Taking Pity (10 page)

Pleased as he is to be away from the North East for a few days, Mahon is mildly disquieted by the chain of events that has disrupted his routine. He has had to deal with many interlopers and threats during his years beside Mr. Nock, but there is something too calculated and disciplined about the new organization that has so many of his outfit’s allies and competitors running scared. Mahon has seen pretty much every type of criminal organization over the years. The Headhunters are a new breed. They seem unencumbered by the kind of petty territorialism that has undone so many crime families and syndicates. They do not trouble themselves with boundary disputes or staffing issues. They simply take over existing firms. They come in at the top, promise resources and rewards, and demand that those in command bow down, or end up nailed to their own knees. Those who fight back, lose. In those cases, underlings are approached with a similar offer. Eventually, they find somebody willing to play along. It is a merciless, brutal, and very corporate way of running a criminal enterprise and Mahon half admires them for it. In another couple of years he imagines they will be running the North East in Mr. Nock’s place. But for as long as the old man is alive, it is Mahon’s duty to protect what he owns.

Mahon turns his back on the lighthouse and heads the way he has come; walking in his own bootprints and obscuring his own tracks. He hasn’t been gone too long. Mr. Nock will be happy enough. He’ll be sitting where Mahon left him, drinking tea and watching the waves, lost in memories and schemes. He lives inside his own head. Doesn’t watch TV or read books. Just sits and thinks with that little half smile on his face, as though he is listening to a radio show playing in his head. He’s doing it more of late. There are moments when he almost seems to have disappeared from himself. There are times his body looks like an empty suit. Sometimes he’ll mutter a sentence from a conversation he had twenty years ago. Sometimes he’ll take an extra couple of seconds to remember where he is. Mahon worries that such incidents are signs of old age, but as soon as he gets himself together, Mr. Nock is quick to reassure him.

Never been fitter, Raymond. Never felt more alive.

It was Mahon’s decision to get Mr. Nock away for a time. He has been left perturbed by Mahon’s interrogation of the man who turned Lloyd’s head. The man held on for a long time before giving up the information Mahon had pressed him for. And Mahon has no doubts that the organization will be displeased to have lost somebody who is clearly a key player. He has no doubts they will come for Mr. Nock. It will be easier to persuade some ambitious young lad from Newcastle to represent them if the specter of Mr. Nock has already been removed. Mahon is not afraid of the people who will come, but there are other matters that require his attention and he doesn’t trust anybody to look after Mr. Nock in his absence. So he has brought the old man with him. Here. To this wild, ragged bit of coastline with its screaming gulls and feasting puffins and clouds of kittiwakes. Here, where gannets drop as stones into water the color of earth.

They are perhaps an hour from Hull.

A little farther from the church that Mahon hasn’t seen since he was handsome.

Winestead,
he thinks to himself as he traipses back along the cliff top. Then under his breath: “Flash Bloody Harry.”

Mahon has had decades upon which to think of that night. Remembers every second of it. The snow. The gunsmoke. The wet branches that slapped his face as he made his way through the woods. The sight of the girl’s pretty, delicate foot in the gravel and the broken bones. The way the skull disintegrated in a tornado of shot and stones.

That night cost him dear. Cost him his looks. Changed him, inside and out. He’d known his decision would come at a price. He simply hadn’t known how high.

“Y’all right?” says Mahon in greeting to a woman walking a little terrier and who is trying to maneuver herself out of the way of the big, lumbering man in sunglasses and a scarf. “Not much of a day for it.”

The woman is in her seventies and seems as nervous as the shivering creature that leaves muddy paw prints on her legs as it leaps up and asks to be carried.

“We get worse,” she says, trying to be conversational. “Sea air’s good for you, apparently. I like it when it’s bracing.”

