Taking Pity

by David Mark

  “Perhaps we can make amends now. If we get a conviction. Get the full story. Get the truth.”

  Vaughn seems about to say something, but a sudden burst of conversation at the other end of the line cuts him off. McAvoy hears a female voice. Mumbled words. Tries to make them out but hears nothing but static.

  “Vaughn? Sir?”

  “We’ll see, eh, Sergeant?” says Vaughn, sudden and too loud. “I don’t know how I feel about any of this. But I appreciate the call and will help however I can. Just try not to dig up more than you have to, eh? I buried them a long time ago, and I still hear their voices in my dreams. I’ve put thirteen thousand miles between us and I don’t think it’s far enough.”

  McAvoy is about to reply when the call cuts off. He considers his phone, then slowly puts it away. He lowers himself back on the grass. A sudden gust of wind rushes in from the river. The clouds change shape.

  McAvoy feels the first drops of rain on his face at the same instant he watches the star wink out.

  He stands and walks back through the downpour to the room where his son sleeps. Opens the door and lies down beside the boy, fully clothed, and damp, front and back.

  He strokes Fin’s hair back from his face.

  Feels his eyes grow heavy.

  A whisper, in the dark.

  “Sweet dreams, Roisin.”

  He kisses the air.

  Falls asleep looking at the ceiling through a veil of tears.

  NINE

  WEDNESDAY MORNING, 10:01 A.M.

  It’s the look in Downey’s eyes that Helen Tremberg can’t forget. She can’t remember the color. Couldn’t say whether the terror was inked on a canvas of green, blue, or brown. But she remembers what they contained. Remembers gazing into absolute certainty: seeing the look of somebody who knows that hell is just seconds away.

  He was a bad man, of course. He’d helped take a life. He would have taken hers, if he could. But in the instant that he knew he was going to die, he suddenly looked very young, and very scared.

  Helen can’t shake that image. Can’t help wondering if she looked the same. Whether her own eyes were wide and teary as the grenade hit the floor and she threw herself in the first direction that felt like “away.”

  She shakes it from her mind as she crosses Ferensway. She’s eating a cinnamon pretzel from the shop in the train station to her rear and wishing she had a coffee to wash it down with. Her lips are sugary and her fingers sticky. She pushes in the last mouthful, then scoops up some standing rainwater from the top of the metal barriers in the center of the busy road. Washes her hands and dries them on her jeans. Pushes her hair back from her face and straightens her jumper, scarf, and purple woolen trenchcoat. Brushes the crumbs from her front.

  Colin Ray is waiting for her outside the department store on the corner of Jameson Street. He gives her a nod as she approaches and holds out a takeaway coffee for her. It’s an oddly generous thing for him to do, but Helen is nothing if not well-raised and takes it from him gratefully.

  “It’s got a flavor in it,” he says, ill at ease. “Thought you might like it.”

  Helen sips her drink. It tastes of vanilla and isn’t at all bad. She gives a thin-lipped smile and considers her senior officer. He looks like he’s made an effort. He’s wearing cords and his work shoes, with a battered linen jacket over a striped polo shirt. He’s got his raincoat on; darker at the shoulders than below the waist. He’s been here, in this rain, for a while.

  “We said ten, didn’t we? I’m not late . . .”

  “It’s fine, pet. I had nowhere to be.”

  Helen doesn’t know what to say, so just sips her drink and wonders what the hell she is doing here. These past months have been hard. When she left the hospital she spent a few weeks living with her parents, and that experience alone had made her determined to get better as soon as possible. She has been back in her own little bungalow for a month now. She’s eating properly. The stitches have been removed and her stomach wall seems to have repaired itself without the need for the surgery the consultants feared when she was first brought in. The damage was largely cosmetic. She suffered puncture wounds and lacerations. Took a bad blow to the back of the head and the top of the shoulder as the ceiling fell in. Even the paramedics who found her had used the word “miraculous.” But she feels well enough to return to work—whatever that work may be. The past couple of weeks have seen her climbing the walls with boredom and frustration. She has been desperate to pick up the phone, call Trish Pharaoh, and demand to be allowed to resume her duties. But Helen isn’t sure she will ever be able to call herself a policewoman again. She has made mistakes in her life. The Headhunters have something over her that could cost Helen her career and even her liberty. She needs them brought down. And while she considers Colin Ray to be a vile and dangerous specimen, she had agreed to meet him without a second thought.

