The Dark Winter dam-1

by David Mark

  McAvoy makes a mental note to remedy his inadequacy and turns his head to look in the direction from which he assumes Roisin will appear. He can’t see her among the milling shoppers, who are taking care on the slick cobbles that carpet this most historic part of town. Were this one of the nearby cities, York or Lincoln, the streets would be chock-a-block with tourists. But this is Hull. It’s the last stop before the sea, on the road to nowhere, and it’s falling to bloody pieces.

  The tremble by his heart again. The fumble for the phones. It’s the work phone this time. The on-call phone. He feels a tightening in his stomach as he answers.

  ‘Detective Sergeant McAvoy. Serious and Organised Crime Unit.’ To say that still gives him a thrill.

  ‘Now then, Sarge. Just checking in.’ It’s Helen Tremberg, a tall, earnest detective constable who transferred over from Grimsby when she made the move from uniform a few months before.

  ‘Excellent. What have we got?’

  ‘Quiet one, given the time of year. City are playing away this weekend so all pretty basic stuff. Bit of a scrap off Beverley Road way but nobody wants to take it any further. Family party that got a bit out of control. Oh, the ACC asked if you’d give him a call when you have a moment.’

  ‘Yes?’ McAvoy tries to keep the squeak from his voice. ‘Any clue?’

  ‘Oh, I doubt it’s much to worry about. Said he wanted a favour. No screaming or anything. Didn’t use any rude words.’

  They both give a little laugh at that. The Assistant Chief Constable is not a daunting man. Skinny, spry and softly spoken, he’s more of an accountant than a thief-taker; his most telling contribution to the local force being the introduction of a ‘data-sharing intranet matrix’ and a memo warning against the use of bad language during a visit to Priory Road station by Princess Anne.

  ‘Right. So. Nothing pressing?’

  ‘Sorry, Sarge. I wouldn’t even have called, but you asked to be notified …’

  ‘No, no. You did right.’

  McAvoy hangs up with a sigh. His immediate boss, Acting Detective Superintendent Trish Pharaoh, is on a course this weekend. The station’s two detective inspectors are both off duty. Should anything major occur, he will be the senior officer on call, the one to take the reins. While he feels the familiar prickling of guilt in his belly at wishing for a set of circumstances that would spell misfortune and pain for some poor soul, he knows that such circumstances are inescapable. There will be crime. Same as there will be snow. It’s just a question of where it falls, and how deep.

  A waitress appears, goose pimples on her bare forearms. She gives a good-natured scowl at McAvoy and his son. ‘You must be mad,’ she says, with exaggerated shivering.

  ‘I’m not mad,’ says Fin, indignant. ‘You’re mad.’

  McAvoy smiles down at his son, but says his name chidingly, to warn him about being rude to grown-ups. ‘It’s a lovely day,’ he says, turning back to the waitress, who’s wearing a black skirt and T-shirt and looks to be in her early thirties.

  ‘They say it’ll snow,’ she says, clearing away the remnants of the chocolate cake, the glass of lemonade, the mug of hot chocolate that McAvoy had devoured in three burning, delicious gulps.

  ‘There’ll be a scattering today, but not much more. Maybe another day or two. Be a heavy fall. A good few inches at least.’

  The waitress surveys him. This big, barrel-chested man in the designer double-breasted coat. Good-looking, even with the unruly hair and broad, farmer’s face. He must be an easy six-foot-five, but there’s a gentleness about his movements, his gestures, that suggest he is afraid of his own size; as if constantly apprehensive that he will break something more fragile than himself. She can’t place his accent any more accurately than ‘posh’ and ‘Scottish’.

  ‘You a weatherman?’ she asks, smiling.

  ‘I grew up in the country,’ he replies. ‘You get a nose for these things.’

  She grins at Fin and nods at his father. ‘Your dad got a nose for the weather?’

  Fin regards her coolly. ‘We’re waiting for Mammy,’ he says.

  ‘Oh yes? And where’s Mammy?’

  ‘Getting prizes for Daddy.’