Mahon gives her a nod and moves past her. Doesn’t look at her too closely. He knows that he unnerves people. Frightens them, even. He doesn’t want to frighten her. She seems pleasant enough. He doesn’t like to cause displeasure to people who don’t deserve it, though he would happily cut her head off with a big fucking knife if Mr. Nock insisted. Mr. Nock used to mock him for his scruples. Would call him a soft shite and roll his eyes. But he indulged his monster his conscience. Used to give some of the less palatable jobs to loyal men who didn’t share Mahon’s peculiar code of ethics. Mahon wishes that had been the case in 1966.

It was always going to end in bloodshed, of course. Mr. Nock was an established name. He had the area sewn up. He’d greased the right palms and broken the right skulls and ran the city in a way that everybody could tolerate. He didn’t need extra muscle or men from London with big ideas. He should have said no. Should have done what the papers said he did and seen them off at the station when they dared set foot on his turf. But Mr. Nock had liked the brothers. Liked their London swagger and the way their men responded to them. He offered a hand of friendship and extended the freedoms of the city to the two tall, dark-haired Cockneys who had such big plans. It had been fine, at first. No areas of conflict. No ill feelings. Sometimes the brothers would send a couple of men north to assist Mr. Nock with a job that required an unfamiliar face. Sometimes that favor would be returned. It was all fucking peachy, for a while. Then one of the brothers had lost the plot. Took an insult personally and put a man in the ground. Started himself a war with another London gang. It all got out of hand. Bullets, and blades, and pigs growing fat on flesh and bone. The brothers had reached out. Asked Mr. Nock to provide a safe haven for one of their boys. A good boy, who needed to keep his head down for a while. And Mr. Nock had agreed. Handed the job of keeping his guest happy over to the new boy, Flash Harry.

Savile Row suits and Mr. Fish ties.

Ruffle-fronted shirts and a lacquered pompadour.

A dandy, with pretty-boy looks and eyes like a dead fish.

The young lad whom Mr. Nock wanted to groom for the future and who hid the fact he was a psychopath right up until he stuck a knife in the London boy’s guts and ripped it up to his throat.

The man whose mess Mahon is still cleaning up, all these years later.

Tomorrow, Mahon will go and say hello to an old copper he hasn’t seen in years. He’ll make sure that memories remain hazy and lips remain sealed. If necessary, he’ll close them forever and open a new mouth in the man’s throat. He won’t take Mr. Nock. He’ll leave him to enjoy the sea air and the view. Let him listen to the radio show in his head and leave him a note with the times to take his pills.

Mahon will do what he has always done. He’ll take care of it. Then he’ll take Mr. Nock home and prepare for what the Headhunters have planned.

Giving the sigh of a tired old man, Mahon lets himself into the tiny, one-bedroom chalet that clings to the rain-pummeled, wind-scarred cliff. He shouts a hello to his employer and goes into the kitchen to make tea. As the kettle boils, he pulls a phone from his pocket. It belonged to a slick piece of work who is still dying, hundreds of miles away, on Mahon’s living room floor. The device is too complicated for him. It does things he thinks of as positively science fiction. But he knows how to read the messages it contains. Knows a code when he sees one. And he can press the play button in the video messages.

He wonders who the girl is.

She’s pretty. Dark-haired and tan. Has a gypsy look about her. Hoops at her ears and gold at her throat. There’s a sadness in her eyes, despite the red-haired, big-eyed baby that she holds in her arms: rocking gently, from side to side—framed in the window of some ugly apartment in a city Mahon doesn’t recognize.

He wonders idly what she has done to become the focus of the Headhunters’ attention.

Hopes that, if he watches the video enough times, he will eventually see her eyes fill with something other than loss.

Mahon fancies that the girl must be beautiful when she laughs.

He shudders at the thought of how she will look when they are through.

M
C
A
VOY
SITS
on the damp grass, feet dangling over the wall.

He watches the pea-green channel marker sit on the motionless water. Turns his head to watch the car headlights flash by on the bridge that towers up into the cloud to his left. Squints as he tries to make out the flag of the cargo ship slowly inching its way toward the docks.

