Dark Winter (9781101599891)

by Mark, David

  “Found him, have they?” she asks at last.

  “Perhaps we could—”

  Her sudden glare cuts him dead. She stands there, snarling, her head shaking, her glasses slipping down her nose as her countenance turns hard and cold. She spits her words, as if taking bites out of the air.

  “Forty years too bloody late.”

  “Would you mind taking your boots off? We have a cream carpet in the kitchen.”

  McAvoy bends down and starts unfastening the soggy, triple-knotted laces. Lets his eyes sweep the little cloakroom from his vantage point at knee height. No Wellingtons. No dog baskets. No rubbish bags or newspapers waiting for the next bonfire or tip-trip. Incomers, he thinks instinctively.

  “So,” she says, standing above him like a monarch preparing to bestow a knighthood. “Where did they find him?”

  McAvoy looks up, but can’t make eye contact without straining his neck, and can’t unpick his laces without looking at them. “If you’ll just give me a moment, Mrs. Stein-Collinson . . .”

  She responds with an irritated sigh. He imagines her face becoming stern. Tries to decide if it will do more harm to give her the details from this most inappropriate of positions, or to make the poor lady wait until he’s removed his boots.

  “He was about seventy miles off the coast of Iceland,” McAvoy says, trying to inject as much empathy and compassion into his voice as he can. “Still in the lifeboat. A cargo ship saw the vessel, and the search teams went straight to the scene.”

  With a tug, he pulls off one boot, coating his thumb and forefinger in thick mud. He surreptitiously wipes his hand on the seat of his trousers as he begins work on the other.

  “Exposure, I assume,” she says thoughtfully. “He won’t have taken any pills. Won’t have wanted to numb himself to it, our Fred. Will have wanted to feel what they did. I never guessed this was what he was planning. I mean, who would? Not when he’s laughing and telling stories and buying everybody a drink . . .”

  McAvoy wrestles the other boot free and stands up quickly. She’s already halfway through the open door, and it’s with relief that he leaves the cloakroom and steps into the large, open kitchen. He’s surprised by what he finds. The kitchen is as unruly as a student bedsit. There are dirty dishes stacked high around the deep porcelain sink which sits beneath a large, curtainless window. Splashes of grease and what looks like pasta sauce are welded to the rings of the double-oven at the far end. Newspapers and assorted household bills are scattered across the rectangular oak table that fills the center of the room, and laundry sits in crumpled islands all over the precious carpet, which has not been cream in many a year. His policeman’s eye takes in the dribbles of wine that sit at the bottom of the dirty glasses on the draining board. Even the pint glasses, embossed with pub logos, seem to have been used for the slugging of claret.

  “That’s him,” she says, nodding at the wall behind McAvoy. He turns and is greeted with a stadium of faces, a gallery of higgledy-piggledy photographs stuck or Sellotaped to a dozen corkboards. The photos are from each of the past five decades. Black-and-white and color.

  “There,” she says again. “Next to our Alice. She’s my older brother’s youngest. Or is she? I forget. My grandniece, if that’s a word. There he is, anyway. Our Fred. Looking like the cat that got the cream.”

  McAvoy focuses on the image that she is pointing to. A good-looking man with luscious black hair, swept back in a rocker’s quiff, holding a pint of beer and grinning at the camera. The fashion of the man in the foreground suggests it was taken in the mid-eighties. He’d have been thirtysomething. McAvoy’s age. In his prime.

  “Handsome man,” he says.

  “He knew it, too,” she says, and her face softens. She reaches out and strokes the photo with a pale, bejeweled hand. “Poor Fred,” she says, and then turns to look at McAvoy, as if seeing him for the first time. “I’m pleased you came. It wouldn’t have been nice to hear it in a phone call. Not with Peter away.”

  “Peter?”

  “My husband. He does a lot of work with the police, actually. You might know him. He’s on the authority. Was a councillor for many a year until it got a bit much for him. He’s not as young as he was.”

