The Dark Winter

by David Mark

  He feels Pharaoh’s hand on his forearm and this time he doesn’t shake her off.

  ‘So what is his style? Tell me.’

  McAvoy breathes out. Looks down the deserted main road with its random constellations of blinking neon lights and broken shop-signs.

  ‘He can tell you himself,’ he says angrily. ‘We’re going to see him.’

  Pharaoh looks up at him. Her breasts are heaving with the exertion of running, and her smell is ripe in the small pocket of air that seems to contain them both.

  He pulls back.

  Looks at his feet, and then fills himself with Daphne Cotton.

  With Fred Stein.

  With Angie Martindale.

  Even Trevor fucking Jefferson.

  He finds himself suddenly aware that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are not the same things as ‘right’ and wrong’.

  And he knows that the reason he has to catch the right man, has to reset the scales by flinging the right murderer into the right cell, is the same reason he will not let himself kiss this sexy, passionate, powerful woman.

  It’s because somebody has to give a damn about the rules.

  And because nobody else really gives a fuck.

  CHAPTER 24

  McAvoy and Pharaoh are forty miles from Hull when the call comes through. Forty miles from Wakefield Prison, too. A little under an hour from a private meeting room, a table, three chairs, and an hour in the company of the only man who can tell him if he is right.

  Pharaoh, in the driver’s seat, pulls the mobile from between her thighs and answers with the word ‘Tom’. She gives a few brief grunts and curses. Her face darkens as she hangs up.

  Silently, one hand distractedly silencing McAvoy’s questions, she pulls onto the hard shoulder.

  ‘I think we’re at the end of the road,’ says Pharaoh.

  ‘What? It’s miles yet …’

  ‘Chandler. He tried to kill himself.’

  McAvoy feels like he’s been punched in the stomach.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Had a razor in that false leg of his. Nobody checked. Found him in his cell, bleeding from the throat. The wrists. The ankles. Well, the ankle …’

  ‘He knew we were coming,’ says McAvoy flatly.

  ‘He didn’t, Hector,’ she says, and her voice is barely audible over the sound of the articulated lorries that tear past, inches away. ‘We were off-radar, my love. The warden was doing us a favour. We were going out on a limb. If his solicitor had found out …’

  ‘He knew.’

  ‘Hector.’

  ‘He fucking knew.’

  There is silence for a moment.

  He knows what she will say next. Knows that Pharaoh has gone as far as she can. That she, Spink, Tremberg, all of them, will begin to convince themselves of Chandler’s guilt. That they will begin to do what needs to be done to ensure Colin Ray’s case remains watertight. That they are all seen to get their man.

  ‘You know he didn’t do it,’ says McAvoy. ‘Not properly, I mean.’

  ‘I don’t know what to think, Hector. These are the actions of a guilty man.’

  ‘A guilty man who happens to be innocent.’

  Pharaoh shakes her head.

  ‘We haven’t really got anything, have we?’ she says, half to herself. ‘Not you and me. Not Colin. We’ve made a bloody pig’s ear of this from the start. Serious and Organised? Which one do you see me as?’

  McAvoy looks out of the window. Watches the angry sky.

  ‘What do you really think?’ asks Pharaoh.

  McAvoy sighs. ‘I think what Chandler saw as an idea for a book, somebody else saw as something more. Something that made sense. I don’t know …’ Raps himself on the forehead with a bruised knuckle, furious at his inability to unravel the tangle of thoughts that were messing up his mind. ‘This isn’t random. I know that much. This isn’t a crime for love or money or revenge. These are deaths that only make sense in the mind of one person. Somebody is redressing the balance. They’re taking away their second chances at life. People who survived when nobody else did. They’re being bumped off in the same way that somebody thinks they should have died. That means something. They’re replicating the conditions. They’re trying to take the miracle away. The only reason I could see Chandler doing that is to get himself a book out of it, but I met the man and there’s anger and self-loathing in those eyes but there’s no …’

  ‘Evil? McAvoy, it’s not always about—’

  ‘I know, I know. Most crimes are just about anger or drink or hitting somebody harder than their head can take. But I’ve looked into evil eyes and the eyes of the man who’s doing this aren’t like that. This is about sadness and despair and having to do something you don’t want to do. It’s about paying the price. It’s …’

  Pharaoh reaches out and puts a hand on the back of his own. She nods at him.

