Dark Winter (9781101599891)

by Mark, David

  “But we were going to interview him tomorrow,” McAvoy says through gritted teeth.

  “There’s more,” says Spink, looking away. “There was no chance of a warrant. Not at this hour. So Shaz Archer laid on the charm. Persuaded the night staff to do a search of Chandler’s room. They found his notebook.”

  Something about Spink’s tone of voice makes McAvoy feel as though he is opening a final demand.

  “And?”

  “And Daphne Cotton’s name’s in there, son. Clean sweep.”

  McAvoy’s shoulders slump forward. His head lolls to his chest. He takes a step backward and leans against the wall, blood rushing in his head. Could he really have been so wrong? Could he really have sat and chatted with a killer?

  “It doesn’t have to mean anything,” says Spink. “I’ve seen bigger coincidences.”

  McAvoy tells himself to nod, but can’t find the strength. He feels as though he’s been kicked in the gut.

  “He’s not admitted it, then?” he asks, his voice suddenly weary and old.

  “They’re conducting the interview now. All he’ll say is ‘no comment,’ or at least that was how he was playing it last I heard. But Colin’s persuasive. He won’t back off.”

  McAvoy manages the faintest of nods. “Jonsson? That’s . . . ?”

  “Icelandic, yes. Again, could be nothing.”

  “But probably not.”

  “No.”

  He tries to pull himself together. Wishes, for a moment, that he smoked, just so he could busy his fingers with lighting something that will bring him a modicum of comfort.

  “If it is him . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “At least he’ll be off the streets,” he says, trying to make himself feel relieved that at least a murderer would be behind bars. “At least we’ll have done some good.”

  “Exactly,” says Spink, and tries a grin.

  The silence stretches out.

  “It looked nothing like him,” says McAvoy, more to himself than anybody else. “Different eyes.”

  “I know.”

  “And he called me,” he says, suddenly loud. “He called me about Angie Martindale. Why would he do that? And he wouldn’t have had time. He called me, remember? You’re getting this so wrong . . .”

  “They found a mobile in his room. They’ve contacted the mobile phone company. Should hear back in the morning. They’ll know where the signal came from. They’ll know if he took a break from carving his name on Angie Martindale for long enough to give you a fighting chance at stopping him.”

  “They think he was playing a game?”

  Spink nods.

  “Cat and mouse, with me the stupid Scottish pussy?”

  Spink smothers a smile by wiping his hand across his mouth. “We don’t know anything yet,” he says.

  From nearby comes the sound of voices. Footsteps. Excited chatter. Without saying anything, McAvoy and Spink push off from the wall and follow the sound. They turn left at the next T-junction and carry on past the four pieces of Blu-Tack that used to hold a laminated piece of paper bearing the words INTERVIEW ROOMS.

  Outside a wooden door with a long narrow pane of glass at its center stand Colin Ray and Shaz Archer. Ray is holding open a manila folder, nodding vigorously as Archer points into its depths with a chewed Biro.

  “. . . would make anybody frustrated,” she’s saying. “Big brain, little dick, big problems, eh Col? How many times we seen it? Can’t just go out and pick a fight, because he’s too high and bloody mighty for that, but he can dream up something like this, eh? Something that makes him that bit special. It’s all here.”

  McAvoy would have been content to turn away. To walk back the way they’d come without being seen. But Spink coughs and greets the two officers with a smile.

  “Going well?”

  Colin Ray’s eyes flash anger. He closes the folder as if trying to squash a fly in its pages. Flares his nostrils as if preparing to charge.

  “She sent her errand boy?”

  The question is directed at Spink, but McAvoy knows it is himself to whom Ray is referring. Later, he will tell himself that it’s a good thing, that he’s now known as Pharaoh’s blue-eyed boy when a week ago she couldn’t even spell his name. But now, it just makes his cheeks burn.

  “It’s my case, too,” says McAvoy, and even as he does so, wonders where the words came from.

  The two senior officers share a look.