  “You heard from him since yesterday?” asks Colin, producing a cup of tea from the windowsill behind him and taking a sip. “Mr. Mouthpiece?”

  Helen shakes her head. She hasn’t heard from him since she left the hospital. And the flowers he sent had gone straight in the bin.

  “He’s fucked up,” he says, as if to reassure himself. “You’re young. You know all this technical shit. We must be able to trace where he was when he made that call. I mean, he was within spitting distance. I heard the ambulance. I heard it.”

  Helen spreads her hands. “I said when you called, sir. I said that Dan in Tech Support could do all kinds of marvels. We can trace phones, and with the agreement of the service provider we can ping people’s mobiles and find out where they’re at. You’ve got the number he rang you on, but if we ping that phone we both know it will be like all the others—ditched. They know what they’re doing. He changes his phones after every call. We’ve tried all that, sir.”

  Ray wipes his nose with the back of his hand. “He was somewhere nearby. Here, listen.”

  He pulls the recording device from his pocket and hands it to Helen. His eyes take in the scar on her wrist. She can see him wondering whether it was caused in the blast or whether she has tried to bump herself off. The wound is older than her most recent injuries. It was put there by a killer, and Helen wears it with a degree of pride.

  She listens to the recording. Tries not to shudder as she hears the voice of the man who set her up, manipulated her, and who in all likelihood still possesses a video clip that would end her days in the police if ever released.

  “He hasn’t changed his patter,” she says, handing the tape recorder back. “Still talks more than he listens. Still seems to be charging by the word.”

  “He’s a prick. What we don’t know is whether he’s realized he’s fucked up. He hung up almost the second the ambulance came past. You heard him cut the call. None of his usual patter. If he’d kept talking, I might not even have realized what it meant.”

  Helen finishes her coffee. Ray takes the cup from her as if she were a child. He does it naturally, and Helen finds herself wondering whether he has any children. She curtails the thought before she can picture what his offspring would look like.

  “And the ambulance came past the pub a few seconds after he cut if off, yes? You heard it faintly where you were but loud at his end of the line. We should be able to work it out, then. I mean, if we had enough people in different spots, each with a mobile, we could surely see how far away from you he was when the ambulance came past.”

  Ray shakes his head. “Too much fuss, love. Not enough people. And we don’t need all that science shite. We can sort this together.”

  Helen listens as Ray explains that he has already found out that the ambulance on the previous day had been dispatched from Hull Royal Infirmary and was making its way back there with an elderly patient who had tripped and grazed her shins to the bone while getting into a taxi near the Rugby Tavern, a quarter of a mile away.
It had traveled down Alfred Gelder Street and turned right onto Lowgate, where it had passed Colin Ray. That meant the call had been made somewhere on Lowgate, or one of the little streets nearby. And Colin had an idea for how to narrow it down.

  Ten minutes later, Helen is standing outside the Burlington Tavern. She’s near the rear of Marks & Spencer, facing the hideous office buildings that block the broad green expanse of Queens Gardens. She can hear Colin breathing in her ear.

  “Have you got the right table?” she says into the phone. “Right sort of conditions?”

  “Shush,” he says. “It will be past any second.”

  Helen listens out. Takes the phone from her ear and hears a distant siren approaching from her left. She raises the tape recorder and presses play. The ambulance flies past her a few seconds later, and she hears the tiny tinny sound of Colin Ray swearing and shouting, “No!”

  “This is about as scientifically exact as astrology, you realize that,” she says, feeling like an amateur. “They could be going at different speeds. There could be more background noise today . . .”

  “Don’t whinge, Detective Constable,” he says, unfairly pulling rank. “We’re doing the best with what we have.”