  ‘Who do you think is killing these people, Hector?’

  ‘Someone like me,’ he says.

  ‘You’d never do this,’ she says. ‘You’d never hurt people.’

  ‘I would,’ he says to the floor. ‘For my family. For love. I’d send my soul to hell for the people I love. I’d cry while I was doing it, but I’d do it. Wouldn’t you?’

  Pharaoh turns away. ‘Not everybody loves like you.’

  ‘So we need to find a man who does. Somebody strong enough to fight me. Somebody capable of cutting their way out of a container and killing an old man. Somebody close enough to Chandler to use his connections. To make him call Algirdas. We’re looking for a man who loves like me.’

  His face is angry, his gestures manic. Pharaoh, involuntarily, seems to shrink back a little in her seat, and McAvoy instantly realises the intimidating picture he must be presenting.

  ‘I’m sorry, guv, I just …’

  Pharaoh shakes her head slowly, the tension breaking only when she gives a half smile. She follows it up with a punch to his shoulder.

  ‘You should come with a bloody manual,’ she says. ‘Your Roisin must be a saint.’

  McAvoy gives the faintest of laughs.

  ‘She’s better than all of us,’ he says, gesturing, his vague wave taking in the street and its drunken occupants, its boarded-up shops and litter-strewn doorways. ‘Better than all this.’

  Pharaoh regards him, holding his gaze. Eventually, she nods, a decision apparently made. ‘Keep making her shine, Hector. See if any of it rubs off.’

  CHAPTER 25

  McAvoy is lounging against one of the red brick columns that make up the elegant portico framing the glass sliding doors.

  ‘Detective Sergeant McAvoy?’

  He turns and sees a tall, slender, short-haired woman in a Puffa jacket over a white coat and trouser suit. The woman extends a pale, ringless hand which disappears entirely as McAvoy closes it in his own and takes care not to squeeze.

  ‘Megan Straub,’ she says.

  McAvoy smiles and is pleased to see it returned.

  ‘I’m Anne’s doctor,’ she says, gesturing for him to follow her back into the warm embrace of the modern hospital. ‘I think some of our executives and pencil-pushers are a bit upset about all this,’ she adds brightly as the double doors swish open and they begin walking down a long corridor laid with gleaming polished wood.

  ‘Well, as I explained, this is a murder investigation …’

  ‘Yes, they said something like that,’ says Doctor Straub carelessly, then laughs and adds: ‘I can’t imagine Anne’s a suspect.’

  ‘No, nothing like that,’ begins McAvoy, and then halts abruptly as he notices that the doctor has stopped by a door and is standing with her fingers on the handle.

  Doctor Straub opens the door.

  The room is lit by a glorious rectangle of light which scythes down from a high, undraped window set in a wall painted in deep crimson and adorned with black and white sketches in chunky gold frames.

  In the centre of a wrought-iron, four-poster bed, lays Anne Montrose. Both of her arms re
st above the smooth, cream and gilt bedspread and her blonde hair puddles on the pillowcase like a pool of molten gold.

  The drip that feeds her, and the other that takes away her waste, are discreetly hidden behind two tall, rococo lamps, and McAvoy’s eye is drawn to a hand-carved, pine bedside table and matching bookcase that stand against the near wall, beneath a giant mirror which makes the room seem even bigger and more opulent than it is.

  ‘She looks like a princess,’ breathes McAvoy.

  Behind him, Doctor Straub laughs. ‘The families of our patients sometimes like to decorate the rooms. Whether it’s for them or the patient, I couldn’t say, but this one is a definite favourite with the staff.’

  ‘The light that comes through …’

  ‘There’s a set of bulbs up there,’ explains Doctor Straub. ‘Even when the weather is shocking, it’s like a summer’s day in here. That’s how it was set up.’

  ‘Can’t have been cheap.’

