McAvoy pulls his phone out of his inside pocket and replays the last voicemail. Even distorted as it is by the tinny loudspeaker, the anger in the woman’s voice is unmistakable.
‘McAvoy. Me again. How many times is this? I’ve got better things to do with my time than chase after you. We need you here. Get a fucking move on.’
The voice is Trish Pharaoh’s. The most recent message had been left only forty-five minutes after the first, but there had been six in between, including a mumbled, whispered heads-up from Ben Nielsen, suggesting that whatever McAvoy was doing, he should drop it immediately and head for Queen’s Gardens or risk losing important body parts.
There are a dozen reporters milling around the front of the station, but they pay him little heed and he makes it through the large double doors and into the lobby of the squat glass-and-brick building without being questioned.
‘Incident room?’ he asks, panting.
‘Pharaoh’s?’ asks the portly, pale-skinned desk sergeant. He is sitting on a swivel chair with a mug of coffee and a hardback book. Muscly and middle-aged, he carries the look of somebody who has worked the night shift for a long time, and isn’t going to let anything come between him and his routine. He is wearing a short-sleeved shirt which seems too tight at the collar, giving his large, round head a curiously disembodied look.
‘Indeed.’
‘Still setting up. Try Roper’s old office. Know the way?’
McAvoy locks eyes with the desk sergeant. Tries to work out whether there is an accusation in the way the man says it. Feels his blush begin.
‘I’m sure I can find it,’ he says, trying a smile.
‘I’m sure you fucking can,’ says the uniformed officer, and runs his tongue over his lips with the faintest of sneers.
McAvoy turns away. He has grown used to this. Grown used to contempt and venom, to distrust and outright loathing, among the cadre of officers who rode Doug Roper’s coat-tails.
Knows that if it weren’t for his size half of his colleagues would spit in his face.
He walks as quickly as dignity will allow until he is out of sight, then breaks into a semi-run. He takes the steps three at a time. Down another corridor. Pictures and posters and warnings and appeals whizzing past in a blur from noticeboards and unhealthy magnolia walls.
Voices. Shouts. Clatters. Bangs. Through double mahogany doors and into the lion’s den.
He is raising his hand to knock on the door when it suddenly swings inwards. Trish Pharaoh storms angrily out, deep in rushed conversation.
‘… high time they realised that, Ben.’
She’s a handsome woman in her early forties, and looks more like a cleaner than a senior detective. Barely regulation height, she’s plump, with long black hair that is expertly styled about once every six months, and left to grow wild the rest of the time. She has four children, and treats her officers with the same mix of tenderness, pride and aggressive disappointment as she does her offspring. Tactile and flirty, she scares the hell out of the younger male officers, to whom she exudes a certain best-mate’s-mum kind of sexiness. She wears a wedding ring, though the photos on her desk do not include a man’s picture.
She stops suddenly when she notices McAvoy, and DC Nielsen clatters into her back. She spins round and glares at him before turning to snarl at McAvoy.
‘The wanderer returns,’ she says.
‘Ma’am, I was in a radio black spot on a goodwill assignment from ACC Everett and-’
‘Shush.’
She places her finger to her own lips, and then holds her palms out in front of her, her eyes closed, as if counting to ten. The three of them stand in silence in the corridor for a moment. DC Nielsen and Sergeant McAvoy, naughty, clumsy, absentee schoolboys who’ve gravely disappointed a favourite teacher.
Eventually, she sighs. ‘Anyway, you’re here now. I’m sure you had your reasons. Ben will bring you up to speed and you can start working the database. It’s a bit late to get much done on the phones, but we need the congregation loading into that matrix you came up with. I’m right in thinking that it was for this kind of case, yes? Lots of witnesses. Disparate backgrounds? Links between-’
‘Yes, yes,’ says McAvoy, suddenly enthusiastic. ‘It’s like a Venn diagram. We find out everything about a certain group of people, then load that into the system and see where there are parallels, or, in particular, overlaps, and-’
‘Fascinating,’ she says with a bright smile. ‘Like I said, Ben can bring you up to speed and get your statement.’
