by David Mark
I hold his gaze, make him squirm. Examine him properly. Big and broad-shouldered, open-faced. Clever eyes and huge hands, the knuckles sunk beneath ridged, rough skin. There’s something else. Some spark in his gaze, some flicker in his expression, that I take as being fuelled by a rapidly moving mind. Could be a thinker, this one. Could go far.
“You had a tiff with your fearless leader?” I ask.
McAvoy closes his mouth and purses his lips until it seems they are shaded in pencil.
“I need to know what’s happening. What he wants you to do. What he’s done to you.” He pauses. Seems to make a decision. “I think he knows Shane Cadbury didn’t kill that girl.”
Despite the blood in my nostrils and the heavy scent of the wet air, I can suddenly smell burning. For a moment, it seems that the metal of the guns is searing into my flesh…
54
I sit in the front pew of the church, colder in here than I was on the street. Eight gaudily-attired stone bishops gaze down from plinths behind the altar, faces serene, halos golden. One is captured mid-blessing, his hand raised, three fingers extended. He looks like he’s lost his glove-puppet. Fat angels and unfeasibly clean shepherds stretch towards the white clouds and perfect sunrise that crowns the masterful painting on the far wall. It seems to shimmer in the pin-pricks of heat that rise from the candles, and Jesus, sat atop the mural like a fairy on a cake, looks at once beatific and sinister in the rippling air.
It’s a magnificent church: a splendid, gorgeous, ornate celebration of a religion I don’t understand. If this place were on the continent, it would be full of tourists. It’s not. It’s empty, save the rumpled copper genuflecting before the cross, and the good-looking, battered journalist in the front row.
He finishes his ritual and takes a seat behind me, so I have to swivel to talk to him. He looks wild-eyed and earnest. I can’t help myself. I take pity on the poor sod and open the conversation.
“Catholic, I presume?”
He pulls a face, apologetic. “Yes and no. Free Church of Scotland, as a child, but Mother’s new husband was a Catholic, and I had to convert to get into the school he wanted me to go to. Some of it’s stuck. All must seem rather disingenuous, I suppose.”
I twist in my seat and give him a hard stare. “You’re not like the other coppers on Roper’s team, I can tell. You’re not like many other coppers, period.”
“I’ve heard that before.”
We sit in silence for a moment. I run through what I know about him and feel a sickness in my gut as I remember where our paths crossed before.
“You found her,” I say, softly. “Ella.”
McAvoy nods, looks down.
“Thought I remembered you. You know I covered it, don’t you? I was on the scene an hour after they found her. I’d done plenty on the search, like. Got a tip something had come up. You were uniform, then.”
“I was busy taking the sergeants’ exams around the same time. Hadn’t been long in Hull. Got a CID posting a few months back. First available sergeant job.”
“Straight onto the golden boy’s team? Lucky for you.”
He looks up at the church roof, as if expecting to see something. Gulps, as though swallowing a half-pint. “I’m not one of them,” he says. “Not properly. It doesn’t bother me, you understand. I’m not out to make friends, though I don’t like not being liked. Who does? But it’s not the blokey talk or the drinking or the talking about girls. That’s the same in any workplace. I can do all that. I’m a farmer’s boy, for pity’s sake. I can swear with the best of them. It’s something else. Something they seem to have accepted and I can’t bring myself to. They reckon that ‘good enough’ will do. They whinge about lack of resources and manpower and money, and they laugh when the official figures come out and they show that there’s about a five per cent chance of actually getting caught if you do something wrong. ‘That’s life’, they say. ‘Ain’t got the lads’.”
“You out to catch every shoplifter in Hull, are you?” I ask, and can’t keep the sneer out of my voice.
“It’s not that,” he says, shaking his head. “It’s not about crime figures. Or being seen to do everything you can. That’s all just a show. It’s about right and wrong. About doing something wrong, and paying for it.”
“Justice?” I ask, trying not to laugh.
