Original Skin (10 page)

McAvoy struggles to put it into words. Cannot explain why, from the outset, he has felt such unease.

“Writes?” asks Tressider.

“There’s something about his death that troubles me,” he says, and he feels sweat prickling on his forehead. Can picture two men standing by the River Hull in the pouring rain. Can see the phone sitting on the mud. Can see himself slithering down the dock wall to pick up the device that has led him here. Wonders what the fuck he was thinking and how badly this will end.

“Follow your gut, my boy,” says Tressider, and he appears to lose interest. “You can’t go wrong if you do that. Anyway, it’s been a pleasure. Mrs. Pharaoh, I look forward to our next meeting, and, Aector—did I get that right?—I’m delighted to hear you’re unharmed. Do keep me posted.”

He turns away. Gathers up Davey the way a tornado snatches cattle, and bangs out of the door like a benign storm.

“I’m thinking about hurting you,” says Pharaoh eventually. “I’m not going to do it, but there will be a part of me this afternoon that will regret not punching you in the head, I hope you realize that.”

McAvoy looks down. Keeps quiet.

“Were you going to tell me?” she asks.

“There was nothing to tell. Not really.”

She gives a frustrated sigh. “Like we’re not busy enough.”

“I can do it on my own time.”

“You haven’t got any time, Aector. You’re up to your eyes in drug dealers and babies. It was only yesterday that bugger told us he wanted violent crime stats down inside a quarter. And now you want to turn a suicide into a murder investigation?”

“It just needs a bit of a dig, guv . . .”

Pharaoh throws her hands up. Looks at the closed door, as if Tressider were still there. She shrugs. Appears to reach a decision.

“Fuck it. I’m only on peripherals. And the boss said to follow your gut. Give it a dig. And if you balls-up the crime statistics, it was all Colin Ray’s fault. Deal?”

McAvoy smiles.

“Deal.”

•   •   •

THE ELEMENTS
have made Hull a city of gargoyles. McAvoy has never seen so many faces locked in grimaces. Attractive office workers snarl into the driving wind. Shoppers popping to Marks & Spencer to pick up their evening microwave meal gurn angrily at the rain. The entire Old Town seems to be wincing.

It is just gone lunchtime. Whitefriargate, here on the periphery of the city center’s nucleus, should be bustling with shoppers. Instead, the weather has forced everybody indoors. McAvoy has the broad, attractive shopping street to himself. He’s one of the few people who bother to look up. Lets his eyes roam past the first floor and enjoys the architecture: the handsome old mercantile palaces that lead down to the Museums Quarter and the waterfront. Enjoys the ornate frontage of the bank on the corner of Parliament Street. Lets himself daydream a little. To imagine this street when Hull was living its best days rather than remembering them.

He’s glad he walked. Likes to feel the city beneath his feet. Wishes the destination were farther away.

The files from the Simon Appleyard case have not yet been electronically input, and the paper copies are still at the Coroner’s Court. He is enjoying the walk. Looking forward to an hour or two in a quiet room, immersing himself in the final moments of a prematurely ended life.

His booted feet leave large prints on cobbles that seem to have been dyed the color of varnished clay by the incessant rain.

The smell of spit-roast chicken assails him from the butcher’s shop. He realizes he has not eaten since yesterday. Makes a mental note to admit this to Roisin when he gets home, so as not to be accused of hiding things from her, and then wonders if it would be kinder to conceal it so she does not feel pressurized into making him something as soon as he walks in. Wonders if she will think that he is trying to make her feel guilty. Whether it would not just be easier to tell her that last night they went to the dance class so he could find out why somebody had buried a mobile phone.

He wonders if this is how other people feel. Wishes, just once, he had a clue how to live.

He continues to salsa in his mind as he makes his way to the attractively named Land of Green Ginger. The little side street is home to two pubs, a legal office, a beauty salon, and a courtroom, though not all of these facilities are mentioned by the leasing agents who try to flog the seemingly endless apartment developments springing up in this part of the Old Town.

He prepares his speech in his head. Wonders if they could help him. Just needs a quick favor. McAvoy knows a couple of the ladies at the Coroner’s Court and feels instantly embarrassed when he acknowledges that they will probably cooperate for no other reason than they like him.