  The mention of the Police Authority comes as a slap to the jaw. McAvoy takes a breath. Tries to do what he came for. “Yes, I’m aware of your husband and all the hard work and dedication he put in to campaign for the police service. As soon as we heard the sad news about Mr. Stein, Assistant Chief Constable Everett asked me to come and speak to you personally. We’re in a position to be able to offer you the services of a highly qualified family liaison officer and—”

  She stops him with a smile that makes her look suddenly pretty. Somehow vital and colorful. “There’s no need for that now.” She frowns. “I’m sorry, what was your name?”

  “Detective Sergeant McAvoy.”

  “No, your real name.”

  McAvoy smiles. “Aector,” he says. “Hector, to the English. Not that there’s much difference in how you say it. It’s the spelling that matters.”

  “Heads will be rolling for this, won’t they?” she asks suddenly, as if remembering why this man is standing, in stockinged feet, in her kitchen. “I mean, we didn’t want him to go, but he said they would take care of him. He must have been planning it from the moment they got in touch with him. I mean, we knew the tragedy had affected him, deep down, but it still came as a surprise. I didn’t expect them to find him, but . . .”

  McAvoy frowns and, without thinking about it, pulls one of the chairs from under the table and sits down. He is suddenly intrigued by Mrs. Stein-Collinson. By her brother, the dead rocker. By the lady from the TV and the Norwegian tanker that plucked the inflatable from the gray sea.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Stein-Collinson, but I’m only familiar with the vaguest of details about this case. Would you perhaps be able to clarify the nature of the tragedy that your brother was party to . . .”

  Mrs. Stein-Collinson lets out a sigh, refills her glass, and comes across to the table, where she removes a pile of laundry from a chair and sits down opposite McAvoy.

  “If you’re not from around here, you won’t have heard of the Yarborough,” she says softly. “It was the fourth trawler. The one that went down last. Three others went down in 1968. So many lives. So many good lads. The papers were full of it. Catching on to what we already knew. It was bleeding dangerous work.”

  She picks a pen from a pile of paperwork and holds it like a cigarette. Her gaze settles on the middle distance, and McAvoy suddenly sees the East Hull girl in this middle-class lady of a certain age. Sees a youngster raised in a fishing family, brought up amid the smog of smokehouses and the stink of unwashed overalls. Barbara Stein. Babs to her mates. Married well and got herself a pad in the country. Never really settled. Never felt comfortable. Had to stay close enough to Hull to be able to phone her mam.

  “Please,” he says softly, and there is suddenly no affectation or falsehood in his voice. He will tell himself later that it is presumptuous, but in this moment, he feels he knows her. “Carry on.”

  “By the time the Yarborough went down, the papers had had a bellyful of it. We all had. It didn’t make the front page. Not until later. Eighteen men and boys, pulled down by ice and wind and tides seventy miles off Iceland.” She shakes her head. Takes a drink. “But our Fred was the one who survived. Worst storm in a century, and Fred walked out of it. Managed to get himself into a lifeboat and woke up in the back of beyond. Three days before we heard from him. So I suppose that’s why I’m not crying now, you see? I got him back. Sarah, his wife. She got him back. Papers tried their damnedest to get him to talk about it. He wouldn’t have a bit of it. Didn’t want to answer any questions. He’s only a couple of years older than me, and we were always close, though we knocked lumps out of each other as bairns. It was me th
at took the phone call to say he was alive. The British consul in Iceland hadn’t been able to get Sarah, so he called our house. I thought it were a joke at first. Then Fred came on the line. Said hello, clear as day, like he was just in the next room.” Her face lights up as she speaks, as if she is reliving that moment. McAvoy notices her eyes dart to the telephone on the wall by the cooker.

  “I can’t even imagine it,” he says. He is not serving her an idle platitude. He truly cannot imagine how it would feel to lose one that he loved, and then to have them restored.

  “So, we got him back. The hubbub died down soon after. Sarah asked him to give up the sea and he agreed. I don’t think he took much persuading. Took a job at the docks. Worked there for nigh-on thirty years. Retired with a bad chest. Every once in a while he’d get a phone call from a writer or a journalist asking him for his story, but he’d always say no. Then when Sarah died, I think he got a glimpse of his own mortality. They only had one daughter, and she upped and left when she was a teenager. He suddenly had itchy feet. I honestly think if somebody had been willing to take him on he’d have gone back to trawling, though there’s none of that these days.”

