The Dark Winter dam-1

by David Mark

  Colin Ray and Shaz Archer have gone to speak to an informant. A telephone call to his bedsit home has already produced one lead. One of the punters at the Kingston Hotel has been letting his mouth run away with him. According to the snout, the bloke has always had strong opinions about foreigners and incomers, but recently lost his wife to the attentions of an Iranian pizza chef, and has been talking more and more about making somebody pay. It would be dismissed as idle gossip, were it not for the fact that a quick check on the Police National Computer showed that he’d been nicked twice for possessing illegal weaponry, and once for wounding. Even though Colin Ray is supposed to be managing the office, he’s decided that he’s best placed to follow this particular line of inquiry, and made himself scarce. Inspector Archer, never far behind, has tagged along, leaving only McAvoy and Helen Tremberg to answer the phones.

  McAvoy looks back through his notes. He’s written pages of names, numbers, details and theories on his lined pad. The script is unintelligible to anybody but him. He’s the only officer who knows Teeline shorthand. He learned it in his spare time while in training, after being impressed by the speed at which a journalist had taken down the quotes of the senior officer he’d been shadowing that day. It has proven a useful six months of his time, even if it has left him open to the occasional moment of open-mouthed scorn from colleagues who wonder if he’s having a mental breakdown and filling his notebook with hieroglyphics.

  The phone calls so far have been pretty weak. Despite the television appeal this morning, they’re suffering from Sunday syndrome. People are enjoying days out with their families or relaxing down the pub, and the idea of ringing a police station with information about a murder feels much more like a nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday kind of activity, so the flurry of calls that the team had expected has not materialised. It’s barely proving worth the overtime.

  If nothing else, at least the incident room is taking shape; this is largely thanks to McAvoy and the relative inactivity the day has delivered. He’s brought a whiteboard in from another office and begun sketching a brief outline of the previous day’s sequence of events. His own description of the suspect has been written in the centre of the board in red marker pen. Medium build. Medium height. Dark clothes. Balaclava. Wet, blue eyes. It’s not much to go on, and they all know it. And although there is nothing more McAvoy could have done, he feels achingly guilty that he did not glimpse more of his attacker.

  A map of the city has been stapled to another wall. On it, drawing pins of different colours denote the definite and possible sightings of the suspect as he made his escape from Trinity Square. It is a composite of witness statements, CCTV footage, and guesswork. With it, they can surmise that the suspect travelled east through the city and past the river, before disappearing from the map somewhere near Drypool Bridge. A team of uniformed officers have walked the route, but found nothing save a footprint in the snow that matched the location given by one of the more believable witnesses. There was no sign of the murder weapon. The uniforms’ best guess was that he’d ditched it in the Hull. When Pharaoh had heard that snippet of information she had slammed her hands down so hard that one of her bangles had snapped.

  The phone on his desk begins to ring. He picks up the beige, Bakelite receiver.

  ‘CID. Major Incident Room.’

  A woman’s voice is at the other end of the line. ‘I’d like to speak to somebody about Daphne. About Daphne Cotton,’ she says. And then, unnecessarily, even more shakily, adds: ‘The girl who was killed.’

  ‘You can talk to me. My name is Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy-’

  ‘That’s fine,’ she says, cutting him off. With the tremble in her voice it’s hard to place her, but McAvoy would class the speaker as around his own age.

  ‘Do you have information …?’

  She takes a breath, and McAvoy can tell she has been rehearsing this. She wants to get it out in one go. He lets her speak.

  ‘I’m a supply teacher. A year or so ago I did some shifts at Hessle High. Daphne’s school. We hit it off. She was a lovely girl. Very intelligent and thoughtful. She was a very keen writer, you know. That’s what I teach. English. She showed me some of her short stories. She had real talent.’

  She pauses. Her voice cracks.

  ‘Take your time,’ says McAvoy softly.

  A breath. A sniff. A clearing of a throat blocked with tears.