  ‘You been a good boy, have you?’ she asks McAvoy, and there’s a practised sauciness to her voice. She casts another glance over his well-muscled body, his thick, bullish neck, his round, square-jawed face, which, in this light, seems striped with the faintest of scars.

  McAvoy smiles. ‘One tries,’ he says softly.

  The waitress gives a last little grin then scurries back indoors.

  McAvoy breathes out slowly. He plonks Fin back in his own chair and pulls out a notepad and a box of crayons from the recesses of the leather satchel at his feet. A man-bag, Roisin had called it when she’d presented him with the gift a few months before, along with the designer coat and trio of expensive suits. ‘Just trust me,’ she’d said, as she’d tugged down his old shiny black suit trousers and dragged his waterproofed hiking jacket from his hand. ‘Try it. Just let me dress you for a little while.’

  He’d relented. Let her dress him. Carried the man-bag. Grown used to the coat, which was warm and kept the rain off, and spared him too many barbs about his unruly ginger hair.

  When he insisted that clothes don’t make the man, she said: ‘When people see you, they need to see somebody to reckon with. Somebody with confidence. Somebody with style. It’s not as though you’re Columbo. You’re just badly dressed.’

  And so Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy had become a fashion victim. Turned up at the station that Monday morning to catcalls, wolf-whistles and a chorus of the Rawhide theme tune. For once, it had been good-natured banter. ‘You’re a scary-enough looking bugger at the best of times,’ DC Ben Nielsen had said, lounging against the custody suite wall as they waited for a suspected burglar to be brought down from the cells. ‘Now you’re looming in the doorway with a handbag. The poor sods don’t know whether they’re going to get shot or bummed. It confuses them. Stick with it.’

  McAvoy likes Nielsen. He’s one of the half-dozen new faces brought in six months back by the brass to try and wipe out the stench of the bad old days. The era that had both made and cost McAvoy his name. Nailed him as the copper who cost a detective superintendent his job and sparked an internal investigation that scattered a crooked team of CID officers to the four winds. Who managed to glide through the whole thing without a blemish on his written record. He’s the copper who did for Doug Roper, the copper who nearly died out at the woods beneath the Humber Bridge, at the hands of a man whose crimes will never be known by anybody other than a handful of senior officers who stitched his face up more expertly than the doctors at Hull Royal. He’s the copper who refused to take up the offer of an easy transfer to a cosy community station. Who now finds himself on a team that doesn’t trust him, working for a boss who doesn’t rate him, and trying to blend into the background while carrying a Samsonite satchel with adjustable straps and waterproof bloody pockets …

  Pharaoh has had to hit the ground running. In the wake of Doug Roper’s departure the Chief Constable decided the bad-boy’s old team should become an elite unit, specialising in serious crime. A unit within the greater body of CID, run by an experienced, reliable hand and staffed with the best officers from within the Humberside boundary. Nobody had expected the job to go to Trish Pharaoh, the sassy, determined ‘token woman’ from across the Humber. Detective Chief Inspector Colin Ray had been the bookies’ choice for promotion, with his protegee Sharon Archer as his number two. Instead, Trish Pharoah had been hand-picked by the Chief Constable, who needed something attention-grabbing to put in a press release. Brought her over from Grimsby and told her to make waves. Ray and Archer were drafted into the team as Pharaoh’s deputies, and neither took to the roll with good grace. Rumour had it the top brass told them on their first day that their new boss was a mere figurehead — a lightning conductor positioned to take the heat when it all went wrong. Told them that, in reality
, they were the unit’s leaders. Pharaoh had different ideas, though; saw a chance to build something special and set about picking her team. But for every officer she recruited, Ray brought in one of his own. The unit was soon laced with intrigue and duplicity, split between Ray’s old campaigners and Pharaoh’s more forward-thinking, hand-picked specialists.

  McAvoy falls into neither camp. His business cards declare him a member of the Serious and Organised Crime Unit, but he is nobody’s blueeyed boy. He requested the transfer himself. Used up his thank-you from the top brass. Slid into the unit as a muted reward for nearly getting himself killed in the line of a duty that nobody had asked him to burden himself with.