  ‘Her bills are always paid very promptly, I’m led to believe,’ says Doctor Straub, cautiously, crossing to the bed and smiling at the figure in its centre. ‘And there are never any problems when we want to try new techniques that may cost that little extra.’

  ‘I’m sure Colonel Emms is very generous,’ says McAvoy, staring into Doctor Straub’s eyes.

  ‘I wouldn’t be able to discuss that,’ she says with a smile that tells McAvoy all he needs to know.

  Curious, he crosses to the bed and leans over Anne Montrose’s sleeping body as if leaning out over a ravine. Her skin is perfect. Her face unwrinkled. Her hair full of lustre and life.

  ‘It’s like she’s …’

  ‘Sleeping? Yes. That’s the difficult thing for loved ones to understand. They’re grieving for somebody who’s still here.’

  ‘Is she still here?’ he asks, dropping his voice to a whisper. ‘Do they come back?’

  ‘We get some of them back,’ she says. ‘Not always as much as was there to begin with, but they can come back.’

  ‘And Anne? Will she …’

  ‘I hope so,’ says Doctor Straub with a sigh. ‘I’d love to get to know her. From her records we would appear to have lots in common, though I fear that the work she did abroad would have been beyond my generosity.’

  ‘You know about her charity work?’ asks McAvoy, stepping back from the bed.

  ‘I’m her doctor,’ she explains. ‘It’s my job to try whatever I can to get a response.’

  ‘You remind her of who she was?’

  ‘Of who she still is.’ She stops herself and purses her lips. ‘What’s this about, Sergeant?’

  McAvoy opens his mouth and begins to tell her it’s just routine, but stops himself before he has made a sound. ‘I think somebody is killing people who have survived atrocities and disasters,’ he says, ‘and I think Anne is involved somehow.’

  ‘You think she might be in danger?’ asks Doctor Straub, pulling a face and raising a hand to her mouth.

  McAvoy shakes his head. ‘Perhaps,’ he says.

  ‘But …’

  McAvoy just shrugs. He’s too tired to go through it all, to explain the thought processes that have brought him into Doctor Straub’s world.

  ‘Does she get many visitors?’ he asks gently.

  ‘Her mother,’ says Doctor Straub, and there is more animation and excitement in her gestures now. ‘Her sister occasionally. Obviously, we have visiting doctors and students …’

  ‘I understand she was in a relationship at the time of her death,’ says McAvoy.

  ‘Yes, her personal effects were brought here when she was transferred to this facility and I have spoken to her family as much as I can to get some details of her life. She fell for a soldier she met while working in Iraq. I’m led to believe he may even have been a chaplain with his regiment. A grand passion, it seems. Such a tragedy to have it cut short.’

  ‘You use this in the therapy, do you?’

  ‘We use whatever we can.’

  ‘You read to her?’ asks McAvoy, nodding at the bookcase.

  ‘Sometimes,’ she replies. ‘I’ve read her the odd romance. Some poetry. Talked to her about the political situation in Iraq.’

  She smiles at McAvoy’s expression of surprise.

  ‘Things she was interested in, Sergeant. I’ve got a patient downstairs who appears to become more withdrawn when we don’t tell him how Sheffield Wednesday got on. They’re still people. They’re just trapped in there. We’re looking for whatever it is that unlocks them. We’re trying to disentangle a miracle …’

  McAvoy runs his tongue around his mouth. He looks again at the figure on the bed. Closes his eyes. Looks inside himself. Grits his teeth and presses his large hands to his forehead as he tries to make sense of what he thought he understood …

  ‘Sergeant, are you OK?’

  His vision is blurring. The room is starting to spin. His legs feel weak, as though unable to support the weight of his thoughts.

  ‘Wait there,’ says Doctor Straub urgently, as she lowers him into a sitting position on the floor. ‘I’ll get you some water.’

  The door swings open and McAvoy is left alone in the room, his huge body folded into a schoolboy pose, cross-legged, heavy-headed on the wooden floor.

  He finds the strength to look up.

  Focuses on the bookcase.

  Romances and poetry, fairy-tales and myths.

  He reaches out and takes a book at random.

