Dead Pretty: The 5th DS McAvoy Novel (DS Aector McAvoy)

by David Mark

  McAvoy breathes deeply. His face has gone white.

  ‘Where was he last night?’ he asks quietly. ‘Seriously, Guv. Where?’

  Pharaoh gives a shake of her head. ‘We’ll talk later. I know what you went through last night. I know you’re hurting. Don’t let your emotions get on top of you.’

  McAvoy watches as she turns away, her shoulders a little stooped and dandelion spinners in her hair.

  ‘Jesus, Sarge,’ says Tremberg, under her breath. ‘I thought she was going to hit you.’

  McAvoy turns and looks at the red-roofed cottage. Takes in the ivy and the wildflowers, the gravestones and buckled railings. Imagines, for a moment, how it would feel to wake in this place. How it would feel to see Roisin sitting on the steps of the old bow-top gypsy wagon, hoops in her ears and dirt on the soles of her dainty feet. Wonders how Pharaoh looked, last night, moving on top of Hollow as McAvoy and his family coughed on the stench of Hannah Kelly’s body outside their home.

  ‘You don’t think there’s anything going on between them, do you?’ asks Helen, pulling a face. ‘I mean, she wouldn’t. She’s Pharaoh.’

  McAvoy shakes his head. Remembers all the nights he has held her hair back while she has thrown up red wine and vodka. Remembers the slurred conversations at 2 a.m. and the miles he has put in to ensure she never drives the children to school when she’s too drunk to see.

  ‘No, she’s not,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘Not any more.’

  Chapter 22

  Roisin doesn’t understand the motivation of the teenagers who lounge on the damp grass outside Grimsby Minster. It’s a ghastly day. Although the fog has not taken this part of the east coast in its fist, the sky is an endless smear of grey and the air is speckled with a misty rain, a billion tiny raindrops hovering like flies.

  ‘This is Webbo,’ says Sophia, indicating a tall, jointy specimen in a black hooded top, heavy white foundation and eyeliner. ‘He’s studying drama at Franklin.’

  Roisin gives Webbo a parental once-over. Underneath the Goth make-up he seems to be quite freckly and she spots red roots peeking out through the black hair around his temples. He flicks his hair out of his eyes and nods a hello. Roisin smiles politely.

  ‘Nice to meet you, Webbo. Eyeliner, eh? What’s the word for that look? Emu, isn’t it?’

  Webbo sneers, flaring his nostrils contemptuously. ‘I don’t do labels,’ he says. ‘I’m just me, man. I’m no emo.’

  ‘Emo, that’s it,’ says Roisin conversationally. ‘I heard you’re into slicing your arms with paper clips and razor blades and stuff. What’s that all about, then?’

  Webbo looks to Sophia for support. Turns back to Roisin.

  ‘When the blood flows, your pain leaves with it, yeah? When I’m in pain inside, I just take a razor to my arm and let it out.’

  Roisin considers this, nodding and sucking her cheek.

  ‘It’s not for me,’ she says at last. ‘If I’m feeling sad I have a good cry or cuddle somebody I love or have a bit of a shout and a bar of chocolate. But if you like slicing yourself to bits, that’s up to you.’ She turns to Sophia and gives her a hard look. ‘You’re not into that shit, are you? Because if you’re cutting yourself, I swear, I’ll save you the bother. You won’t need to self-harm – you’ll be in enough pain from the slapping I’ll give you.’

  Sophia shakes her head, colour rising in her cheeks. Webbo looks between the two women and makes a poor decision.

  ‘It’s her body,’ he says, indicating Sophia. ‘She’s her own person. She wants to deal with her pain, that’s up to her, nobody else.’

  Roisin ignores him for a moment, continuing to stare at Sophia. Slowly, she bends down and attends to Lilah in her pushchair. Her voice takes on a sing-song quality as she addresses her child.

