Dark Winter (30 page)

Relief floods him. His wife sounds tired, but very much alive.

Safe.

They are safe.

Breathing heavy, sweat running down his face, he pulls open the car door and slumps heavily into the driver’s seat.

‘Oh darling …’ he begins. ‘I thought …’

He looks at himself in the rear-view mirror.

Too late sees the movement in the back seat.

And then the blade is at his throat.

A face, turned to melted plastic and charred meat by flame, eases out of the darkness, and a hand partially covers McAvoy’s own, closing the phone.

McAvoy stares into the wet, blue eyes of Simeon Gibbons.

Feels the knife move down his body.

Feels the pressure as it slices through his coat, his shirt. As it nicks at his skin.

Feels Gibbons lean forward, and part the ruined clothing with his hand. Sees him stare at the wound left by a murderer’s blade a year before.

Realises, too late, that he, too, is a survivor. A man who walked away.

He closes his eyes as he realises that Chandler has misled him. That his wife and children are safe, but that it is he who will be dispatched in the manner that he survived twelve months ago.

There is a thud. A sudden dull pain as a rigid thumb rams into his carotid artery with an expert swiftness and precision.

And then blackness.

McAvoy wakes into nothingness. He can’t move. The pain in his throat, his neck, is the centre of his being.

He tries to lift his head. Fails. Tries to move his arms. He can’t seem to send the message to his limbs.

He listens. Tries to focus. He senses the hum of car tyres.

He is crumpled in the passenger seat of his own car, moving at speed.

There is a voice near by. A soft, sibilant, animal whisper. It sounds as though it has been talking for an age.

‘… just this one, my love. This one, then wake. Wake for me. Wake for me. Take it back. Please. Take it back …’

McAvoy tries to will himself back to his limbs.

He manages to lick his dry lips. Moves his head the tiniest fraction.

‘He survived. Survived when you didn’t. Survived like me. Like all of them. We’ll take him to where it happened. Cut him like he should have been cut the firssst time …’

Through the fog, the haze of his thoughts, McAvoy understands. Understands that Simeon Gibbons is taking him to where it all began a year before. Where Tony Halthwaite
slashed him with a blade for daring to discover that he was a killer of young girls. Where he became the one that got away.

McAvoy shifts his head. Catches a glimpse of the road. Of dark trees, swaying in a wind filled with slashing rain.

Recognises the familiar silhouette of the Humber Bridge.

Half an hour from home.

Five minutes from the spot where, a year ago, he’d caught a killer, and almost bled to death for his trouble.

‘… Sparky let us down, didn’t he? The room. The bed. The best money could buy. And you still asleep. Asleep and beautiful, but no more than a picture in a frame. He said he was our friend. But they couldn’t fix you. Couldn’t make you wake, could they? It was beyond that. Beyond medicine. We needed somebody’s miracle, didn’t we? The writer knew. Made it make sense. There’s only so much justice. Mercy is finite. It falls like rain but the sky is dry. Only so much luck. People lived when others died. Why not you? Why did they steal your mercy?’

McAvoy feels the car swing round a roundabout. Sees the density of the tree cover begin to change overhead.

McAvoy thinks of Roisin. Remembers the last time he kissed her mouth. Pictures her in the kitchen, grating and mixing and chopping like his good little white witch …

Remembers the potion in his pocket.

The glass vial of ammonia.

He opens his eyes. Turns his head.

Looks into blue eyes set in a face of pulped skin; of molten flesh and risen welts.

Reaches into his pocket and, with an arm that tingles and throbs, closes his tingling fingers around the glass.

Turns.

Lashes out …

Smashes the glass vial into the ruined features of the man who killed them all.

Tries to grab the wheel and flicks his head to look at the road …

Doesn’t even have time to exclaim as the vehicle ploughs at 60mph into the brick and glass building at the edge of the car park and explodes in a ball of flame.

The heat is intense against McAvoy’s cheek as Gibbons pushes his face against the window of the buckled passenger door. The windscreen itself is so much shattered glass, and the flames from beneath the bonnet are starting to curl, like flapping laundry, into the vehicle.

