Dark Winter (7 page)

He raises his arm and pulls Roisin back down into an embrace.

Hates himself for the warmth that spreads through him: for being damnably happy, as an innocent girl lies dead on a slab.

8.04 a.m. Roper’s old room at Queen’s Gardens.

A commotion of cops
.

Buttocks perched on desks; feet on swivel chairs, backs lounging against bare walls. A collection of untucked shirts and two-for-one supermarket ties. Nobody’s smoking, but the room smells of nicotine and beer.

McAvoy, in the middle, sitting properly on a hard-backed seat, notebook on his lap, tie tight at a throat scrubbed pink and raw by vigorous, punishing hands.

Trying to keep his feet still on the threadbare carpet. Listening to a dozen conversations at once and finding none he would know how to join.

Six hours’ sleep and a good breakfast that wouldn’t go down.

It’s still sitting there; a weight in his chest; every breath a wheeze that tastes of scrambled egg and granary bread. There’s a flask of hot water and peppermint leaves in the bag at his feet, but he’s afraid to unscrew it in this cramped, busy room, for fear of releasing the aroma. He could not stomach the comments. Could not stand to be remarkable. Not here. Not now.

He glances at his watch.
Late
, he thinks.

‘Right, boys and girls,’ says Pharaoh, clapping her hands as she enters the room. ‘I’ve been up since five, I’ve had no fucking breakfast and in a minute I’ve got a press conference with a bunch of wankers who want to know how we’ve allowed a teenage girl to be killed at Christmas. I would like to be able to tell them that the person who did it is a nutter and that we’ve caught him, but I can’t. We haven’t caught him, so that’s not going to happen. Nor do we know that he’s a nutter.’

‘Well, I know I wouldn’t ask him to babysit, ma’am.’ This from Ben Nielsen, to laughs and nods.

‘Nor would I, Ben, but I’d pick him before you. Remember, I’ve got a teenage daughter.’

Laughs and whoops. A polystyrene cup chucked at a grinning Ben Nielsen.

‘What I mean,’ continues Pharaoh, pushing her hair out of her eyes, ‘is that we don’t know this was random. We don’t know if it’s somebody who hates the church, somebody with a grudge against the clergy. We don’t know if Daphne Cotton was the intended victim. Why did he wear a balaclava? Why disguise himself if he were just a random attacker? And the weapon. What’s the significance of the machete?’

‘Are we thinking race hate?’ This from Helen Tremberg, to an accompanying chorus of moans.

‘We’re thinking everything, my love. We haven’t flagged it as race hate, but the very fact that it was a black girl means that it has to be considered.’

‘Fucking hell.’

Colin Ray speaks for all of them. They know what this means. Race crimes are a recipe for headlines and headaches. It’s kid gloves and placards all the way; the clamour for a resolution comes not just from the public and the pressure groups, but from the top brass, still sensitive about a decade of bad publicity spawned when a black prisoner died in the custody suite. The video footage aired at the subsequent investigation – and replayed almost constantly across the news channels – showed four officers standing around chatting while the lad took his last, rasping breaths on the cold, tiled floor at Queen’s Gardens nick.

‘So, this is goldfish-bowl time,’ concludes Pharaoh. ‘We need this solved quickly, but we need to remember we’re being watched. We’re talking national news. People don’t like having their Christmases ruined by murder, and they need us to make them feel safe again. This happened about nineteen hours ago, and that gives this murderous fucker a good head start. The public appeal will be on the news by nine, which means a lot of you will have the fun and games of answering the phones. The calls will be coming through to this room. And yes, the tech monkeys will be wiring them up within the next half hour. There’ll be no shortage of nutters, people, but every piece of information is important. Every name needs to be checked.’

She stops her flow momentarily, and her eyes seek out McAvoy. She gives him a nod.

‘Now I know you’re all technical wizards, but on the off-chance that you’re not, McAvoy here is going to show you how his brand-spanking-new database works.’

There are groans. A chorus of swear words.

‘Now now, children,’ she smiles. ‘I’ve been on inquiries where the floor has caved in under the weight of paperwork, so if McAvoy’s system helps us keep a better track of what we’re doing, then it’s something we need to be using. Personally, I feel like I’ve got something of a head start, given that I once got to level three on Sonic the Hedgehog, but the rest of you might need a catch-up course.’

