Dark Winter (9781101599891)

by Mark, David

  “Hello there. Awful day, isn’t it? Looks like you’re dressed for the conditions. Do you think it’ll lie? We might get a white Christmas after all. Haven’t had one of them in years. I think our guests will appreciate it. We had a hoot last year. Can I help you, m’duck?”

  McAvoy has to make a mental effort not to recoil from the sheer force of her jollity. Although she’s slim, she puts him in mind of a fat and happy Victorian cook, with big, floury arms and a red face. He pities the poor shambling drunks who must deal with her on their way to begin their detox programs. Another twenty seconds in her company, McAvoy thinks, and I’ll be needing a bottle of brandy.

  “I’m Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy. Humberside Police CID Serious and Organised Crime Unit. I was wondering . . .”

  “Serious crime, is it? Isn’t all crime serious? I mean, it’s not as though having your bike nicked isn’t serious to somebody. That’s what happened to my nephew and he was so upset . . .”

  She rattles on until he wants to reach across the desk and physically press her lips together. The smile never leaves her face, although it never quite reaches her eyes, which puts him in mind of lights left on in the upstairs windows of a deserted house.

  “It’s about one of your patients,” he says, jumping in when she pauses for breath. “Russell Chandler. I did call ahead, but I had difficulty getting through.”

  “Ooh, we’ve had no end of problems. It’s probably the weather. E-mail and Internet have been playing up as well.”

  McAvoy runs his tongue around his mouth and twitches his face to reveal a hint of teeth. He has had quite enough of today. Although he covered his own back by contacting ACC Everett and telling him that Barbara Stein-Collinson had requested his help in tying up some loose ends regarding her brother’s death, he’d still received an angry call from Trish Pharaoh when the message had been relayed that her office manager was following up on that same bloody errand for the top brass. “Say no, you silly sod,” she’d shouted down the line. “We’re in the middle of a murder investigation, for God’s sake. This is where you let yourself down, McAvoy. Trying to do too many things for too many people and ending up pissing everybody off.”

  She’d only hung up when he gave her something bigger to worry about, and relayed Colin Ray’s message about bringing in a suspect.

  “Russell Chandler,” he says firmly. “I understand he’s a patient here?”

  The receptionist switches off her grin. “I’m afraid that’s confidential.”

  McAvoy doesn’t speak. Just looks at her for a moment with an expression that could melt a computer screen. “It’s important,” he says eventually, and although he’s not sure if the statement is true, discovers that he is starting to believe it.

  “House rules,” she says, and there’s an air of smugness about her now. Despite the cold wind blowing in through the open doors, McAvoy feels sweat trickling down his neck. He’s pretty sure that if he made a big enough fuss, he could gain access to Chandler, but what if they were to complain? What would be his defense? Chandler is not a suspect in any investigation. Not even a witness in any real sense. It’s just a bit of background info on a case from another patch. And besides, he wonders, would it be ethical to speak to somebody in a place like this? At a time when they’re seeking help to combat their problems? Oh Christ, Aector, what have you bloody done?

  He steps back from the desk, suddenly unsure of himself. “Excuse me, did I hear my name?”

  McAvoy turns. Standing in the doorway are two men. One is dressed in athletic gear—hooded sweatshirt, zipped up to his chin, woolly hat pulled down tight, and jogging trousers tucked into soccer socks. He’s jogging on the spot, and the small window of face that peeks out from between the hat and the hoodie is flushed and red. The other man is shorter and almost skeletally thin. He’s wearing baggy corduroy trousers, sneakers, and a padded lumberjack shirt over a V-neck T-shirt. His head is shaven, but the light from the hall reveals that he would be bald on top even without the ministrations of the razor, and his dark goatee is flecked with gray. He wears glasses that, even from a distance of some yards, appear filthy with dust and grime.

  “Was the gatekeeper here making life difficult?” asks the short, thin man with a smile. McAvoy hears a trace of Liverpudlian in his accent. “She’s ferocious, is our Margaret,” he says. “Isn’t that right, sweetie?”

