by David Mark
The payphone on the landing of the house where she has a room is answered by a Kurdish-sounding man. I’m pretty good at telling the difference. I can mumble an introductory salutation in Albanian, Serbian, Arabic and Bosnian, having made it my business to get myself on good terms with the influx of asylum seekers and migrants who flooded into the city a decade back. It’s done Hull a power of good, though it hasn’t been without trauma. I covered a riot a few years ago that started when a gang of Bosnians and a gang of Serbs all decided to attend the same family fun day at their local pub, and things turned sour. Ended with half of West Hull being sealed off, and got worse when some daft bastards with white skin decided to get involved and got their heads kicked in. Other daft bastards with white skin took umbrage at this, and some poor Kosovan who had nothing to do with it got himself spread across a good swathe of the city centre. Relations are still in decline. Personally, I couldn’t give a fuck where people come from, and reckon their life must have sucked if they think that life on Spring Bank in Hull is a better option.
“Bayanit bash… tu chawai yi? I was hoping to speak to Kerry, dark hair, slim girl, if you could give her a knock…”
The Kurdish chap hangs up when I switch to English and I sit, grinding my teeth, more pissed off than before.
The phone rings, and I recognise the number as Lenny’s. She’s called half a dozen times already today, and I keep ignoring her. I don’t want to think about Jess, or hear Lenny’s fears. I ignore her, and it stops, so I just sit there for a while, thinking of green painted walls and pale curtains and leather straps and soft toys and pills and shocks and pills and treatments and diagnoses and Mam’s tears and Dad’s guilt and Kerry’s hand in mine.
It rings again, Kerry’s number. I answer it immediately.
“Kerry?”
“Owen,” she mumbles, like a drunk. “Hey you.”
“Are you all right? You left a message last night. Sounded like you were freaking out.”
“Did I?” she asks, vague and blurry. Her voice a ghost. “I don’t know.” Then, with a start. “Owen, I need some money. I need…”
“No, Kerry. I can’t.”
“Please.” Whiny, like a child asking for sweets.
“I can’t let you poison yourself anymore.”
“You’ve got your poison,” she says, anger in her voice. Desperation too. “You’re an addict too.”
“Kerry, you’re going to kill yourself…”
“I will if you don’t get me what I need.” She’s crying now. Snotty and pathetic. So far removed from the little girl who used to hold my hand in front of the painting, that she’s almost unrecognisable. Almost.
“I’ll be round tonight,” I say, shaking my head, and feeling each of her tears fall upon my defences like acid.
“Hope so. But don’t promise. I hate broken promises.”
“I love you,” I say.
The line goes dead.
Almost without warning, a great surge of emotion rises up from within me, pitching me forward as surely as a breaking wave. My head fills with images of Jess. Of the love of my life. Of the girl I drove away because I couldn’t stand how hard she loved me. I think of the skinny, broken, tearful mess she became. That I perhaps turned her into. Broken and miserable and weak. Living for the moments of compassion and tenderness I would sometimes throw her, if the breeze in my mind was blowing the right way.
Tentatively, as if probing at a painful tooth, I start thinking of happier times. I think of sunny days. Throwing stones in the water and holding hands. Me, listening as she prattled on about people at her work, suggesting colour schemes for the dining room. Me, trying to be entertaining, desperate each time her smile failed. Her, talking about babies and the future, trying to disguise her questions over my fidelity. Dark fears dressed as jokes. Me, promising all, denying more. Me, telling her that I need nobody else, that she’s all I want. Her dissecting my answers. Finding meanings that weren’t there. Her, crying again. Always crying. Jess. The girl who loved me to the end, the end of us, the end of her suffering and the doubling of mine. The girl who is missing. Gone from my arms. Taken.
I get out my phone and text Lenny. Tell her to try Jess’s friends in Nottingham, and send her the number. Tell her that it might be worth her driving down there. That Jess used to go there sometimes, when we fought. I apologise for ignoring her, and tell her when I get a moment, I’ll have a ring round a few other people. I tell her not to worry, then feel ice in my stomach as my mind conjures an image of what could have happened to her.