He can feel the wind and rain doing him good. Breathes deeply. Enjoys the scent of distant sea spray and motor oil. Inhales the greasy aromas of the butcher’s, the sandwich shops. Sucks in a lungful of the ever-present cloud of cigarette smoke that hangs outside the dark blue door of the amusements as the punters spend their slot-machine winnings on tobacco and five-for-a-pound lighters.

He wonders if he loves this city or wishes it dead.

The phone in his inside pocket rings and he ducks into the doorway of a trendy new clothes shop to take the call.

“DS McAvoy, Serious and Organized.”

“Sergeant Arthurs, Silly and Slapdash.”

McAvoy moves to one side to allow two teenage girls access to the shop. Despite the weather, they have bare legs beneath short, pleated skirts, and their hooded jumpers are soaked through. He wants to know whether they should be in school. Whether they are okay. How old they are. What they want. Whether they’re safe . . .

“Thanks for calling me back, Sergeant,” he says, forcing himself to turn his eyes back to the street. “It’s about an incident you attended last November.”

“Yep, you said in your message,” Arthurs says brightly. McAvoy has not met the uniformed officer, but from his voice fancies he is in early middle age and almost certainly a dad.

“Simon Appleyard.”

“I’m sorry, can you give me a little more . . .”

“The hanging at Springfield Court. You attended.”

“Oh, right,” says Sergeant Arthurs, recollection dawning. “Yes, sad one, that. The landlord found him, I think. Inquest was just a few weeks back. Open verdict, wasn’t it?”

McAvoy nods, and realizes the other man cannot see it. “Yes,” he says. “What can you tell me?”

“Well, it’s not that exciting,” says the other policeman. “The landlord needed to get in to read the meter. Couldn’t get any answer. Let himself in, and there he was. Dead in the kitchen. Slumped forward on his knees. I think the rope was tied to a knife rack on the wall. He’d been there a few days. Me and Shelley Dalston attended. WPC Dalston. You know her?”

“No,” he says, not wanting to be sidetracked. “I’m on my way to look at your report right now, actually. Can you give me the abridged version?”

Sergeant Arthurs gives a little laugh. “The highlights? Well, he was naked, there’s a start for you. Oh, and he was covered in baby oil. Proper covered in the stuff. What else do you want to know? There was no note, I can tell you that much.”

McAvoy looks up at the sky. The clouds remind him of curbside snow; bulging and dirty white.

“What’s in the forensics report?”

“Well, the whole thing went up to CID after we did our bit, and they gave it about five minutes of their valuable time. When the inquest was coming up, I asked a couple of questions on what had come of it all. Pathologist said cause of death was strangulation. Earned her money that day, eh?”

Across the road, a smartly dressed man appears from the glass-fronted doorway of a legal office. He pushes open a large gold umbrella that almost knocks over a middle-aged woman who is struggling with something heavy in an Argos bag. McAvoy wills the man to apologize. To admit his mistake and help her. To be good. Watches the man walk away.

“Was there anything on his computer, do you know? Was it sent to the tech unit?”

“No computer as far as I can recall,” says Arthurs. “That’s almost a story in itself these days. I don’t think he had much in the way of family, though. I seem to recall he was into dancing, if that’s any good to you. What exactly is it you’re looking into?”

McAvoy had hoped the question would not be asked, but was prepared for it. “Another police service has been in touch,” he lies. “CID in Berkshire have got two apparent suicides. There’s a chance they were logging on to a website where people could share tips on how to bump yourself off.”

“And they think our lad might have done that? No, like I say, no laptop.”

“No phone?”

“Not that we could see. His next of kin lives a few miles away, so it was another force that broke the news. His auntie came to ID him. Lovely lady . . .”

“Did you ask her about his phone?”

There is a pause, as if the other man were thinking. “I’m not . . . oh, hang on, yes. Yes, when we picked her up she said she had been ringing him for the few days before he was found. Hadn’t picked up. Hadn’t even texted back . . . Yeah, I guess that means he must have had a phone.”

“Did you put that in your report? Did CID know that?”

“It will have been in my pocketbook, that’s for sure. But, no, I think I’d written up the incident report before I spoke to his auntie.”

McAvoy falls silent.

“The other lads gay as well, were they?” asks Sergeant Arthurs, his tone jocular.

“I’m sorry?”

“The other suicides. Gay as well?”

“How do you know he was gay?”

The man laughs. “I’m not being a twat, mate. He was gay, that’s all. You could kind of tell.”