  McAvoy turns to look at the receptionist, but she’s rolled her eyes and turned to her screen and is trying to ignore the exchange. When McAvoy turns back, Chandler has crossed the floor and is holding out his hand.

  “Russ Chandler,” he says, and as McAvoy takes his hand in his, he feels like he’s closing his palm around a collection of dried twigs.

  “Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy.”

  “I know,” says Chandler, grinning warmly. “I used to do a bit of work in your part of the world. Knew Tony Halthwaite pretty well. Doug Roper, too. All got shushed up, eh?”

  McAvoy thinks, Does everybody bloody know?

  “I’d rather not . . .”

  “Don’t fret, mate. My lips are sealed. Unless you happen to have a bottle of whiskey on you, in which case they’ll bloody open.” He looks past McAvoy and grins at the receptionist. “Just kidding, sweetheart.”

  In the doorway, the man in the running gear has upped the pace of his stationary sprinting. His knees are getting higher. He looks like he knows what he’s doing.

  Chandler notices McAvoy staring and spins back to his companion. “You just get going, son. Usual route. Keep your arms up. We’ll see you by the bench.” He turns to McAvoy, then nods in the direction of his departing companion. “Roommate. They keep us in twos so we don’t top ourselves in the night. The running seems to help him. Anyway, what can I do for you?”

  “Is there somewhere we can talk, Mr. Chandler? It’s regarding Fred Stein.”

  Chandler sticks his lower lip out playfully and raises his eyebrows in a show of surprise. “Fred? I’m not sure . . .”

  “It won’t take long.”

  Chandler nods, seemingly unfazed at the prospect. “You mind walking and talking? I’ve promised my young lad I’ll time him.”

  McAvoy nods gratefully, happy that this is working out.

  As they leave the foyer and trot down the stairs into the darkening air and billowing snow, McAvoy notices his companion is limping on his right leg. Remembers what Caroline told him. Glances down. Chandler turns and looks up at the bigger man as they walk. “Amputated,” he says simply. “Price you pay for loving the ciggies and living on bacon. Got a falsie under these trousers. I’d recommend them to anybody who goes to Weight Watchers. You just slip your lower leg off and you’ve lost half a stone.”

  McAvoy isn’t sure whether to pat him on the shoulder or give him an encouraging smile, so just brushes over it. “Fred Stein,” he says, as they begin following a neatly tended gravel path toward a line of evergreens. “You heard what happened?”

  “Did indeed,” he says, with a sigh that becomes a cough. It’s a hacking sound. Unhealthy. “Poor bugger.”

  “Caroline Wills told me that you were the one that managed to get him to talk. Tracked him down. Brokered the deal.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Was there anything in his manner when you met him that suggested he was thinking of taking his own life?”

  Chandler stops. They’re perhaps three hundred yards from the building. He cranes his neck to see if anybody’s poking their head out of the front door, then reaches down and hitches up his trouser leg. He takes hold of the limb at the knee and with a swift jerk snaps off his leg just below the joint. Absentmindedly, he reaches inside the false limb and pulls out a cigarette and lighter. He sparks up, and draws the smoke deep into his lungs. It seems an almost religious experience. Without saying another word, he leans down and fastens the leg back in
place. He looks up with a grin that tries to be impish but instead looks strangely gruesome, splitting so unhealthy a face.

  “Frowned upon?” asks McAvoy, smiling, despite himself.

  “You’ve got to sign an agreement when you check in,” he says contemptuously. “No fags. No chocolate. No bloody sugar. All part of the program, apparently. Can’t detox you when you’re still putting toxins in yourself.”

  “And you don’t think perhaps you should listen?”

  “Oh, there’s no doubt they’re right, Sergeant. But that’s the thing with addictions. Rather hard to drop.”

  “But the money you’re spending to be here, surely it’s worth trying . . .”