  ‘This is Webbo, Lilah. He’s an emo. Can you say, “Emo”? He dyes his hair and puts on make-up and likes to cut his arms. What a silly man. Is he a big silly? Yes, he is. Do you know what would happen to Webbo if you brought him home to our house and said he was your boyfriend, Lilah? You do, don’t you. Your mammy would cut his legs off and bury him in the back garden, that’s what she’d do. And Daddy would probably be cross and give Mammy a bit of a telling-off, but deep down, he’d know that it was for the best, because Webbo is a total knob and should probably feck off while I’m distracted. Do you want to sing “Old Macdonald Had a Farm”? You do? Good girl!’

  Sophia finds herself torn between a desire to turn crimson, and to throw back her head and laugh. She likes hanging out with the older lads but thinks of Roisin as the coolest adult she has ever met. Loyalty to Roisin wins out, and she turns her back on Webbo. She crouches down next to Roisin and together they sing a verse or two of Lilah’s favourite nursery rhyme. The child grins, gummy and delightful, and by the time Roisin and Sophia stand up again, Webbo has slouched off to join the throng of black-clad, disaffected teens.

  ‘Is he the one from the party?’ asks Roisin.

  ‘He’s okay,’ says Sophia. ‘He’s a friend. Sort of.’

  ‘Have you done it with him?’ Roisin asks her.

  Sophia shakes her head. ‘I told you, I’m not ready for that. The lad who wanted to at the party isn’t even from around here. It all got blown out of proportion anyway. And I shouldn’t have led him on.’

  Roisin looks at her teenage friend. She feels like lighting a cigarette but is making an effort not to smoke around the children. Instead she reaches into the pocket of her leather jacket for her lip-gloss. Applies a liberal coat and smacks her lips together. She’s fond of Sophia but doesn’t really know how far her duties and responsibilities should go. Although she wishes that Trish Pharaoh spent less time with Aector, she respects her. She doesn’t want to piss her off and make things awkward for Aector by overstepping the mark with her eldest daughter. But she has been stewing these past couple of days. She should have told Trish what happened, about the two men who turned up at her house with a taser and threatened bloody violence. Sophia had been so insistent. Please don’t tell. And in the moments after it happened, Roisin reacted instinctively. She may be married to a copper but she was brought up thinking of the police as a threat. She was brought up to handle things herself and never to tell anything to people in uniform. Instinctively, she had downplayed the incident and her part in it, and Sophia followed her lead.

  In the days since, she has grown increasingly worried that she has put Trish and her children in danger. The two men didn’t seem like local thugs. They had a look in their eyes that she has witnessed too many times before. The horrors of last night have shaken Roisin. The body of Aector’s missing girl was left virtually on her own front lawn. Danger is encroaching on the safe little island of happiness where she and Aector and the children try to live. Aector’s work has cost them dear in the past. They both bear the scars of his need to secure justice for both the living and the dead. She accepts this. She would never ask him to be anything but the man she fell in love with. But she fears what could happen to those close by. Her friend, Mel, lost her life a couple of years ago because of her relationship with Roisin. Pharaoh’s old boss, Tom Spink, has to walk with two sticks after being caught up in an investigation. Now it is Sophia whom Roisin fears for. She has come here to check that she is okay, and to warn her that they must now tell the truth. She has come to tell her that the other night, they got it wrong.

  ‘Did you say you think you led him on?’ asks Roisin, fixing Sophia with a hard glare. ‘Christ, girl, don’t you ever bloody think like that. You can be naked and underneath a fella and still say no. Don’t you understand that? Your body’s your own. Not everybody gets the chance to choose who they share it with, but you’re a strong, intelligent girl from a good family. You don’t have to give yourself away and you don’t have to feel bad if you decide not to sleep with a bloke just because he’s got himself worked up. What was it he called you on Facebook?’

  Sophia looks at the floor. ‘A prick-tease,’ she mumbles.


  ‘A prick-tease? Christ. Sounds like he teases his prick all day and all night. Don’t you realise, that’s not an insult. You’re a pretty girl. You’re sweet and charming and likeable. He wanted to do it with you and you said no. That’s all there is to it. He can go on Facebook and say shit about you if he wants – you’re still the winner here. You stood your ground. Now, tell me once more, just so I’m doubly sure, he did accept it, didn’t he? There’s nothing else you need to tell me? Because there are ways and means of making sure he never does it again.’

