by David Mark
She reaches across and wraps her hand around the large chipped mug of builder’s tea that stands, half-empty, in front of McAvoy. Raises it to her lips and takes a loud gulp. Pulls a face. ‘Sweet enough for you?’ she asks, and her mood is far friendlier than last night.
They are the only two customers in the Pigeon Pie Café, a white-painted, glass-fronted building on the corner of Goddard Avenue. It’s a proper greasy spoon, complete with laminated menus and ketchup dispensers in the shape of tomatoes. The dish of the day tends to be sausage, bacon or both, and the place is a Mecca for anybody who thinks that culinary evolution peaked with the combination of brown sauce and baked beans.
McAvoy would have loved nothing more than to order a sausage and fried-egg sandwich when he walked through the door ten minutes ago, but Roisin had knocked him up a breakfast of scrambled egg and smoked salmon on homemade rye bread before he left the house, and he knows how she would pout if she knew it had barely touched the sides of his appetite. He’d settled for tea.
‘You eating?’ he asks.
‘Tempting,’ she says, mulling it over. ‘They do a belly-buster special, you know. If you manage to eat it all you get it free. Nobody’s managed it yet.’
‘You ever had a go?’
‘What are you saying, Sarge?’ She looks indignant, but then breaks into a smile to let him know she’s joking. ‘Sorry if I was a cow last night,’ she says, taking another slurp of tea. ‘Had just got my teeth into the Daphne Cotton murder and then suddenly I’m given some dead drunk on Orchard Park.’
‘I understand,’ says McAvoy, nodding. He feels bad that Tremberg has been lumbered with this, and worse because of all the things he has to worry about, his fear at having to make conversation with a female colleague for the day is the one uppermost in his mind.
‘Two slices of toast, please,’ shouts Tremberg at the big-boned woman in a blue overall working the counter. ‘Butter, not low-fat spread.’
‘A woman after my own heart,’ says McAvoy. ‘My dad used to say margarine had almost the same chemical qualities as plastic. I don’t know if that’s true, but it rather put me off. Like that whole thing about peanuts on the bar being full of blokes’ wee-wee. Nasty.’
Tremberg pulls a face. ‘Wee-wee?’ she asks, laughing.
McAvoy feels the beginning of a blush and is grateful when Tremberg’s toast arrives. ‘Sorry. Comes from having a young son.’
‘He’s a handsome boy, your Fin,’ says Tremberg, with her mouth full. ‘Proud of you, too. Wasn’t scared, y’know. He knew something bad had happened in the church and he saw you go down, but he knew you’d be getting up again. He said you’d get whoever did it.’
McAvoy has to look away to hide the huge grin that splits his face. ‘That’s his mother’s doing,’ he says, smothering his words with a big hand as he supports his head on his palm. ‘Got him thinking I’m indestructible. Some kind of superhero.’
‘Better than him thinking you’re a knob,’ she says matter-of-factly. ‘That’s what most kids think of their parents.’
‘I don’t.’
‘You’re weird, Sarge. Everybody knows that.’
They sit in silence for a while. McAvoy finishes the tea and watches Tremberg lick butter from her fingers. They’re unmanicured and unadorned with any jewellery. They seem somehow naked when compared to his wife’s, which are sparkling and dainty.
‘You are, anyway,’ she says finally, picking at her teeth with a finger.
‘What?’
‘Indestructible. Everybody knows that.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Last year’s palaver,’ she says, raising her eyes and sitting forward in her chair. She appears to be coming to life in front of him. The tea and toast have given her some kind of sugar rush and she’s suddenly full of energy. ‘When you got, y’know …’
‘What?’
‘You were stabbed, weren’t you? That’s what everybody says.’ If she thinks it’s a sensitive subject that shouldn’t be approached without extreme care, she does not betray the fact in her manner.
‘Slashed, actually,’ he says softly. ‘A hacking motion. Overhand right.’
Tremberg lets out a deep breath. Feels compelled to say ‘fuck’. She screws her face up in thought. ‘Like Daphne?’