McAvoy brings his fist up short beneath Gibbons’s extended right arm, feels something break as the punch slams into his elbow.

For a moment, the connection is broken, and McAvoy grabs at the door handle. He pushes, but the door refuses to give.

He takes his eyes off Gibbons and spins in his seat to face the door. He brings both feet back and kicks at the window. Once. Twice. The glass explodes outwards, and as fresh oxygen rushes into the car the flames are given fresh fuel; tongues of red and orange heat flutter and tear over the steering wheel, the dashboard and the two men in the front seat.

McAvoy feels the flames catch at the trousers. Scorch his hands. Kiss his face.

He kicks at the door this time. Kicks with everything he has.

Creaking, hurting, the door folds outwards, and McAvoy scrabbles for the gap.

Hands close around his boots. Strong arms encircle his legs.

He slithers forward, pulling Gibbons behind him, until both men slide and thud onto the wet car park.

McAvoy kicks his legs free and instinctively rolls away from the vehicle.

He tries to stand.

Then Gibbons is upon him. In the light of the flaming car, his scars are monstrous. There is no moisture in his eyes now. The black of his pupils has almost engulfed the blue of his irises.

They are twenty yards from the burning vehicle. Gibbons is hauling him to his feet. The wounds at the ex-soldier’s throat seem to be reopening.

McAvoy feels himself being dragged towards the dark shadow of the wood that stands at the edge of the car park.

He struggles for purchase on the wet tarmac. Tries to tear himself from Gibbons’s grasp. The other man seems to sense what he is doing and swings another pointed thumb in the direction of McAvoy’s neck. He sees it coming and yanks his head back, lashing out with two swift right hands that catch Gibbons on the side of the head and send him reeling backwards.

McAvoy falls. Tries to stand and slips again.

Everything hurts. He watches Gibbons shake his head, as if trying to clear it. Sees him bunch his fists. The glint of a
blade in his hand. Sees him turn his head and look down on McAvoy’s sprawled, vulnerable body.

McAvoy drags himself to his knees. Puts one hand on the wet tarmac and pushes himself to his feet, righting himself just in time to see Gibbons pounce like something feline and beautiful from five feet away.

The punch is instinctive. McAvoy’s vision clears for a moment. The pain subsides just for an instant. For a heartbeat, he is a strong, big man, a man who could have been a boxer if he had been able to inflict pain without remorse.

The punch swings upwards almost from the floor. It catches Gibbons just below the chin.

His trajectory changes. He flies backwards like a tennis ball struck by a racquet.

McAvoy, the last drop of energy draining from his body, falls backwards onto the wet earth.

And then the car explodes.

Flame and metal and jagged glass fill the night air.

Gibbons is still staggering backwards from the force of the blow when the blast tears his body into offal.

McAvoy doesn’t see the moment of release. Doesn’t see the killer shredded and cooked and smeared across the earth.

He is lying on his back, staring at the sky, wondering whether the clouds above will give Roisin and his family snow for Christmas.

Wake up, wake up, wake up …

The glass of hot milk and cinnamon is going cold on Doctor Megan Straub’s bedside table, a thick skin forming on its untouched surface.

Too wired to switch off. Too energised to let go …

She is sitting up in bed, reading by torchlight so as not to wake the skinny, Asian-looking man who dozes next to her, here in the largest bedroom of this modest apartment on the outskirts of Keighley, forty-five minutes from the hospital where her patients lie in a sleep that mocks her own insomnia.

‘Mercy,’ she reads. ‘From the Latin word for “merchandise”. A price paid.’

She frowns, and wonders at the mercenary origins of a word associated with divine intervention. Could it be bought? Could the centuries have dulled people’s understanding of the true nature of the concept? Could there be a way of influencing the seemingly random, scattered distribution of the Almighty’s pity?

She feels troubled. Confused. Finds herself analysing
concepts that seem too big to unpick. Wonders, for an instant, if prayer is ever anything more than a desperate plea for favour.

