Dead Pretty: The 5th DS McAvoy Novel (DS Aector McAvoy) (20 page)

‘You’re working on the Old Town murder?’ asks Helen, in a rush. ‘I only know what I heard on the news. Twenty, was she? Poor thing.’

‘We’ll get somebody for it,’ says McAvoy, with certainty. ‘There’s a peculiarity. Possibly a signature.’

Helen studies her sergeant. He looks tired. There are flecks of grey in his beard. Tiny red lightning flashes in his eyes.

‘Go on,’ says Helen, curious.

‘The armpits have been removed,’ says McAvoy, quietly, looking at his cuffs. ‘Cut off.’

Helen pulls a face. ‘Sick bastard.’

‘We’re waiting for the post-mortem. A lot of material to be gone through. She must have let him in. He seems to have choked her with the toilet seat. Crushed her windpipe.’

‘Fucking hell,’ says Helen, then registers his distaste. ‘Sorry, Sarge.’

She chews on her lip. Screws up her eyes. Goes through all the little rituals of thinking.

‘Hannah Kelly?’

McAvoy nods. ‘There may be a connection, of sorts. I don’t know. It’s just a whisper in my head at the moment. Some similarity.’ He considers her quizzically. ‘Can I ask you something?’

Helen nods, pleased to be of use.

‘If you were meeting somebody for a romantic assignation, would you shave under your arms?’

Helen laughs before she can stop herself. Sees the colour bloom in McAvoy’s cheeks. She knows how difficult such a question must have been for him.

‘Sometimes ladies don’t have a shave before they meet somebody so they won’t be tempted to jump into bed with them,’ says Helen, pushing the laptop away so she can’t see her reflection as she says it. ‘It’s a way of controlling yourself. If you don’t want to spoil things by having sex straight away, then you give yourself a reason not to be seen in the nude.’

McAvoy nods thoughtfully, as if the same thought had occurred to him.

‘Hannah had hairy armpits, according to one witness,’ he says quietly. ‘Ava’s were chopped off. Is that a connection, or am I just swatting at nothing?’

‘I don’t know much about the case,’ says Helen. ‘Was it a political thing? Was she a feminist? Some people don’t shave as a statement. Some people just don’t bother because they can’t see the point. Not everybody hates it. Very popular in the Mediterranean, I’m told. I knew a bloke once who actually preferred it when I didn’t shave . . .’

McAvoy coughs and puts his arms down on the table a little too heavily, causing a teaspoon to rattle in the saucer of Helen’s cold cup of tea. She pulls a face at him.

‘You did ask.’

McAvoy manages a smile in return. ‘It’s a hard question to bring up in interviews,’ he says, holding her gaze. ‘I’ll have to ask her friends about it again. Her parents. You’ll be able to toast muffins on my face by the time I’m through.’

‘Can somebody else not ask?’

‘Hannah’s my responsibility,’ says McAvoy, and saying it out loud seems to add a weight to his shoulders. He sags a little. ‘You should be in Grimsby, shouldn’t you? Is this just a social call or was there something you wanted me for? Roisin would love to babysit if you need her to.’

Helen shakes her head. Pulls the laptop back towards herself.

‘I wanted your opinion,’ she says, as matter-of-factly as she can. ‘The boss’s too. Is she around? I figured not. Getting a bollocking at Clough Road, is she?’

McAvoy nods; his face flooding with disappointment and outrage on behalf of Trish Pharaoh. ‘More dramas over Reuben Hollow,’ he says, and it seems to pain him to say the name.

‘I saw him on TV,’ says Helen cautiously. ‘He even said she did her job properly and shouldn’t be blamed. That’s like a football manager getting a vote of confidence from the chairman – you know they’ll be for the chop within a week.’

‘He’s a saint,’ says McAvoy, with a flicker of something that Helen has not seen before. ‘What was it you wanted my opinion on?’

