy realises he’s grinding his bunched fists into his knees. Forces himself to stop.

  ‘It’s not Russ Chandler,’ he says through his teeth. ‘I’ve been sitting here thinking about it. Thinking about nothing else. It’s not him.’

  Spink turns to him. Stares into his eyes for a good twenty seconds, as if trying to read the inside of his skull. Seems to scorch the inside of McAvoy’s head with the intensity of his gaze. Then he turns away, as if making a decision.

  ‘It often isn’t.’

  McAvoy pulls a face. ‘What?’

  ‘It often isn’t, son. You know that better than anyone. You’re going to kill yourself if you carry on like this, lad.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with giving a damn,’ he spits angrily.

  ‘No, lad. There’s nothing wrong with giving a damn. But the price you pay for it is this. You must see it, you must see the cops who come to work, do a half-decent job, and head home without a backward glance. You must have seen them toasting questionable results and dodgy convictions. You must have wondered why you can’t be that way.’

  ‘I jus
t think it matters,’ he begins, and then stops when he feels the words catching in his throat.

  ‘It does matter, Aector. It matters that a villain gets locked up, because that way, the public can go back to feeling all safe and secure in the knowledge that our boys in blue are up to the challenge of keeping them safe from nutters. That’s why it matters. And it matters to the press, because it sells newspapers. And it matters to the top brass because it makes their crime statistics look peachy. And it matters to the politicians because voters don’t want to live in a society where a young girl can get chopped up in a church during Evensong. And back at the bottom, it matters to coppers, because they don’t want to get it in the neck from their superiors, and because most of them decided to become a police officer in the hope of making some kind of difference to the world. Then there are people like you, son. People who need to matter on some fucking cosmic level. People who need to find justice as if it’s some fundamental ingredient of the universe. As if it’s some naturally occurring mineral that you can drill for and dole out.’

  Spink pauses. Waves a hand, tiredly.

  ‘McAvoy, son, it’s not like that. It should be, yeah. By Christ it would be nice if the whole world felt your outrage. If people couldn’t eat or sleep or function until the balance had been redressed and the evil expunged by some act of good, or decency, or justice, or whatever you want to call it. But they don’t. They read about something horrible and they say it’s awful and they shake their heads and say the world’s going to the dogs and then they put the telly on and watch Coronation Street. Or they go in the garden for a game of football with the kids. Or they head down the pub and have a few jars. And I know that it makes you sick, son. I know that you see people going about their daily business and it makes you angry and nauseous and empty inside that people are capable of such callousness and heartlessness when they should be focusing on the dead, but if you spend your life waiting for things to change, you’re going to die a disappointed man.’

  Spink stops. Screws up his eyes. Gives his head a little shake. Turns away.

  McAvoy sits in silence. He tugs at the little patch of hair beneath his lower lip. Pulls it until it begins to come out. There’s an anger in him. An indignation at being read, at being analysed, at being judged, by a man he barely knows and who has the temerity to call him ‘son’.

  McAvoy opens his mouth and shuts it again. He wipes a hand across his face.

  ‘Colin Ray’s got evidence, son. It might not match what’s in your gut and it might just hurt like hell, but unless you’ve got any of that big bag of natural justice you want to sprinkle, then Russ Chandler’s the man that can be tried, and maybe even convicted of murder.’

  McAvoy glares at him. ‘Do you think he did it?’

  After a moment of trying to stare him out, Spink looks away. ‘It doesn’t matter what I think.’

  McAvoy spits again.

  He stands up. Takes a gulp of cold, fresh air.

  Towers over the other man.

  ‘It matters what I think.’

  He says it through gritted teeth, but finds himself twitching into a smile, as the elation of realisation of acceptance seems to carbonate his blood, to fill his skull with endorphins and energy.

  ‘It fucking matters.’

  There’s an art to walking in snow. Novices grip too hard with their feet; arching their soles, digging in with their toes, and are on their knees rubbing cramped-up calves within a hundred paces.

  Others are too cautious, taking large strides, stepping onto patches of what seems like firm ground. They slip on iced concrete. Tumble, holding bruised shins – ankles twisting inside unsuitable shoes.

  McAvoy walks as he was taught. Head down. Watching the ground for changes in the texture of the snow. Hands at his sides, ready to shoot out and break his fall.

  He was born into a landscape harsher than this mosaic of tended grass and firm pavements, overlaid with six inches of white. He grew up on terrain scarred with crevices, with cracks, with loose shingle and shale; all concealed for eight months of the year by the relentless snowfall.

  He sometimes remembers the noise the sheep made when they stumbled and snapped a leg. Remembers the silence too, in the moments after he ended their suffering. Slit their throats with a pocket knife. Pinched their mouths and nostrils closed with a gloved hand.

