Original Skin

by David Mark

  He hears a faint buzzing sound. Wonders if there is any chance of reaching his mobile phone. Manages to disentangle himself and climbs out of bed. Finds his trousers on the bedroom floor and curses, silently, as the call ends.

  He looks at the number. Tremberg. He pulls on a pair of rugby shorts and a hooded top, and pads downstairs, intent on making breakfast before doing anything that might upset Roisin on his day off.

  Entering the kitchen, he has the vaguest of memories. Last night. Just after nine p.m. Giggling, here, by the sink, as she held aloft a rolling pin like a club. Roisin telling him that her contact couldn’t be trusted to put Hepburn’s phone back, and suggesting they smash it up instead. Him, knowing that it was the right thing to do, but unable to acquiesce.

  He picks up the phone from where it lies on the counter. Switches it on. Fills the kettle as he lets the phone pick up messages and calls. Looks again at the screen. A dozen texts and seventeen missed calls.

  He would like to give the phone to the tech unit. Wants them to go through it and make it evidence. To make it clinical and somehow policemanlike. At the moment it is still prying.

  Halfheartedly, lips pursed, he glances through the messages.

  More, from Mark Cabourne.

  ARE YOU IGNORING ME?!

  He’s rung again! What is it he wants? Please. Xx

  Have I done something?

  Why are you being like this? I need you. I need this. Please text. Xx

  McAvoy rubs his face, the peace of sleep evaporating. He cannot help himself. He cannot stop now.

  He makes a mug of tea and opens the back door. The day is clear, bright, and blue skied, and the cold air feels good on his bare legs. He sips his tea, and winces, as if it were too hot. It is not. The grimace is the result of making up his mind.

  He dials a number. Waits only three rings.

  “Councillor Cabourne? This is Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy . . .”

  • • •

  THE NOISES coming from the cell seem to be a mixture of English, Gaelic, and Demon. Spits and shouts, screams and cries, all made unintelligible by the fury with which they froth from Ronan Gill’s mouth.

  “And he thinks he’s angry now . . . ,” says Colin Ray grimly to himself, as he passes the custody desk and makes his way to cell four.

  He takes a breath. His ribs ache. There is mud caking his suit. He has a headache where his teeth slammed together, and he can taste blood. And he’s feeling pretty good.

  From within the cell come another series of crude screams and threats.

  “He’ll have you. All of you. And him! Fucking cunt! He’ll take you down. All of you!”

  A noise behind Ray makes him turn. He is surprised to see the tall, imposing shape of Helen Tremberg. It strikes him as odd to have a female companion other than Shaz Archer. Shaz has gone home to get changed, but Tremberg is less concerned about the dirt on her clothes and has made little effort to sponge her knees or face clean. She wants to be here. To be involved. To see what happens next.

  Ray seems about to tell her to piss off. To ask why she’s here and not busy putting antiseptic on McAvoy’s grazes, telling him what a big brave soldier he is.

  He loses interest in insulting her. Just gives her a shrug, as if to warn her that he’s about to do things his way and it’s up to her whether she stays or goes.

  “Where’s my fucking solicitor? I’m not speaking. Not a fucking word. You know how much my brief costs? He’ll have you all. All your jobs . . .”

  Ronan Gill has learned nothing from his guardian in terms of keeping his mouth shut. None of Alan Rourke’s stoic silence has rubbed off on the teen. He has been like this since the uniformed officers dumped him on the cell floor and began stripping him of his clothes. The sergeant in charge, who finished the job with a bleeding lip and bruised knuckles, said that putting him in the paper suit was like trying to put a lobster in a rubber glove, though Ray doesn’t know who did his research.

  “I’ll have you all . . . !”

  Ray bangs his palm on the metal door.

  “Shut the fuck up, son. Back it up.”

  The warning prompts another burst of Gaelic. Ray finds himself smiling back at Tremberg, who pulls a face. It is the warmest moment that has ever passed between the two.

  “I need to talk to you, lad. I can come in with a dozen uniformed officers and we can do this in a way that hurts.”

