Original Skin

by David Mark

  Over the course of several interviews, it has become clear that Shaun is a relatively minor player in the hierarchy of the gang which has taken over the cannabis supply. His job has been that of a glorified deliveryman, overseeing the movement of crops from one factory to another, and transporting the remaining handful of the Vietnamese workforce around the various properties, where they have been reduced to virtual prisoners. He knows nothing about the muscle side of the business. Doesn’t know where the orders come from. Even in drink has confided little in Leanne about his employers, save that they are white and scary as hell.

  “I’m not a snitch,” says Leanne, and it is a mantra she has repeated endlessly in their meetings. “I know he’s been a bad lad. But he wouldn’t do that. He’s not a violent person, not really. I don’t know why they’re pinning it on him . . .”

  Pharaoh coughs, trying to move the conversation on. She knows McAvoy disapproves of the fact that she is letting Leanne think her boyfriend is in the frame over the torture of his two associates. In truth, he is not a suspect. Through an interpreter, the victims had given only the sketchiest of details about their attackers, but they made it clear that the men who hurt them were higher up the food chain than the man who drove the van. The descriptions they had given were sketchy. Big. White. Well built. Acting under the instruction of a smaller man, who seemed to be enjoying it all far too much . . .

  “Do you think we could have a fresh start?” asks Leanne suddenly, putting her dumbbell down to concentrate on her cigarette. She looks at McAvoy. “Do you think you can start again?”

  McAvoy tries his best to summon up an encouraging smile. Tries not to let his eyes linger on her paltry possessions, or the signs of frailty and abuse that are starting to creep into her physique.

  “We’ll take care of you,” he says. “I promise.”

  The words somehow seal it.

  Leanne nods.

  “The warehouse next to the Lord Line building,” she says. “St. Andrew’s Quay. Where they used to fish from. Near the memorial.”

  McAvoy holds Leanne’s gaze as Pharaoh begins dialing a number in her mobile phone. He pictures the location. The darkness. The nearness of the Humber and its cold depths.

  Sees, in his mind, an area that has witnessed death enough times to make the waters run red.

  6:24 P.M. THE CAR PARK AT PETER PANG’S.

  RED GLASS LANTERNS clink and sway, disappear, and then reemerge from the shadow of the pagodalike roof.

  McAvoy looks. Listens. Sees.

  The sound of waves slapping wood and stone beyond the gray seawall; the broad, brown Humber fading into cloud and drizzle.

  The morning’s storms have not blown themselves out, but instead hang heavy and threatening in a headstone-colored sky. The river, swollen by the cloudburst, slaps against the rotting timbers of St. Andrew’s Dock. Dead flowers and plastic memorial cards skitter and tumble on the wind. Flowers are often left here. This dock was home to the Hull fishing fleet. It is the last glimpse of home that thousands of dead trawlermen ever saw.

  On Pharaoh’s orders, McAvoy has switched off his phone, but after two hours in this cramped vehicle with nothing to look at but car bonnets and brick, he needs to do something to keep himself alert.

  The phone bleeps into life at the push of his thumb. Two hands shake on the blurry, liquid crystal screen. A moment later it vibrates to alert him to three new text messages. One is from Roisin, telling him she loves him and will be wearing nothing but the red leather jacket he bought her for Christmas when he gets home. The other two are from Pharaoh, telling him first that she is BORED, and second that she needs a pee. He presses his lips together to stop himself from laughing.

  “Lemon chicken,” says DC Andy Daniells, sniffing the air. “Maybe prawns in oyster sauce.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Black bean, definitely. Not satay.”

  McAvoy drags his eyes from the distant bulk of the warehouse, looks across at his colleague.

  Daniells, who had told him within the first ten seconds of shaking hands that the double L in his surname was originally Scandinavian and not Welsh, is new to the unit. He’s an affable, likable lad in his late twenties, with a bald head and a healthy, ruddy complexion. In the month since Daniells moved across from regular CID, McAvoy has only ever seen him in one outfit. He had clearly decided in his youth that he would never look better than in rumpled navy chinos, a pale blue shirt, and a striped red tie, and had decided to stick with it.