  ‘I’ve done some voluntary work in the part of the world she’s from. Seen some of the things she’s seen. We got talking. I don’t know, but I suppose I became a sort of outlet for her. She told me things that she kept hidden. There were things in her stories. Things a young girl shouldn’t know about. She was very shy when I questioned her about it, so I started setting her writing assignments. Helping to get out the stuff that was inside her.’

  McAvoy waits for more. When nothing else is forthcoming, he clears his throat to speak.

  Then she blurts it out.

  ‘This has happened to her before.’

  CHAPTER 7

  He spots her as soon as he pushes open the glass doors of the trendy pub and steps into the warm blue-black light. She is seated on her own at a small round table by the radiator near the bar. There are empty sofas and loungers near by, but she seems to have chosen the seat nearest the heater, and is all but pressing herself against its white-painted surface. She is staring at the wall, ignoring the other customers. McAvoy cannot see her features, but there is something that makes her seated form seem burdened and sad.

  ‘Miss Mountford?’ asks Aector, as he approaches her table.

  She looks up. Her deep brown eyes are framed with red and seem to float in darkness. The bags beneath her eyes are dark, almost bruised black by tiredness. There is a silver stud in her left nostril, but her other features do not match the mental picture McAvoy had painted when he had arranged to meet her here, in this most inappropriate setting. She is short and plump, with frizzy brown hair that has been inexpertly pushed behind her ears to leave two misshapen curls running down her cheeks. She is not wearing make-up, and her short, fat fingers end in nails that are bitten almost to nothing, while her clothes — a black cardigan over a white vest — speak of a need for comfort over style. She wears no rings, though a large, ethnic wooden bangle has been wedged onto a chunky freckled wrist.

  Vicki Mountford nods timidly and makes to stand, but McAvoy gestures that she should remain seated. He takes the chair opposite her and, with some ceremony, removes his coat. He notices her glass. It is a straight tumbler and contains the dwindling remains of half a dozen ice-cubes, melted to the size and shape of sucked sweets.

  ‘Why here, Miss Mountford? Are you sure there’s nowhere more comfortable we could go?’

  She rubs a hand across her round features and looks at her glass, and then towards the bar. Then she shrugs. ‘I share a house, like I said. My housemate’s got the living room tonight. I don’t like police stations. This is where I always am at this time on a Sunday. It doesn’t bother me.’ She looks at her glass again. ‘I need a drink to talk about her,’ she adds softly.

  ‘It must have been very difficult,’ says McAvoy, as tenderly as he can over the hubbub of the half-full bar. ‘We break the news to family, but people sometimes forget about the friends. To hear something so terrible on the radio. To read it in the newspapers. I can’t imagine.’

  Vicki nods, and McAvoy sees gratitude in the gesture. Then her eyes fall to the glass again. He is wondering whether he should offer to buy her a drink when a waitress, clad in black T-shirt and leggings, approaches the table.

  ‘Double vodka and tonic,’ says Vicki gratefully, then raises her eyebrows at McAvoy. ‘And you?’

  McAvoy doesn’t know what to ask for. He should perhaps order coffee or a soft drink, but to do so might alienate a potential lead, who so clearly has a taste for something stronger.

  ‘Same for me,’ he says.

  They do not speak until the waitress returns. She is back inside a minut
e, placing the drinks on neat white napkins on the black-varnished table. Vicki drains half of hers in one swallow. McAvoy takes only the merest sip before placing the drink back on the surface. He wishes he’d ordered a pint.

  ‘I forgot it was Sunday,’ says McAvoy. ‘Was expecting office workers and people in designer suits.’

  Vicki manages a smile. ‘I only come in on Sundays. You can’t get a table on a week night and people look at you strangely when you’re on your own. It’s music night in here on a Sunday. There’ll be a jazz band on in an hour or two.’

  ‘Any good? I don’t mind a bit of jazz.’

  ‘Different ones each week. They’ve got a South American group on tonight. All right, apparently.’