  There is silence for a moment, then Ronan’s voice, thick with rage. “I’m bleeding! They assaulted me. That’s assault. When my brief gets here . . .”

  “Easy now,” says Ray, and reaches up to open the viewing flap in the metal door. A moment later a comet of spit shoots through the gap, and Ray thanks experience for not having been in the way.

  “Feel better now?”

  “Fuck you!”

  “I can stay out here if you like. We can talk from here. You obviously enjoy your privacy.”

  There is another stream of spit.

  “You’re gonna dehydrate, son.”

  Quickly, deftly, Ray glances through the viewing window. Ronan is bouncing on the balls of his feet, fists at his side, face crimson, like a baby with wind. He has torn the paper suit to shreds, which hang off him as if he has burst out of them from within. The mattress from the bunk is propped against the far wall with fist-shaped dints at its center. The toilet pipe is leaking water, as if it has been booted again and again.

  “I’ve been going through your things, Ronan,” says Ray. “You’re going to have some explaining to do.”

  The silence from the cell is longer this time. Without looking, Ray beckons Tremberg closer. He reaches into his pocket and hands her a slick, expensive mobile phone and a handful of bits of scrap paper. She takes them without asking why. Read them, he mouths at her.

  “You break my phone and I’ll break you,” says Ronan, though his voice has taken on a slightly more whiny tone.

  “I’d have thought you’d have wanted me to break it,” says Ray. “Thought you’d have wanted it smashed.”

  “There’s nothing in it,” says Ronan, but there is a note of uncertainty there now.

  Ray smiles at Tremberg as she looks up from going through the ragged scraps. She looks puzzled. Doesn’t seem to know whether it would make her look like an idiot to admit she doesn’t know what she’s looking at.

  Ronan had fought like a tiger to keep the phone. He was brought into the custody suite with an officer holding each limb, screaming and roaring, and any attempt to book him in properly would have ended in somebody’s blood. He should have been asked his name, age, and address, and been given a list of items that were in his possession at the time of arrest. Instead, he had been dragged to the cell, forcibly stripped, and the contents of his pockets stuffed into a carrier bag, to be given to Colin Ray as soon as he arrived.

  Ray’s fears that any messages in the phone’s history would be in Gaelic were unfounded. He had made sense of it all pretty swiftly. It was clear that Ronan did not use the gadget for personal reasons. There are no messages from girlfriends or mates in the in- or out-boxes. It’s all business.

  “It’s not even my fucking phone,” shouts Ronan.

  Ray grins, and in the lurid half-light of the corridor it’s a ghoulish thing.

  “You gonna stand back so I can open the door, son? Gonna play nice and let me in for a little chat?”

  “I ain’t speaking until my brief gets here. I told you.”

  “We’ll do the interview, Ronan. We’ll go do it all properly, you’ll see. Be super-official and very polite. You’ll follow your brief’s advice and keep your trap shut. I can see it all now. Don’t worry, we’ll follow procedure. I just wanted to have a little parley—two grown-ups together. But we can leave it. Don’t fret. You have a nice time smashing your cell up and tearing your clothes to confetti. We’ll talk later.”


  “Fuck you,” comes the reply.

  “Like autopilot, isn’t it?” says Ray to Tremberg. “Pavlov’s dogs. They hear me speak and start salivating swear words.”

  Tremberg looks up from where she is scrolling through the half-dozen messages in the phone’s history. She can’t make much sense of what she sees. Letters. Numbers. The occasional smiley face. It seems more gibberish than code.

  Ray takes the phone from her hand. Holds it up. Looks at the most recent message.

  He reads aloud. “‘Eleven. H-four. Nine. Agreed. Two crew. Four-oh-one. Transfer H-six.’”

  There is silence in the corridor.

  “I just sunk your battleship,” says Ray through a grim smile.

  “I don’t know what that fucking means.”

  “No,” says Ray. “Neither did I at first. Code of some kind, I reckon, because I’m smart like that. And I reckon that if I spent the rest of my life trying to break it I’d only get a headache. Thing is, son, I don’t need to, do I?”