McAvoy nods. The thought has occurred to him too, though it is significant only to him. He knows that before her heart stopped beating, she will have felt pain. That the sensation is strangely cold. That there is a moment of dull agony, and then mere confusion. That it’s a horrible thing to endure.
Tremberg cocks her head, waiting for more. Nothing is forthcoming. ‘Sarge?’ she prompts.
‘What?’
She throws her hands up in frustration. ‘You’re not much of a bloody conversationalist.’
He looks at his watch. It’s taken her eight minutes to find fault with his company. ‘Has it occurred to you that it’s a conversation I don’t want to have?’
Tremberg considers this. ‘Yeah.’ Then she gives him an impish grin. ‘Just wanted to be the one who got you to crack.’
He looks puzzled; his eyebrows almost meeting in the middle.
‘Don’t worry,’ she says, noting his expression. ‘There’s no cash riding on it. Just professional pride. How are we supposed to get suspects to fess up when we can’t even get one of our own to admit what happened to him?’
‘People wonder?’
‘Course they do. Everybody likes a mystery man, but they’d rather solve the mystery.’
‘Mystery man?’
‘Come on, Sarge. Big bugger like you, tiny, gorgeous little wife who cooks you gourmet packed lunches; son who thinks you’re Spiderman. Then there’s the little matter of Doug Roper and all that fuss last year that saw CID scattered to the four winds and you sent to some fancy private hospital in Scotland for a knife wound? You think nobody’s interested in chapter and verse?’
McAvoy considers it, as if for the first time. ‘Nobody’s ever asked me,’ he says weakly. ‘Anyway, I think I like being mysterious.’
‘You’ve got it down to a fine art,’ laughs Tremberg.
‘My wife will be delighted. I think she sees me as some sort of rebel, out there on the mean streets, righting wrongs, though she knows I’ve spent the past ten months doing nothing more than designing databases and running errands. I haven’t got her thinking I’m some sort of one-man force for good.’
‘She just thinks that way on her own?’
McAvoy looks into her eyes and tries to decide if she’s taking the piss or complimenting him on being loved properly. He wonders if she’s in a relationship herself. Whether she’s had her heart broken. Where she lives, what she thinks and why she became a police officer. It occurs to him he knows nothing about her. About any of them.
‘She was young when we got together,’ he confides, and feels the blush spread to the back of his neck. ‘And I helped her with some problems. She makes up her own mind.’
They sit in silence for a moment, and McAvoy congratulates himself on biting his tongue. For not taking an opportunity to unload his neuroses by telling his colleague that not a moment goes by when he doesn’t worry that his young wife married him out of gratitude, and that some day the novelty will wear off.
‘Problems?’ asks Tremberg, intrigued again.
‘She’s from a travelling family,’ says McAvoy, looking away. He’s far from ashamed about the admission and knows that Roisin would not mind, but he feels uncomfortable talking about any aspect of his personal life and finds it easier not to meet her eyes.
‘Gypsies?’ says Tremberg, surprised.
‘If you like,’ says McAvoy. ‘Prefers it to Pikey, any road.’
‘So what happened?’
‘It was a long time ago. I was barely out of training.’ He stops. Can’t seem to find the right words.
‘Where?’ she asks, helping him along as if it’s an interview situation.
‘Cumbria Constabulary. Bor
ders.’
‘And?’
‘Group of travellers turned up in this farmer’s field on the road to Brampton,’ he says, sighing. Reconciling himself to the fact he will have to share.
‘Popular?’
‘Nice little town. Plenty of Tory voters and blue rinsers who didn’t take kindly to it. Sergeant and me went out to have a chat with them. Told them there was a designated site on the outskirts of Carlisle. Anyway, they said they’d be gone before the day was out. Nice enough bunch. Maybe a dozen caravans. Kids everywhere. Roisin must have been there, but I didn’t see her.’
Tremberg looks at him expectantly. ‘Love at first sight, was it?’ she asks, trying to keep things light.
‘She was a child.’
‘I’m kidding, Sarge. Jesus.’ Tremberg looks pissed off. Shrugs, as if this is too much effort, but McAvoy has already started talking. More freely now. Suddenly desperate to get the words out.