  In truth, he is somewhere between an ambassador and a mascot; an educated, well-spoken, physically imposing emblem of the brave new world of Humberside Police — tailor-made for giving talks to the Women’s Institute and local schools, and a valuable asset when putting together year-end reports on the force’s new software requirements.

  ‘What’s going on, Daddy?’

  As McAvoy stares out across the square, the smell of snow grows suddenly stronger. He’s heard it said that it can be too cold for snow, but a childhood spent in the harsh and unforgiving embrace of the Western Highlands has taught him that it is never too cold for flakes to fall. This sudden plunging in temperature will harden the ground. Catch the snowfall without letting it settle. Cause the wind to rebound. Build a blizzard that will blind his young eyes and turn his fingers to blue stone …

  In the back of his throat he tastes the metallic tang again, and for an instant wonders at the eerie similarity between the flavour of changing weather and the sharp, bitter taste of blood.

  And then he hears screaming. Loud. Piercing. Multi-voiced. This is no drunken reveller, tickled by a boyfriend, chased by a pal. This is terror, unleashed.

  McAvoy’s head snaps towards the direction of the sound. The movement in the square stops suddenly, as if the men, the women, the families moving on its surface are mere music-box ballerinas, spinning to a graceless, abrupt halt.

  He stands, extricating his frame from the cramped confines of the table, and stares into the mouth of the church. He takes two steps and finds the table legs still blocking his thick shins. He kicks out. Knocks the table to the floor. Begins to run.

  McAvoy sprints across the square, sensing movement on all sides. ‘Get back,’ he shouts, motioning with his arms as curious shoppers begin to jog towards Holy Trinity. His breathing becomes shallow, as adrenalin begins to pump into his veins. He feels the blood fill his cheeks. It is only as he runs through the open metal gates and into the shadow of the double doors that he remembers his son. He pulls up like a lame horse, all arms and legs and knotted, tumbling limbs. He stares back across the square. Sees a four-year-old boy sitting in front of an upended table, mouth open, crying for his daddy.

  And for a moment, he is torn. Truly motionless with uncertainty.

  A figure bursts from the doors. It is clad in black, head to toe.

  There are fresh shrieks as this shadow springs forth from the open-mouthed House of God: a streak of silver in its left hand, stains upon its handle, damp upon its breast …

  McAvoy has no time to raise his hands. He sees the blade rise. Fall. And then he is on his back, staring at the darkening sky, hearing running footsteps. Distant sirens. A voice. Feeling hands upon him.

  ‘You’ll be all right. Stay with me. Stay with me, lad.’

  And harsher, stronger, like a firm black pencil stroke among shading and blurs, another voice, drenched in anguish …

  ‘He’s killed her. She’s dead. She’s dead!’

  Staring wide-eyed into the sky, he is the first to see the snow begin to fall.

  CHAPTER 2

  She lies where she fell, crumpled and folded on the altar steps: one leg drawn up, bent the wrong way at the knee — a dislodged training shoe hanging precariously from stockinged toes.

  She is a black girl, her face and hands a rich mahogany: her upturned palms soft, the colour of churned milk. She’s young. Still in the throes of adolescence. Not old enough to buy cigarettes. Not old enough to have sex. Not old enough to die.

  Nobody has tried to restart her heart. There are too many holes in her. Pressing on her chest would be like squeezing a wet sponge.

  Her pure white cassock has been pulled up behind her back, creased beneath her corpse. Its thick white material hugs tight to the curve of one small, firm breast.

  The girl’s blood has made her robe sodden and crimson down one side. It remains pristine on the other. Were it not for the twisted expression that enfolds the entirety of her face, it would seem as though this hideous indignity had only been visited on one side of her small frame.

  It is clear she died in agony. The blood that streaks her cheeks, neck, chin and lips looks as though it was hurled at her in great wet handfuls. It settled on her in a hazy red rain as she lay here, dead and staring, gaze fixed on a distant ceiling of curving columns and hand-drawn stars.

