Dead Pretty: The 5th DS McAvoy Novel (DS Aector McAvoy) (8 page)

‘He’s back, is he? Oh goody.’

‘Yes and no. He’s currently at the beck and call of DSU Pharaoh and her sergeant. I’m pleased we got this one and not the other. Young girl, so I’m told.’

Helen chews on her thumbnail and wonders, for a moment, what kind of case her old unit has landed. She curses Shaz Archer for requesting her transfer to the Drugs Squad, and for a moment, she once again questions the cold bitch’s motivations. Shakes away her suspicions.

‘Poor cow,’ says Helen automatically. ‘Is he okay? Actually, sorry, forget that, just tell me your initial thoughts.’

Reardon pauses for a moment, probably about to give his usual warning that nothing he is going to say should be considered fact and that she would be better served waiting for the complete report. Then he gives an audible shrug. He knows there’s no way Helen will leave it at that.

‘If the body in question is indeed Raymond O’Neill, we can say with certainty that he suffered a great deal before his death. He was tied up, gagged and beaten. It’s hard to say at this stage but some degree of care has been taken to preserve the body. We’ll have to analyse the organic material but from the lividity it certainly seems he’s been there for several months and if that is the case, I’d have expected us to be fighting bluebottles and scooping him up with a spoon. It was professionally done. That’s all I can tell you until we get things properly processed. I will email yourself and DCI Archer as soon as I have more, but it may not be till the early hours.’

‘I’ll probably be awake,’ Helen says absently.

‘I heard you were now a mum,’ says Reardon, emotionlessly. ‘Good sleeper? Happy to be back?’

Helen realises the questions are automatic and not really in search of an answer. She makes some vague responses then thanks him for his time, ends the call and turns back to Vicki.

‘It was definitely O’Neill, then?’ asks Vicki, nodding slightly. ‘And he was killed?’

‘Seems like it. They hurt him badly.’

Vicki digests this. Looks around, like a schoolgirl about to say a swear word.

‘He was a horrible man,’ she says, conspiratorially. ‘When he was freed after hurting that poor woman, even the real hard cases on the estate thought it was disgusting. He was a proper bastard.’

Helen considers her notes. She fills her mind with a mixture of memories and imaginings. Sees him. McAvoy. His sad eyes and scarred skin; an oak tree whose branches are both shadow and shield. She has a constant desire to impress him. Remembers the feeling that fizzed through her when he brought her flowers and some of his wife’s home-made remedies, and first took the baby in his colossal, broken hands.

Beautiful
, he had said, and her head had filled with images of Scottish kings and warrior poets and she had felt absurdly pleased that her child measured up.

The memory fragments as her phone beeps and the crime scene photos begin to fill up her inbox. She has to suppress a shudder as she opens the first image. Whoever killed Raymond O’Neill was no amateur. And they had clearly enjoyed their work.

Chapter 4

8.01 p.m.

The sky is darkening over Hull’s Old Town.

Blue lights, fluorescent coats and flickering tape are strobing and spinning at the entrance to Bowlalley Lane. This is the part of Hull that has barely changed in centuries. It’s all high buildings, old bricks, and cobbles like freshly baked loaves. A hundred yards away on Whitefriargate, men in blue shirts and girls in short dresses are drinking lager and clinking glasses and trying to pretend that the sunshine is going to come back. Their whispers join the car engines, the breaking bottles, the pleas for spare change, the pigeons rustling in the trees around Trinity Square and the echo of the bells of St Mary’s Church. They catch the breeze and rush down this man-made valley, echoing off the boarded-up offices and cut-price studio flats and soaking into the bones and bricks of this battle-scarred city.

The forensics van is parked halfway down, opposite the passageway that leads to the centuries-old drinking den Ye Olde White Harte.

On the other side of the narrow road an archway leads into a courtyard of overflowing dustbins and various kinds of grime. The paving slabs are greasy and the rubbish bags have spilled their contents down the back of the giant bins and into the gutters. Pizza boxes, empty lager cans and the insides of toilet rolls turn to mush beneath the blue-bagged feet of the police officers who mill around awaiting instructions.