  “Well, you’re here just in time to watch it end,” says Ray, nodding in the direction of the interview room. “We’ve got the bloody lot.”

  “He’s confessed?” Spink sounds incredulous.

  “He’s giving it all the no-comment at the moment,” pipes up Archer. “But he’s getting tired.”

  McAvoy looks at them both. Colin looks tired and ill, but the map of burst blood vessels in his cheeks and the vein pounding at the side of his head suggest he has enough fire in him to see this through.

  “You can’t seriously expect to charge him . . .”

  “I bloody can,” snaps Ray, looking down at the closed folder as if it contains treasure.

  McAvoy can’t help himself. “What have you found?”

  Shaz Archer suddenly looks like a cat stretching out after a long nap. Her whole posture becomes preening and luxurious. “Woke up the chap that used to be his agent,” she says through a grin. “Interesting man.”

  “And?” Tom Spink’s voice has become authoritative. The DCI inside him has momentarily forgotten he’s retired.

  “And he says our Russ Chandler, or whatever he likes to call himself, is a bloody head case.”

  She takes the folder from Ray’s hands and holds it out to McAvoy, beckoning him forward as if enticing a dog with a biscuit. He takes the file.

  “Read it,” says Archer, under her breath.

  As McAvoy opens the folder he hears the door to the interview room open and close. He looks up into Shaz Archer’s face. Ray has gone back in to finish the job.

  “Not hard to fathom when you’ve got all the pieces,” says Archer, waggling her fingers in the air as she mimes mystery. “Our boy in there’s spent his bloody life trying to be an author. Dreamed of it since he was a kid. Never good enough. Got his early works rejected without being opened. Got some interest when he started doing a bit of investigative work but never took off. Had to self-publish in the end. One book was almost readable, managed to get himself an agent, but it still never happened. Just lost it in the end. Couldn’t keep taking the rejection. Couldn’t stand writing about people who he saw as nobodies and not being a household name himself. Came up with all of this as a way of payback. Psychologically it’s a neat fit. Get a shrink to sign it. Col knows somebody . . .”

  McAvoy’s been fighting with himself not to blurt out the word “bollocks,” but it’s a battle he can’t win.

  “That’s all just guesswork, isn’t it, DI Archer?” says Spink, distracting her before she can turn on her junior officer.

  “We’ve got his fantasies,” she says, pointing at the folder. “We’ve got Daphne Cotton’s name in his notebook. We’ve got Angie Martindale. His involvement with Fred Stein. Trevor Jefferson. He’s the common link.”

  “But that doesn’t mean—”

  “Read the letter he sent the publisher that turned him down.”

  There is something about the way she says it that makes McAvoy softly shush Tom Spink and take the documents from Archer. He leafs through the photocopied pages in the file. Notices the red-felt-pen circle around the page of handwritten notes. Sees the name “Daphne C.” A phone number. Reams of shorthand. He turns the pages.

  “There,” says Archer, nodding.

  Dear Mr. Hall,

  My agent, Richard Sage, has just informed me of your
decision not to proceed with the publication of my novel, All Hands. As you can perhaps imagine, I find this news very distressing. I have poured my heart and soul into this volume, and as sales of my previous, albeit self-published, literary efforts demonstrate, there is a market for my work. I must ask that you reconsider. In our previous correspondence I have spoken in glowing terms of the esteem in which I hold your publishing house, and I have taken great personal interest in both your organisation and its personnel. For example, I know that your home address is Lowndes Square, Knightsbridge. Your wife’s name is Tamara. Your son, William, boards at Rowan Prep School in Esher. I tell you this not to alarm or threaten you into offering me a publishing deal, but to demonstrate the meticulous single-mindedness of my painstaking research. Indeed, I am willing to go to almost any lengths in order to achieve my dream. As I have already mentioned, my own understanding of the criminal psyche is unsurpassed and my many interviews with convicted killers have offered me an unrivaled insight into the disordered mind. I await your response with interest . . .