  “I’m giving it my best shot,” he says, looking away and blowing out a lungful of smoke. “I’ve been in places like this three times before. I come out full of hope and within a day I’m in a boozer, knocking back whiskey. I know I’ll do it even before I’m out the gates. It’s the finality I struggle with. The idea of never having another cig. Never having another drink. What’s the bloody point?”

  “Your health, surely . . .”

  “Who am I staying healthy for? There’s just me, mate. No kids. No missus. No adoring fans desperate to sleep with me. Got to pay to publish my own bloody work.” He says the last with a sudden rush of venom, and McAvoy notices the way his jaw locks around the cigarette.

  McAvoy quickly runs through in his mind the brief details he had pulled off the Internet about this man. He’d found his byline on several features on various special-interest websites and national newspapers, but the majority of hits had come from a Surrey-based publishing house. Russ Chandler had written several self-published books. Some were about the glory days of the fishing industry, others were on local history, and a couple of tomes were on unsolved crimes in various Northern cities. They came with an author profile that revealed that Russell Chandler was born in Chester in 1966 and spent some time in the army before becoming a full-time writer. He had worked as an insurance salesman and as office manager for a haulage firm. He had lived in Oxford, East Yorkshire, and London, and now made his home in East Anglia. His last book had been published four years earlier, a biography of three of the RAF Bomber Command pilots who had taken part in the raid on Dresden in World War Two. McAvoy had read the extract. He’d been impressed.

  “I won’t tell,” says McAvoy, watching the writer take a contented drag.

  “Thank you,” he replies, making a small, theatrical bow. Then he offers him the packet. “You smoke?”

  “No,” says McAvoy, shaking his head. Then, conversationally: “My wife does.”

  Chandler looks at him with the faintest smirk on his lips. “You want to take one home for her?”

  McAvoy wonders if he’s being laughed at. Feels the prickling of temper in his chest.

  “No thanks. She’s seven months’ pregnant. Got her down to three a day by way of compromise. One glass of wine . . .” He stops. Looks at the ground.

  “She like a drink?”

  McAvoy looks up to see Chandler staring at him hard. He tries to dismiss the moment with a wave of his hand, but Chandler is already intrigued.

  “The way you said that . . .”

  McAvoy shrugs. Figures it can’t hurt. “We’ve lost babies before now,” he says. “This will be our fourth attempt at a second child.”

  Chandler reaches out. Puts a hand on McAvoy’s broad shoulder.

  “I’d pray for you, if I believed any of that bollocks. But I don’t. So I’ll just wish you the best.”

  McAvoy finds himself half smiling. He nods in appreciation, then feels his lips begin to tremble and his eyes fog like glass as he realizes he has made Roisin sound as if she were to blame for the children that never were. “It wasn’t the smoking,” he begins defensively. “And they’re just little glasses of wine. She knows her limits . . .”

  “I wouldn’t know,” says Chandler quietly, and McAvoy wonders if he has just made this interview more difficult for himself than it need be.

  “My dad always said willpower was the way,” says McAvoy hurriedly. “Decide whether you’re a smoker or a nonsmoker, and just be that. I’m a nonsmoker. My wife’s a smoker. Just one of those things.”

  “Sounds a bright chap.”

  “He was. Is.”

  “He a cop, too?”

  “No,” says McAvoy, looking away. “Crofter. Up near Loch Ewe. Western Highlands to you. His family have farmed the same patch of land for more than one hundred years.”

  “Yeah?” Chandler sounds interested. “I’ve read about them, crofters. Hard life, from what I’ve heard.”

  “Oh, aye,” says McAvoy, now torn between talking more about his childhood, of testing the edges of that damp scab, and getting back to Fred Stein. “Dying way of life, too.”

  “So I hear. All the crofts being turned into tourist lodges nowadays, from what I read in The Times. Your dad not fancy that?”

  “He’d rather bite his own arms off,” says McAvoy, more to himself than to his companion. “He and my brother work the land.”