  ‘You poor, poor girl.’

  McAvoy stands by the altar, one big pink hand gripping the wooden backrest of the front pew. He feels sick and dizzy and there’s a haziness to his vision where the swelling above his eye is disrupting the edges of his sight. The paramedic had wanted to take him straight to casualty for an X-ray, but McAvoy, no stranger to injury, knows that this wound brings nothing more harmful than pain. Pain can be endured.

  ‘Got lucky, eh Sarge?’

  McAvoy turns too quickly as the voice rings out in the echoing cavern of the empty church. There is a fresh explosion of pain in his skull and he sinks into the pew as DC Helen Tremberg makes her way up the central aisle. A sickness hits him in the gut.

  ‘I’m sorry, Detective Constable Tremberg?’

  ‘They said he almost filleted you as well. Lucky break.’

  Her cheeks are flushed. She’s excited. For the past hour she’s been marshalling the uniformed officers from their makeshift HQ in the verger’s office and one of the younger constables had called her ‘ma’am’, thinking her a senior officer. She had enjoyed the feeling. Enjoyed telling people what to do, and seeing it done. Already the dozen uniforms have taken the first batch of statements from the congregation, as well as the names and addresses of those currently too deeply in shock to be able to explain what they saw.

  ‘He hit me with the handle, not the blade.’

  ‘Must have liked the look of you, eh? Must have been more difficult to knock you out than to kill you. Heat of the moment, machete in your hand. Million to one that he decides to crack you one rather than slash you.’

  McAvoy stares at his feet, waiting for the thudding pain to cease.

  He knows how this story will be told. He has a reputation as a desk jockey; a master of spreadsheets and databases, computing and technology. To be knocked out cold at a crime scene by the prime suspect? He can hear the jokes already.

  ‘Your boy get home OK?’

  McAvoy nods. Swallows. Coughs some gravel into his voice.

  ‘Roisin came and got him. The waitress from the coffee shop was looking after him. I think I’m in the doghouse with both of them.’

  ‘The waitress?’

  McAvoy smiles. ‘Yeah, probably her as well.’

  They fall silent for a moment, Tremberg letting herself look at the girl’s corpse for the first time. She shakes her head and looks away. Focuses on her notebook. Tries to get this right. She’s never had any worries about organising a crime scene or giving a report, but there’s something about McAvoy that she finds strangely disconcerting. It’s more than just his size. There’s a sadness to him. A quiet, brooding intensity that makes him difficult company. She gets on fine with the blokes at the station. She’s perfectly at ease telling jokes with the lads and can drink most of her male colleagues under the table, but there is a quality to her sergeant that makes her unsure how to impress him. He seems to take it all so personally. And he’s obsessed with getting things done by the b
ook. With filling in forms and quoting the right sections and sub-sections, and using the politically correct references for every scumbag they come into contact with.

  She knows he has his secrets. Something happened a year ago, up at the Country Park, and it cost a well-known copper his job and put McAvoy on the shelf for months. He was injured, she knows that. The faintest of scars are on his face. There are rumours of more beneath the expensive clothes he seems to wear so inelegantly. Tremberg had only joined Trish Pharaoh’s team a few weeks before McAvoy returned from sick leave, and she had been excited about having a chance to get to know him. But the first meeting was a disappointment. She’d found a small man trapped in a giant’s body. He had the personality of an unassuming, bespectacled accountant, but it was rattling around inside a colossal frame. And then there were the eyes. Those big, sad cow-eyes that seemed to be forever questioning, assessing, disapproving, judging. At times, he put her in mind of an old Scottish king, his sword across his knees and a blanket round his shoulders, coughing, wheezing, but still able to wield a claymore with enough force to decapitate a bull.

  She looks at him now. Hopes to God that they make a start on this before Detective Chief Inspector Colin Ray and his trained seal can steam in and spoil the party.

  McAvoy stands. Steadies himself and sees that his hand, supporting his weight on the pew, is resting on a leatherbound Bible.