Helen takes a breath. Checks the clock and decides that she should do this quickly, efficiently and without embellishment. Hopes that McAvoy trusts her enough to let her finish.

‘Raymond O’Neill,’ she says, typing quickly. ‘Found in a former stash house with tied wrists, an irritant in his eyes and injuries to his skull consistent with having his head beaten off the floor. He was every type of bastard. Got away virtually untouched after a violent assault. Was laughing at us, at the system. He was hurt professionally.’

McAvoy nods, waiting for more.

‘This is a crime scene from Ipswich,’ says Helen, spinning the screen to show her sergeant. ‘Dennis Ball. Body found in an industrial skip behind an electrical store. Bruising to the throat and a smashed kneecap but again with an irritant to the eyes. And here.’ She pulls up another image on the screen. ‘Bruce Corden. Found dead in south London in November the year before last. It looked like he’d slipped on ice coming down the steps outside his house. Huge amount of damage to the base of the skull. But the post-mortem found a patch of hair missing from the front of his scalp that suggested he may have had his head smashed against the stone steps. Coroner recorded an open verdict.’

‘Irritant in the eyes?’

‘No, but it did match the other criteria.’

‘What other criteria?’

‘He had recently been given what many considered a rather lenient sentence for drink driving. Knocked a local woman off her bike while three times over the limit. Drove off and left her dead in the road. Spent some time on remand so when it got to court, he was sentenced to time already served and allowed to walk free. The victim’s family gave an interview to the local paper talking about justice and how they had been robbed. He didn’t even show any remorse, they reckoned. Stood in the dock smug as you like. Grinned at them when the judge said he could go.’

‘The other case. Dennis Ball. He’d been inside?’

‘Nothing recent,’ says Helen, grimacing. ‘No actual court case. But his son was up for arson and witness intimidation about a month before Ball was found dead. Ball had a record long as your arm and it seems his son was a chip off the old bollock. The judge even said so when Ball Junior got sent down. I’ve spoken to the investigating officer and he reckons it was an open secret that everything Ball Junior did, he did on his dad’s orders. They just couldn’t find anybody willing to say so in court. They had forensics on the boy, so they charged him. His dad still put the word out that if he went down, half the estate he ran was going to go up in smoke. Real nasty piece of work. Was done for rape when he was seventeen and doesn’t seem to have changed his attitude to women much since then. The DCI I spoke to said that Ball sexually assaulted one of his officers when she tried to arrest him over some stolen goods he had in his house. Ended up being his word against hers because her partner didn’t actually see the assault. You’d think he’d have backed her up, eh?’

McAvoy says nothing. Helen takes a deep breath and pushes on.

‘This from the Turkish police,’ she says. ‘Paul Dean. Forty-six. Found dead at the bottom of his empty swimming pool two summers ago. He’s a Brit. Ran a restaurant in Sheffield; owned a holiday house in a place called Kalkan. No record and no negative press. But he was found with irritants in his eyes. The Turkish authorities filed it as an accident – reckoned he’d got something in them and drunkenly fallen into the pool.’

‘And why do we doubt that?’

‘Because of this,’ says Helen, and presses play on the video clip on her screen. It shows a short, snappily dressed man with a shaved head and pointed features. He’s in his mid-forties. He’s sitting at the end of a long bar in a quiet, modern pub. There are several empty glasses in front of him. The image is black and white and there is no sound but McAvoy watches, his chest beginning to constrict, as the man starts dropping his empty glasses onto the floor. A barmaid, dressed in black, appears and begins waving her hands. The man lunges forward and grabs her. Smashes her face onto the bar. Glasses break and fall. He pushes her away. Her hands fly to her face and come away bloody. A second figure appears and drags the first man away. A bar stool topples. The video cuts to black.

‘Paul Dean,’ says Helen. ‘The victim was an eighteen-year-old. Jessica Heaney. That was in a bar in County Wicklow, Ireland. He’d been drinking all day. She refused to serve him and he went batshit. She needed microsurgery for the cuts to her face. Will have scars for the rest of her life.’