‘Ma’am?’
‘You were a witness, McAvoy. You saw who did this. They hit you in the bloody face with the murder weapon. Quite what you and ACC Everett were thinking …’
‘I was following orders, ma’am.’
‘Well, follow mine. There’ll be a briefing at eight,’ she says, looking at her watch, then clip-clops down the corridor in heeled biker boots.
DC Nielsen raises an eyebrow at McAvoy. They both look like teenagers who’ve just got away with something, and there is an impish smile on both their faces as the junior officer steps back into the office and McAvoy follows him into the brightly lit room.
DCs Helen Tremberg and Sophie Kirkland are sitting side by side at the same desk, staring an open laptop computer. Sophie is eating a slice of pizza and using it to gesture at something on the screen. It is the only computer in the room. The rest of the office is empty, save for some spilled and battered old files, and a firing squad of assorted binbags, which look like they’ve been sitting there by the wall for months.
‘Given us the presidential suite,’ says Ben, leading McAvoy to a semi-circle of plastic chairs by the window.
‘Looks like it. Why here? Why not back at Priory?’
‘Convenience, they said. Order came down from on high. I think they were imagining headlines.’
‘Like what?’
‘Usual shit. Us being eight miles from the scene, when there’s a station three hundred yards from where it happened.’
‘But there’s facilities at Priory,’ says McAvoy, confused. ‘This can’t have been Pharaoh’s call.’
‘No, she thought it was bloody stupid as well. But she’s had to hit the ground running. By the time she got up to speed, the ACC had put out a press release saying this would be coordinated from our city-centre local policing team.’
‘So we’re running uphill?’ he asks.
‘In fucking treacle, Sarge.’
He sighs. Plonks himself down in the hardbacked chair. He looks at his watch.
‘What do we know?’
‘Right,’ says Nielsen, jabbing a finger on the page. ‘Daphne Cotton. Fifteen. Residing with Tamara and Paul Cotton at Fergus Grove, Hessle. Nice little place, Sarge. Off a main road. Terraced. Three-bedroomed. Big front garden and a back yard. You know the ones? Back to front houses near the cemetery?’
McAvoy nods. He and Roisin had been to view a house in the area when she was pregnant with Fin. Had decided against it. Too little parking and the kitchen was too small. Nice neighbourhood, though.
‘Brothers? Sisters?’
‘The family liaison is trying to get all that, but I don’t think so. Her parents are an older couple. White, obviously.’
McAvoy screws up his face. ‘What?’
‘She’s adopted, Sarge,’ says Nielsen quickly.
‘She could have been adopted by black people, Constable,’ he says softly.
Nielsen looks to the ceiling, as if considering this for the first time. ‘Yes,’ he concedes. ‘She could have been.’
They sit in silence for a moment, both brooding over the point. Behind them, they can hear the two female officers. Helen Tremberg is reading out names from a list of members of the congregation and Sophie Kirkland is dividing them up between CID officers.
‘She wasn’t, though,’ says Nielsen.
‘No,’ says McAvoy, and tells himself to just let some things go. To shut his mouth until he has a point worth making.
Nielsen leaves another respectful pause. Then, after a bright smile, ploughs on. ‘Anyway, as you can imagine, the parents are broken up. They weren’t there, you see. Normally, the mum goes to the service with Daphne, but she was planning some big Christmas shindig and was busy preparing the food. Dad was at work.’
‘On a Saturday? What does he do?’
‘They run a haulage firm, of sorts.’ He suddenly stops and shouts over at Helen Tremberg. ‘What is it the dad does, Hell’s Bells?’
Helen pushes herself back from the desk and walks over to where the two men are sitting. She gives McAvoy a smile. ‘Joining us, eh?’
McAvoy tries not to grin. He feels a sudden sensation of warmth towards her. Towards Ben, also. He doesn’t like to admit it, but he is feeling excited. Alive.
‘Logistics, is it?’ asks McAvoy, trying to keep his voice even.