  She begins to stand, but a pain in her knee makes her reconsider. McAvoy, without being asked, returns to the work surface and grabs the wine bottle. He refills her glass, and she says thank you without a word passing between them.

  “Anyway, not so long back he rings me up, telling me this TV company’s been in touch with him. That they’re doing a documentary on the Black Winter. That he’s going out with them on this cargo ship to lay a wreath and say good-bye to his old mates. Of course it was completely out of the blue. I’d barely thought about all that in years, and I think to him it had just become a story. I suppose he must have kept it all inside. For him to go and do this.” Her bottom lip trembles, and she pulls a tissue from her sleeve.

  “Perhaps they were paying him for his story?”

  “Oh, I’d say that’s guaranteed,” she says, suddenly smiling and giving the photo wall a quick glance. “He always knew how to make money, our Fred. Knew how to spend it, too, mind. That’s trawling for you, though. A month away grafting then three days home. A wodge in your pocket and a few hours to spend it. The three-day millionaires, they called them.”

  “So that was the last you heard?”

  “From him, yes. We got a phone call from the woman at the TV company three days ago. We must have been listed as his emergency contacts. Said he’d disappeared. That one of the lifeboats was missing and that Fred had got himself a bit upset talking about it all. That they were looking for him. That she’d keep us informed. That was the end of it. All seems bloody silly to me. After all those years. To end up dead in the sea, just like his mates.” She stops and looks at him, her blue eyes suddenly intense and probing. “It sounds awful, Aector, but why didn’t he just take pills? Why do all this song and dance? Do you think he felt guilty? Wanted to go like his mates from sixty-eight? That’s what the telly lady seemed to be hinting at, but it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing he’d do. He’d do it quiet. No fuss. He liked to tell a story and spin a yarn and charm a lady, but he wouldn’t even talk to the papers when all this happened, so why would he want a dramatic bloody exit now?”

  “Perhaps that’s why he agreed to be filmed? Because they would be passing the area where the trawler went down?”

  She breathes out, and the sigh seems to come from deep within her. It is as though she is deflating. “Perhaps,” she says, and drains her drink.

  “I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. Stein-Collinson.”

  She nods. Smiles. “Barbara.”

  He extends a hand, which she takes with a cold, soft palm.

  “So what happens next?” she asks. “Like I said, I don’t think he’s been taken care of particularly well. He’s an old man, and they let him wander off and do this! I’ve got plenty of questions . . .”

  McAvoy finds himself nodding. He has questions of his own. There is something scratching weakly at the inside of his skull. He wants to know more. Wants it to make sense. Wants to be able to tell this nice lady why her brother died, forty years after he should have done, in the exact way that nearly claimed him as a young man.

  He knows he shouldn’t promise that he will stay in touch. That he will find out what happened. Knows he shouldn’t give her his home phone number and tell her to call if she has any more information. Any questions. Just to talk.

  But he does.

  4.

  McAvoy pulls his phone out of his inside pocket and replays the last voicemail. Even distorted as it is by the tinny loudspeaker, the anger in the woman’s voice is unmistakable.

  “McAvoy. Me again. How many times is this? I’ve got better things to do with my time than chase after you. We need you here. Get a fucking move on.”

  The voice is Trish Pharaoh’s. The most recent message had been left only forty-five minutes after the first, but there had been six in between, including a mumbled, whispered heads-up from Ben Nielsen, suggesting that whatever McAvoy was doing, he should drop it immediately and head for Queen’s Gardens or risk losing important body parts.

  There are a dozen reporters milling around the front of the station, but they pay him little heed and he makes it through the large double doors and into the lobby of the squat glass-and-brick building without being questioned.

  “Incident room,” he asks, panting.

