Dark Winter (18 page)

‘You sure you don’t want to tag along?’

‘Next time. You’ve got my number. Text me later and I’ll see what I’m up to.’

He gives another big grin. ‘I’ll do that.’

‘I’ll probably just be at home, all by my lonesome.’

‘Well we can’t have that. Can we?’

‘No, love.’

He kisses her cheek before he leaves. She feels his rough stubble against her skin and the tickle of his moustache against her eyelashes. Wonders if he’ll want to taste her down below, like these bloody modern men always seem to. Whether his moustache will tickle her thighs. Whether he’ll want the light on. Whether he’ll mention the scars.

Slowly, carefully, she steps down from the bar stool. Leans over and gathers up her shopping bags. Some cheap cooked meat from the butchers. Some liver. Six white rolls. Bottle of vodka. Twenty Richmond Superkings.

‘You off, Angie? Place will be dead without you.’

Dean has finished loading the bottle fridge and is standing behind the beer pumps, watching the door. It’s been a quiet
lunchtime, and he doesn’t see business picking up again until tea. He gets a set wage, so doesn’t wish too fervently for a sudden rush, but his shift passes quicker when he’s busy and the owner gives him disapproving looks when the weekly takings aren’t what he has expected. There are even fewer excuses at Christmas, when, according to Wilson, people have got no excuse not to be pissed.

‘Think I’ll go and put my feet up,’ she says, smiling and feeling pleasantly unsteady on her feet. ‘Taped a
Miss Marple
last night. Might give my brain a workout.’

‘You enjoy yourself, love. You deserve it.’

She gives him a different kind of smile from the one she reserves for her gentlemen. It’s genuine. The sort of smile she used to display without thinking. The fleeting, happy grin she once flashed at the man who carved his initials on her vagina before sticking a twelve-inch bread knife through her ribs and fucking her while she lay bleeding on the tiled floor of a pub toilet.

‘Probably be in tomorrow,’ she says. ‘You working?’

‘No rest for the wicked.’

As she heads for the door a cold draught of air works its way up her body and concentrates itself on her bladder. She looks back at Dean and giggles. ‘Call of nature, I think. First of the day.’

‘Honestly, I don’t know where you keep it,’ he says good-naturedly. ‘Must be a camel somewhere in your family.’

‘Ooh, you charmer,’ says Angie, putting her shopping bag on top of the nearest table and heading for the toilet.

‘I meant it as a compliment,’ shouts Dean as she pushes open the door, but she’s already out of range, and he pulls a
face as he realises he might have upset her. Fears he’s put his foot in it and that it may cost him a drink or two to make amends. He decides to get it over with and stoops to grab an empty glass.

He’s halfway to the floor when the blow comes.

There is an instant of crushing, mind-numbing pain to the back of his neck, and then he is flat on his face; a crumpled heap of unconsciousness lying on his belly by the beer fridges, one unmoving hand comically positioned inside a half-full box of salt and vinegar crisps.

Dean doesn’t hear the man stepping over his body and walking over to the front door.

Doesn’t hear the soft ‘snick’ as the bolt is slid home or the soft sound of black boots on wooden floor as they cross the room.

Doesn’t hear the door to the toilets creak open, the sound of a blade being drawn slowly from inside a leather sleeve.

Doesn’t hear the screaming begin …

‘You’re sure?’ bellows McAvoy, one finger wedged in his ear to blot out the squeal of the engine and the hum of the tyres on the concrete road. ‘Well how hard did he knock?’

Tremberg changes down to fourth gear, trying to ease an extra 5mph from the one-litre engine. She finds what she’s looking for, and despite the protestations of the smoking metal beneath the bonnet, pushes the accelerator almost through the floor.

‘No … I can’t say for certain, but there’s a strong chance …’

Tremberg looks across from the driver’s seat at McAvoy.

She finds herself examining the back of his hand. It’s all she can see of him, gripping the mobile phone which he is pressing too hard to the side of his skull. The knuckles look as though they’ve been broken several times. They seem to represent the sum total of what she knows about him. That he has inflicted harm, and taken it. That the warm, protective palm and fingers in which she pictures him cradling his handsome son and beautiful wife can be turned over and balled, to create a fist capable of extraordinary, self-destructive damage.

‘Kick the door in,’ he’s yelling. Then: ‘I don’t care. Trust me.’

