Dead Pretty: The 5th DS McAvoy Novel (DS Aector McAvoy) (46 page)

He’s surprised that the building is so palatial. He had expected a rubbish-strewn garden, rotten timbers and flaking paintwork. He figured, from the pervasive smells of ethnic food and the sound of video-games from the room above, that he was in a more broken-down neighbourhood than this.

Instead, he glimpses wrought-iron railings and sand-blasted brick. Snatches a look at a six-storey apartment building with a curved façade and neat balconies. He gets a glimpse of wealth and status.

‘In.
Ublyudok!
Get fucking in.’

He obeys the well-muscled European. He’s too weak to do anything else. His body doesn’t feel like his own. It hasn’t for a long time. His mind feels only loosely tethered to his own control; a kite, pulling and weaving on a frayed piece of string. He only half remembers himself. Recollections bubble up unbidden, gently breaking the surface of his consciousness like goldfish rising to feed. He has a memory of his second wife. She was Thai. They buried her in a bamboo casket and when the light shone on her coffin during the funeral, he could see the outline of her corpse. He half remembers a son. A lad who called him ‘Dad’ for a while and who asked if he would stay in touch if he and his mam ever split up. He doesn’t know whether he honoured his promise.

He slithers onto luxurious leather. Presses his face against cream calfskin. Recoils, wincing, in anticipation of pain, as he realises that the mucus and blood from his nose might mark the sumptuous interior of the vehicle.

A part of him tells him to do it again. A part of him tells him to take a shit, right here.

The engine turns over with a soft, expensive-sounding purr. He feels the vehicle move away. Catches sight of himself in the blacked-out windows.

There’s not much left of him, physically. He has a sensation that he has degenerated into something made of half-devoured food. His face is little more than a skull, covered with a meat that puts him in mind of gone-off ham. His remaining teeth protrude from gums of soft, over-ripe fruit. His eyes are olive stones, pushed into chunks of brie.

Through his own face, he sees the city beyond. Sees the wealth, the pleasure-craft that bob in the harbour and the Audis and Bentleys that sniff one another’s bumpers at the kerbside.

‘Head down.’

He obeys the accented voice. He can tell something is wrong. There is anger and fear in the voices of the two men in the front of the car. They have moved him before, but never so quickly. Never so openly. Never with such panic in their eyes.

He stares at his shoes. The leather is torn and blood has soaked into the uppers. His grey trousers are the colour of wine on stone.

A memory rises. A bearded man, wordy and arrogant, bleeding out in his arms . . .

Her. The blonde. His friend. Lying. Betraying him. Doing this . . .

The memory falters and fades. He doesn’t know if he wants to bring it back.

He listens to the muffled voices coming from the front of the car. Hears the two men. He recognises one of them and thinks he can pick up an accent.

‘Time for your medicine.’

He’s been craving it. He fought it for the first months. Clawed and spat and lashed out whenever they approached him with the needle. Now he needs it. Needs the ferocious numbness that courses through him when the needle sinks into his half-collapsed veins.

He feels the sting as the hypodermic enters his neck. Feels a rush of nausea and exhilaration that propels him upwards. Then he seems to strike a flat surface and feels himself spread out and puddle against something unyielding. And he is falling. Sinking into himself and insensibility.

The chemical that pulses through his body is called Krokodil: so named because of the effect it has upon the skin. Use leads to discolouration and then breakdown of the flesh, leaving the skin looking like a crocodile’s. It is an injectable drug, cooked up from codeine-based medication, iodine, paint thinner, lighter fuel and red phosphorus scraped from the strike pads on matchboxes. The result mimics the effect of heroin at a fraction of the cost. Wherever a user injects the drug, blood vessels burst and surrounding tissue dies, sometimes falling off the bone in chunks. The average life expectancy of a user is two to three years. His captors have been injecting Colin Ray for the last six months.

Colin Ray doesn’t notice when the van ploughs into the side of the expensive 4x4 in which he is being transported. He feels nothing as it flips onto its side and bounces, again and again, down the opulent street in south London where it had been idling at the lights.

He isn’t aware of being pulled from the wreckage or of the fingers pressed to his neck, searching for his faint pulse.

He won’t wake up until he is miles from here, stripped and washed and resting in clean sheets.

Nor will he recognise the amber eyes of the old, half-crippled man.

Here, now, he is too far within himself to know what happens next. Perhaps later, he will have flickers of memory; snatches of swirling picture and sound. But he will never truly remember.