‘They didn’t go,’ he says, staring out of the window. ‘More travellers turned up. Bad lot. So the landowner went down there to ask them why they hadn’t moved on. He was attacked. Hurt enough to upset some of his staff. They went looking for a spot of revenge. Found Roisin and her sister walking back from the shops.’
McAvoy pauses. Tremberg notices him pick up the salt cellar and grip it hard. Watches his knuckles grow white.
‘If I wasn’t such a bloody idiot, I don’t know what would have happened,’ he says, his jaw tight.
‘What?’
‘I’d dropped my bloody pocketbook at the camp,’ he says apologetically. ‘Sergeant sent me back to the camp on my own. Got myself lost. Found myself on this little country road a couple of miles from the camp. Pulled into a gap in the hedge to do a U-turn and get myself back in the right direction. There was an old outbuilding there. Holes in the roof. Looked like there’d been a fire a while before. Anyways, there were two cars parked up outside it. It didn’t look right. There was no reason to be there. I don’t know what I felt. Just some sensation that something bad was happening. So I killed the engine, and that’s when I heard the screams.’
‘Jesus,’ says Tremberg, half wishing she’d never asked.
‘I should have called for back-up,’ says McAvoy, rolling the salt cellar between his palms. ‘But I knew that whatever was happening in there couldn’t go on a second longer. I didn’t think. Got out the car and ran into the place. Caught them at it. These farmer boys, whooping and hollering and having their fun.’
‘Jesus,’ says Tremberg again.
‘I lost my temper,’ says McAvoy, staring at the backs of his hands.
Tremberg waits for more, and nothing comes. McAvoy is motionless in his seat; his usually red face now a deathly grey. She wonders if he’s ever talked about this before. Wonders what he did to them, this big, barrel-chested, soft-spoken man with the scarred face and the unruly hair and a love for his wife that makes her feel almost ashamed to have ever laughed when one of her colleagues cracked a joke at his expense.
She looks down at her plate and decides there is absolutely nothing left to eat on it.
Decides, too, that whatever McAvoy did in that shed, she will never judge him for it as harshly as he appears to judge himself.
She lets out a breath. Beats a little rhythm on the table top. Tries to get them both into gear.
‘Shall we make a move?’
McAvoy nods. Begins to stand. For an instant, their eyes meet. And for the briefest of moments she fancies she sees flames dancing on his pupils; a burning building, burning cars.
The double-glazed front door is already swinging open by the time McAvoy and Tremberg find themselves walking up the neat path to number 58. After spending the past hour being told to fuck off in a variety of colourful ways, and with McAvoy’s face still crimson from being called ‘Hoss’ by the naked fat woman who threw open the upstairs window at the house that had made the original 999 call, neither detective is sure whether the opening of a front door is a sign of welcome or a prelude to the emergence of a shotgun.
‘About yonder, is it?’
The man on the front step is in his mid-sixties and bald as a bowling ball. He’s short but wiry, and his Merchant Navy tie is fastened immaculately at the neck of a check shirt tucked into polyester trousers with creases so sharp they could be used to slice meat at a deli counter. He stands with a straight back, and although he’s accessorised the outfit with the old-man twinset of cardigan and slippers, there is something about him that commands respect. Although he’s standing in the doorway of a two-bedroomed terraced house on an abandoned street on the city’s worst estate, his manner puts McAvoy in mind of a country laird, opening the great double doors of a stately home.
‘Jack Raycroft,’ he says, offering McAvoy a liver-spotted but firm hand. He gives Helen Tremberg the same courtesy and then nods again. ‘Bad business,’ he says. His accent is local.
‘It is that,’ says McAvoy, after they’ve gone through the business of showing identification and introducing themselves.
‘Don’t know why it had to be that one,’ says Raycroft with a sigh. ‘Enough empty houses round here. Why pick one that somebody’s taken a bit of pride in, eh? It’s like pride’s the crime.’