Doctor Straub is suddenly unsure whether she should have taken the book. Whether she should have left it untouched, sitting among the scattered snowstorm of papers on the carpeted floor around Anne Montrose’s hospital bed. Would the bull-chested policeman with the soft eyes and the easy blush be returning to gather up the gospel that had sent him sprinting from the room?

Despite the heat rising from the naked man at her side, Doctor Straub shivers and tucks herself more firmly inside the expensive quilt. She angles the torch to better illuminate the ruined pages of the holy book. Tries to make sense of the scribbles and jagged graffiti. Wonders why she cannot put it down.

She turns the book slowly, like a wheel. Through the mess of violent scribbles, there is some sense to what at first appears to be muddled hieroglyphs. She wonders if it is her own long experience of reading other doctors’ handwriting that allows her to make out a meaning in the blocks of ink.

Prayer indeed is good. But while calling on the gods a man should himself lend a hand
.

She looks away. Screws up her eyes and attempts to locate a memory. She remembers the quote. Hippocrates? Yes. The man whose oath marshals her profession.

Doctor Straub peers closer. Locates another strand of meaningful writing.

Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself to this: Great God, grant that twice two be not four
.

She finds herself wondering who might have written these words – at the venom and fury that had caused them to drive the pen into the paper with the force of a knife.

The creator who could put a cancer in a believer’s stomach is above being interfered with by prayers
.

Doctor Straub closes the book.

She has given up on sleep. Is surprised she even went to the trouble of going to bed. She shouldn’t be here, really. Should be back at the hospital, waiting for news. Should be stroking Anne Montrose’s hand. Should be urging her to try again. To open her eyes …

She had already been on her way home when the call came through. It was one of the nurses on the ward, her voice breathless with excitement.

This evening, Anne Montrose had stirred. Her eyelids had flickered, and the read-out from the monitor showed a spiked increase in brain activity.

A dream? Dr Straub has often wondered what her patients see. What goes on behind the eyes.

Here, now, she wonders whether, wherever she is, Anne Montrose is happy.

Wonders, too, whether she will ever get the chance to ask her. To talk to somebody who has come back.

She locks her teeth and feels a tension in her jaw. She does not want to let herself get carried away. Is trying to contain her excitement. But somewhere, in the unscientific part of herself, she fancies that, before dawn, Anne Montrose may experience a miracle.

Softly, so as not to wake the man at her side, she slips out of bed and pads across the varnished, hardwood floors. She
opens the bedroom door and makes her way into the living room, with its white leather suite and tasteful black and white photographs.

She switches on the large plasma TV that dominates the imitation chimney breast and lowers the volume as she flicks through the news channels. The clock in the corner of the screen declares it well past midnight.

Drowsily, Doctor Straub settles on one of the twenty-four-hour rolling news stations. There are hundreds of homes in Scotland without electricity owing to the storms. A police officer has been taken to hospital with minor injuries following an incident at the Humber Bridge Country Park which saw a vehicle explode and destroy a nearby administration block. One person is believed to have died in the incident. In other news, a decorated British army colonel has been arrested in West Yorkshire by officers looking into the death of Daphne Cotton, who was murdered several days ago in Hull’s Holy Trinity Church. Officers say he is not being questioned about the murder, but about withholding vital evidence linked to this and several other cases …

To her left, nestled on a tower of books, Doctor Straub’s telephone begins to ring.

Quickly, for fear of the noise waking her partner and robbing her of these moments of thoughtful solitude, she jumps up from the chair and answers the call.

‘Doctor Straub?’ The voice is breathless and excited. ‘Doctor, this is Julie Hibbert. I’m sorry to call so late, but I thought you would want to know …’

‘It’s no problem, Julie,’ she says, and there is a tremble in her voice. Could her patient be awake?

‘It’s Anne Montrose, Doctor Straub,’ says the nurse.

‘Yes?’

‘I think it must have been an anomaly. She’s stabilised. Returned to her standard brain function. Heartbeat regular. Whatever caused her to flicker, it’s gone.’

Doctor Straub thanks her. Replaces the receiver.

Settles into the chair and leans her head against the cushion.

She gives an almost imperceptible shake of her head, and then closes her eyes.