The victim’s flat is upstairs. It’s a one-bedroomed mezzanine affair; the floor carpeted with discarded clothes, unopened letters and plates that look like an artist’s palette: blobs of red slowly scabbing over on their cheap white surfaces.

In the bathroom, the tenant stares up, sightlessly. There is vomit in her mouth and on her chin. The curved bruise on her throat reveals the horror of her final moments. She has been strangled between the porcelain rim and the plastic seat of her toilet. Somebody pressed the seat down on the back of her neck and didn’t let go until she had choked on her own puke. Then they lifted her arms and scalped her armpits, before emptying a full bottle of bleach onto her corpse.

She was an ‘alternative’ girl, in life. Tattoos, piercings and thick eye make-up. Petite. Maybe 5 foot, at a push. Her hair is shaved around her studded left ear and long and black everywhere else. She was wearing a little black vest and a pair of purple knickers when she died, showing off elaborate ink around her skinny thighs and sharp shoulder blades, which rise from her pale skin like shark’s fins. Her feet are dirty and her toenails need cutting. She has cheap string bracelets around her thin wrists. Her fingernails look expensive; pink and black with tiny diamante sparkles. There are calluses on her fingertips. The ring finger on her right hand is missing, sliced off below the second knuckle. There is a hole in the linoleum floor, among the blood and bleach, that seems to indicate where the digit was severed; a knife going through the skin and gristle and bone with one sharp, practised push.

‘Jesus,’ says Pharaoh. ‘That’s bloody horrible.’

She raises a hand to her face and takes a whiff of the blue plastic glove. It stinks like a condom but is a damn sight better than the stench of rotting flesh, blood and chemicals that has been trapped in this poxy little bathroom since a killer closed the door.

She turns back to McAvoy, who is hovering in the doorway and making the place look even smaller than it already is. He’s wearing the same white coveralls and blue plastic shoe-bags as everybody else, but somehow his make him look like a statue, while everybody else’s make them look like bewildered ghosts.

‘Are you coming in here?’ she asks, testily.

‘Is there room?’

‘Would I ask if there bloody wasn’t?’

McAvoy sidles back into the bathroom.

‘A good few days,’ says McAvoy as Pharaoh stands up and turns to face him.

Pharaoh feels like spitting. Her hair is still wet from the shower and her clothes smell of hastily applied perfume and the cigarettes she chain-smoked on the drive over. She’s never cried over a corpse before but she spotted a couple of uniforms with red eyes as she pulled up on the cobbles outside and pushed her way under the police tape and past the forensics officers and made her way to the great sad island of composure at the centre of it all; busy directing operations in his low Scottish grumble and apologising every time he stepped on somebody’s toes.

‘This is her place?’ asks Pharaoh. ‘We’re sure?’

McAvoy nods. ‘Ava Delaney. Twenty-one. Lived here five months. No computer or phone that we can find. Neighbour thinks she’s got family in Warwickshire but can’t be sure. Likes to play her music loud and there’s usually a smell of cannabis wafting around the flat entrance.’

Pharaoh looks at the corpse again. ‘Pretty one,’ she says, pursing her lips. ‘Fuck, I need air.’

The pair push back out into the tiny flat and into the corridor. McAvoy follows her down the stairs and out into the little courtyard, where she instantly unzips her coveralls and fishes out one of her black cigarettes.

‘Nice day off?’ asks Pharaoh, through a cloud of smoke. ‘Up until now, I mean? You take Roisin and the kids for a picnic . . . Sandwiches, lemonade, Hannah Kelly’s body . . .’

‘It’s not a day off when you’re on call,’ he says, bristling slightly. ‘And we weren’t looking for her body, that would be sick. It’s just somewhere nice.’

‘Don’t correct me,’ she says, kicking him on the shin and giving him a smile. ‘You’ve got your obsessions, I’ve got mine. Is Roisin cursing me?’

‘Not your fault,’ says McAvoy, looking at the pattern on the brickwork and refusing to meet her eye. ‘And it’s your day off, if you remember. Have you eaten properly? And have you made that appointment for your back? You can’t put it off, you need to take care of yourself.’