No, I say, shutting it down, and I grip the gun through the material of my jacket, holding it like a talisman and feeling its strength flow into me. No, don’t…
15
“…no, I’m back at the office. Setting up the incident room. It’s important. Useful. Honestly, this is the best place for me. I wish I could be there but this could be the opportunity, you know? Who did? Roisin, she’s a senior officer, a decorated senior officer, she wasn’t looking at me like anything. Contempt, perhaps. No, I didn’t notice. She’s not a woman, she’s a police officer. Yes. I’m not getting into this conversation – everything about you is perfect. Of course. Like there’s no tomorrow, I swear it. You’ll make me blush. You will. The plastic’s melting, I have to go…”
McAvoy hangs up. Holds his hand in front of his mouth until he’s sure that the smile has disappeared behind a cloud. Gets a grip on himself. Sits, quietly, unobtrusively, waiting for somebody to tell him what to do. Nobody looks his way. Nobody gives a damn.
McAvoy’s grown used to his own company since he ditched the comfortable camouflage of uniform and moved down the corridor to CID. It’s not that they don’t like him. They just don’t know what to do with a man who cycles to work and loves his wife. Who brings home-made soup in a flask each day to save himself the prices at the canteen. Who arrives early, stays late, doesn’t swear and won’t use the office phone for personal calls. Who doesn’t surf the web unless it’s work-related. Calls people by their full rank and smiles when he mentions his wife or son.
Months after being unveiled as the new boy, McAvoy knows he’s the loose stitch in Roper’s tightly-knit team. The unknown quantity. Mentally bracketed by the others as a computer geek, paperwork junky, oddball and anal retentive.
They’ve tried, of course. Tried to help him chisel his way through the invisible barrier that keeps him apart from the rest of them. Even given him nicknames.
Mac.
The Highlander.
The Flying Scotsman.
None have stuck.
They’ve played jokes, too. Left a raw chicken breast in his desk drawer when they found out he was experimenting with vegetarianism. Superglued his fountain pen to his keyboard. His coffee cup to his coaster. His coaster to his desk. Left his mobile number on a toilet wall under the legend ‘Jock Sucks Cock’.
All good, clean, workplace stuff.
They’ve watched his reactions, and despite his attempts to laugh along, he’s come up short.
Been dismissed as a do-gooder, know-it-all and pain-in-the-fucking-arse.
He’s never been any good at all that blokey stuff. Never really felt comfortable with the back-slapping and the swearing and the burping of pop songs down the boozer. All the talk about tits and arses. Fifteen pints and a fight. Then being sick and starting again. He doesn’t doubt that he and his father could drink each and every one of them under the table given a bottle of whisky and a log fire, but he isn’t the competitive sort. He wants to fit in, but for the right reasons. Wants them to indulge him in his idiosyncrasies because he’s good at what he does. Wants to hear them whisper that McAvoy might have his own way of doing things, but that he gets results.
He likes it when Roisin calls him a maverick. He’s never imagined himself as such, but somehow she’s right. He is the loose cannon. He is the one who does things his own way. By doing things properly, by the book, deliberately, methodically, legally, he’s become a trouble-maker, and b
een pushed to one side.
He takes a swig of carrot and coriander soup. It’s got chilli in it and makes his nose run and his cheeks flush, but he can feel it warming him through. Doing him good. Lifting the damp, corpse-tainted air of the Country Park from his raw lungs.
He’s used to the cold, of course. Accustomed to it. His skin has been toughened by two decades of working the land. But the weather in this city chills him to the bone. It makes his marrow seem soggy with ice water. The air, laced with a grey, insidious mist, makes him cough and his eyes drip and seems to sap the strength and stoop the shoulders. A year after arriving in Hull, with little Fin only just turned two, he wonders how long it is since he last saw sunlight. Wonders what this place is doing to him. To his family. He feels like a figure in a still-damp watercolour. Sees the people around him in greys and washed-out swirls of dirt. It sometimes feels like living inside a rain cloud. It’s a hard place to find the motivation to be different.
To do your job.
To get on.
To shine.
Even the victims seem somehow accepting.
People cudgelled in the street.
Grandads beaten up for asking a teenager to get off their front wall.
The owners of burgled homes and firebombed restaurants.
All seem to have a shadow in their eyes that suggests they knew it had been only a matter of time. That everybody gets it, at some point. That it could have been worse.