  The windscreen wipers squeak inelegantly across the glass of the Corsa, smearing the drizzle into streaks. McAvoy winds down the window, reaches out, and uses the cuff of his jacket to try to make the glass better equipped for surveillance.

  “You think this place has got owt to do with it?” Daniells asks, nodding in the direction of the restaurant.

  McAvoy, pleased to be back on more familiar ground, gives a shake of his head. “No, we’ve spoken to the owner. Clean as a whistle. Making a mint and wouldn’t want to risk it. Did you know John Prescott’s a regular here? Once got in trouble for parking in a disabled bay. Was in the papers . . .”

  “Prescott. Deputy prime minister, wasn’t he?” asks Daniells, without any hint of embarrassment.

  McAvoy pauses for a moment, wondering whether he should instruct the detective on the importance of sound political and local knowledge, but decides that the cheerful, chatty young man will probably pick it up as he goes along. He’s only lived on this coast for a year or so, and his Midlands accent remains strong.

  “Yeah, he was Blair’s number two.”

  “Must have done a lot for this city, then . . .”

  “Yes, you’d think.”

  They sit in silence for a moment, and McAvoy, who has never felt comfortable in one-on-one situations with colleagues, begins to feel self-conscious. He goes back to his notes, shuffles through the papers in his lap, and checks his watch again.

  “Late,” says Daniells, lifting his left arm from the steering wheel and showing McAvoy his cheap watch. “She said six.”

  McAvoy bristles. Can’t help himself. “She?”

  “Pharaoh. She said six.”

  McAvoy’s mouth becomes a tight line. “Do you mean Detective Superintendent Pharaoh?”

  “Yeah,” says Daniells, not detecting the warning note in McAvoy’s voice. He laughs suddenly, at a memory. “Did you see her trying to get the stab vest on? Could put that on YouTube . . .”

  “I beg your pardon, Constable?”

  This time, Daniells spots the danger. “Wouldn’t want to mess with her, though,” he says hurriedly. “Great boss.”

  “Yes. She is.”

  He stares out of the window across the gloomy car park.

  Spots the rear tire of the surveillance van. McAvoy tries to picture the scene inside: Trish Pharoah, Helen Tremberg, Ben Neilsen, and half a dozen uniformed officers, all sitting cramped and anxious in the half-light, extendable batons greased and palmed, jumping with each crackle of the radio . . .

  “We’ve got movement.”

  The voice on the radio belongs to Detective Chief Inspector Colin Ray, the second in command of the unit. He’s a gangly, goggle-eyed, rat-faced man with a fondness for pin-striped suits. Pushing fifty, and with a greenish pallor to his skin, he is at once feared, respected, and reviled. In the event of impending apocalypse and the collapse of the rule of law, he would find himself getting punched in the face by a lot of colleagues.

  McAvoy tries to heighten his senses. Hopes Daniells will do the same.

  A black Land Rover glides into the car park, its tires making an expensive-sounding swish on the wet tarmac.

  Daniells appears to be about to duck his head below the steering wheel, but a warning hand from his sergeant holds him steady. No sudden movements, suggests McAvoy with his eyes. Nothing to alert the occupant.

&
nbsp; “Is it our guy?”

  This time the voice is Pharaoh’s.

  “Too dark. Can’t say.”

  “Fuck.”

  McAvoy can hear the frustration in his boss’s voice.

  “This them, d’you think?”

  Daniells’s voice sounds excited and nervous. McAvoy wonders how many of these operations the young officer has been a part of.

  “We’ll just have to wait.”

  McAvoy wishes he were in the van with Pharaoh; able to give her the kind of encouraging smile that tells her he believes in her and that this will come good.

  “Steady now,” comes Pharaoh’s voice.