McAvoy feels himself get hot inside his damp clothes. “And how does one ‘just tell’?”

“Well, I don’t know many straight lads with peacock feathers tattooed on their backs, do you?”

McAvoy is silent. Swallows. “Well, no.”

“Anyway, it said so in the paper, didn’t it? At the inquest.”

McAvoy scratches his head. Watches the lady with the heavy shopping readjust herself, leaning the burden on a metal post.

She puts her weight on a loose paving slab and dirty water splashes up her leg. Her face twitches. Tears begin to fall.

He asks his next question straight out. “You think it was suicide?”

Sergeant Arthurs blows out a noise that suggests deep thought. “I think so,” he says eventually. “I didn’t at first. Thought he was into that autoerotic stuff. Maybe a game went wrong. But, no, that was a lonely life. Was just a shabby existence. I think he bumped himself off.”

McAvoy thanks the other man for his time. Is about to hang up, already hoping the actual case file will be more useful.

“Oh, hang on,” says Arthurs. “There was one thing surprised me when I flicked through the file. There was no mention of the bruise.”

McAvoy stops. “What bruise?”

“On his back,” says Arthurs. “In among all the peacock feathers and the bloody baby oil.”

ELECTRIC FIRE,
lit to the third bar.

Glowing red: hot against his cheek.

No other light in this stuffy, airless room.

McAvoy, squinting, struggling to see the words he is scribbling in his notebook with a pen that tears holes in the damp pages.

“Do you think somebody killed him?”

The question comes from nowhere, and is asked in a voice that sounds like an inquiry into whether he would like another piece of cake.

McAvoy doesn’t raise his head. He doesn’t know what facial expression to pull. He does not know the answer. Does he think Simon Appleyard was killed? Her question forces him to consider his thoughts. He realizes he has been behaving as such from the start. Acknowledges that, in his heart, he already feels he is hunting a killer.

Wonders why.

He is a procedural, methodical detective, given to only occasional flashes of instinct and hunch. He has nothing on which to base his feeling that a life has been taken before its time.

“I think there are questions to be answered,” he says, and hopes she will leave it at that. He is habitually beset by feelings of guilt and uncertainty, unsure of who or how to be. Here, now, in this tiny two-bedroom terraced house with its unmowed front lawn and unfashionable wallpaper, its impersonal prints and halfhearted tidiness, he feels he does not deserve to be treated so warmly. He fears that he is, to all extents and purposes, trying to make her cry. He needs her to harbor fears and doubts. Wants her to tell him to dig and claw and kick until he gets her answers. Needs to feel that he is prying into her nephew’s death for more noble reasons than his own macabre curiosity.

He looks at her. Nods to show the tea is lovely, and commits her image to memory.

Carrie Ford was probably very pretty twenty years and five thousand cheeseburgers ago. Beneath a hefty layer of fat, McAvoy can make out what was once a willowy, elegant frame. Her green eyes and quick smile are anachronisms in a doughy, makeup-free face that sits atop a careless, dumpy frame.

She is dressed in her supermarket uniform. White polyester dress and green tabard, concealed beneath a plus-sized denim jacket. She looks her age. She looks as though six months of grief have carved a lifetime of wrinkles into her skin.

She had been on her way to work when he knocked on the frosted-glass door.

“Thought you were the taxi,” she says again, as she pours McAvoy a second cup of tea. Then, for the third time, “Work can wait, eh?”

She is a nice woman. She lives alone in this two-bedroom semi-detached, a short drive to work and ten minutes from where her nephew died bug-eyed and helpless on a blue cord carpet.

“That’s our Simon,” she says, waving in the direction of the mantelpiece.

There are half a dozen birthday cards obscuring photo frames and ornaments, and McAvoy cannot see whom she means. She crosses to the fireplace. Retrieves a picture in a cheap frame. Hands it to McAvoy with a smile.

“That’s from the class. Our class. The line dancing. See the smile on his face? That’s when he was happiest. Performing. Helping people learn. Getting other people excited.”

In the poor light, McAvoy has to angle the picture as though trying to cast a shadow on the ceiling with the glass. Squinting, he looks at the picture of the lean, dark-haired lad. He is smiling broadly for the camera and the image, though far from flattering, is a happy one. Simon’s fringe is damp with exertion and flopping over his eyes, and there is a sheen of sweat across his neck and chest where it slopes into a sleeveless sweatshirt, slashed provocatively at the collar. McAvoy angles the picture again. Sees his own face in the reflection. Hurriedly tilts it back.