Why should they?
she thinks.
They don’t know you. I barely knew you until this morning. I barely know you now
.

McAvoy slams the phone down. ‘No answer at her flat,’ he says, looking up at her from under a cowlick of damp, ginger hair, with eyes that are veined red and shining. ‘They’ve tried the neighbours and no answer. Won’t kick the door in without permission …’

He tails off. To Tremberg, it looks as though he is fighting with himself. Trying not to acknowledge that, throughout his career, he, too, has done things the right way. Waited for the order. Done as he was asked.

‘So, where?’ she asks, her eyes back on the road.

McAvoy says nothing. He appears to be biting the skin on his wrist, gnawing distractedly at it like a dog with a bone.

It’s getting dark beyond the glass. There are flakes of snow in the air.

She asks again: ‘Where first?’

They are approaching the industrial estate that marks the Grimsby boundary. The area smells of fish and industry, and the road beneath the tyres, with its concrete surface, is almost soporific in its brain-rattling vibration.

McAvoy lowers his arm back to his lap. Appears to make a decision.

‘The uniformed officer says one of the neighbours reckons she’s usually down Freeman Street from lunchtime. One of the pubs. Couldn’t say which …’

‘Freemo?’

‘If that’s what you call it. This is your part of the world, not mine.’

Somehow, Tremberg manages to coax another 10mph out of her hatchback, taking the needle to eighty as she screeches around the first roundabout on two wheels and roars up the flyover past the docks. She knows this area. Was a beat constable here.

‘What do we know about her?’ she yells, cruising past the fish-processing plant with her right foot hard to the floor. ‘What does she drink?’

McAvoy looks at her as if she’s insane, then gives a flustered shrug and picks up his notepad from his lap. He looks at the unfinished sentences and cryptic keywords he scrawled in shorthand during his hasty chat with the desk sergeant at Grimsby Central, as well as the vague details that Sergeant Linus found on the database and telephoned across within ten minutes of Tremberg and McAvoy running for the car park and spinning the wheel hard in the direction of the bridge.

‘She’s on benefits,’ he reads out. ‘Eligible after the attack. Admitted to Diana, Princess of Wales Hospital for a drunk and disorderly incident outside the Fathom Five …’

‘Fathom Five? Closed down last year.’

‘There’s nothing else here!’ shouts McAvoy, re-reading his notes in the hope that he’ll see something new. A clue. An indication of what to bloody do next.

Tremberg bites her lip, swinging the car hard to the right at the latest in a seemingly endless chain of roundabouts that leads into the town centre. ‘Call Sharon at the Bear,’ she says triumphantly. ‘If Angela drinks down Freemo, she’ll know her.’

Grateful for something to do, McAvoy dials the first of the directory inquiries numbers that he can remember. Listens for what seems like an age as the Asian voice at the other end of the line reads off the welcome script. ‘The Bear,’ he yells. ‘Freeman Street. Grimsby.’

Tremberg winces as she hears him repeat it.

‘No,’ he’s bellowing. ‘Just put me through. Put me through.’

A moment later he gives her a nod. It’s ringing.

‘Hello? Is that the landlady? Ms …? Sharon? I’m ringing from Humberside Police. I urgently need to contact a lady who might be one of your regulars. Angela Martindale …’

Tremberg takes her eyes off the road for a full ten seconds, watching McAvoy’s face drift through different stages of anger and frustration. She can imagine what the woman at the other end of the line is saying. Knows full well that she thinks she’s doing Angie a good turn. That she’s sticking by her regulars. Telling the Old Bill where to get off.

Without thinking, she reaches across and takes the phone from her sergeant. ‘Sharon,’ she barks into the receiver. ‘This is Helen Tremberg. I arrested Barry the Bailiff when he cracked Johnno with his car-lock. Remember? Right, we need to find Angie Martindale now. I swear to God, if you find out we’ve nicked her for anything on the back of what you’ve told us, I’ll pay for your beer order from my own pocket for the next twelve months. Right.’ She nods. ‘Good, love. Good.’

She hands the phone back to McAvoy. ‘One of her regulars said he was nattering with her in Wilson’s an hour or so back. Top of Freeman Street. Serves Bass.’

‘Does she have a means of contacting—’

‘Freemo,’ says Tremberg, as she turns sharply right past the
Grimsby Telegraph
building and onto a rundown shopping street strung with dismally outdated Christmas lights. ‘The place where dreams are made.’