  The title swims in his vision. He blinks. Focuses.

  Holy Bible.

  Gives a half laugh and opens it.

  The pages fall like leaves from a dead tree.

  McAvoy finds his lap covered in pages of text, torn into confetti, ripped into angry strips and shards.

  He stares at the hardback binding.

  Scrawled in angry, jagged letters on the inside cover of the empty book he holds in his hands, McAvoy makes out five words, scrawled again and again; deep enough to be fatal if etched in human skin.

  The Unjust Distribution Of Miracles

  And in the centre of the mantra, amid the mass of angry letters and ferocious scribbles, a piece of scripture, dug into the page in the same furious hand.

  On that day I will become angry with them and forsake them; I will hide my face from them, and they will be destroyed. Many disasters and difficulties will come upon them, and on that day they will ask, ‘Have not these disasters come upon us because our God is not with us?’ (Deut. 31:17).

  McAvoy forces himself to his feet; torn pages of the scripture falling from his body as he yanks himself upright.

  He is breathing heavily, trying to make sense of this rage, bitten deep into the Holy Bible.

  He stares again at the figure in the bed.

  He scrabbles through the pages; creasing and crumpling leaf after leaf of mania.

  Holds up a page of artful lines. Another. More.

  Among the scrawls, the furious words, are half a dozen pen-and-ink drawings; vague and abstract, beautiful and unreal.

  The tears in his eyes, the blue tinge to his gaze, make the images suddenly swim into focus.

  The pictures are all of Anne Montrose. Intricate, loving, detailed images of her laughing, smiling face.

  He has seen such penmanship before.

  He stares at the images in turn. They are poems to the feeling she has evoked in the artist. Smiling. Laughing. Sleeping …

  McAvoy holds up the last image. It has been daubed on a torn-out page of a notebook.

  It is a picture of Anne Montrose, asleep, in a wrought-iron four-poster bed; her arms above the bed-sheets, her hair puddled on the pillow.

  It is smudged with tears.

  McAvoy turns it over.

  It is signed and dated a little over a week ago.

  He runs for the door.

  Pulls his phone from his pocket.

  Calls the only person he knows with the skills to raise the dead.

  CHAPTER 26

  Three hours later, and Mc
Avoy is pulling up outside Wakefield Hospital. The snow hasn’t reached this outpost of West Yorkshire yet. It’s bitterly cold and the air feels like it has been breathed out of a damp, diseased lung.

  McAvoy pushes his hair out of his eyes. He straightens his back and stands his collar on end.

  He takes a last breath of outside air, then steps through the automatic doors and strides across the tallow-coloured linoleum. Somebody has made an attempt to put Christmas decorations up in reception, but they look somehow obscene against the peeling plaster of the walls or hanging from ceiling tiles mottled with brown damp.

  He endeavours to look like he knows where he’s going. Passes the reception desk without a glance. Picks a corridor at random and finds himself following the signs to oncology. He decides that the direction feels wrong, and spots another corridor leading right. He takes it, and almost immediately has to pin himself to the wall as two burly female nurses with round backsides and bosoms that strain their blue uniforms all but take him out as, side by side, they push two tall cages stacked with linens.

  ‘Coming through,’ says the older of the pair in a thick West Yorkshire accent.

  ‘Narrow squeak, eh?’ says the other, who has proper ginger hair and the sort of round spectacles that went out of fashion a decade before.

  ‘Well, if I was going to get run over today, I couldn’t have asked for a nicer pair of assailants. Can I just check, am I going the right way to ICU …?’

  Five minutes later, McAvoy is stepping out of the lift on the third floor. His nostrils fill with the scent of blood and bleach; of flavourless food; of the squeak of trolley wheels and rubber-soled shoes on the scarred linoleum.

  A fat prison officer is leaning back against the front desk, sipping from a plastic beaker. He has a head shaved down to guard number two, and small, slightly cauliflowered ears sit like teacup handles on the sides of a misshapen, potatoesque face.

  McAvoy makes eye contact with the man as he approaches. For the first time since the rugby pitch, he tries to make himself look big. Hopes he looks like somebody to be reckoned with.