  There is silence from the cell.

  “You took that illegally . . .”

  Despite the pain in his ribs, Ray starts laughing. “Always hide behind the law, these fuckers,” he says to Tremberg.

  “You don’t know what you’re doing,” says Ronan, and there is desperation in his voice.

  Ray takes the handful of paper scraps from Tremberg. Holds one up; a lined page scrawled with a Biro.

  “H4—Division Road,” he says clearly. “Nine equals movement of crops. Nips know. Pick up by Lee. Four hundred one plants. Transfer—New Bridge Road. Before weekend.”

  There is silence in the corridor.

  “I’m surprised you remember much from your school days, Ronan, but it’s nice to see you show your workings out.”

  Ray slams the viewing window shut to muffle the screams and threats and pounding fists that rattle against it. He gives Tremberg a nod and walks past her, favoring his left side.

  “Sir?”

  Ray turns back. “Stupid prick couldn’t remember the code. Wrote it down in English for us and shoved it in his pocket. Little shit thought he was untouchable.”

  Tremberg throws her hands up. “I don’t understand.”

  “He’s running the Vietnamese crew for somebody. He’s moving the crop before the weekend. The farmers know to expect him and a crew of two and take it all to the next house on the list.”

  In the poor light, it takes Tremberg considerable effort to show her shock and skepticism. “He’s just a little thug.”

  “They all started out like that, love,” he says, and for the first time he does not sound as though his every word is spraying bile. “Ronan was on the ladder.”

  “Was?”

  Ray rubs a hand over his unshaven face. “I don’t think they’ll fast-track him once we raid Division Road.”

  • • •

  EVEN IF he were not already a vaguely familiar face, McAvoy would still recognize the councillor as he enters the diner. There is an air of dread and panic about him; a cloud of anxiety that dampens his face and slicks down his hair.

  The man scans the room. Takes in the monochrome baseball and Rat Pack photos on the wall, the black-and-white tiles on the floor, the expensive flowers by the till, and the open grill at the back of the room, where white-suited chefs toss pancakes and grill bacon.

  McAvoy waves a hand. Beckons him over.

  “Detective?” he asks, approaching. He lifts his hand to shake, drops it to his side and then lifts it again.

  McAvoy begins to stand. Smiles through a mouthful of breakfast. Realizes that, even in this half crouch, he towers over the other man, and is quick to sit down again so as not to be instantly intimidating.

  Cabourne slides into the seat opposite him. He is full of nervous energy. Drumming his hands on the table. Playing with the saltcellar. Jiggling his legs.

  “That your partner?” Cabourne asks the question with what is intended as a little laugh, but it comes out as a strangled, high-pitched giggle. He is nodding at Lilah, fast asleep in a car seat at McAvoy’s side.

  “Saturday parenting duty,” says McAvoy. “You got children?”

  Cabourne looks away.

  McAvoy already knows that his brunch companion is a father. A married man. Home owner and former council officer turned politician. Fourteen years on the local authority. A member of the Police Authority and face on more committees than he could name. This is an important man, and he looks like a child summoned to the headmaster.

  “Nice here,” says Cabourne distractedly. “Chain, is it.”

  McAvoy nods. Approves. Wishes they would switch back on the Italian jazz they had been playing when he arrived.

  He and Cabourne are among only a handful of customers in this imitation-American diner. It sits between the hamburger joint and the fried-chicken chain that constitute a major part of the “retail and leisure” end of the Kingswood estate.

  Roisin has taken Fin to see a Disney film at the nearby cinema. There is talk of slush puppies and bowling afterward. It could yet be a nice family day within walking distance of home. There has been no need to tell Roisin that his offer to take Lilah for breakfast is not entirely selfless. He is not sure how he would have arranged things if Cabourne had not agreed to meet him here.

  As it happened, Cabourne had been only too willing to help—happy to meet the detective whenever and wherever he wanted, and not once asking what it was about.

  “Can I get you something?”