‘He was arrested?’

‘Went to his holiday home with his boyfriend. It took the Garda weeks to identify him from the footage. He’d been over to Ireland on a golfing holiday. By the time they got a name, he’d had his accident in the pool. The footage of his attack on the barmaid was posted onto his Facebook page. They didn’t want anybody grieving for him.’

‘Who posted it?’

‘Victim’s sister. She lives over here. Goes to the University of Hull, the Scarborough campus.’

‘You’ve spoken to her?’

‘I thought I’d see what you thought before going any further.’

McAvoy plays the video again. His nose wrinkles as he watches the violence.

‘Has DCI Archer been made aware of this?’ he asks cautiously.

‘She’s got O’Neill’s death down as drugs related and nothing’s going to change that.’

‘You believe somebody is targeting bullies,’ says McAvoy, thinking aloud. ‘Are we talking a vigilante?’

Helen shrugs, not certain. ‘I know it’s thin. I know I may have found connections because I was looking for them and saw what I wanted to. There’s a good enough reason to kill anybody, you know that.’

McAvoy rubs at his forehead. Breathes hard through his mouth.

‘There was a hit and run at Wawne,’ says McAvoy. ‘He was a bully too. And he was the boyfriend of our murder victim from the Old Town.’

Helen raises her eyes, unsure if the connection is relevant, or merely interesting.

‘It wouldn’t do any harm to talk to some of the victims’ families,’ muses McAvoy. ‘The families of the people who were hurt, I mean. Not everybody is able to leave it to the courts. People have their own ideas of justice. Hogg hurt something that mattered to Hannah but I don’t know who she would ask to beat him half to death in revenge. I don’t think that kind of viciousness is in her.’

‘It’s in everybody, Sarge.’

‘I don’t believe that.’

Helen sighs, exasperated with him. She casts around for the right words to describe the victims of a killer who may not exist. ‘These men all seem like they deserved pain,’ she says. ‘If anybody deserves pain, it’s men like this.’

McAvoy looks at her. ‘We don’t think that way. We can’t. Everybody does things wrong. We can’t deserve death as a consequence.’

Helen finishes her crisps and considers her companion. He has seen people die. Has found bodies and saved lives. He carries guilt and self-doubt as constant companions. He lives to try and make the world a little nicer for the people he loves. She wants to be like him but knows the price he pays for holding his emotions so close. She has never seen him let go. Not even when she was in the hospital, having saved the life of his wife and child. Even then, his tears were held inside. She fears he will break one day and wonders what he will become when the tears flood out. She wishes he were able to free himself of the barbed wire of conscience that he has wrapped in and around himself. Helen has suffered at the hands of bad men, and she feels no remorse for being glad that somebody is serving up a different kind of sentence. She will still try and catch whoever is doing it, but she will not grieve for those they have killed.

‘Look for connections,’ says McAvoy. ‘Do it quietly. Don’t boot down any doors. I’ll clear it with the boss when she’s back. Call me at home tonight and let me know what you’ve found. If there’s enough to take things forward, the boss will bring it under the unit’s purview. The Wawne link will be enough to sell it to the brass.’

Helen looks doubtful. ‘You think she’ll come through this unscathed?’

McAvoy looks momentarily displeased, like a schoolteacher who has seen a favourite pupil put an apostrophe in the wrong place.

‘She’s the boss,’ he says. ‘She’s done nothing wrong. We won’t catch anybody without her.’

Helen looks at him again. Sees in him a desperate desire to do good and a terrible fear of getting things wrong. He needs Pharaoh to remain an unsullied icon, somebody to look up to and impress. He needs Roisin to be his symbol for goodness and wonder, and his boss to be an example of how to behave. McAvoy is not an overly religious man, but Helen suddenly feels that he thinks of the two women in his life the way Christians think about favoured saints. They are his channel to something greater.