  The Land Rover still has not moved. It remains at a stop, diagonally opposite where McAvoy and Daniells sit. If they are lucky, two burly men will get out and walk across the five hundred yards of wasteland between here and the disused warehouse. Once they are inside, Pharaoh will give the signal, and her team will move in to arrest everybody inside. McAvoy is here in case anybody slips the net: ready to block off the road if someone flees in a vehicle. DCI Ray and DI Shaz Archer are hopefully shivering as they keep watch on top of the giant furniture store that marks the end of the retail park that the road winds through on its way down to this washed-out, run-down location. At the far side of the warehouse, two patrol cars from the Operational Support Unit are parked up behind a wall of containers, ready to block off the escape of anybody who makes it into the storage area of the still-working dock.

  Pharaoh’s voice: “Keep it together, children . . .”

  Seconds tick by.

  Minutes.

  “Hell of a place, isn’t it?” says Daniells broodingly, staring through the glass at the brick building opposite. “All those fishermen . . .”

  “Trawlermen,” McAvoy mutters under his breath. “Fishermen stand on a bank with a rod. Trawlermen risk their lives in seas harder than you can imagine.”

  “I’m just saying . . .”

  Daniells does not get a chance to say anything more. In a shriek of rubber, the Land Rover roars out of the parking space.

  DCI Ray’s voice on the radio . . .

  “Fucking hell . . .”

  The vehicle tears out of the car park, but instead of turning left back onto the road through, it spins right, barreling across the area of wasteland and rubble between Pang’s and the nearest tumbledown warehouse.

  “. . . what’s he doing?”

  McAvoy feels a fist close around his esophagus. He grabs the radio, but in his haste it slips from his hand and into the footwell. He grabs for it, papers falling from his lap, scrabbling desperately until his fingers close around its bulk.

  “Guv, get out of there, it’s a setup . . .”

  McAvoy doesn’t know why, but he is flinging open the car door. He could have instructed Daniells to drive. He will never know why he did not.

  He has run only a half-dozen steps when he sees the light. Sees the flame emerge from the dark glass of the Land Rover. Sees it flicker and bounce as the vehicle smashes its way over the ragged landscape. Sees a figure climb halfway out the window of the moving vehicle and draw back its hand . . .

  The Land Rover spins 180 degrees and barely slows as it approaches the small outbuilding where McAvoy had seen the telltale smudge of a police van’s back tire.

  His shout of warning dies in his throat. The light is momentarily airborne, arcing upward, bright against the dark sky, before it tumbles down, down . . . and smashes against the double doors at the back of the police van, stuffed to the gills with police officers: sudden prisoners in a vehicle clothed in flames.

  HOME. The back end of the Kingswood estate, a twenty-minute drive from the center of Hull and near enough to the East Riding villages on one side to compensate for the nearness of Europe’s biggest council estate on the other.

  It’s a computer simulation, this place: a sprawl of Identikit houses and lawns the size of bath towels; of used cars bought on finance; and square living rooms costumed with hand-me-down sideboards and January-sale sofas and first-day-at-school photos.

  Here, on the curve of one nondescript cul-de-sac, all white paint and bare brick, a rusty blue Peugeot with two wheels on the curb, tasteful ivory curtains and the slightest scent of baking . . .

  Roisin McAvoy, pressing her head to her husband’s bare chest, absentmindedly tracing the ridged outlines of one of his many scars with her dainty, red-painted fingernails.

  McAvoy barely registers her touch upon his dead skin. He can still smell flames. Twenty minutes in the shower scrubbing his face and hair with Roisin’s homemade rosemary-and-mint shampoo has not removed the acrid tang of petrol and smoke that clings to his skin like damp linen.

  “Another?”

  Roisin removes herself from his embrace and nods at her husband’s mug, held limp and lopsided between finger and thumb. The marshmallows have melted together and formed a rather pretty roof over the inch-deep sludge of hot chocolate.

  “Aector? Another?”

  “Not yet,” he says, and doesn’t know why. “It was lovely.”

  “It’s the cinnamon,” she says brightly. “Aphrodisiac, y’know.”

  McAvoy does know. They’ve had this conversation before. Roisin knows this, too, but in the past, such chats have led to tickles and fun, so he is pleased she is trying to steer him toward that goal once again, even if he has no energy for the helping of “adult time” she has clearly been craving all day.

  “You sure you didn’t bump your head, darling?”