Pharaoh holds up a hand. Ash tumbles onto her biker jacket. She wipes it away, as far as the hem of her knee-length black dress.

‘Sophia went to a party last night,’ she says, with her eyes closed. ‘Boys galore. I only found out when I saw her in a picture on Facebook. I shouldn’t have been looking. Made a right tit of myself. She’s not talking to me.’

McAvoy plays with the zip of his coverall. Tugs at the patch of hair beneath his lower lip. He loves Pharaoh’s girls. They each contain something of her spirit. They’re strong and feisty, independent and fearless. They love his own children and think Roisin is the coolest grown-up on the planet. Roisin reckons they need a dad, and a good telling-off, but has no intention of volunteering her husband for either job.

‘She’s a good girl,’ he tells her, trying to find something helpful to say. ‘It’s just a phase. You’re a good mum. I can talk to Sophia, though I don’t know what good I’d be. Maybe Roisin—’

Pharaoh gives a bark of laughter. ‘Yeah, that would do my self-confidence a power of good. Christ, I’m a mess, Aector.’

McAvoy looks at her. He considers telling her she’s wrong. He’d love nothing more than to tell her she looks a million dollars and she’s everything from his hero to his best friend. He doesn’t. Just colours slightly and looks away. He looks at this horrible little courtyard and wonders at the lives of the people who call it home. Wonders if these are palaces and sanctuaries to some, and cells to others. Wonders when people stopped using the words ‘slum’ and ‘hovel’ and replaced them with words like ‘bijou’ and “compact”. Wonders if he’s being a snob. He never had money when he lived at home on the croft. Had no need for it when his stepdad sent him off to boarding school aged ten. He shared a squalid house in Edinburgh with a couple of fellow psychology students when he was briefly at university, had a room in the house of a copper’s widow when he was a young uniformed constable, and only got himself somewhere vaguely presentable when Roisin and Fin entered his life. He spent a whole summer living in a hotel room a couple of years ago, crying himself to sleep. He makes a mental note to keep those memories at the forefront of his thoughts. To remember the pain and isolation of living in a place made smaller by the weight of loneliness and the sense of having somehow failed.

‘Tell me about Ava,’ says Pharaoh, placing a hand on his arm. ‘Boyfriend?’

McAvoy looks at her hand. Stubby nails and a wedding ring. Short, plump fingers and a dozen bangles, disappearing into her jacket. Soft, tanned skin.

‘Ben has been chatting to her downstairs neighbour,’ he says, rubbing his face so he has an excuse to dislodge her arm. ‘Nice girl. Romanian. Antoaneta Osmochescu. Don’t ask me to repeat that, please. She speaks wonderful English. Works in a freight office at the docks. She’s been for a few coffees with Ava now and again. Apparently Ava wasn’t seeing anybody steady but Antoaneta has seen a few people come and go from the flat.’

McAvoy points in the direction of the front door, where a shapeless wraith in a white suit is dusting the grimy wood for prints while two uniformed constables start placing cigarette butts into clear plastic bags, neatly labelling each one and grumbling at the enormity of the task.

‘There’s no intercom, you see,’ he says. ‘Can’t buzz yourself up. So most people just give out the code to the door and people can let themselves in, if they’re expected. A lot of people seem to have had Ava’s code.’

Pharaoh makes a clicking noise with her tongue, as if mentally compiling a list of a thousand different things that are wrong with today’s world.

‘Work?’ she asks.

‘We found payslips from Rocky’s, the clothes shop in Princes’ Quay. We’ve put a call in to their manager but no answer yet. Probably enjoying the bank holiday.’

Pharaoh nods. She turns away, looking at the overflowing bins and the soggy cigarette butts; the damp brick and clogged, loose gutters. She seems about to speak when her phone vibrates. She grumbles a little and looks at the incoming message. Gives a puzzled sort of laugh then puts it away. For a moment, it looks as though a blush is rising in her cheeks, but she manages to suppress it.