  Remembers the artfulness with which his father could snap a neck. His acceptance of the necessity of his actions, laced with a resolute determination to take no pleasure in them.

  Remembers, too, the damp eyes his father had turned upon him. The tenderness with which he had reached down and stroked the wool. The way he raised his hand to his nose and breathed in the damp, musky scent of a ewe he had reared from birth, and whose neck he had snapped to end her pain.

  The man at Holy Trinity Church had that same look in his damp, blue eyes. So did the man who carved his name in Angie Martindale. Who sat, crying, for an age before embarking on his work.

  Energised, blood pumping, thoughts racing in his mind, McAvoy considers a killer.

  ‘Is that what you’re doing? Putting them out of their misery? Are you ending their suffering? Are you asking me to end yours?’

  McAvoy stops. Lost in his thoughts, he has taken the wrong path from the park.

  His phone begins to ring. Number withheld.

  ‘Aector McAvoy,’ he says.

  ‘Sergeant? Hi, this is Jonathan Feasby. I got a message to call …’

  McAvoy racks his brains. Puts the events of the past twenty-four hours into some sense of order. Feasby. The reporter from the Independent. The guy he’d emailed about the aid worker in Iraq.

  ‘Mr Feasby, yes. Thanks for getting back in touch.’

  ‘No problem, no problem.’ His voice is breezy. Southern-sounding. Cheerful, considering the weather and the hour.

  ‘Mr Feasby, I’m involved in the investigation into Daphne Cotton’s murder and I believe you may have some information that would be relevant to the inquiry.’

  McAvoy listens as the reporter gives a whistle of surprise.

  ‘Me? Well, yeah, if I can. Hull though, isn’t it? I’ve never even been to the North East.’

  ‘Hull isn’t in the North East, sir. It’s in the East Riding of Yorkshire.’

  ‘Right, right.’

  ‘Are you aware of the case I’m referring to?’

  ‘Not her name, no. But I just Googled “Hull” and “murder” and “McAvoy” and got myself about a billion hits. Process of elimination, I’m assuming it’s the current one. Poor girl in the church, yes? Terrible.’

  McAvoy nods, even though nobody can see.

  ‘Mr Feasby, I want to talk to you about an article you wrote some time ago. It concerned an Anne Montrose. She was injured in an incident in Northern Iraq. I understand you were the freelance writer hired by the Independent to cover the incident …’

  There is silence at the other end of the line. Pressing his ear to the phone, McAvoy fancies he can hear the sound of mental gears clashing.

  ‘Mr Feasby?’

  ‘Erm. I’m not sure I remember the case,’ says Feasby. He’s lying.

  ‘Sir, I have a decent relationship with the local press and my colleagues make fun of me for my belief in human nature. If I talk to you off the record, will it stay that way?’

  ‘I’m one of the last reporters who believes in such a concept.’

  ‘Well, I’m one of the last men in the world who believes that a promise means something, and I promise you I won’t be pleased if the contents of this conversation appear in print.’

  ‘I understand. How can I help you?’

  ‘I’m working on a theory that perhaps the man who killed Daphne Cotton may be targeting other people who have survived near-death experiences. That perhaps he or she is finishing off something that they view as an unacceptable escape from the Reaper’s scythe. I am trying to work out who might be next on their list, if such a list exists. Anne Montrose fits the criterion. S
he was a survivor in an incident in which everybody else involved died. I want to know what happened to her after the story you wrote. I want to know that she’s safe.’

  There is silence at the other end of the phone. McAvoy listens out for scribbling.

  ‘Mr Feasby?’

  ‘If I’m off the record, then so are you, yes?’ Feasby’s voice has lost its lightness. He sounds pensive. Almost afraid. ‘I’m not intending to incriminate myself or anybody else here …’

  ‘I understand.’

  The reporter lets out a whistled breath. ‘Look, it probably doesn’t mean much to you, but when I say that I’ve never done this before …’

  ‘I believe you.’

  McAvoy isn’t sure whether he does or he doesn’t, but knows how to sound sincere.

  ‘Well, the only time I’ve ever taken money not to publish a story was when I tried to follow up on Anne Montrose. I had the opportunity to write one more bloody follow-up on one more bloody victim of one more bloody day of that bloody war. And I had the chance to write nothing. To call in a favour with my news desk and bury the whole thing …’

  ‘How? Why?’

  ‘I had the chance of a way out.’

  McAvoy pauses. He tries to clear his head.

  ‘After I wrote the story about the explosion, about what happened to her, a man came to see me,’ he says, and his voice sounds far away.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘He was the boss of a company that was making money in the clean-up operation. Rebuilding communities. Building schools and hospitals. And he said that if I did him a favour, he’d do me one in return.’

  ‘And the favour?’