His face folds in on itself and it’s hard not to reach back and hug the big lump until he feels better. He’s so miserable and confused it’s like looking in a mirror.
“I just know how she smelled when we found her. How she looked. Just a body, a headless mannequin, her white dress stained red. Skin like orange peel. Her private parts exposed…”
I don’t speak. I don’t want to visualise what he’s telling me, but I can’t help it.
“He just stood there beside me,” he’s saying, his world turned inwards, watching his memories. “Said she was a gift. That he’d found her. I couldn’t even breathe. Couldn’t think. And then Roper’s there, and he’s taking over and taking charge and it’s like he’s floating above us, untouched by it all. We went home with her stink on our clothes and he walked out of there smelling like a film star. It’s me who wakes up retching. Me who scares my son with my nightmares. ‘Work through it’, they said. ‘Been through something terrible’. Catch the bad guys, put them away. Make the streets safe. Do your job. And that’s what I’ve been doing. Trying to catch the villains and lock away the dangerous people and find some kind of ending for the people who loved her…”
“But you are, mate,” I say, comfortingly, wanting to tell him it will be OK. “They’ve got the Chocolate Boy and he’s going to go down.”
He looks up and through me, eyes seamed red. “It wasn’t him. I stood there next to him and he told me what he had done to her and it didn’t bother him for a second. There was regret in his eyes, but it wasn’t for what he had done. It was for what he hadn’t. He hadn’t been the one to kill her. Wasn’t the one to stick the knife in, and the thought upset him. I convinced myself otherwise. I was too busy trying not to let my mind unravel. But the more I think about it, the more I think he’s still out there. The person who killed her.”
We sit in silence, growing cold, breath forming into ghosts on the chill air.
“You’re sure?” I ask, eventually.
“No,” he says, soft, with a faint, hopeless smile. “I could be wrong. But I don’t think so. I think Roper took the easy option. And I think he wants you to help keep it that way.”
I can’t help but probe for more. “So who do you think did it?” I ask.
“Until last night, I thought it was you.”
Eventually, I say: “And now?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why?”
“I watched you take your beating. Through the window in the cell door. You took it like you wanted it. There was nothing in your eyes. No anger or disgust. No venom. You found your release in your own pain, not the pain of others. The man on the floor in the cell couldn’t do those things to her. To Ella. I saw hatred in your eyes, but it wasn’t for anybody else. The man who did this has a rage turned outwards…”
“The headlines might disagree,” I say, and my voice catches. I feel tired, suddenly. Tired and cold and empty.
“I know what you did,” he says, softly. “But you were a child. A child who had access to guns. You had opportunity and motive, and in the eyes of the law, you were too young to know what you were doing. And by God, you’ve suffered enough.”
“Justice, right?”
“You’re the only person I can think of who might begin to understand something about what it really means.”
More silence, save the rain on the stained glass, the drip of water onto stone flags from the hem of McAvoy’s soaked clothes.
“He wants me to kill him,” I say, and the words are out of my mouth before I can stop them. “The witness. Roper gave me a gun and let me go, and told me to make sure Cadbury went down. Then it’s night-night for
me. Prison, maybe. More likely, he knows I’d do myself in and tidy up the loose ends. And, do you know, I’d do it. Go out on a high. Do something that mattered, then end it all.” I stop, angry and accusing. “Even that’s gone now. I can’t even help Ella. Can’t even send the right man down…”
“You can still help make it right,” says McAvoy, staring into me, hard. “I don’t know how to play this game of his. Of Roper’s. But I know you’re a pawn. I think I am too. He’s moving us where he wants us. Toying with us like we’re puppets and this city is his stage. You need to get out of the city. Anything happens to the witness, he’ll be straight after you.” He stops, as his thoughts tumble into one another. “The bodies in the woods.”
I’m so far gone now there’s no turning back. I need to tell somebody. Need to rid myself of all these carcinogenic truths.