  A few minutes later, Helen has deposited herself in a different part of Lowgate. She’s on the other side of the road, leaning against the imposing façade of the old magistrates’ court. It’s a wasted space these days, but plenty of infamous prisoners have passed through its doors. Some of the women at Hull City Council refuse to go down there for fear of prisoners’ ghosts jumping out and spooking them. Helen doesn’t believe in ghosts. If she did she wouldn’t be able to sleep as soundly as she does—even with the painkillers and anxiety tablets the doctors insist she dose herself up on.

  “Is there anybody in Hull doesn’t owe you a favor?” she asks as the driver of the ambulance gives her a thumbs-up and cruises past noiselessly, returning to the Rugby Tavern for another circuit. “Is he not going to get into trouble?”

  “He’s helping the police with their inquiries.”

  “You’re suspended and I’m on sick.”

  “But he doesn’t know that. And besides, you’re the one who caught the bastard who killed that ex-paramedic a few months ago.”

  “No I’m not,” she says, indignant. “I just—”

  “Take the credit, you silly cow. He doesn’t know how to use credit. Make sure you do.”

  Helen knows who Ray is referring to. She has a sudden vision of her sergeant. Sees the pitiful gratitude in his eyes as he thanked her for saving his family. Saw him fighting with himself, struggling to keep it all in. She doesn’t know how Roisin could have left him. Doesn’t like to entertain the disloyal thoughts that sometimes creep up on her as she considers the prospect of McAvoy as a single man.

  “Right, play it again . . .”

  On the fourth circuit, Ray shouts, “Stop!” Helen lifts the phone to her ear again. She is soaked to the skin, cold and goose-pimpled. Her injuries are starting to hurt and her short bobbed hair is beginning to look like it was cut with a knife and fork.

  “Where are you?” asks Ray excitedly. “There. It was wherever you fucking are now.”

  Helen steps back and looks up at the building. She’s almost back where she started. She’s between Silver Street and the Burlington Tavern. This is where the solicitors have their offices. It’s a place of briefcases and suits, water fountains, and yachting magazines discarded on polished coffee tables.

  “Well?”

  Helen gives him her location. He tells her to wait. A minute later, he appears, running arthritically and splashing through puddles.

  “‘Wilde and MacHale,’” he says, reading the brass nameplate. “‘Conveyancing and Consumer Law.’”

  He looks through the glass. Sees nothing of interest. Steps back and stares up.

  “Three bloody floors,” he says. “And solicitors on all of them. Should we just bomb it?”

  Helen gives him a look that suggests she’s still not ready for jokes about bombs, and Ray has the good grace to wince.

  “A lawyer,” he says, biting his lip. “Fuck, I’m an idiot. The way he talks; the bullshit. All those bloody vowels.”

  “Sir, I don’t really know what we do with this.” Helen looks around her. “I mean, what have we got?”

  Ray isn’t listening. He steps onto the polished tiles of the entrance hall and walks into the front office of Wilde and MacHale. Helen sighs and hurries in behind him. She walks into his back. Ray has stopped short in the reception area. He is leering at the girl behind the desk.

  Helen follows his gaze. Sees a face she recognizes. She’s kooky. Dressed like a student with an eye for a bargain. Fruit pastille earrings and a nose ring, sweatbands on her wrists, and plastic beads at her throat. Her hair is tied up with a pencil and her glasses are worn halfway down a cute nose.

  Colin Ray saw her yesterday, ordering breakfast with two lawyers in his local pub. A few minutes later, Ray had taken the gloating call.

  Helen Tremberg knows her from another case. Knows that she has blossoms tattooed on her back and butterflies on her wrists. Knows she nearly died at the hands of a pleasure-seeker.

  Suzie Devlin beams at her visitors. Recognizes Helen and gives a wave.

  “Hello,” she says brightly. “You’re a friend of Roisin’s, aren’t you? Have you seen her? I’ve been calling.” Her face falls. “Oh, I’m sorry, it was you, wasn’t it? You who saved her . . .”

  Helen turns to Colin, whose grin almost reaches his ears.

  “Take the credit,” he mumbles, then turns his back and walks out.

  Helen knows what he wants. Wants her to manipulate this girl’s gratitude. Wants her to be a detective—whatever that takes.