The three of them stare at the house across the tiny street. There are few signs that up until two days ago, it had been a treasured home. It is now every bit as derelict and broken as its neighbours. The front wall is smoke-blackened, and the chipboard nailed over the broken front window has already been daubed with graffiti, a canvas of obscene drawings and spray-painted tags.
‘You’ve spoken to the uniformed officers, I understand?’
‘Yeah, yeah. Not that there was much to tell. My pal Warren was in hospital with a spot of angina. Joyce, his missus, was with their lass out in one of the villages. We were inside watching some costume thing on BBC. We heard the sirens about the same time we saw the flames. Not that we pay much attention to the sirens. You hear them all day and night round here. But they were definitely heading our way. I looked out of the window to see what was going on and there was smoke pouring out the front door opposite. Even with the smoke it was the open door that struck me first. It’s funny how your mind works, isn’t it? You just never see an open door around here. Least of all over there. They’ve been here almost as long as we have. Know better.’
Tremberg reaches into the pocket of her waterproof and pulls out a sheaf of typed papers that she had printed off before leaving the office last night. It’s a basic breakdown of the investigation so far, and is woefully short. ‘The lock was picked,’ says Tremberg, nodding, as if to congratulate herself on remembering the fact. ‘Professional job, too.’
‘Must have been,’ says Raycroft. ‘Double glazed job like that. Bought it with security in mind.’
From inside the house comes a woman’s voice. ‘Is it more police, Jack?’
He rolls his eyes at the two officers, who return his slight smile. ‘The wife,’ he says. ‘Taken it badly.’
‘I’ll bet,’ says McAvoy, nodding.
‘I’d invite you in but I think she’d get upset.’
‘We’re fine,’ says McAvoy, content to loiter on the doorstep. From the floral print on the walls of the small section of hallway he can see behind Raycroft, he imagines the living room will be a chaotic fusion of antimacassars and lace, grandchildren and wall-mounted flying ducks, and he knows instinctively that seeing all that will make him sad. He has a great admiration for people who refuse to be intimidated and refuse to move on when all common sense dictates that they should cut their losses and sell, but deep down, he knows their stand is a futile one. That when they die, the house will be flogged to whatever private company decides to clear the land and build flats for asylum seekers.
‘Odd business, isn’t it? Leaving the photographs and all that?’
McAvoy finds himself nodding politely, then realises he’s no clue what the man is talking about. ‘I’m sorry, sir?’
‘I told the u
niformed chap who came yesterday. On the front lawn of the house, there was a big holdall full of all Warren and Joyce’s photographs. They kept them on the mantelpiece. I don’t know if the victim was on the rob and chucked the stuff, then went in for a kip, but at least that’s one good thing out of all this – none of their photos were ruined.’
McAvoy looks at Tremberg, who shrugs. This is news to her too.
‘Where are the photos now?’
‘I’ve got them,’ says Raycroft, matter-of-factly. ‘Picked them up off the lawn, still in the bag. I’ll give them to the daughter when she comes round. That’s OK, isn’t it?’
McAvoy turns away. Looks back at the burned-out house. Tries to work out what it might mean. Why somebody would go to the trouble of saving the family pictures before setting fire to a house with a human being on the sofa. He thinks back to what had been said the day before. About the homeowner’s daughter being pleased that her parents would now have to leave the area. For a moment, he wonders if her concerns for her parents’ safety could be enough to persuade her to light a fire at their home or whether this was all coincidence and foolishness.
‘Jack, love. Is that police?’
‘Won’t be a minute, pet,’ shouts Raycroft over his shoulder.
‘We won’t be much longer,’ says Tremberg, taking the lead while her colleague stares into the distance and runs his tongue around his mouth as if he’s chasing something.
‘Do you know who the silly bugger was yet?’ asks the old man, turning his gaze on Tremberg and surreptitiously standing a little taller, as if uncomfortable at having to look up to keep eye contact with a woman half his age. ‘Why he chose that house to fall asleep in? We heard on the news that there was a fire at Hull Royal in the burns unit and that the victim had been involved. When they took him out of here he didn’t look like he was ready to roll himself a cigarette …’
McAvoy and Tremberg exchange a glance and decide that this nice old boy deserves a little honesty.
