Sorrow Bound
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Quercus Editions Ltd
55 Baker Street
7th Floor, South Block
London
W1U 8EW
Copyright © 2014 by David Mark
The moral right of David Mark to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78206 313 1 (HB)
ISBN 978 1 78206 314 8 (TPB)
ISBN 978 1 78206 315 5 (EBOOK)
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
You can find this and many other great books at:
www.quercusbooks.co.uk
Also by David Mark
Dark Winter
Original Skin
For my children, George and Elora.
I hope you never stop being seriously frigging odd.
Oft have I heard that grief softens the mind,
And makes it fearful and degenerate;
Think therefore on revenge and cease to weep.
Henry VI
, Part 2, 4.4.1–3
ROLOGUE
Keep going, keep going, it’s only pain, just breathe and run, breathe, and fucking run!
He skids. Slips on blood and ice. Tumbles into the snow and hears the sound of paper tearing. Feels the flap of burned skin that was hanging, sail-like, across his chest, being torn away on unforgiving stone.
His scream is an inhuman thing; primal, untamed.
Get up, run, run …
Sobbing, he bites into the fat of his hand. Tastes his own roasted flesh. Spits blood and skin and bile. Petrol. Somebody else’s hair.
Not like this. Not now …
He tries to pull himself upright, but his naked, frozen toes fail to respond to his commands. He thrusts his ruined hands into the snow and pushes his body up, but slips again and feels his head hit the pavement.
Stay awake. Stay alive
.
His vision is blurring. From nowhere, he finds himself remembering the television in his old student flat – the way the picture disappeared down a dwindling circle of colour in
the centre of the screen, creating a miniature whirlpool of swirling patterns and pictures. That is what he sees now, his whole world diminishing. His senses, his understanding, are turning in a shrinking kaleidoscope of crimsons and darks.
Half-undone, almost broken, he raises his head and looks back at the grisly path his feet have punched in the snow. Miniature ink-bombs of blue-black blood, scattered haphazardly among ragged craters.
‘There! There he is! Stop him. Stop!’
The voices force him upright, boost his vision, his perception, and for a blessed moment he gathers himself and takes in his surroundings. Looks up at the Victorian terraces with their big front windows and bare hanging baskets: their ‘vacancies’ signs and joyless rainbows of unlit coloured bulbs.
His own voice: ‘Bitch, bitch.’
He realises he can hear the sea; a crackle of static and sliding stones, slapping onto the mud and sand beyond the harbour wall.
And suddenly he is adrift in a symphony of senses.
Sounds.
Scents.
Flavours.
He smells the salt and vinegar of the chip shop; the stale ale of a pub cellar. Hears the scream of gulls and the wet kisses of rotting timbers knocking against one another as bobbing fishing boats softly collide. Doors opening. Sash windows sliding up. Glasses on varnished wood. Faintly, the triumphant song of a slot machine as it pays out. A cheer. The rattle of coins …
Up. Run!
He has taken no more than a dozen steps when his strength
leaves him. He slides onto his belly. Feels the snow become a blanket. Deliriously, tries to pull it around himself. To make a pillow of the kerb.
Running feet. Voices.
Up. Up!
A hand around his throat, hauling him to his feet. An impact to the side of his head. Perhaps a fist, perhaps a knee.
‘Bastard. Bastard!’
His teeth slam together: the impact a blade biting into wood.
Stars and mud, snow and cloud, boots and fists and the kerb against his skull, again, again, again …
He is drifting into the tunnel of shapes, now. Disappearing. Everything is getting smaller. Darker.
All over. All gone …
The snow so soft. The dark so welcoming.
Fresh hands upon him. Hands, not fists. Soft. Firm, but tender. Flesh on flesh.
A face, looming over him.
‘Look what you’ve done to him.’
A moment’s clarity, before the black ocean pulls him under …
‘Let him die. Please, let him fucking die.’
1
Monday morning. 9.16 a.m.
A small and airless room above the health centre on Cottingham Road.
Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy, uncomfortable and ridiculous on a plastic school chair, knees halfway up to his ears.
‘Aector?’
He notices that his left leg is jiggling up and down.
Damn!
The shrink must have seen it too. He decides to keep jiggling it, so she doesn’t read anything into his decision to stop.
He catches her eye.
Looks away.
Stops jiggling his leg.
‘Aector, I’m not trying to trick you. You don’t need to second-guess yourself all the time.’
McAvoy nods, and feels a fresh bead of sweat run down the back of his shirt collar. It’s too hot in here. The walls, with their Elastoplast-coloured wallpaper, seem to be perspiring, and the painted-shut windows are misting up.
She’s talking again.
Words, words, words …
‘I have apologised, haven’t I? About the room? I tried to get another one but there’s nothing available. I think if we gave that window a good shove we could get it open, but then you have the sound of the road to contend with.’