There’s not much of a moon tonight. What little light it gives off forms a maze between the clouds. From below, it seems the sky is scored with scars and jagged lines: reflecting back in the still, black surface of the Humber. A low, easterly wind ruffles the leaves of the trees in the dark, shapeless forest to McAvoy’s rear. He has promised Fin they’ll go in there one night. Have themselves an adventure after dark. He has not yet found the time or the courage to make good on his word. Bad memories lurk inside the forest’s embrace. He was hurt there. Hurt badly. His blood has soaked into the mud and leaves of the forest floor. He has no desire to walk past the spot where it happened. No desire to tell Fin that it is not ghosts or shadows that he needs to fear in the darkness, but bad men of flesh and blood.

A bad man died today. A big, thuggish drug dealer. He was thrown fifty feet by a big SUV and was dead before he hit the ground. The driver didn’t stop. Was never likely to.

McAvoy thinks about Bruno Pharmacy. He hadn’t known the man’s name when they fought. Had just seen a brute attacking his family. McAvoy had put him down. Put his friends down, too. And one of those friends came back and blew up his house.

Pharaoh broke the news with a phone call around teatime. She’d sounded pensive. Had spent a couple of hours waterproofing her team’s stories and trying to cover her own back. Bruno had been under police surveillance, and yet nobody had managed to get a look at the driver or glimpse more than a couple of letters of the registration plate. Ben Neilsen needs a blood test, having tried to give unprotected mouth-to-mouth to Bruno’s battered corpse. Sharon Archer has subtly suggested to the top brass that Pharaoh had deliberately been winding Bruno up and that it was his aggravated state of mind that caused him to walk out into Holderness Road without spotting the vehicle that turned him inside out. It’s a shitstorm. But Pharaoh had still made time to call McAvoy. Still made time to tell him that one of Roisin’s abusers was dead.

McAvoy doesn’t know how to feel. He never wishes death on anybody. But Bruno put his hands on Roisin. And Roisin has been absent from his life ever since. His only hope is that Bruno’s demise will somehow remove the threat to her life and that she can be allowed to come home. He had suggested as much to Pharaoh and been rewarded with a sigh. She said she was working on it. To trust her. To carry on with the Peter Coles case and to hope for the best.

He looks down at the laptop that balances on his knees. He can get a signal here, as the landlord never switches the Wi-Fi off. Can do what he needs to do without losing sight of his room, where Fin is sleeping contentedly after polishing off a double portion of complimentary shepherd’s pie. They had a good chat tonight. Fin told him what they had learned at school. Asked him if he knew who Henry the Ace was and whether he knew he had six wives. McAvoy had gently educated the boy. Told him what had happened to some of Henry’s brides, only to find that Fin was already well aware. The conversation had taken a turn. Fin had asked his father if he had ever seen somebody have their head chopped off. Asked if Henry was arrested and sent to prison for murder. Whether a policeman was better than a king. Asked him what he would do if somebody cut Mammy’s head off. Drew a picture of a corpulent king holding a big, blood-soaked ax over the head of a stick figure with black hair. McAvoy had steered them away from the subject. Told him the names of some Scottish heroes and a few stories about his granddad. Tucked the lad up in bed not long after eight. Sat himself down on the floor and waited until the thudding waves of panic and nausea subsided. He’d known, in that instant, just how much he missed his father. Had known that the arguments between them could be remedied with a phone call. But he had known, too, that he did not have the courage to make that call. McAvoy’s father had angered his son beyond forgiveness when he refused to attend his wedding. He believed that Aector’s teenage bride could not be trusted. He’d called her a gypsy bitch who was no better than the mother who abandoned Aector and his brother when they were children and who came and bought them back when she married money. McAvoy misses his dad. Knows, too, that the old man will feel like the worst kind of bastard for being so wrong in his estimations of his daughter-in-law. But the McAvoys are stubborn men, and neither will break first.