“You had no indication?” he asks. “Never felt he was depressed?”

Mrs. Ford sits down on the high-backed armchair.

McAvoy, on the far corner of the matching two-seater sofa, wishes he had taken her up on her offer to hang up his coat. He is too hot, his damp clothes beginning to steam in the heat from the three-bar electric fire she had turned on instinctively as she led him into the tiny living room.

“He had his ups and downs,” she says, and looks at the picture in McAvoy’s hands. Wordlessly, he hands it over to her, and is touched by the tenderness with which she looks at the photograph.

“There was mention at the inquest of difficulties with his father. With his sexuality . . .”

Mrs. Ford pulls a face. Holds the photograph to her chest. “Only person who had difficulties with his sexuality was his dad,” she says. “My brother, before you ask. Always was an arsehole.”

“He didn’t have much to do with Simon as a child?”

“Neither of them did. Mum or Dad.”

“That can’t have been easy,” he says. “Nobody to talk to . . .”

Mrs. Ford waves her hands, dismissively. “Simon knew what he was from being a kid,” she says. “Never bothered him. He was outgoing, you know? Full of life. He never hid who or what he was. And his dad had no right to even comment.”

“But he did comment, yes?”

She sighs. Looks again at the birthday cards on the mantelpiece. “They’re from my class,” she says. “Line dancing. Not many left now. Not the same without Simon. He was the attraction, I know that. So funny. Would have been a great DJ. Was him that got the crowds in. They didn’t come to learn how to line dance.”

“I hear he was quite a dancer, too.”

“Simon could do anything,” she says, and her voice sounds far away.

“Everything I’ve heard about him suggests he was a lovely lad,” says McAvoy. Such lines often help.

“I raised him, you know,” she says, appearing to snap back into the present. “His mum wanted nothing to do with him, and his dad, well, he was bloody hopeless. He lived with me most of his childhood. Never had kids of my own. Never married, though don’t be thinking I’m some spinster. There have been fellas. Simon was the only constant thing in my life.”

McAvoy realizes he is talking to a woman who was all but a mother to the dead man. Tries to understand how that must feel.

“He grew up here?”

“No, love. I only moved in here a few years back. Always lived in Anlaby, though. Him and me have lived in nigh-on every flat in the village. Gypsies, I think we are, though we never move far . . .”

McAvoy sits back in the chair and lets her talk. Tries to craft a person from her memories.

“His dad would come back now and then,” she says scornfully. “He’d ring, when he remembered. Would sometimes send a few quid. But there was no closeness there. His dad wanted a lad he could take to the football and down to the pub. Simon wanted to dance and write poetry. It was awful, watching him realize that everything about him was grotesque in the eyes of his own father. He was thirteen the first time his dad called him a poof. Can you imagine?”

McAvoy closes his eyes. Takes a sip of his cold tea.

“At the inquest there was talk of some text messages? An argument with his dad?”

Mrs. Ford puts her hands together in her lap and her leg begins to jiggle. She is either nervous or trying not to let her emotions get the better of her.

“Who hasn’t done that? Who hasn’t had a couple of drinks and sent some text messages telling the world you’re pissed off? That’s life. It is these days, any road.”

McAvoy nods. “He texted a lot?”

“Fiend for it,” laughs Mrs. Ford. “Hundreds of them a day if you were daft enough to reply more than once. Him and Suzie almost starved themselves to death trying to get enough cash to buy one of those fancy phones. He was still saving when it happened. Silly lad. Should have spent it before he did it, don’t you think? Go out on a high.”

McAvoy makes a show of looking through his notebook. “Suzie?”

Mrs. Ford pinches the bridge of her nose, as if suddenly beset by sinus pain. She looks down at her name badge. Reads it, as if looking for proof of who she is.

“Thick as thieves, them two.” She smiles. “Wish I could tell you her last name. Awful, isn’t it, not knowing, but you don’t ask these days, do you? Lovely girl. Mad as a box of frogs, of course. The clothes! Looks like she’s in fancy dress half the time, but would do anything for my Simon. Inseparable, they were.” She stops. Appears to be struggling with something. “I don’t think they were bad influences on each other or anything. Just brought out the devil in each other. Suzie split up with her fella just before she and Simon became friends. Simon was a good listener. They had some silly idea for getting back at her ex. Made some silly mistakes. But they learned from them . . .”