“I did one of them,” I say, flatly. “Prescott. I walked into the middle of it. He’d just killed the younger lad, and then he tried to kill me. I stopped him.”
He doesn’t react. “What else?”
I feel myself growing lighter as the weight of the dead lifts from my chest. “There are more. I got caught up in something. I’m still in it. People have died because of it.”
“Your girlfriend? The one the papers say is missing?”
“I don’t know if she’s still my girlfriend, but she’s alive. I’m a bastard to live with, mate. Treat her like a trained pet, so she says. It all got too much, and she left me, but she couldn’t get me to leave her thoughts, so she went away. Told me to get in touch when I was ready to be loved. I wasn’t. I went to chuck myself off a bridge and ended up mucky to the eyes in other people’s blood.”
I realise I’m panting, eyes cold, fingers shaking, lighter than air.
McAvoy, nodding, sniffing back snot, making fists as he deals with thoughts unfamiliar and anger undirected. He takes a folder from inside his jacket, and starts pulling out pieces of paper. Crime reports. Probation documents. Psychological evaluations. Even a few newspaper clippings. Black-and-white photocopies of colour photographs. He starts holding them up for me, like props, then laying them out on the pew beside him. He starts talking quickly.
“I don’t take any notice of hunches. Feelings, even. Maybe if you get an inkling that somebody deserves a closer look than others, you follow it through, but I don’t do things like that. I build. Put the pieces together and see what emerges. I’ve been a detective a few months, and the lads are probably right when they say I know nothing. But I reckon that if there are this many grey areas, then the picture probably isn’t perfect.”
“Go on.”
“I took a call, meant for Roper. London technological expert. Asking how he managed to shush up the stuff that didn’t fit. The report on her phone? I suppose it got me thinking. Remember, I’d been there. Seen him. Looked into his eyes when she was still lying on the bed. And it just started from there. This gnawing sensation in my head. A feeling we hadn’t got the right person. That Roper had taken the easy option…”
“Pretty cut and dry, though, isn’t it?” I say, trying to be a voice of reason. “I mean, they found her in his flat. They’ve got his semen inside her head. You don’t get much more unequivocal than that. Was hardly worth pleading not guilty.”
“Look, there’s so much stuff here,” he says, mania creeping into his voice as he jabs his finger into the papers. “There are other cases, some solved, some not, going back years. Stabbings of young girls. Did you know Ella had reported a stalker outside her house only a few weeks before this happened?”
“Tony and me heard something but it was bollocks,” I protest.
“No, it wasn’t!” He’s hissing through gritted teeth. “I went back through the computer database. Contacted every complainant who logged a call in the windows of time I’d been given. Checked them against the hard copies we keep on file in the basement. There was a discrepancy. On the official log, one log number related to a complaint about a group of yobs making a racket outside a house in north Ferriby. But the sergeant’s logbook, the one that keeps a record of where the different cars are sent, it had the same number for a despatch to a house on Bransholme. A complaint about a prowler. Somebody staring in through the windows at the house. The address matched the Butterworths’. Somebody took it out of the official log. Didn’t want people knowing about it…”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean…”
“There’s more. The other girls. Look, this is basic stuff. Basic investigative procedure. I put together a profile of what we knew about the murder, up to the point Cadbury claims he found the body. Young, pretty girl. Dark alley. Vicious, frenzied stab wounds. Right handed. Nothing taken. No witnesses. Previous reports of prowler or stalker. The computer started churning out lots of cases, mostly London, some further north, going back to the early 1990s. Some had been put to bed. Solved, so to speak. Druggies put away for losing their temper. Robberies gone wrong. Unhappy or jealous boyfriends. But there were plenty still open. Some where the victim died, some where they didn’t. All young, attractive women. Half a dozen had made previous reports of suspicious characters following them or showing up at their home. Some had received letters, full of fantasy stuff. Grim, sexual stuff. Some had reported having personal items taken. Some had made complaints before the attacks. Others, this all came out afterwards. There was a pattern that nobody else seemed to be following up.”