For the last hour, McAvoy has been working. Going through the witness statements. Cross-referencing evidence logs. Double-checking dates. On the computer screen before him, the timeline is taking proper shape, but there are still peculiarities. Some of the witness statements are signed by policemen whose names appear nowhere else in the report. And worse, he is having difficulty locating the actual physical evidence. An e-mail from HQ explained that the shotgun used to wipe out the Winn family was moved from its original repository some years before, when the various police forces merged, and has since disappeared. The lack of the gun could scupper the case before it begins. Prosecutors will need to make the gun available to the defense team for independent analysis. They would also want to see the clothes worn by the victims on the day of their deaths. They, too, have not yet been unearthed by the civilian custodians who look after the evidence store.

McAvoy isn’t really sure how he feels about the assignment yet. He has enjoyed today, in a peculiar way. Liked asking questions and building up a picture. He has heard of detectives who hear the voices of the dead as they search for justice in their name. McAvoy does not. He simply feels pity for the fallen. Mourns the waste of life. What drives him is a need to know. He believes in justice, of a sort. He is finding it hard to think in the same way about the events of 1966. In this case, half a century has elapsed. Peter Coles’s loved ones are dead. Those who do remember him will not thank the home secretary for tearing open old scars. McAvoy wonders if it would not be best simply to e-mail Pharaoh’s contact and ask them exactly what they would like his report to say. He won’t do it, of course.

Did Peter Coles kill these people? It certainly seems so. Is there enough evidence to secure a conviction? He isn’t sure. There are witness statements aplenty, but in many cases, the people who gave them are no longer alive to be cross-examined in the witness box. If he were to put together a watertight case he could hand over to the Home Office it would do his reputation and prospects no harm. He should spend his time doing what he has been asked to, and simply check the facts for oddities and anomalies that would be embarrassing if put before the court. And yet, he feels a compulsion. Feels a familiar disquiet. He has a picture in his mind of the young Peter Coles. Has a vision of that place, with its bodies and its corpses between the graves. Something about the two pictures seems awry when placed together. Could Peter truly have taken the time to reload? To kill two family members and then stalk the others? Why did they not fight back? What order did they die in? And why the hell did he do it?

McAvoy blows air through his nose and rubs a hand across his face. He flicks a key on the laptop and opens up an Internet browser. He’s becoming quite familiar with the history of Holderness. Spent a good hour reading about its notable people and places. Has taken a virtual tour around the inside of St. Patrick’s Church and seen for himself why it is held in such royal regard. Has read about the RAF base in Patrington and the men who were based there. It was built during the Second World War, when the coastline was of strategic importance. For a decade, it served as a radar station and base for ground-controlled interception. In 1955 it moved to nearby Holmpton. Its former servicemen still return to Patrington for celebrations and anniversaries. To coincide with one recent get-together, the
East Riding Mail
published a special “Bygones” supplement about wartime in Holderness. It revealed just how important the area was to Churchill’s war effort. Told of the network of bunkers and hideouts that would have been used by a special local militia in the event of German invasion. McAvoy had read the story twice and been amazed at the units’ sophistication, complexity, and secrecy. They were known as Auxiliary Units and were dreamed up in 1940 by a Colonel Colin Gubbins. These highly secretive units were trained in all aspects of guerrilla warfare. They were taught to kill and disappear. To make and detonate bombs. And they were made up of local men handpicked from the Home Guard. Of farmers, butchers, and bakers. Of men too old to fight on the front line. They signed the Official Secrets Act and trained for a battle they would never fight. McAvoy wonders whether his grandfather knew about their existence. There was an Auxiliary Unit in the Western Highlands. How the hell did people manage to keep secrets like that? These days, anybody asked to dig a secret bunker for the government would be updating their Facebook status on their smartphones before their shovel even bit the dirt.

McAvoy checks the time on the corner of the laptop screen. Looks at his phone. Gives a sigh. He hates people being unpunctual, even if he always manages to make good excuses for them in his head. Starts counting backward from one hundred, just for something to do . . .

His phone rings. A foreign number, complete with a lot of zeros.

“Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy. Serious and Organized.”

“G’day, Sergeant. How you going?”

Vaughn Winn’s voice is chatty and very Australian. He’s in his late sixties now, but his words come out bright and sparky. His e-mail, too, had been amiable and light. He’d responded to McAvoy within half an hour. Promised to ring when he got out of his morning meeting and had a bit of time to himself. Apologized for the time difference and asked if it was okay.

“I’m very grateful for your returning my call, Mr. Winn. As I explained, we’re—”

“It’s just Vaughn, mate. Mr. Winn was my dad.”

McAvoy stops. Doesn’t quite know what to say.

“You there, mate? Is this line all right?”

McAvoy starts again. Outlines what he is doing. Promises to get some answers for the family. Can’t guarantee a conviction but hopes the older man realizes how seriously Humberside Police take murder, even after all these years.

When McAvoy stops talking, there is no reply at the other end of the line.

“You reckon it’s worth it?” asks Vaughn eventually. “After all these years? They’ve talked about this in the past, mate. Never came to nothing. And people’s memories get hazy after a few years. I mean, I appreciate it and all, but I reckon you’ve got the shitty end of the stick.”

McAvoy chews on his lower lip. He had been hoping Vaughn would give him some encouragement. Tell him he is doing the right thing.

“Well, as I said, we are only doing some preliminary work to gauge the likelihood of securing a conviction against Peter Coles . . .”

“But he’s locked up already, isn’t he? I mean, why move him from one cell to another? What would be the point?”

McAvoy watches the channel marker move slightly on the water. Watches a crooked smile of moonlight ripple on the surface. Wonders how to make a meaningful argument when you don’t agree with your own opinions.

“We have no idea what the outcome of these investigations will be, sir. I contacted you out of courtesy, and I personally believe it’s important for justice to be seen to be done. He killed four people, sir. Perhaps he should be sentenced for it.”

Vaughn makes a musing sound, as though mulling it over. McAvoy can almost hear him shrugging.

“You got new evidence, or something? New techniques?”

“No, sir. We believe the initial investigation was handled effectively. I’m just double-checking the case that would have been brought against Peter Coles had he not been declared insane.”

Vaughn clears his throat noisily. In the background, McAvoy can hear the squawking of some unpleasant-sounding bird. Tries to get a picture of where the other man may be sitting or standing. He knows that Vaughn owns several properties in Queensland. Has his main residence at a little place called Noosa Heads, an hour or two from Brisbane. McAvoy has found a handful of images of him online. He’s a good-looking older guy with a full head of hair that turns up at the front in a luxurious quiff. His skin is tanned and his teeth a bright white. In each of the images, he looks fit and healthy: all linen suits, deck shoes, and designer sunglasses. He’s made a respectable living since moving to Australia in the wake of his family’s death. Opened a business transforming unused or substandard grain from the area’s giant breweries into animal feed. Won some big contracts and eventually supplied half the coast. Mixed up some special batches for the equestrian community and won an endorsement from a national show-jumping star. Made a mint and put his cash into houses and good causes. Sends money home to Holderness whenever a charity needs a boost. He seems a good man. A hard worker. Single and childless, according to what McAvoy found, but seemingly happy enough.

“Daft Pete was always a nutter, mate. Long before that night. You know we were mates, don’t you? Well, near as dammit, anyways. I knew him pretty well, and he always had a screw loose.”

“Did you ever fear for your family’s safety?” asks McAvoy, sensing an opportunity to hear the words that would make him feel better.

“Nah, he was just a bit of a nuisance,” says Vaughn conversationally. “Never grew up, I suppose. Liked to play in the woods and shoot rabbits and talk about racing drivers and look at mucky books. I didn’t think there was any harm in him. My brother was a bit younger than him and a lot cleverer than me, and he’d mentioned a few times that he thought Daft Pete had what people nowadays call a personality disorder. Maybe he did. I just know that when I heard they had been killed, Daft Pete wasn’t the first name I thought of.”