  “Yes,” she says, walking toward the desk. “I suppose so. I was wondering, could you do me a favor . . .”

  • • •

  “DO YOU THINK she planned the layout with graph paper and a ruler? That’s a thing of beauty.”

  Trish Pharaoh is admiring the structural engineering skills of a three-hundred-pound woman who has taken the all-you-can-eat offer at the West Bulls public house as a personal challenge. Her breakfast is a magnificent construction. A nest of beans, bacon, eggs, and sausage, divided into separate floors by a supporting wall and ceiling of fried bread.

  “You could put that in a gallery,” says Pharaoh, openmouthed. “You could put the woman in as well. Jesus, she’s getting another hash brown . . .”

  They serve a bumper breakfast at this pleasant chain pub on the edge of West Hull. It’s only a five-minute drive from the police station on Priory Road, and Pharaoh is a regular visitor. She woke up on the sofa again this morning. Her youngest daughter had thrown a blanket over her and taken off her boots. Returned in the early hours to pour the last of the red wine down the sink and bring her a fresh orange juice and two acetaminophen. They were sitting there when she awoke—two eyes in a sad cartoon face.

  Pharaoh is still wearing the same clothes as yesterday and put her deodorant and perfume on as she drove the kids to their various pre-school clubs. She did her makeup in the rearview mirror as she headed toward the Humber Bridge. Flicked a V sign at the Volvo driver who flashed his lights at her for talking on a mobile while driving. She’d made it in to work by 8:40 a.m. And after reading her e-mails, necking a coffee, and shouting at her computer screen for half an hour, she got back in her car and came for breakfast. She’s feeling human again after a full feed, though she is conscious that there will be a line carved into her middle when she takes her tights off.

  The air is greasy with the scent of cooked fat and burned toast. A persistent rain beats against the glass and hammers onto the uneven tarmac of the car park beyond. Some easy-listening is tinkling from the speakers, competing for aural supremacy with the sound of clattering knives and forks and the low murmur of
half-chewed conversation.

  “I think she’s drinking Diet Coke. She is! That’s brilliant!”

  Pharaoh’s breakfast companion is her old boss, Tom Spink. He’s an elegant, sixty-something chap in soft cords and a collarless shirt, who now makes a living writing local-history books and running a guesthouse on the crumbling Holderness coast. Chances are it will be underwater within a decade, but Tom doesn’t put that on the marketing materials.

  “Should we get her autograph?” he asks. “She could scrawl her name in your notebook.”

  “Could we have her use a sausage?”

  The pair drag their attentions away from the large lady, who is working her way through her breakfast in a manner that is both determined and workmanlike.

  “Makes you proud to be northern, doesn’t it?”

  “I’m sure they have fat bastards in the south.”

  “Yeah, but we take it more seriously. There’s a pride in it.”

  Tom sips at his tea and examines his protégé. She’s done damn well. Risen higher than he ever did. Blossomed from a hard-as-nails police constable into a hard-as-nails detective superintendent. Tom is happy to admit he first took her under his wing because he fancied her, but twenty years on, he thinks of her more as a daughter than anything else. He’s proud to see how she’s climbed the ladder, despite the old boys network and the accusations she was sleeping her way to the top. Spink knows the truth. Knows that she was far more loyal to her husband than he was in return. Knows that every time she came back to the force from maternity leave she had done her prospects more harm, but she kept catching crooks until the men upstairs had no option but to promote her. Tom had had words in a few ears to ensure the job as head of Serious and Organized went her way, but she got the role on merit and has had some solid results, despite the best efforts of some of her underlings. She’s a good copper. The best. He hates that her personal life is seamed with unhappiness. Her prick of a husband made some bad investments and went bankrupt. The stress of it all caused him a massive aneurysm and he has been a living ghost in the lives of his wife and daughters ever since. Pharaoh and her family are crammed together in a nondescript semidetached in Grimsby, and what little money she has left over, after paying the mortgage and her daughters’ various babysitters, goes to paying back her husband’s debts. It’s no wonder she still has red wine in the cracks in her lips. No wonder she has started lighting one cigarette with the tip of her last one.