McAvoy joins in the laughter. Looks up and gets a grin and the tiniest of winks from Pharaoh.

‘Don’t forget,’ she adds, ‘McAvoy has seen this bloke. He could have been a victim himself, if he hadn’t used his forehead to block the blow.’

There are more laughs, but they feel somehow more warm and inclusive, and McAvoy is almost tempted to take a bow and add a witticism of his own. Pharaoh interrupts before he can.

‘Right, you should all know what you’re doing for the next couple of hours. We need witness statements. We need CCTV footage of every inch of that square. Where did he go when he left the church? And most important, we need to know everything there is about Daphne Cotton. We need to unpick her life. We’ll have the PME results by lunchtime, toxicology by tonight. Just bring your A-game, people. None of us want to live in a city where you can chop up a girl in church and get away with it. It’s Christmas, after all.’

She gives the troops a grin. And then she’s barging back out of the room, a dervish of perfume and jangling jewellery, her soft palms touching shoulders and forearms, investing faith and belief in her team.

They sit in silence for a moment, each officer lost in his or her own thoughts.

Eventually, DCI Colin Ray turns and opens the blinds. It’s night-time black beyond the glass, and the window reflects a shambolic semi-circle of squatting, lounging, disordered men and women; scratching heads and blowing through steepled palms.

The officers get a glimpse of themselves; a sharp, unexpected vision of who and what they are. Each sees the truth of themselves: their imperfections, their one-dimensional, cold, crumpled, actuality.

Of all the men and women staring into their own faces, only Aector McAvoy feels no compulsion to look away.

They have been answering phones for six hours now. Beyond the dusty, grime-encrusted windows, the sky has almost completed its subtle transition from deep grey to soft black. Above, the clouds continue to hang low and fat, but the worst of the snow is another few days away. They might get a white Christmas this year, though McAvoy, who experienced nothing else in his youth, is only excited by the prospect because he knows it will make his wife and child smile.

He and Helen Tremberg are the only two actual police officers in the room. A community support officer is sitting at one of the spare desks and Gemma Tang, the pretty Chinese press officer, is leaning over the large table by the window, crossing out large sections of a press release. She’s model-beautiful, with a backside that Ben Nielsen has frequently imagined bouncing coins off. McAvoy is giving himself eyestrain trying not to look.

In ones and twos, the officers have drifted away from the major incident room. Trish Pharaoh and Ben Nielsen are at
the morgue, witnessing the post-mortem exam. The two most junior detectives are collecting witness statements from those members of the congregation too shaken up to speak coherently yesterday. Sophie Kirkland took a phone call just before lunch from a pub landlady whose security cameras had captured a fleeting image of a man in black roughly five minutes after the attack took place. She’s taken two uniformed officers with her to search the local area for clues.

Colin Ray and Shaz Archer have gone to speak to an informant. A telephone call to his bedsit home has already produced one lead. One of the punters at the Kingston Hotel has been letting his mouth run away with him. According to the snout, the bloke has always had strong opinions about foreigners and incomers, but recently lost his wife to the attentions of an Iranian pizza chef, and has been talking more and more about making somebody pay. It would be dismissed as idle gossip, were it not for the fact that a quick check on the Police National Computer showed that he’d been nicked twice for possessing illegal weaponry, and once for wounding. Even though Colin Ray is supposed to be managing the office, he’s decided that he’s best placed to follow this particular line of inquiry, and made himself scarce. Inspector Archer, never far behind, has tagged along, leaving only McAvoy and Helen Tremberg to answer the phones.

McAvoy looks back through his notes. He’s written pages of names, numbers, details and theories on his lined pad. The script is unintelligible to anybody but him. He’s the only officer who knows Teeline shorthand. He learned it in his spare time while in training, after being impressed by the
speed at which a journalist had taken down the quotes of the senior officer he’d been shadowing that day. It has proven a useful six months of his time, even if it has left him open to the occasional moment of open-mouthed scorn from colleagues who wonder if he’s having a mental breakdown and filling his notebook with hieroglyphics.