In a blossoming darkness punctuated by neon signs and winking headlights, the boarded-up shop fronts and graffiti-covered corrugated shutters strike McAvoy as something transplanted from the Eastern bloc. He is used to this misery in Hull. This is a new town. A new imagining of recession and poverty, of apathy and pained acceptance. It hurts him to his heart.

‘Top of the street,’ says Tremberg again.

They see the swinging signs and ruined facades of three different pubs on their right as they pass the yawning entrance to the fish market. McAvoy tastes the air, expecting cod, haddock, perhaps turbot. Finds nothing. Not the salt of the sea. He can smell nothing but chips and petrol fumes. See nothing but snow and darkness, streetlights and shadowy shop doorways.

‘That’s Sharon’s place,’ says Tremberg as they pass a bar with a whitewashed front and black-painted double doors, inside which huddle half a dozen smokers, stamping feet, hand-rolling cigarettes, watching the traffic and spitting as far as the kerb.

‘Lights are on,’ says Tremberg, motioning ahead at a building on their right, sandwiched between a charity shop and a bakery. ‘Good sign.’

She slows the car and pulls into a parking bay outside the bar. Closes her eyes for a second before killing the engine. Looks up and slowly turns her head. McAvoy is staring over her shoulder at the closed front door.

‘She might not be here,’ says McAvoy.

‘No.’

‘Might be anywhere. Having a drink somewhere else. Met a bloke. Gone to do her Christmas shopping …’

‘Yes.’

‘The chances of her being in there now …’

‘Slim.’

‘Almost non-existent.’

‘May as well get a drink while we’re here, though …’

‘Pint of Bass?’

‘Pint of Bass, yeah.’

A look passes between them as they both tell themselves they believe their lies. And then McAvoy nods.

The wind grabs the door as McAvoy tries to disentangle himself from the too-small vehicle and he feels a shooting pain in his arm as he battles with the wind to pull it shut. By the time he has got both feet on the road and slammed the door closed, Tremberg is already trying the door; rattling the rusted handle, knocking with her boots.

‘It’s locked,’ she says breathlessly, over the sound of the wind. She locates the letterbox and pushes her fingers in, pressing her face to the gap through which a sliver of yellow light emerges. ‘Police,’ she yells. ‘Police.’

She looks through the letterbox again. Presses her ear to it.

‘Anything?’ asks McAvoy.

Tremberg screws up her face as she turns to him. ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’ Distractedly, she waves her hand at the wind, as if motioning for it to be quiet. ‘I can’t hear. You try.’

She moves aside and McAvoy presses his ear to the gap.
Angles his head and shouts ‘Angela Martindale! Are you in there? Police. Open up.’

There is no mistaking the sound. It is human. Afraid. A guttural, animal roar of timeless, faceless terror.

Tremberg has heard it too, but her attention is distracted by sounds from down the road. The smokers from the Bear are pouring out into the street, drawn to drama like flies to shit.

She looks back at McAvoy, about to tell him to break the door in, but he is already running at the entrance.

The door comes off its hinges, smashing backwards as if ram-raided, and McAvoy spills into the foyer of the bar. There is a pain in his shoulder and he tastes blood where his teeth collided too hard on impact, but he pushes such sensations from his mind, shaking his head to clear his thoughts.

He drags himself upright, pushing down on the broken door, feeling a long, jagged splinter slide under his skin.

‘Sarge!’

Tremberg takes his arm and hauls him upright. They stand on the muddy wooden floor, blinking in the light. The bar is empty. Some abandoned shopping bags stand by a bar stool. There are dirty glasses on the bar top.

‘Hello.’

The word sounds comical in the abandoned space.

Then the scream comes again.

McAvoy whirls round, searching the near wall for a doorway. Finds none. Begins running for the far end of the bar. He puts a hand out and grabs the brass rail that runs along the varnished wooden top. Without thinking, he picks up a dirty glass. Almost stops as he sees the body behind the bar.

‘Helen,’ he yells, spotting the entrance to the toilets. ‘Behind the bar!’

Without drawing breath he bursts through the swing door and clatters into a plaster wall. To his right are the entrances to the ladies’ and gents’ facilities. With the glass in his right hand, he kicks out at the door to the ladies and throws himself inside.