  McAvoy closes his eyes for five whole seconds. Imagines the correspondence being read out in court. Pictures Chandler’s defense barrister telling him to change his plea to guilty and take the prosecution’s offer of a reduced sentence. Sees Ray smiling as his mates slap his back.

  “Open and shut,” says Archer, and for once her words don’t seem designed to pummel him. They merely state fact.

  “What was the upshot?” asks McAvoy, in little more than a croak.

  “Publisher threatened to go to the police, and the agent dropped him,” says Archer, taking the folder from his hands and putting it under her arm. “The agent’s had plenty of e-mails from him as well. All in a similar tone. Totally obsessive. Sage said he’s never met anybody so desperate. Somebody who would kill to see their name on a bookshelf.”

  McAvoy frowns. It makes no sense. He’s seen nothing in Chandler’s eyes to make any of this believable.

  “His eyes,” he remembers suddenly. “The man I fought with had blue eyes. Chandler doesn’t.”

  “Fucking hell, McAvoy,” says Archer angrily. “Maybe he wore contacts. That’s all just detail. We’ve got murders, and we’ve got a guy with ‘murderer’ written through him like a stick of Blackpool rock.”

  “But if it’s not . . .”

  “Then he won’t confess.”

  McAvoy reaches into his coat and pulls out pages he’d printed off the Internet moments after Spink sent him the message. “Look at these,” he says pleadingly. “There are other people at risk. Look at this woman. A charity worker blown up in Iraq. Still alive but she’s the only one who made it. We can’t get this wrong. The next victim could be here . . .”

  McAvoy turns to Spink, but the older man is facing away from him, staring down the corridor, as if unable to meet his eyes.

  The door opens and Colin Ray pokes his head out of the crack. His face is covered in sweat. The neck of his jumper is ragged and twisted. He looks at McAvoy for less than a heartbeat and then turns his gaze to Archer.

  “Come in, Shaz,” he says quietly. “Peg-leg wants to confess.” She takes the printed pages from McAvoy’s unresisting hand and walks back into the interview room.

  20.

  8:43 a.m. Queen’s Gardens

  Ten days before Christmas

  A sunken area of parkland overlaid with a quilt of untouched snow, crisscrossed with hidden paths and peppered with dead rose bushes and rubbish-filled flower beds.

  One set of footprints punched deep in the ground.

  A bench, missing its backrest.

  Aector McAvoy. Elbows on knees. Hat pulled down low. Eyes closed.

  Pulls his phone from his pocket. Eighteen missed calls.

  He’s hiding. He’s stomped off into the snow and the solitude because it hurts too much to see somebody else shaking the chief constable’s hand and drinking whiskey surrounded by laughing uniforms and grinning suits.

  Russ Chandler.

  Charged with two counts of murder at 6:51 a.m.

  Russ Chandler.

  The man who butchered Daphne Cotton in view of the congregation at Holy Trinity Church.

  Who set fire to Trevor Jefferson, then did it again in his hospital bed.

  Russ Chandler. The man who answered “no comment” for four hours, then told enough lies to get himself charged with murder.

  In three hours he’ll be remanded into custody pending trial. It will be months before the prosecutors begin spotting the holes in the case.

  By then, the unit will probably have imploded, or been given over to Ray, and McAvoy will probably be driving a desk in some remote community police station where a man with a talented hand with a database is a vaguely useful tool.

  He puts the mobile away. Reaches down and picks up the liter bottle of fizzy pop that stands between his feet. Unscrews the cap and takes a swig. He’s guzzling orangeade like a tramp downs cider. He’s eaten three chocolate bars and a bag of jelly sweets. The sugar’s making him feel a bit manic, and he’s craving something beefy and deep.

  He uncrosses his legs. Sits forward. Rubs his cold thighs. Sits back. Takes another swig. Wonders if he could just stay here for good. Make this bench his permanent home. Here, in the snow-covered isolation of Queen’s Gardens, huddled inside his jacket, chocolate on his tongue, cold pain in his bones, and a feeling not unlike toothache boring into his brain, as if deliberately trying to make his thoughts hollow and painful.

