David Mark - The Dark Winter

She stops him with a smile that makes her look suddenly pretty. Somehow vital and colourful. ‘There’s no need for that now.’ She frowns. ‘I’m sorry, what was your name?’

‘Detective Sergeant McAvoy.’

‘No, your real name.’

McAvoy screws up his face. ‘Aector,’ he says. ‘Hector, to the English. Not that there’s much difference in how you say it. It’s the spelling that matters.’

‘Heads will be rolling for this, won’t they?’ she asks suddenly, as if remembering why this man is standing, in stockinged feet, in her kitchen. ‘I mean, we didn’t want him to go, but he said they would take care of him. He must have been planning it from the moment they got in touch with him. I mean, we knew the tragedy had affected him, deep down, but it still came as a surprise. I didn’t expect them to find him, but …’

McAvoy frowns and, without thinking about it, pulls one of the chairs from under the table and sits down. He is suddenly intrigued by Mrs Stein-Collinson. By her brother, the dead rocker. By the lady from the TV and the Norwegian tanker that plucked the inflatable from the grey sea.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Stein-Collinson, but I’m only familiar with the vaguest of details about this case. Would you perhaps be able to clarify the nature of the tragedy that your brother was party to …’

Mrs Stein-Collinson lets out a sigh, refills her glass and comes across to the table, where she removes a pile of laundry from a chair and sits down opposite McAvoy.

‘If you’re not from around here, you won’t have heard of the Yarborough ,’ she says softly. ‘It was the fourth trawler. The one that went down last. Three others went down in 1968. So many lives. So many good lads. The papers were full of it. Catching on to what we already knew. It was bleeding dangerous work.’

She picks a pen from a pile of paperwork and holds it like a cigarette. Her gaze settles on the middle distance, and McAvoy suddenly sees the East Hull girl in this middle-class lady of a certain age. Sees a youngster raised in a fishing family, brought up amid the smog of smokehouses and the stink of unwashed overalls. Barbara Stein. Babs to her mates. Married well and got herself a pad in the country. Never really settled. Never felt comfortable. Had to stay close enough to Hull to be able to phone her mam.

‘Please,’ he says softly, and there is suddenly no affectation or falsehood in his voice. He will tell himself later that it is presumptuous, but in this moment, he feels he knows her. ‘Carry on.’

‘By the time the Yarborough went down the papers had had a bellyful of it. We all had. It didn’t make the front page. Not until later. Eighteen men and boys, pulled down by ice and wind and tides seventy miles off Iceland.’ She shakes her head. Takes a drink. ‘But our Fred was the one who survived. Worst storm in a century and Fred walked out of it. Managed to get himself into a lifeboat and woke up in the back of beyond. Three days before we heard from him. So I suppose that’s why I’m not crying now, you see? I got him back. Sarah, his wife. She got him back. Papers tried their damnedest to get him to talk about it. He wouldn’t have a bit of it. Didn’t want to answer any questions. He’s only a couple of years older than me and we were always close, though we knocked lumps out of each other as bairns. It was me that took the phone call to say he was alive. The British consul in Iceland hadn’t been able to get Sarah so he called our house. I thought it were a joke at first. Then Fred came on the line. Said hello, clear as day, like he was just in the next room.’ Her face lights up as she speaks, as if she is reliving that moment. McAvoy notices her eyes dart to the telephone on the wall by the cooker.

‘I can’t even imagine it,’ he says. He is not serving her an idle platitude. He truly cannot imagine how it would feel to lose one that he loved, and then to have them restored.

‘So, we got him back. The hubbub died down soon after. Sarah asked him to give up the sea and he agreed. I don’t think he took much persuading. Took a job at the docks. Worked there for nigh-on thirty years. Retired with a bad chest. Every once in a while he’d get a phone call from a writer or a journalist asking him for his story, but he’d always say no. Then when Sarah died, I think he got a glimpse of his own mortality. They only had one daughter, and she upped and left when she was a teenager. He suddenly had itchy feet. I honestly think if somebody had been willing to take him on he’d have gone back to trawling, though there’s none of that these days.’

She begins to stand, but a pain in her knee makes her reconsider. McAvoy, without being asked, returns to the work-surface and grabs the wine bottle. He refills her glass, and she says thank you without a word passing between them.

‘Anyway, not so long back he rings me up, telling me this TV company’s been in touch with him. That they’re doing a documentary on the Black Winter. That he’s going out with them on this cargo ship to lay a wreath and say goodbye to his old mates. Of course it was completely out of the blue. I’d barely thought about all that in years, and I think to him it had just become a story. He said once he felt like it had happened to somebody else. But I suppose he must have kept it all inside. For him to go and do this.’ Her bottom lip trembles and she pulls a tissue from her sleeve.

‘Perhaps they were paying him for his story?’

‘Oh, I’d say that’s guaranteed,’ she says, suddenly smiling and giving the photo-wall a quick glance. ‘He always knew how to make money, our Fred. Knew how to spend it too, mind. That’s trawling for you, though. A month away grafting then three days home. A wodge in your pocket and a few hours to spend it. The three-day millionaires, they called them.’

‘So that was the last you heard?’

‘From him, yes. We got a phone call from the woman at the TV company three days ago. We must have been listed as his emergency contacts. Said he’d disappeared. That one of the lifeboats was missing and that Fred had got himself a bit upset talking about it all. That they were looking for him. That she’d keep us informed. That was the end of it. All seems bloody silly to me. After all those years. To end up dead in the sea, just like his mates.’ She stops and looks at him, her blue eyes suddenly intense and probing. ‘It sounds awful, Hector, but why didn’t he just take pills? Why do all this song and dance? Do you think he felt guilty? Wanted to go like his mates from ’sixty-eight? That’s what the telly lady seemed to be hinting at, but it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing he’d do. He’d do it quiet. No fuss. He liked to tell a story and spin a yarn and charm a lady, but he wouldn’t even talk to the papers when all this happened, so why would he want a dramatic bloody exit now?’

‘Perhaps that’s why he agreed to be filmed? Because they would be passing the area where the trawler went down?’

She breathes out, and the sigh seems to come from deep within her. It is as though she is deflating. ‘Perhaps,’ she says, and drains her drink.

‘I’m terribly sorry, Mrs Stein-Collinson.’

She nods. Smiles. ‘Barbara.’

He extends a hand, which she takes with a cold, soft palm.

‘So what happens next?’ she asks. ‘Like I said, I don’t think he’s been taken care of particularly well. He’s an old man, and they let him wander off and do this! I’ve got plenty of questions …’

McAvoy finds himself nodding. He has questions of his own. There is something scratching weakly at the inside of his skull. He wants to know more. Wants it to make sense. Wants to be able to tell this nice lady why her brother died, forty years after he should have done, in the exact way that nearly claimed him as a young man.