  “Pharaoh’s?” asks the portly, pale-skinned desk sergeant. He is sitting on a swivel chair with a mug of coffee and a hardback book. Muscly and middle-aged, he carries the look of somebody who has worked the night shift for a long time and isn’t going to let anything come between him and his routine. He is wearing a short-sleeved shirt which seems too tight at the collar, giving his large, round head a curiously disembodied look.

  “Indeed.”

  “Still setting up. Try Roper’s old office. Know the way?”

  McAvoy locks eyes with the desk sergeant. Tries to work out whether there is an accusation in the way the man says it. Feels his blush begin.

  “I’m sure I can find it,” he says, trying a smile.

  “I’m sure you fucking can,” says the uniformed officer, and runs his tongue over his lips with the faintest of sneers.

  McAvoy turns away. He has grown used to this. Grown used to contempt and venom, to distrust and outright loathing, among the cadre of officers who rode Doug Roper’s coattails.

  Knows that if it weren’t for his size half of his colleagues would spit in his face.

  He walks as quickly as dignity will allow until he is out of sight, then breaks into a semi-run. He takes the steps three at a time. Down another corridor. Pictures and posters and warnings and appeals whizzing past in a blur from notice boards and unhealthy magnolia walls.

  Voices. Shouts. Clatters. Bangs. Through double mahogany doors and into the lioness’s den.

  He is raising his hand to knock on the door when it suddenly swings inward. Trish Pharaoh storms angrily out, deep in rushed conversation.

  “. . . high time they realized that, Ben.”

  She’s a handsome woman in her early forties, and looks more like a cleaner than a senior detective. Barely regulation height, she’s plump, with long black hair that is expertly styled about once every six months, and left to grow wild the rest of the time. She has four children, and treats her officers with the same mix of tenderness, pride, and aggressive disappointment as she does her offspring. Tactile and flirty, she scares the hell out of the younger male officers, to whom she exudes a certain best-mate’s-mum kind of sexiness. She wears a wedding ring, though the photos on her desk do not include a man’s picture.

  She stops suddenly when she notices McAvoy, and DC Nielsen clatters into her back. She spins round and glares at him before turning to snarl at McAvoy.

  “The wanderer returns,” she sa
ys.

  “Ma’am, I was in a radio black spot on a goodwill assignment from ACC Everett and—”

  “Shush.”

  She places her finger to her own lips, and then holds her palms out in front of her, her eyes closed, as if counting to ten. The three of them stand in silence in the corridor for a moment. DC Nielsen and Sergeant McAvoy, naughty, clumsy, absentee pupils who’ve gravely disappointed a favorite teacher.

  Eventually, she sighs. “Anyway, you’re here now. I’m sure you had your reasons. Ben will bring you up to speed, and you can start working the database. It’s a bit late to get much done on the phones, but we need the names of the witnesses from the church loading into that matrix. And I use the word ‘witnesses’ loosely. I’m right in thinking that it was for this kind of case, yes? Lots of witnesses. Disparate backgrounds? Links between—”

  “Yes, yes,” says McAvoy, suddenly enthusiastic. “It’s like a Venn diagram. We find out everything about a certain group of people, then load that into the system and see where there are parallels or, in particular, overlaps, and—”

  “Fascinating,” she says with a bright smile. “Like I said, Ben can bring you up to speed and get your statement.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “You were a witness, McAvoy. You saw who did this. They hit you in the bloody face with the murder weapon. Quite what you and ACC Everett were thinking . . .”

  “I was following orders, ma’am.”

  “Well, follow mine. There’ll be a briefing at eight,” she says, looking at her watch, then clip-clops down the corridor in heeled biker boots.

  DC Nielsen raises an eyebrow at McAvoy. They both look like they’ve just got away with something, and there is an impish smile on both their faces as the junior officer steps back into the office and McAvoy follows him into the brightly lit room.

  DCs Helen Tremberg and Sophie Kirkland are sitting side by side at the same desk, staring at an open laptop computer. Sophie is eating a slice of pizza and using it to gesture at something on the screen. It is the only computer in the room. The rest of the office is empty, save some spilled and battered old files and a firing squad of assorted bin bags, which look like they’ve been sitting there by the wall for months.