McAvoy has had time for only the quickest of glances through the case file and has found no mention of any female friend. “School pal?”

“No, they met on a writing course,” she says, with a touch of pride. “That’s what he would have liked to do, I think. Be a writer. Or a poet, in a different time. He had such a lovely gift with words. Even when he was texting he’d try and make it sound pretty.”

Placing his teacup down on the floor beside the sofa, McAvoy leans forward. “Mrs. Ford, it doesn’t sound as though you think for a moment that he took his own life.”

She grimaces, and then breathes out a sigh that appears to have come from the heart. “What do any of us really know about anybody else?” she asks. “No, I wouldn’t have thought of Simon as being that sort of person. He didn’t smile all day like a clown, but he enjoyed enough of life to make the bad stuff okay. That’s what it’s about, isn’t it? Life.”

McAvoy looks away so he doesn’t have to answer.

“Mrs. Ford, I need to ask you about Simon’s personal life.”

“His sex life?” She smiles, warm and friendly. “We’ll both end up blushing.”

“He was promiscuous?”

“He was young.”

“He had a lot of sexual partners?”

“He enjoyed himself.”

McAvoy looks at his notebook. “Mrs. Ford, I need a little bit more. We have evidence that suggests Simon had made contact with a new sexual partner some time before he died.”

She shrugs. Looks at the photograph in her hands. “Sergeant, I was his auntie. More of a mum than his real one. We had fun together and giggled more than most, but he didn’t think to ring me every time some new bloke rolled off him.”

McAvoy instinctively pulls a face. She spots it. He tries to cover it up with a cough. Wants her to know it was her unnecessary crudeness and not the act that she described which caused him to shudder.

“So you didn’t meet any boyfriends?”

“I met ‘friends,’” she says, smoothing down nonexistent creases in her uniform. “Sometimes he’d get picked up from the church hall by a lad, or he’d tell me he’d been to see a play or for a drink or something and mention some bloke or other, but I didn’t like to pry.”

“You indicated he was promiscuous . . . ,” he says cautiously.

She sits forward in her chair. It appears she is about to stand up and put the photo back on the mantelpiece, but she seems to decide against it and stays where she is.

“It’s just things that Suzie and he said to each other,” she explains, waving a hand, vaguely. “Maybe they were teasing each other, I don’t know. They were like two kids. He’d make her blush, telling me to ask her what she’d been up to some night or another. She’d crack jokes about Simon being too worn out to give his all at some classes. Just the usual.” She glances at her watch. “He wasn’t shy, I know that much.”

McAvoy wonders if there is any more to be gained from this. Whether there ever was. He looks at his notes.

“He had tattoos, I’m told . . .”

“Oh, yes,” she says brightly. “Goodness, they were lovely. Got his first when he was just turned sixteen. Some lyric from a band he liked. Got a real taste for it after that.”

“I’m told his back was a work of art.”

She smiles. “He’d have loved to hear you say that. They were in a magazine, you know. An advert in that glossy mag. I saw it in a doctor’s waiting room, not long back. Simon would have been over the moon if he knew. I wasn’t sure about it when he told me. You not being from round here, you’ll not know, but peacock feathers are awful bad luck.”

“They are where I come from as well.”

“Really? I thought it was a Hull thing.”

“No, I think it’s the same everywhere.”

Mrs. Ford sticks out her lower lip as though mulling over whether this matters. Decides it doesn’t. “Either way, I wasn’t sure about them, but he was mad keen. He was going through his more, erm . . .” She searches for the word, before finishing with “flamboyant phase.”

“And this was?”

“Not more than a year ago. He and Suzie got their tattoos done the same day. They were both walking like they had sunburn for a few days afterward, but when he showed me, I thought it looked lovely.”

“Why peacock feathers?”

“It was something he’d read, I think,” she says, looking at her watch again with a sudden expression that suggests work might not be able to wait much longer. “Seemed to like peacocks for a while. It suited him. Just a phase, I suppose.”

McAvoy drums his fingers on his notepad. Taps his pen between his teeth. Wonders if he has learned anything. Turns his face away from the three-bar heater and presses the backs of his hands to his too-warm cheeks.

“Do you think somebody may have killed him?”