There’s a weariness to this city. A lethargy. He sees it as a man made old by hard work: coughing up lumps of gristle and weak with emphysema, limbs riddled with arthritis and only bitter memories in its eyes.
He finishes the soup, and mops the bowl with a hunk of Roisin’s home-made bread. Thanks her, in his mind. Pictures her smile. Spends a moment enjoying the image of her and Fin, picking herbs, rolling pastry, seasoning the meal that he won’t be home in time to eat.
Turns back to the computer screen and flicks through the files in front of him. Cross-references database after database. Does everything he has been asked to do. Completes every pointless task. Watches the windows grow dark and the reflection in the glass more vivid. Tries not to glance at the clock on the wall. It’s not his way to criticise. Even when he returns home long after his loved ones have gone to bed, he climbs in beside them and holds them tight, and thanks God for what he has. The ethic was drummed into him by his father, on the croft they farmed at Wester Ross in the far north of Scotland. Five hectares of land and a white-washed stone cottage half an hour’s walk from the nearest B-road. A childhood spent preparing to take over, of letting his hands grow used to the feel of feed buckets biting into his palms, of frost crystals splintering beneath his Wellington boots, of being too cold to breathe and too tired to stand, and knowing that only by keeping going, and sowing, planting, feeding, slaughtering, would his family be able to eat. Then boarding school. A new life, with a mother who didn’t know what to do with him and a stepdad who offered nothing but money. He’s never fitted in anywhere since. Not at university. Not out there in the big wide world. And he can’t go home again. Not now. Not after what happened when he chose the old family croft as a safe place to disappear with the teenage Traveller with whom he had fallen desperately in love. Not after the bad men came, and left blood on the whitewashed walls.
After a while, he looks up from the computer for the screen-break that the clock in the corner of the monitor is telling him he is due. He blinks and casts his eyes around the long, empty office. Messy desks. Dusty computers, rarely switched on. Evidence bundles and rain-spattered files spilling off desks and under tables.
He wonders where they are. Which avenues Roper is following up. Who’s in the frame. Whether they’ll even bother to tell him.
A flash of anger followed by customary reproach and regret…
Roper.
The man who charged Shane Cadbury with the murder of a young girl. A girl whose stench is still in McAvoy’s nostrils. Whose decomposing flesh seems to be continuing its ruination inside his throat. Whose smell masks the scent of his wife’s perfume, his son’s freshly-washed hair. Whose face seems to stare at him from every computer screen and newspaper, noticeboard and magazine rack.
A face he didn’t see, the first time they met, because her head had been removed by the butcher who stood there beside him.
Shane Cadbury.
A look of longing upon his ugly, moonish face…
The phone begins to ring in Roper’s empty office at the far end of the room, and McAvoy instinctively keys in the number into the pad that transfers the call to his own phone.
“Humberside Police CID. Can I help you?”
The line is crackly. Hard to make out, as if the person at the other end of the receiver is outside, buffeted by angry winds.
“Doug, that you?”
“Detective Superintendent Roper is unavailable. Might I be able to help?”
“Doug? Doug, I’m losing you…”
“Sorry, this is a terrible line, might I be able to ring you back…”
“Doug, look, it’s Paul Gosling. Tech unit for Thames Valley. I just heard the news. I’m sure you’re up to your eyes with this double murder so I’ll keep it brief…”
McAvoy hears another roar of wind. Tries again to interrupt but is drowned out.
“The Cadbury case, yeah? I heard it’s all systems go. What did you do with the tech report?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The tech report. About the mobile number? The ghost messages the lads did for you? Was it nothing, after all? I wouldn’t be asking, but they were wondering if you’d got to the bottom of it. They aren’t cheap, these boffins, so I hope they were worth your while. We don’t normally follow up, but the Butterworth case affected everybody. Even down here. Getting the right man means a lot to everybody…”
McAvoy finds himself breathing harder.
Ella: like fingers down his throat.
He reaches into his pocket for his twisted handkerchief pouch, fat at one end like a comet, an elastic band wrapped around the crushed spices Roisin picked and mixed for him, when he first began to complain that the smell of Ella’s memory wasn’t going away.
He breathes it in.