The phone calls so far have been pretty weak. Despite the television appeal this morning, they’re suffering from Sunday syndrome. People are enjoying days out with their families or relaxing down the pub, and the idea of ringing a police station with information about a murder feels much more like a nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday kind of activity, so the flurry of calls that the team had expected has not materialised. It’s barely proving worth the overtime.

If nothing else, at least the incident room is taking shape; this is largely thanks to McAvoy and the relative inactivity the day has delivered. He’s brought a whiteboard in from another office and begun sketching a brief outline of the previous day’s sequence of events. His own description of the suspect has been written in the centre of the board in red marker pen.
Medium build. Medium height. Dark clothes. Balaclava. Wet, blue eyes
. It’s not much to go on, and they all know it. And although there is nothing more McAvoy could have done, he feels achingly guilty that he did not glimpse more of his attacker.

A map of the city has been stapled to another wall. On it, drawing pins of different colours denote the definite and possible sightings of the suspect as he made his escape from Trinity Square. It is a composite of witness statements, CCTV footage, and guesswork. With it, they can surmise that the
suspect travelled east through the city and past the river, before disappearing from the map somewhere near Drypool Bridge. A team of uniformed officers have walked the route, but found nothing save a footprint in the snow that matched the location given by one of the more believable witnesses. There was no sign of the murder weapon. The uniforms’ best guess was that he’d ditched it in the Hull. When Pharaoh had heard that snippet of information she had slammed her hands down so hard that one of her bangles had snapped.

The phone on his desk begins to ring. He picks up the beige, Bakelite receiver.

‘CID. Major Incident Room.’

A woman’s voice is at the other end of the line. ‘I’d like to speak to somebody about Daphne. About Daphne Cotton,’ she says. And then, unnecessarily, even more shakily, adds: ‘The girl who was killed.’

‘You can talk to me. My name is Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy—’

‘That’s fine,’ she says, cutting him off. With the tremble in her voice it’s hard to place her, but McAvoy would class the speaker as around his own age.

‘Do you have information …?’

She takes a breath, and McAvoy can tell she has been rehearsing this. She wants to get it out in one go. He lets her speak.

‘I’m a supply teacher. A year or so ago I did some shifts at Hessle High. Daphne’s school. We hit it off. She was a lovely girl. Very intelligent and thoughtful. She was a very keen writer, you know. That’s what I teach. English. She showed me some of her short stories. She had real talent.’

She pauses. Her voice cracks.

‘Take your time,’ says McAvoy softly.

A breath. A sniff. A clearing of a throat blocked with tears.

‘I’ve done some voluntary work in the part of the world she’s from. Seen some of the things she’s seen. We got talking. I don’t know, but I suppose I became a sort of outlet for her. She told me things that she kept hidden. There were things in her stories. Things a young girl shouldn’t know about. She was very shy when I questioned her about it, so I started setting her writing assignments. Helping to get out the stuff that was inside her.’

McAvoy waits for more. When nothing else is forthcoming, he clears his throat to speak.

Then she blurts it out.

‘This has happened to her before.’

He spots her as soon as he pushes open the glass doors of the trendy pub and steps into the warm blue-black light. She is seated on her own at a small round table by the radiator near the bar. There are empty sofas and loungers near by, but she seems to have chosen the seat nearest the heater, and is all but pressing herself against its white-painted surface. She is staring at the wall, ignoring the other customers. McAvoy cannot see her features, but there is something that makes her seated form seem burdened and sad.

‘Miss Mountford?’ asks Aector, as he approaches her table.

She looks up. Her deep brown eyes are framed with red and seem to float in darkness. The bags beneath her eyes are dark, almost bruised black by tiredness. There is a silver stud in her left nostril, but her other features do not match the mental picture McAvoy had painted when he had arranged to meet her here, in this most inappropriate setting. She is short and plump, with frizzy brown hair that has been inexpertly pushed behind her ears to leave two misshapen curls running down her cheeks. She is not wearing make-up, and her short, fat fingers end in nails that are bitten almost to
nothing, while her clothes – a black cardigan over a white vest – speak of a need for comfort over style. She wears no rings, though a large, ethnic wooden bangle has been wedged onto a chunky freckled wrist.