Dead Pretty: The 5th DS McAvoy Novel (DS Aector McAvoy) (4 page)

‘So what’s the connection?’ asks Roisin, giving a little yawn.

‘I don’t know yet. Too many coincidences. Too many unanswered questions. I just can’t seem to get past it. I want to hear that she’s alive. I don’t believe that she is. I can feel her, Roisin. You know I’m not like that. I don’t hear voices or believe in clairvoyants. I’ve never read my horoscope. It’s not like that. It’s just . . .’

‘An obsession?’

He looks at his feet, chastened and ashamed.

Roisin changes her position and snuggles into his chest, poking a finger through the buttons of his shirt to tickle his hair. ‘She might be having the time of her life somewhere,’ she says. ‘You don’t have to think the worst.’

He reaches down and kisses the top of her head. Wishes he could convince himself that Hannah is just a missing girl and not a murder victim. It feels like when he was eleven – still trying to persuade himself of the existence of Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy and God.

They sit in silence for a while, only rousing themselves when Lilah wakes and uses Daddy’s leg to right herself and starts bumbling off down the slope to where her brother is running towards them, holding a branch as long as himself. From this distance, he’s a kilted Highlander, charging through the heather and the thistles with a claymore in his hand: a miniature of his father.

McAvoy is about to stand up and charge towards the boy, pretending to be an English invader dead set on having his innards sliced open by the noble Scotsman’s blade. He knows Fin will like that. Wishes only that the boy wasn’t spoiling the overall effect by wearing a Ross County football shirt and a pair of Bermuda shorts.

‘Your phone,’ says Roisin, nodding at his pocket as she hears it ring. ‘The work one.’

He answers with his name, rank and unit, briefly recalling the days when a call from work would set his heart racing with excitement. Here, now, he simply knows that something bad has happened and it is about to interrupt his day.

He nods into the phone. His eyes darken. The colour seems to leach from his skin. He looks up at the sky, at the blue overhead, and the grey to the east.

He takes his keys from his pocket and starts walking up the hill to the car.

Towards Hull.

And an appointment with another dead girl.

Chapter 2

The two men sit in the front seat of the unremarkable Ford Focus and stare at the convertible parked in the drive at the far end of this quiet, nondescript cul-de-sac on the outskirts of Grimsby.

Inside the sports car, a teenage girl and a curvy middle-aged woman are screaming at one another. The younger one looks like she is ready to do bloody violence. The older one looks tired. Like she’s been through a washing machine at too high a temperature. Wrung out, and sad.

Inside the Ford, the two men do not speak. They have exhausted their conversational resources and have learned to feel comfortable in one another’s silence. They could be father and son.

The older man smiles as the teenager and the old tart go at it like dogs fighting over a chicken leg. He hopes there will be hair-pulling. Perhaps a top ripped open and an exposed breast. They’ve had little to entertain them since they pulled up. They listened to the radio for a while but could only get local stations. They don’t give a damn about what’s happening locally. They’re a good way from home. Couldn’t care less if the whole east coast fell into the sea.

The teenage girl is getting out of the car now. Her face is flushed and there are tears on her cheeks. She looks like she slept in her clothes and her hair is a mess, but both men have fucked worse. They’ve fucked younger, too. This one’s maybe fifteen. A good deal older than the Eastern European girls that their boss keeps in the back room at his casino and whom they get to enjoy when they are being kept waiting and have read all the magazines in the foyer.

‘Nice to see,’ says the one called Teddy, as he sips from a bottle of Lucozade. ‘You’d have thought a copper’s kid would be less highly strung. Gives me hope. No better than the rest of us when you strip it all away.’

He passes the Lucozade across to the man called Foley, who shakes his head without taking his eyes off the scene before him. In his lap sits a wooden figurine. It’s carved from cherry wood and exquisitely beautiful. It is no more than the height of a chess piece but breathtaking in its detail. He picks it up and compares it with the older woman from the convertible. The similarity is obvious, though the figurine shows a sultriness that the reality does not currently live up to. The figurine is also unclothed, while the old strumpet in the sports car looks like she got dressed in the dark. Foley holds it up for closer examination and rubs the pendulous breasts. He’s pleased he took the box. He hadn’t been able to resist. It had been left on the doorstep by a good-looking man with designer stubble and a flat cap. There was no note. No name. Foley had wanted it. Foley had taken it. And now it belongs to Foley.

‘Copper kids are probably more fucked up than the rest of us,’ he says, moodily. ‘Can’t be easy, knowing what the people in authority are like when they’re at home. Must be terrifying. You grow up watching your mam or your dad fall over putting their socks on or reading a map the wrong way or picking up the ketchup by the top and spilling it all over the floor. You get to see them as a person – y’know, a real, crap specimen, like the rest of us. How are you supposed to believe they turn into a superhero when they leave the house? Must give you a few issues. Must make you almost want to rebel to see how they respond.’

Teddy considers his companion. He’s a skinny thing but there are muscles on him like a condom full of billiard balls. He’s maybe thirty. Younger than Teddy by a good twenty years but the pair have grown close since they were introduced to one another in the recreation room of Wormwood Scrubs and saw something in each other that they admired. Their relationship was a physical one, on the inside. Pragmatic, if not exactly tender. Since they’ve been out they have not spoken of what they did for comfort in the confines of the cell they shared. What happens in the Scrubs stays in the Scrubs. And besides, they have fucked enough girls between them, and together, to know in their hearts they aren’t gay.

‘You’re a philosopher,’ says Teddy, warmly. ‘Good head on your shoulders, when you’re not being a moaning little twat.’

Foley shrugs. He’s a moody soul. He muttered and grumbled about the heat in the car all through the drive up from London but has yet to remove his padded coat, hooded jumper or the jeans with elasticated ankles that he has forced into a pair of boots.