“And Ella? She’d had things taken, had she? She’d had messages?” I can feel the ice I’m standing on starting to splinter.
“Messages, yes. There’s a report in there on her mobile phone. The boffins dug back into the memory and found the ghost of some old messages. Nothing too sinister, just messages that didn’t have a name attached. It was just a number. A pay-as-you-go. Things like ‘you look good in yellow’ and ‘that colour brings out your eyes’. The way I read it, this was somebody telling her they were watching…”
I’m scowling, unsure what I want to be true: feeling my brain protest at being forced to consider new truths so late in the game. “That’s a leap,” I mumble, but I realise that his words are striking home. There’s something in his passion that’s infectious. He doesn’t seem capable of lies.
“Maybe, but it’s something that needs to be investigated. I’ve been going through the interview boxes and these questions weren’t asked. There was no attempt to ask the family if anything was missing. No contact made with the phone provider.”
“But if the phone isn’t contract…”
“But it’s still active! I dialled it. There was no answer, but it’s still in service. There are ways, if you have the resources, to triangulate the signal, to make a GPS reference for which phone mast is being used to transmit the signal. There are things that can be done if the investigation is done properly.”
“What else?”
“Whoever did this, had to be covered in blood. That means, they can’t have been on the streets for very long after the incident. So they either lived nearby, or were parked nearby. I’ve gone back through the CCTV footage of all the streets within a two-minute walk of the crime scene. I got a list of all the registered users and whittled that down to the people who aren’t local to the area. Left me with two dozen.” He looks at me. “You were one of them. You were there.”
I smile, tiredly. “So I’m back in the frame?”
“No, I told you. I believe you.”
“Who else?”
“Half a dozen with known form. Two fleet cars from the Hull Daily Mail…”
“Yeah, we were having a drink. A few of us…”
“I know.”
“Who else?”
“Her fiancé. Jamie.” He stops, almost pained to be saying it.
“He’s already said, he was having a beer at The Ship…”
“Then why park there? Two streets from your girlfriend’s house? Why not park outside? Or at the pub?”
“So your money’s on him?”
“No! But these are thin
gs that should be followed up. Roper’s just trimmed away all the stuff he doesn’t want to hear. That means we have a man in the dock who’s far from innocent but who may not be guilty! This is a hate crime. It has the hallmarks of an obsessive. Somebody who saw a pretty girl, fell for her, stalked her, drove themselves crazy over her, then killed her. Then Cadbury found her. His gift. Took her and did what he wanted. But the person who did it is free. The person who may have done all these girls. There’s a serial obsessive. A serial stalker. A killer! And Roper doesn’t want to know.”
He falls silent, breathing heavy.
“So why me?” I ask, at last. “Are you wanting to expose this? Tony’s your man. I don’t know for certain, but I rather doubt my newsdesk are taking my calls.”
McAvoy opens his mouth to speak. Closes his eyes, as if trying to find the right words written on the inside of his head. He looks ill and frantic. Lost.
“You can do something,” he says, eventually. “Roper’s got you as one of his pawns. I don’t want you to be. I don’t know the rules of his game, but I know that if you move somewhere he isn’t expecting, it could change everything.” Then, softly. “I know he has to go.”
“And I’m the man to make that happen? You and me? Are you insane? Look at where I am! At what my future holds…”
McAvoy folds in on himself. Then, staring at his feet: “All I have are vague ideas. Bits and pieces. He’s Roper. The celebrity copper. He’s got everything sewn up.”
“And you want me to unpick the stitches? How?”
He pauses. Looks up at the mural of saints and seraphim. “You could give evidence. Explain what he’s done to you. That he gave you a gun and told you to kill a witness.”
My face tells its own story.
“And you think that case would get to trial, do you? Me, accusing Roper of dirty tricks. I’m not in any rush to prolong my life, mate, but I’m not going to let Roper be the one to end it.”
*