McAvoy raises his hands to tell her not to worry, though in truth, he is so hot and uncomfortable, he’s considering diving head-first through the glass. McAvoy was dripping before he even walked through the door. For two weeks it has felt as though a great wet dog has been lying on the city, but it is a heatwave that has brought no blue skies. Instead, Hull has sweated beneath heavens the colour of damp concrete. It is weather that frays tempers, induces lethargy, and makes life an ongoing torture for big, flame-haired men like Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy, who has felt damp, cross and self-conscious for days. It’s a feverish heat; a pestilent, buzzing cloak. To McAvoy, even walking a few steps feels like fighting through laundry lines of damp linen. Everybody agrees that the city needs a good storm to clear the air, but lightning has yet to split the sky.
‘I thought you had enjoyed the last session. You seemed to warm up as we went along.’ She looks at her notes. ‘We were talking about your father …’
McAvoy closes his eyes. He doesn’t want to appear rude, so bites his tongue. As far as he can recall, he hadn’t been talking about his father at all. She had.
‘Okay, how about we try something a bit less personal? Your career, perhaps? Your ambitions?’
McAvoy looks longingly at the window. The scene it frames could be a photograph. The leaves and branches of the rowan tree are lifeless, unmoving, blocking out the view of the university across the busy road, but he can picture it in his imagination
clearly enough. Can see the female students with their bare midriffs and tiny denim shorts; their knee socks and backcombed hair. He closes his eyes, and sees nothing but victims. They will hit the beer gardens this afternoon. They will drink more than they should. They will catch the eye and, emboldened by alcohol, some will smile and flirt and revel in the sensation of exposed skin. They will make mistakes. There will be confusion and heat and desire and fear. By morning, detectives will be investigating assaults. Maybe a stabbing. Parents will be grieving and innocence will be lost.
He shakes it away. Curses himself. Hears Roisin’s voice, as always, telling him to stop being silly and just enjoy the sunshine. Pictures her, bikini-clad and feet bare, soaking up the heat as she basks, uncaring, on their small patch of brown front lawn.
Had he been asked a question? Oh, yeah …
‘I’m not being evasive,’ he says, at last. ‘I know for some people there are real benefits to what you do. I studied some psychology at university. I admire your profession immensely. I’m just not sure what I can tell you that will be of any benefit to either of us. I don’t bottle things up. I talk to my wife. I have outlets for my dark feelings, as you call them. I’m okay. I wish my brain didn’t do some things and I’m grateful it does others. I’m pretty normal, really.’
The psychologist puts her head on one side, like a Labrador delicately broaching the subject of a walk.
‘Aector, these sessions are for whatever you want them to be. I’ve told you this. If you want to discuss police work, you can. If you want to talk about things in your personal life, that’s fine too. I want to help. If you sit here in silence, that’s what I have to put in my report.’
McAvoy drops his head and stares at the carpet for a moment. He’s bone-tired. The hot weather has made his baby daughter irritable and she is refusing to sleep anywhere other than on Daddy. He spent last night in a deckchair in the back yard, wrapped in a blanket and holding her little body against his chest, her fingers gripping the collar of his rugby shirt as she grizzled and sniffled in her sleep.
‘The rowan tree,’ says McAvoy, suddenly, and points at the window. ‘They used to plant them in churchyards to keep away witches. Did you know that? I did a project on trees when I was eight.
Sorbus aucuparia
, it’s called, in Latin. I know the names of about twenty different trees in Latin. Don’t know why they stayed in my mind but they did. Don’t really know why I’m telling you this, to be honest. It just came to me. I suppose it’s nice to be able to say something without worrying that people will think I’m being a smart-arse.’
The psychologist steeples her fingers. ‘But you’re not worried about that at this moment? That’s interesting in itself …’
McAvoy sighs, exasperated at being analysed by anybody other than himself. He knows what makes him tick. He doesn’t want to be deconstructed in case the pieces don’t fit back together.
‘Aector? Look, is there somewhere else you would rather be?’
He looks up at the psychologist. Sabine Keane, she’s called. McAvoy reckons she’s divorced. She wears no ring but would be unlikely to have been saddled with a rhyming name from birth. She’s in her early forties and very slim, with longish hair tied back in a mess of straw and grey strands. She’s dressed for the hot weather, in sandals, linen skirt and a plain black T-shirt that exposes arms that sag a little underneath. She wears no make-up and there is a blob of something that may be jam halfway up
her right arm. She has one of those sing-song, storytelling voices that are intended to comfort, but often grate. McAvoy has nothing against her and would love to be able to tell her something worthwhile, but is struggling to see the point of these sessions. He’s grateful that she learned to pronounce his name the Celtic way, and she has a friendly enough smile, but there are doors in his head he doesn’t want to unlock. It doesn’t help that they got off to such an inauspicious start. On his way to the first session, he had witnessed her involvement in a minor incident of cycle rage. It’s hard to believe in somebody’s power to heal your soul when you have seen them pedalling furiously down a bus lane and screaming obscenities at a Volvo.