  McAvoy sticks out his lower lip — his own elaborate gesture of interest. He had policed the Beverley Jazz Festival during his last days as a uniformed constable and been blown away by some of the ethnic jazz groups that had made their way to the East Yorkshire town to play a dozen intermingling tunes for drunk students and the occasional true aficionado.

  ‘Expensive, is it?’

  ‘If you’re here before six, it’s free. A fiver after that, I think. I’ve never paid.’

  ‘No? Must save you a bob or two.’

  ‘On a supply-teacher’s wages every penny counts.’

  Her words seem to steer them back to the reason for their meeting. McAvoy positions himself straighter in his chair. Looks pointedly at his notebook. Softens his face as he prepares to let her tell the story in her own words.

  ‘She must have meant a great deal to you,’ he says encouragingly.

  Vicki nods. Then gives what is little more than a shrug. ‘It’s just the wastefulness of it all,’ she says, and it seems as though some of the anguish leaves her voice, to be replaced by a weary resignation. ‘For her to go through all that and to get her life in some kind of order …’

  ‘Yes?’

  She stops. Tips the empty glass to her mouth and inserts her tongue, draining it of the last dribbles of watery alcohol. Closing her eyes, she appears to make a decision, and then ducks down below the level of the table. McAvoy hears a bag being unzipped and a moment later she is handing him some folded sheets of white paper.

  ‘That’s what she wrote,’ she says. ‘That’s what I’m talking about.’

  ‘And this is?’

  ‘It’s her story. A bit of it, anyway. A snippet of how it felt to be her. Like I said, she had a talent. I would have liked to have taught her all the time but there was no permanent position at the school. We just got chatting. I’ve done some voluntary work in Sierra Leone. Building schools, a bit of teaching here and there. I knew some of the places she was familiar with. It was enough for us to become friends.’

  McAvoy cocks his head. A fourteen-year-old girl, and a woman perhaps two decades her senior?

  ‘She had friends her own age, of course,’ says Vicki, as if reading his thoughts. She moves her empty glass in slow, steady circles. ‘She was an ordinary girl, inasmuch as there is such a thing. She liked pop music. Watched Skins and Big Brother, like they all do. I never saw her room but I don’t doubt there were some Take That posters on the wall. It was her writing that set her apart. That and her faith, although that wasn’t something we ever really discussed. I’m not really that way inclined. I put “creature of light” on official forms when they ask my religion. That or “Jedi”.’

  McAvoy smiles. Without thinking, he takes a large swallow of his drink and feels the pleasing warmth of its passage down his throat.

  ‘I just leave it blank.’

  ‘Not a believer?’

  ‘Nobody’s business,’ he says, and hopes she will leave it at that.

  ‘You’re probably right. Daphne certainly never shoved it down anybody’s throat. She wore a crucifix but she was quite literally a buttoned-up sort of girl in her school uniform, so she couldn’t be accused of flaunting her beliefs. We only got talking because I’d been intrigued by some of the answers she’d given in class. It must have been about a year ago. I was on a three-week posting at the school. We were doing Macbeth.’

  McAvoy screws up his face and tries to remember the passage that he had memorised for performance day at school. ‘And oftentimes, to win us to our harm, The instruments of darkness tell us truths, Win us with honest trifles, to betray, in deepest consequence-’ He stops, embarrassed.

  ‘I’m impressed,’ says Vicki and as her face breaks into a grin, McAvoy is dazzled by the transformation that the simple act of smiling has upon her looks. She is casually cool enough to sit alone in a jazz club, rather than too unremarkable to attract a companion.

  ‘I did it when I was thirteen,’ says McAvoy. ‘I had to recite that in front of a room full of parents and teachers. I still shudder when I think about it. I don’t think I’ve ever been as scared.’

  ‘Really? It’s never bothered me,’ she says, as the interview evolves into a chat between friends. ‘You couldn’t get me off the stage when I was a kid. I’ve never been the shy type.’

  ‘I envy you,’ says McAvoy, and means it.

  ‘I didn’t think you could be a policeman if you were shy,’ she says, crinkling her suddenly pretty eyes.