Loses himself for a second in rosemary, sage, marjoram, picked with hands that can make him feel wonderful, safe, beloved…
“It was just that with the other stuff we were surprised you went with the murder charge, but look I know you know what you’re doing…”
McAvoy sits and stares, listening to the wind whistle down the phone, wondering if the gale will mask his Scottish brogue. If he can sound as swish and glamorous as the man whose face is more famous than the villains he catches. Wonders if he should. If it’s right. If he’s letting curiosity get the better of him. Indulging himself. If he’s guilty of conceit for daring to second guess such a decorated officer.
But he remembers Shane Cadbury’s face.
And Roper’s, that night.
When he had found her, on the bed, in the bloodied gown.
He remembers that feeling, that certainty, unequivocal and deafening.
He didn’t kill her.
Took her, but didn’t stick the knife in.
“Paul,” he says, talking through the handkerchief and the herbs. “Can you send that report to me again…?”
16
3 p.m. Hessle foreshore.
Three clapped-out motors and an ice cream van spread out on the concrete car park.
Wind.
Rain.
The bleakest of midwinters. Each gust of wind more pissed off and miserable than the last.
The sun giving up and letting the grey clouds and the darkness swallow it whole and pull it, inexorably, below the brown waters and the white caps and the frothing waves.
The street lights and headlamps opening their eyes.
Waiting.
Watching.
Drinking it in.
Looking at the Humber. My old friend. A s
trip of shingly beach and then the muddy waters. A shimmer to the brown surface today, as though somebody has jostled a cup of cold coffee.
The Humber Bridge overhead. Tonnes of metal twisted into a thing of beauty, its peaks and troughs precise and perfect, resembling a reading on a heart monitor.
The door creaks open on the other car, three spaces to my left, and Tony H gets out. He walks towards me, neck sunk into the collar of his dirty cream mac. Eyes darting. Hands in his pockets. Naturally shifty. He once appeared before a judge to explain a story he had written and was ordered to bring his transcript of an interview. He produced perfect shorthand notes on beer mats and the backs of bank statements. He can write in his pocket with a stub of pencil lead under his fingernail. Everything is a prop for Tony. He can wrap Hull around himself like candy floss around a stick. He’s a fucking rat. Feral, and fag-stained. My mate.
He raps on the roof of the car before he pulls open the passenger door.
“Fucking hell, it’s pissing down.” He throws himself down hard on the passenger seat. He crushes an old burger box and puts his boots all over my cuttings collection, but doesn’t seem to notice or care.
“All right, Rat-boy?” I say, pulling out a cigarette. “It’s funny, but your mum’s dry as a bone when I fuck her. Still, she does insist on up the arse.”
Pleasantries exchanged, I offer Tony a fag and he accepts. He pulls a Hamlet box from a pocket and slips the cigarette inside.
“What are the headlines, mate?”
He sinks back into the seat and stretches his legs, arching his back like a yawning cat, then he begins rummaging in his pockets. Eventually he finds a Gregg’s chicken and ham pasty. The bag is grease stained, and gives off no steam. The coat was probably manufactured around the pasty.
Tony gives a little yelp of triumph as he roots in the bag, and takes a big bite.
“Right, I’ve spoken to the desk and the young lad’s been keeping an eye on the trial. Nowt better than we’ve already got. The mum’s going to be giving evidence first thing tomorrow. Then Lewis. Choudhury’s going to eviscerate him. No steer yet on whether Cadbury’s going to give evidence. Fucking big bugger, wasn’t he? Could snap a girl like Ella in half with those big shovel-hands of his. How he’s pleading not guilty I don’t fucking know. Funny one, this, ain’t it? Was looking back at my notes and I reckon you and me couldn’t have been that far off when it happened. Remember, when all that stuff about Two-Jags Prescott came out and we were up in Sutton, outside the gates waiting for a chat with his missus, freezing to death. He might have walked right past us. Makes you think, doesn’t it? Anyway, we splashed on this morning’s opening. Not bad stuff. I saw yours on the wires. Decent write. So much to squeeze in the intro, wasn’t there? The family must have been stapled to their seats not to storm the cells and rip his bastard head off. I don’t know how much they know about his past but when it comes out we’re looking at more fireworks. How many times has he been banged up for sex crimes? Fucking nonce. Shagging little girls for years.”