Teddy does not dress to impress. He doesn’t give a damn about style, or looking like a gangster. In his experience, it’s best to blend in. Teddy does this very well. He’s a bulky man, but with his receding hairline, double chin and unremarkable clothes, he rarely attracts attention. He’s wearing a pale shirt with market jeans and a pair of service-station sunglasses. He urged Foley to do the same, but the younger man had been convinced that the weather up north would be intolerable, and dressed for an Arctic winter.

‘Take the picture,’ says Foley, as the front door of the house slams and the older one with the dark hair starts punching the steering wheel. ‘Let him know we’re here.’

‘Will do,’ says Teddy, and snaps a couple of images with his mobile phone. He checks his messages. ‘Nothing new. We’re still to hang on until we hear more.’

Foley shakes his head, pissed off and bored. ‘Can’t we just do it now? We’re here. She’s just sitting there. And that lass had a decent rack on her. So does the mum. A scare, he said. Why wait?’

Teddy shrugs. He’s seen it all before. Has more patience than his young companion. Knows he’s on to a good thing. He puts ‘debt collector’ down on forms when he’s forced to explain his occupation. It’s a title that covers a multitude of sins.

‘He’s going to call her himself,’ says Teddy. ‘Explain things, and then we’ll see. She’s an important woman. Near enough to being the boss of CID. This has to be done right. Finesse, my young friend – that’s what we need here.’

Foley broods. Teddy knows he doesn’t like finesse. He likes hitting people over the head with a golf club and stamping on their faces until he can see the pavement through their eye sockets. But he’s getting paid well to employ restraint.

Foley lifts the Lucozade and takes a swig. Belches loudly. In response to Teddy’s pained look, he opens his window a crack.

‘You done a copper before?’ Foley asks, staring at a wasp crawling up the windscreen. He leans over and flicks on the wipers, cursing as the wasp flies away before it can be pulped.

‘Years ago,’ says Teddy, nostalgically. ‘Undercover he was. Can’t remember which prison it was in. May have been Durham. He was trying to get some pervert to open up to him and tell him where he’d left this kid’s body. Me and a lad called Fleetwood didn’t know he was a copper. We bunged the guards a fifty to let us have half an hour with one of the nonces. This poor bastard was the one who drew the short straw. He fought like a fucking tiger. Didn’t help him though. Not in the end.’

Foley nods appreciatively. Scratches at his groin, then slips his hand inside his jogging pants.

‘He get the other nonce to confess?’

‘Dunno, son,’ says Teddy. ‘He never came back from the hospital wing. I think he got a disability pension. Couldn’t be a copper after that. Say what you will about coppers, but one thing they all need is teeth.’

Foley considers this. He nods at the woman getting out of the convertible and leers at her ample backside – enjoying the spectacle even more as she seems to change her mind and artfully lowers herself back inside.

‘This poor bitch had better start looking for a new career, then.’

Teddy smiles affectionately at his partner. Looks at his phone and lets the anticipation build.

‘Oh yes,’ he says. ‘Oh yes indeed.’

Fat bitch, fat bitch, fat bitch 
. . .

It had almost been lost, under the slam of the door and the tinny sound of shit music bleeding from her headphones, but there had been no mistaking the mumbled insult as Sophia grabbed her bag (condoms, cigarettes, tampons, a bra and the perfectly sensible knickers she’d been wearing when she left) and stomped towards the front door of the unremarkable semi-detached house on the Scartho estate in Grimsby.

Detective Superintendent Trish Pharaoh sits for a moment in the driver’s seat of her sports car. Feels hot tears pricking at her eyes. She can’t decide whether she wants to run after her eldest daughter and slap her until she’s purple, or go and gorge herself on medicinal red wine and Maltesers.

Pharaoh sniffs. Sucks at her cheeks for a moment. Flips down the rear-view mirror and winces.

Fat bitch, fat bitch, fat bitch 
. . .

She’s forty-six. Dark-haired and curvy. 5 foot 4 inches when she takes her biker boots off. The darkness under her eyes looks like bruising and there is a fine spray of burst capillaries across her cheeks. She’s tried to tie her hair back but wispy strands have escaped from the ponytail and are curling up like tiny snakes around a forehead that looks like it has been grooved using a pizza-cutter. There is red in the cracks in her lips. Her eyebrows need plucking. She smells of tobacco and roll-on deodorant, of the clothes she slept in and which she has no intention of taking off today.

Pharaoh hates her reflection so intensely that she’s tempted to rip the mirror off and smash it. She resists. Can’t afford to have it repaired.

Slowly, she steps out of the vehicle and into the warm spring evening. There’s a twinge in the back of her left leg and the base of her spine. She turns to look at the car as she closes the door and sees herself staring back in the darkened glass. Sees the full effect. She wishes she’d put a bra on, that she were wearing something slimming, instead of the jogging pants and man’s shirt that she woke up in. Wishes she’d brushed her teeth or eaten a mint before she turned up at the big house near the airport and grabbed her eldest daughter by the hair. Trish could have played the thing a little more deftly. Could have been the cool mum she used to be, giving her little girl a wink as she waited for her to pack her things and disentangle herself from the sleeping bags and beer cans and pizza boxes. Could have told her she’d known all along that she wasn’t staying at her friend’s house and had in fact gone to a party with older boys. But she didn’t. She went in all guns blazing, stinking of last night’s booze, demanding to know if any of the slumbering lads had put their hands on her child. She might even have flashed her warrant card. She made damn sure she stepped on the bare thigh of some tattooed halfwit who dared to look up from the floor and tell her to chill. More than anything, she could have waited until she got into the car before screaming at Sophia that she was a dirty little scrubber who was going to be Aids tested as soon as the surgery opened in the morning.