  McAvoy passes the brunch menu across the table. He takes a sip of his chocolate milk shake, and skewers another pancake with his fork, teaming it with a half rasher of bacon and enough maple syrup to fossilize a woodpecker.

  “Erm, coffee would be nice. And water, please. I’ll get them . . .”

  Cabourne plunges his hand into his pocket and tries to retrieve some change. As he does so he seems to get his sweaty palms stuck, and as he wrenches his hand free, change spills onto the hardwood floor.

  “Shit!”

  A waiter in black trousers and shirt comes to help as McAvoy levers himself out of the booth and starts retrieving coins. The councillor just sits there, arms folded, looking down at the black lacquer of the table, seemingly unsure what to do or say.

  “Coffee,” says McAvoy to the waiter, as they both deposit a handful of change in front of Cabourne. “And water, please. Tap.” As McAvoy slides back into his seat, Cabourne gives him a grateful smile. “I’ve always been clumsy,” he says. McAvoy looks him up and down. He is around six foot. Late forties to early fifties. Gray hair swept back from a thin face, made stern and bookishly intelligent by rimless glasses. He is dressed in a thick mauve shirt and chinos, and his only adornments are a simple gold wedding ring on his left hand and a thin silver chain at his throat. To McAvoy, he has the air of a foreign football manager. He looks like he can afford his own breakfast.

  “I appreciate your coming,” says McAvoy, pushing his plate away. “As I explained, we are at the very earliest stage of an investigation and I am talking to you purely out of courtesy . . .”

  Cabourne holds up one hand. He closes his eyes. Takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes.

  “I think I already know,” he says quietly.

  They sit silently as the waiter leaves the coffee and water on the table.

  “Councillor?”

  Cabourne sips his water. Puts the glass down. Lifts it and gulps some more.

  “I didn’t know it was illegal,” he says.

  McAvoy sits in silence, content to let things play out.

  Cabourne’s eyes are darting, flitting from booth to booth, table to table, although whether for familiar faces or a way out, McAvoy cannot say.

  “Why don’t you get it off your chest?”

  The older man seems to sag. It is as if he has been punc
tured. When he looks up again, McAvoy has removed Lilah from her car seat and is sitting her, floppily, on his knee. Deep down, he knows he is using his daughter as a prop: putting the councillor at ease by making this a chat between fathers rather than an interview with a policeman, but to acknowledge it would be an admission of manipulation, and that is an admission he does not want to make.

  “Hepburn’s ignoring me now,” Cabourne says. “I think he’s more scared than he’s letting on. That’s Steve, though. Always the same.”

  McAvoy strokes his daughter’s cheek with the back of his knuckle. Dips his finger in the dregs of maple syrup and lets her lick it, while nuzzling her head with his nose.

  “Councillor, I know you want to tell me something. You’ll feel better. You’re not under caution. This is just a chat.”

  Cabourne seems to galvanize his resolve. Gives a nod.

  “He’s left me so many messages. This Ed Cocker. Some sort of political fixer. I don’t know what he wants me to say.”

  McAvoy gives an encouraging nod.

  “Some people get sports cars or motorbikes when they hit middle age. I did this.”

  “This?”

  Cabourne looks suspicious suddenly. “Can I see your warrant card?”

  McAvoy raises his eyebrows. Pulls out his card from his shirt pocket and slides it across the table. Cabourne studies it. Nods.

  “This Ed Cocker. He won’t take no for an answer.”

  McAvoy sighs. “What’s the question, Councillor?”

  “He says Hepburn’s the story, but he’s not, is he? Not when he finds out.”

  McAvoy runs his tongue over his lips and strains his brain. Thinks of the desperation in Cabourne’s messages to Hepburn’s stolen phone. The kisses. Looks now at the father of three, sweating and panicking in the seat opposite him.

  “Councillor, your personal life is your own. Whom you have relationships with is not police business.”

  Cabourne sags again. “It’s not a relationship,” he says. “It was just one of those things.”

  Something that you wish would continue, thinks McAvoy. “And the journalist from the Hull Daily Mail knows about it?”