  Sophia shakes her head and Roisin looks her full in the face. Sees the truth in her eyes. Nods, satisfied.

  ‘Right, so, that’s one problem solved. Now, about those dickheads who came to the house the other night. What have you told your mammy?’

  Sophia seems relieved to change the subject. She gives a half-smile and starts digging at a piece of stuck-down chewing gum on the pavement outside the church.

  ‘I haven’t seen much of her,’ says Sophia. ‘But when she asked, I said the same as you did. Couple of idiots who wandered into the wrong house. That man told them to get out. That was the end of it.’

  Roisin starts wheeling the pushchair away from the church, past the Fishermen’s Memorial with its polythene-wrapped tributes placed reverentially on the black steel. Roisin looks at the face of the bearded trawlerman as she passes. It is hard and weather-beaten, his expression one of grim determination. Fleetingly, she wonders if the figure ever truly lived; whether he was sculpted from life or from photographs, or is just a work of the sculptor’s imagination. She wonders if other people ask such things. Knows one who certainly would.

  ‘You know those men were more than local idiots,’ says Roisin, as they pass the window of the run-down boozer beneath St James’ Hotel and into the main square. A tramp is asleep on one of the stone benches, steadfastly refusing to open his eyes despite the attentions of two police community support officers, several pigeons and a seagull. An old woman shelters in the doorway of the hardware shop, smoking a cigarette and eating a sausage roll. Food containers and betting slips chase each other on the breeze, tangling around the legs of the half-dozen office workers and listless shoppers who cross the drab grey forecourt.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ asks Sophia, cautiously. ‘I’ve been telling myself it was my fault. What do you think?’

  ‘It’s just the things they said. The way they were. I don’t want to know about your money worries or your mam’s past or anything like that but they seemed like they wanted more than a bit of trouble. I was wrong to try and keep it from your mam. We need to tell her. I’ve told Aector. We don’t have secrets.’

  Sophia says nothing, just trudges alongside as they leave the square and start to pass the nicer shops. There’s a sale on in House of Fraser. A two-for-one offer in Specsavers. Five sausage rolls for a pound in Greggs.

  ‘Tell her, Sophia,’ says Roisin. ‘I’d just mention it, in passing, like. Say I’ve been thinking about it and that maybe there was more to it. I won’t say anything about them roughing you up or what they threatened to do. But she’s a good copper and a good mammy and she’s better placed to sort it out than me. Is that okay?’

  Sophia stares at the ground as they mooch down a side street, past a charity shop where a woman in her eighties is standing in the window trying to put a leather jacket on a mannequin. The windows are steamy with condensation and through the smeary, damp glass, it looks to Sophia as if two corpses are preparing one another for a night out.

  ‘It could have been nothing,’ says Sophia in a low voice. ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘No, we don’t,’ says Roisin. ‘But if anything happened to you I’d fill a bucket with tears.’

  Sophia gives a genuine smile. Walks a little closer to Roisin. Considers her for a moment. She’s extraordinarily attractive; her eyes the blue of the water in a well-kept tropical fish tank. There are holes for several earrings in her dainty ears and a tangle of inked stars and flowers disappears down the tanned skin of her neck and shoulders beneath the collar of her leather jacket. She exudes something – a strength and confidence; a self-belief. Sophia has so many questions for her. Wants to sit her down and demand to know what it feels like to be her.

  ‘She’ll kill me for not saying anything,’ says Sophia flatly. ‘It will be my fault. You should have heard what she said to me after the party. She hates me sometimes.’

  ‘Not true,’ replies Roisin lightly. ‘She worries. She’s bound to worry. She had good reason to worry.’

  ‘I called her a fat bitch,’ says Sophia, and there is guilt in her voice.

  Roisin pulls a face. ‘If I said that to my mam I’d have been in hospital for a month, and I’d have deserved it, too. Don’t say that to her again.’

  ‘She makes me so bloody angry,’ says Sophia.

  ‘She’s your mammy. She’s meant to. Here, do you want a lift back to school or are you done for the day?’