  ‘You just have to learn how to hide it,’ he says with a shrug. ‘How am I doing?’

  ‘You had me fooled,’ she whispers. ‘I won’t tell.’

  McAvoy wonders if he is playing this right.

  ‘So,’ he says, trying to get them back on track. ‘Macbeth?’

  ‘Well, long story short, I was asking some questions of the class. Something about evil. I wanted to know which of the characters in the play could be called truly good and which truly bad. All the other kids had Banquo and Macduff down as heroes. Daphne disagreed. She put just about everybody down the middle. She said you couldn’t be one thing or another. That good people did evil things. That evil people were capable of kindness. That people weren’t always one thing. She can’t have been more than twelve or thirteen when she was saying this, and the way she said it just intrigued me. I asked her to stay back after class and we just got talking. My contract with the school eventually became a six-month thing, so I got to know Daphne pretty well. Obviously, the other teachers knew she had been adopted and that she must have seen some hellish things, but how much was in her official record I couldn’t say.’

  ‘So how and when did she tell you about her time in Sierra Leone? About what happened to her?’

  ‘I think I just asked her one day,’ says Vicki, turning in her seat to try and catch the waitress’s eye. Without thinking about it, McAvoy pushes his own glass across the table and, wordlessly, Vicki takes it in her palm. ‘Like I told you, I’ve done quite a lot of work in countries that have seen conflict and poverty. I was walking between classes with her and she just came out with it. Told me that all of her family had been killed. She was the only one who survived.’

  For a whole minute they sit in silence. McAvoy’s mind is full of this murdered girl. He has investigated lost lives before. But there is something about the butchering of Daphne Cotton that smacks of futility. Of a cruel end to a life that had been unexpectedly reprieved, and which could perhaps have offered so much.

  ‘Read it,’ says Vicki eventually, nodding at the papers on the table in front of McAvoy. ‘She wrote that about three months ago. We’d been talking about drawing on your own experiences to become a better writer. Putting parts of yourself into your work. I’m not sure if she fully understood, but what she wrote just tore me up. Read it.’

  McAvoy unfolds the pages. Looks at Daphne Cotton’s words.

  They say that three years old is too young to form memories, so perhaps what follows is the product of what I have been told, and what I have read. I truly cannot say.

  I cannot smell blood when I think of my family. I do not smell the bodies or remember the touch of their dead skin. I know it happened. I know I was plucked from the pile of bodies like a baby from a collapsed building. But I do not remember i
t. And yet I know that it happened.

  I was three years old. I was the second youngest child in a large family. My oldest brother was fourteen. My oldest sister a year younger. My youngest brother was perhaps ten months old. I had two more brothers and one sister. My youngest brother was called Ishmael. I think we were a happy family. In the three photographs I have, we are all smiling. The photographs were gifts from the sisters as I left to meet my new parents. I do not know where they came from.

  We lived in Freetown, where my father worked as a tailor. I was born into a time of violence and warfare, but my parents kept us cocooned from the troubles. They were God-fearing Christians, as were their parents, my grandparents. We lived together in a large apartment in the city, and I think I remember saying prayers of gratitude for our good fortune. From history books and the internet, I know that people were dying in their thousands at a time when we were living a happy life, but my parents never allowed this horror to penetrate our lives.

  In January of 1999, the fighting reached Freetown. When I ask my memory for pictures of our flight from the bloodshed and carnage of that day, there is nothing. Perhaps we left before the soldiers arrived. I know that we went north with a groupof other families from our church. How we reached Songo, the region of my mother’s people, I cannot say.

  I remember dry grass and a white building. I think I remember songs and prayers. I remember Ishmael’s cough. We may have been there for days or weeks. I sometimes feel I have let my family down by not remembering. I pray to God the Father that I remedy this sin. I ask for the memories, no matter how much they will hurt.

  When I was old enough, the sisters at the orphanage told me that the rebels had come. That it had been a bright, sunny day. That the fighting was beginning to die down elsewhere in the country, and that the men who passed our church were fleeing defeat. They were drunk and they were angry.