‘According to their website, they take a lot of charity stuff to inaccessible locations. They have the contract for a lot of the different aid agencies. You know when you give your old jumpers and whatnot to the women with the binbags? Well, this is one of the companies that gets it to places where it’s needed. Some freight, sometimes container ships, sometimes air.’
‘Right,’ says McAvoy, making a note in his own pad. ‘Carry on.’
‘Well, long and the short of it is that this couple have a child of their own who died a few years ago. Leukaemia. Anyway, they adopted Daphne through an international agency when she was ten. They had a year of paperwork but it’s all above board. She’s from Sierra Leone, by birth. Lost her family in the genocide. Tragic stuff.’
McAvoy nods. He remembers little about the politics of the disagreement. Can only summon up hazy television footage of atrocities and brutality. Innocents, sprayed with bullets and chopped down with blades.
‘Is the machete significant?’ asks McAvoy. ‘That’s the weapon of choice out there, isn’t it?’
‘The boss asked the same thing,’ says Nielsen. ‘We’re looking into it.’
‘And are they are a church-going family? How did she become a server?’
‘Apparently she was that way inclined when she arrived. Her family were very religious. She had seen some horrors over there but it hadn’t put her off. Her mum, her new mum, took her to Holy Trinity just for a day out when she first arrived, and she thought it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. It became a big part of her life. Her mum says she’d never been so proud as the day she became an acolyte.’
McAvoy tries to get a mental picture of Daphne Cotton. Of a young girl, plucked from horror, decked out in a white robe and allowed to hold the candle during the honouring of her God.
‘Have we got a picture?’ he asks softly.
Helen jogs back to her desk and returns almost instantly with a colour photocopy of a family snap. It shows a smiling Daphne, sandwiched between her two short, plump, greying adoptive parents. The background shows Bridlington sea front. The skies are eerily and unusually blue. The image seems almost too glossy and perfect. McAvoy wonders who took the snap. Which poor passer-by captured the image that would come to define this tragic girl. McAvoy takes his own mental picture. Memorises the snap. Makes this smiling, happy girl his vision of Daphne Cotton. Superimposes it onto the bloodied, broken corpse. Makes her human. Makes her death the tragedy it needs to be.
‘So, she was a regular at church, yes?’
‘Three nights a week and twice on Sundays.’
‘Big commitment.’
‘Huge, but she was a clever girl. Never let it get in the way of her homework. She was a straightA student, according to her mum. We haven’t spoken to her teachers yet.’
‘Which school?’
‘Hessle High. Walking distance from home. She’s due to break up on Tuesday for the Christmas holidays.’
‘We need to speak to her friends. Her teachers. Everybody who knew her.’
‘That’s what Sophie and me are dividing up, Sarge,’ says Tremberg, pulling an appeasing face. It is as if she is trying to tell an ageing father not to worry — that it’s been taken care of.
‘Right, right,’ says McAvoy, trying to slow himself down. To restore order in his mind.
‘Shall we get your statement down, now, Sarge? Best get it out of the way. Tomorrow will be a nightmare.’
McAvoy nods. He knows that in reality, the only thing he is bringing to this investigation is a witness statement and a glorified filing system. But he’s got a foot in the door. A chance to do some good. To catch a killer. He lets his mind drift back to this afternoon. To the chaos and bloodshed in the square. To that moment when the masked man appeared from the doorway of the church, and looked into his eyes.
‘Is there anything distinctive, Sarge?’ asks Nielsen, although there is no real hope in his voice. ‘Anything you’d recognise again?’
McAvoy closes his eyes. Lets the masked face swim in his vision. Blocks out the cold, snow-filled air and the screams of the passers-by. Lets his memory focus in on one moment. One picture. One scene.
‘Yes,’ he says, with the sudden sense that the memory is important. ‘There were tears in his eyes.’
He stares into the blue irises of the mental image. Fancies he can see his own reflection on the wet lenses. His voice, when it emerges from his dry mouth, is but a breath.
‘Why were you crying? Who were you weeping for?’