  They have reached the ugly grey car park on the outskirts of the town centre. It’s a four-storey construction and looks as if it was built purely to get rid of a job lot of leftover breeze blocks. Few people park here. Roisin parked her vehicle on the top floor because she wanted to hear the end of the song that was playing on the radio and it made Lilah giggle to hear the wheels squeal as Mammy wound the car around the tight turns, up through the darkness and into the grey light of the open top floor.

  Sophia checks her watch. Roisin thinks school must have started by now, but the girl seems in no hurry to head to class.

  Together they manoeuvre the pushchair up the stairs to the top floor. They swing open the yellow doors and are halfway across the grey tarmac towards Roisin’s car when they hear the voice, cheerful and playful, like a game show host welcoming viewers to another fabulous edition.

  ‘Well, hello there, ladies. Mighty fine day for it, eh – whatever “it” might be. You’ve no idea how pleased we are to see you. We were despairing.’

  Roisin and Sophia turn back towards the doors. Teddy and Foley are standing there like sentries. Teddy is panting a little, having taken the stairs two at a time. Foley is grinning, his gold necklace pulled up and wedged in his smile, carving shiny jewels into his cheeks.

  ‘That’s what I love about small towns,’ says Foley, pushing the chain out of his mouth with his tongue. ‘Everybody knows everybody. People bump into each other. Not like this where we’re from. You can go your whole life and never so much as run into your next-door neighbour in the local shop. But the north? I think there’s only a dozen people live here. I’m getting an authentic experience, that’s for sure. I’ve only been an adopted northerner for a few days and already I’m running into a couple of old friends.’

  Without thinking about it, Roisin stands in front of Lilah’s pushchair. She puts one hand across Sophia and gently moves her backwards.

  ‘We were just talking about you,’ says Roisin conversationally. ‘Honestly, right at this second. Funny old world.’

  ‘I bet you were,’ says Foley, moving forward. ‘I fucking bet you were talking about me. I bet you’ve been dreaming about me, you pikey bitch.’

  Roisin gives Foley a withering look and then turns to Sophia. ‘People always go for the low-blow, don’t you find? It’s just rude. I mean, there are all sorts of things he could call me but he has to go straight in there with the “traveller” thing. As if I think it’s an insult! I mean, if I was going to insult him, I’d mention the spots and the piggy eyes and the appalling clothes but I’d never have a pop at his heritage. That’s just uncalled for.’

  Teddy takes a deep breath. Reaches out and puts a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. Whispers something in his ear and then steps forward, taking the lead.

  ‘We got off on the wrong foot the other day,’ says Teddy, addressing his words to Sophia. ‘We were rude. Truth be told, we came up here to do a job. That job involves recovering a debt of your poor crippled father’s. A very important man wants that debt paying and given
that your father’s too busy shitting in a bag and withering away to dust, it means your mum’s liable. Now, we understand she’s a copper but that isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card, if you’ll pardon the pun. So she needs to pay up. And I can’t think of a better way of getting her attention than letting my friend here bend one of you over the bonnet of that car. Can you?’

  Sophia turns teary eyes on Roisin, who is fiddling with her tobacco tin and making a roll-up on the handle of Lilah’s pushchair. She takes her time. Fixes her eyes on Teddy’s as she licks the cigarette paper closed. Picks a piece of tobacco from the shiny gloss on her lips and lights her fag with a cheap lighter. She blows out a cloud of smoke and appears to be thinking.

  ‘A lot of money, is it?’ she asks Teddy, at length.

  ‘Not an unmanageable sum,’ he says, still looking at Sophia. ‘Not for somebody with a good job and a sports car. She doesn’t have to write us a cheque straight away. We’d just like a gesture.’

  Roisin considers this, then gives a rueful smile.

  ‘You had the money in your hands, lads. You don’t even know what you let go.’

  Teddy drags his gaze away from Sophia. Considers Roisin. She’s a tiny little thing but nothing about her suggests she is afraid. He’s dealt with pikeys before. Wonders whether she’s connected to anybody important. Whether there would be hell to pay if he threw her off the roof.

  ‘In our hands?’ asks Foley. ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Her fella,’ says Roisin, taking another drag. ‘Bloke who saw you off the other night.’