David Mark - The Dark Winter

He knows he shouldn’t promise that he will stay in touch. That he will find out what happened. Knows he shouldn’t give her his home phone number and tell her to call if she has any more information. Any questions. Just to talk.

But he does.

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.