Such oblivion is a mercy. He would not want to see. Would not want to watch the old man drag the three Headhunters from the vehicle and begin his work on the sparkling, glass-jewelled tarmac of this graveyard-quiet street.

The man’s weapon of choice is a cleaver; a rectangle of gleaming silver that reflects the cobwebbed beam of light that glares from the smashed headlamp.

Only one of the men has enough strength to put up much resistance, but he is quickly silenced. The handle of the cleaver thuds into his temple and his eyes roll back.

It takes the old man under a minute to complete his task. He has done this before.

A length of rubber tubing around the neck holds the blood in the bodies while he severs their throats and vertebrae. There is little mess until he releases the knots. Then the blood floods out, rushing onto the road to mingle with the black rainbow of petrol that sloshes from the crumpled vehicle.

He picks up the heads without ceremony. Two have hair, and he is able to hold them by their tresses in one hand. He has difficulty with the other; has to hold it like a bowling ball, with his fingers stuffed in nostrils and mouth.

He deposits his prizes in the boot of a nondescript car, parked just out of reach of the CCTV camera that monitors the road. Returns for Colin Ray and carries him like a bride. Places him in the back seat and climbs behind the steering wheel.

The man in the passenger seat does not need to ask if things went according to plan. He does not need to. The smudges of blood upon the older man’s hands are proof enough.

The vehicle pulls away from the kerb just as the first police patrol car arrives. Of its two occupants, both will require counselling after tonight and one will never return to policing.

Both will be forever known by their colleagues as the poor bastards who found
them
.

The trio of decapitated Headhunters.

Acknowledgements

I have lots of people to thank for helping this novel become, well, a novel. Prior to their intervention, it was just an idea, and ideas are vague, nebulous things that tend to float away.

So . . . Ruth. Thank you. Truly. You’re a joy to work with, a proper friend and you’re taking my brain places I always hoped it would go. Thanks for putting up with me.

Oli. As ever. Agent, friend and fearless devourer of banoffee pie.

Val. Peter J and Peter M. Stav. Steve. Mari. Anya. Danielle. Mark B. You’re inspirations, friends and dangerously attractive individuals.

On the research front, thanks to the people I can’t name. Thanks to the serving prisoners and the internet performers who were kind enough to share their experiences. Thanks to the gangsters who told me how best to make somebody talk. Your secrets are safe with me until the point that somebody does what you suggested . . .

Jessica G. Babs. Gemma, you fox. Rob, of course. I’m not an easy friend so thanks for sticking around. Danielle and the girls. You’re brilliant, and I say that as somebody who thinks most things are a bit shit.

Mam. Dad. Nana Milly. Nana Phyllis. This is all getting a bit like an Oscar speech but thanks for being largely useful and entirely weird.

Finally, Nikki. You’re the gnomon on my sundial, and I’m not going to tell you what that means. George, you’re my superstar. Elora, you’re the best thing I’ve ever created.

Apologies to anybody I’ve omitted. If it’s any consolation, you’ll note that I didn’t thank myself once, and I actually wrote the damn thing . . .

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If you have enjoyed
Dead Pretty
, be sure to check out the earlier McAvoy novels,
Dark Winter, Original Skin
,
Taking Pity
and
Sorrow Bound
, all available in print and e.

Turn the page for a thrilling extract from McAvoy’s first investigation…

DARK WINTER

Hull, northern England. Two weeks before

Christmas. Three bodies in the morgue.

The victims – each a sole survivor of a past tragedy

– killed in the manner they once cheated death.

Somebody is playing God. And it falls to

DS Aector McAvoy to stop their deadly game.

Prologue

The old man looks up, and for a moment it feels as though he is staring through the wrong end of a telescope. The reporter is forty years away.

‘Mr Stein?’

A warm, tender hand on his bony knee.

‘Can you share your memories of that moment?’

It takes a physical effort of will to drag himself into the present.

He blinks.

Tells himself, with an old man’s fear of losing his memories, to get it together.

You’re still here, he tells himself. Still living.

‘Mr Stein? Fred?’

You’re alive, he tells himself, again. The supertanker Carla. Seventy miles off the Icelandic coast. One last
interview, here in the galley, with its stink of fried food and burned coffee, its diesel and sea-spray; the deep, bass-note hum of unwashed men and wet wool.

So many memories . . .

He blinks again. It’s becoming a habit. There should be tears, he thinks. Deserves tears, this.

He sees her properly. Sitting forward on the hard-backed chair like a jockey on a horse. Holding the microphone in front of his face like she’s a toddler who wants him to lick her lolly.