  “Not you, though?” Chandler’s voice is subtle. Soft. Inviting.

  “I gave it ten years,” he says. “Then went to live with my mother. City life. Or at least, as much of a city life as you can get in Inverness. Gave that a year. Then off to boarding school, paid for by my stepdad. Bit of a culture shock. University in Edinburgh. Three years of a five-year degree. Then this. Policeman. Yorkshire. Hull. Husband and father. I wouldn’t be any use to my dad up there now. Don’t think I ever really was.”

  “Shame,” says Chandler, and seems to mean it.

  McAvoy nods. Wishes he were capable of thinking about his old life, his old family, with anything other than sadness. They stand in silence for a moment, until they remember what has brought them together.

  “So?”

  “Yeah, Fred. Was big news in his day. Before my time, of course. Was just a baby when it happened. But I did a bit of work in Hull and it was impossible not to hear about Black Winter. Anyways, I heard the story about Fred Stein years ago. The Yorkshire Post used to have an office on Ferensway and they had framed front pages on the wall. I was in there one day, having a can of ale with an old boy from the Sun who used to share an office with them, and I started reading this front page from the sixties. All about this one bloke who survived. Made it to the lifeboats with two of his crewmates and drifted to some remote bloody hellhole in Iceland. Tramped cross-country until some local farmer found him. Media frenzy, there was, when it turned out he was alive. Everybody had given him up for dead, see? I just logged the info in the back of my brain. It’s getting cramped back there, like.”

  “Did you know him personally at this point?”

  “No, no. He was just a story. I had it in my mind that one day I might try and get him to talk about it. There might be a book in it. That’s what I do, see? I publish at least a book a year. You can buy them in the bookshops under local interest or get them from the publishing house website. Sell pretty well, considering. Fred seemed ideal, but I never really got round to it.”

  “Until?”

  “Well, that Caroline, from Wagtail. Met her during the Dunbar inquiry. Nice girl, if a bit fond of herself. Didn’t know a damn thing about the fishing industry and was willing to pay for background. That’s my line. Did her chapter and verse on the history of the local fleet—the characters, the names. Theories, contacts. She was made up with it. That’s when Fred Stein came back into my mind. I told her about it, thought no more, and then last year she got back in touch and said she thought there could be a documentary in it.”

  They’ve reached the tree line now and the darkness suddenly becomes harder to penetrate. Chandler points to a wrought-iron bench and they both take a seat. McAvoy is hunched up inside his coat, but the wind is still bitter on the fe
w inches of exposed skin. He wonders how Chandler, just skin and bone in a shirt and vest, can stand it. He seems so fragile, and there’s a pestilence about him, a suggestion that even without cigarettes, his breath would be a plume of gray smoke.

  “So where do you start with something like that? Tracking him down?”

  “It’s not difficult,” he says dismissively. “Start with a last known address and just start working the phones and writing letters. Fishing community’s a small one with a long memory. Found him in Southampton within a week. Put the phone down on me the first three times, so wrote him a nice letter with my details and he got in touch. Gave him the spiel. Chance to close that chapter in his life. To honor his crewmates. Say good-bye. Tell his side of the story. I really don’t think he was that interested, to be honest, but when I mentioned what they were willing to pay, he changed his tune. I’m not saying he was mercenary or anything. There’s nothing wrong with greed. He wanted a few quid in his old age, that was all.”

  “And you met in person?”

  “Just the once. Caroline was in the U.S., and she needed the deal signed, sealed, and delivered. I went down there on expenses and we had a few beers down his local. Nice old boy, really. Would have made a better book than a TV program, but my pockets aren’t deep enough. That’s the way of the world now. You try getting a book deal and you’ll see nobody gives a damn. It’s all celebrity biographies and misery fucking memoirs.”

  The venom is back in Chandler’s voice. McAvoy notices that he has started rooting about beneath the bench with his left hand, and he suddenly pulls out a bottle of single malt.