  “I was nowhere near, Roisin. Didn’t even get warm on the flames.”

  Nobody was badly hurt in the blast. Ben Neilsen had tripped jumping from the van and cut his hand. One of the uniformed constables who had used too much hairspray before suiting up for the operation had found herself looking momentarily angelic when the flames took hold, but Pharaoh had had the presence of mind to push her headfirst into a puddle, and she had escaped without significant injuries.

  The operation had not gone well. The four-by-four had managed to lose the patrol car somewhere in the maze of old buildings down by the docks. The helicopter, when it had finally turned up, couldn’t pick up the trail. And when Pharaoh and her remaining team had burst through the sagging wooden doorway of the ramshackle warehouse, hoping to salvage the evening by at least seizing a few tons of marijuana, the place had been deserted. The long tables that lined the cold, dark space were covered in dirt and leaf, indicators that the building had indeed been used for cultivation of drugs, but whoever had used the place was long gone. Leanne has not answered her phone, and the uniformed officers dispatched to her house said it was empty and unlit.

  “She’ll be fine,” says Roisin softly. “Pharaoh. She’s a big girl.”

  McAvoy looks at his wife, trying to read her expression. She has not yet met his boss. Despite being married to a policeman, she is not comfortable in the presence of the law. She knows that Pharaoh means a lot to her husband and that there is no risk of him straying, but McAvoy has lately detected an edge in his bride’s voice whenever Pharaoh comes up in conversation.

  “Briefing in the morning,” says McAvoy. “Debriefing, really. See what we can salvage from tonight. I’ll go and try Leanne again first thing. I’m sure she wouldn’t be involved in any setup. She’s not a bad person. She’s just, you know . . . it’s a mess . . .”

  “You’ll sort it, Aector. Don’t worry.”

  They are in the kitchen, leaning against the work surfaces. Roisin has just finished the dishes. McAvoy, at her insistence, has not been allowed to help. The arrangement is in part due to her claims that men should not worry about housework, and partly because he has a habit of dropping things and making a mess.

  “Oh, I got a call from an old friend today,” says Roisin suddenly. “Can get us one of those Toyotas, the four-wheel-drive ones. Two grand and only three years old
. . .”

  McAvoy winces. Colors instantly. Wishes she had not brought this up. He does not know how to respond to her mentions of “friends” and “contacts”—least of all since this morning’s embarrassments with the travelers. He does not believe that any such car will have been procured legitimately. Fears it may even be stolen. He is ashamed of his thoughts and what they say about his prejudices, even toward the person he loves more than any other.

  “We’ll see,” says McAvoy. “The insurance could still pay out.”

  Roisin barks out a derisory laugh. The McAvoys are locked in a battle with their insurers. Their minivan had been reduced to a burned-out shell a week before Christmas, driven into a brick building by a killer who perished in the resulting blast. McAvoy had escaped with only minor burns. Those wounds have been a picnic compared to the resulting insurance headache. The company claims he is not covered for a “work-related” accident. Refuses to pay up. They have passed him between a dozen different departments; all apparently peopled by twelve-year-olds who keep laughing when they read his description of what caused the accident.

  A sudden, halfhearted cry from upstairs causes Roisin to close her eyes in frustration. She is looking tired. Lilah has been difficult all day, grizzling and sobbing, refusing to feed.

  “I’ll go,” says McAvoy, but Roisin waves a hand at him, insisting he go sit down. He does not want to, fearing he will fall asleep as soon as he closes his eyes. She brushes past him, too tired to notice him put out an arm for a cuddle.

  McAvoy stands alone in the kitchen for a while. Looks in the bread bin and the biscuit barrel. Eats a couple of peanut butter cookies and takes a swig of milk from the carton in the fridge to swill the crumbs from his teeth. He looks for some kind of chore. Spots his coat over the back of the small kitchen table, and picks it up to go and hang it in the cupboard under the stairs. As he does so, Roisin appears at the top of the staircase. Lilah is red-faced and wet-eyed in her arms.

  “I’m throwing those trousers away,” she says, nodding at the laundry basket by the bathroom. “Horrible.”