  It’s quiet, here in the park. At this hour, this time of year, it’s empty. Hull’s empty. The sudden snowfall after days of frost has turned the city’s network of potholed B-roads and winding dual carriageways into so many ice rinks and snowbanks, and McAvoy fancies that the thousands of commuters who usually make their way into the city center will be ringing in and suggesting they start their Christmas holidays early. Others will chance it. Take their old cars with their bald tires and their too small engines, and drive too fast on glassy tarmac. People will grieve today. Families will lose loved ones. By nightfall, forensics officers will be disentangling broken limbs from crushed cars. Uniformed officers will have broken bad news to sobbing relatives. A detective will have been assigned. A press release will have been circulated. The cycle will go on.

  He wonders briefly whether anybody really gives a fuck about anything.

  “Feeding the penguins, McAvoy?”

  He looks up and sees the slender, elegant figure of Tom Spink crunching through the snow toward him.

  “Sir, I . . .”

  McAvoy begins to speak and stops again.

  “Can’t say I blame you,” says Spink airily. “Does you good. Clears the head. Clears the lungs, too, if you’re a smoker. Mind if I join you?”

  McAvoy nods at the space on the wrought-iron bench. “It’s wet,” he says, in case Spink hasn’t noticed the two inches of snow icing the green-painted bench.

  “It’ll do,” says Spink, sitting down.

  “Nippy,” he adds, as he makes himself vaguely comfortable. He’s wearing a thin leather coat over his collarless shirt and soft cords. “Suppose this is nothing where you’re from, eh?”

  McAvoy turns away.

  “Pharaoh got as far as the Humber Bridge,” he says. “Managed to get across despite the weather warnings. She was at the top of Boothferry Road when her mobile went, and the brass told her not to risk it. To take a few days off. Colin Ray’s got things under control.”

  “She take any notice?”

  “Yes and no. She’s not going to crash the party. Diverted to Priory Road.”

  “How’s she taking it?”

  “About as well as you’d expect. Managed to bite her tongue, but she’s got to be careful how she plays this. If she keeps her head down, it could all work out fine. She’ll have been lead detective on a successful hunt for a killer.
If she starts shouting the odds and kicking up a stink, her card will be marked.”

  McAvoy realizes he’s grinding his bunched fists into his knees. Forces himself to stop.

  “It’s not Russ Chandler,” he says through his teeth. “I’ve been sitting here thinking about it. Thinking about nothing else. It’s not him.”

  Spink turns to him. Stares into his eyes for a good twenty seconds, as if trying to read the insides of his skull. Seems to scorch the insides of McAvoy’s head with the intensity of his gaze. Then he turns away, as if making a decision.

  “It often isn’t.”

  McAvoy pulls a face. “What?”

  “It often isn’t, son. You know that better than anyone. You’re going to kill yourself if you carry on like this, lad.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with giving a damn,” he says, spitting angrily.

  “No, lad. There’s nothing wrong with giving a damn. But the price you pay for it is this. You must see it, you must see the cops who come to work, do a half-decent job, and head home without a backward glance. You must have seen them toasting questionable results and dodgy convictions. You must have wondered why you can’t be that way.”

  “I just think it matters,” he begins, and then stops when he feels the words catching in his throat.

  “It does matter, Aector. It matters that a villain gets locked up, because that way, the public can go back to feeling all safe and secure in the knowledge that our boys in blue are up to the challenge of keeping them safe from nutters. That’s why it matters. And it matters to the press because it sells newspapers. And it matters to the top brass because it makes their crime statistics look peachy. And it matters to the politicians because voters don’t want to live in a society where a young girl can get chopped up in a church during Evensong. And back at the bottom, it matters to coppers because they don’t want to get it in the neck from their superiors, and because most of them decided to become a police officer in the hope of making some kind of difference to the world. Then there are people like you, son. People who need to matter on some fucking cosmic level. People who need to find justice as if it’s some fundamental ingredient of the universe. As if it’s some naturally occurring mineral that you can drill for and dole out.”