As he sits waiting for a gap in the traffic, Allan Godber hits himself in the chest with the flat of his hand. He swallows hard, neck bulging like a bullfrog’s. He makes his hand into a fist and strikes himself in the ribcage. Manages half a belch. He screws up his face at the taste and spits like a baby trying solids for the first time. He reaches into the pocket of his jeans and finds a loose antacid tablet among the coins. He takes his eyes off the road for a moment, checks the chalky pill for any obvious fluff, then pops it in his mouth. He chews it up and swallows, wishing he had a glass of milk to chase it down with. Then the weight settles back on his chest.
During his last visit to his GP, Allan had been told he was suffering with gastro-oesophagal reflux disorder. It was a more satisfying title for the condition than the ‘heartburn’ that his wife had diagnosed him with. Allan also discovered that he more than
likely had something called a hiatus hernia as well. They won’t know until next month, when he goes to Castle Hill Hospital for an endoscopy. He’s not looking forward to the procedure. He still knows a lot of the staff at the hospital, and doesn’t want to know which of his mates will be knocking him out and sticking a tube down his gullet. He knows them too well to believe that they won’t take a liberty or two while he is unconscious. He imagines himself coming round from the procedure to find himself naked in a corridor with the name of his least favourite football team scrawled in permanent marker on his chest.
Allan misses his old job. Misses the camaraderie and his mates. He gave seventeen years to the Ambulance Service, but when the last voluntary redundancy scheme was announced he saw a chance to get out and retrain in something that didn’t involve quite so much blood, guts and night shifts. He’s been a driving instructor for four years now and doesn’t hate it. The money’s okay, he’s patient enough to tolerate the pupils, and he hasn’t had to pick up any body parts or restart someone’s heart in an age. The only downside is the rather sedentary nature of his job. He spends all day sitting down. He’s put on three stone since quitting the service, and the gastric problems are clearly linked to his increasing waistline. Still, he’s not a bad-looking guy. Despite being bigger than he was, he’s not noticeably fat and has most of his hair, which he keeps in a short and fashionable style. He wears T-shirts with the right logos and buys the kind of jeans that his two teenage sons don’t sneer at. He’s in okay condition, and smells of an aftershave that his female students have admired from time to time, while his prescription sunglasses carry the same designer emblem as his underpants. He looks like he’s doing alright, generally speaking, though he
does not see himself as any kind of catch or Romeo. It’s hard to woo women or charm your way into somebody’s pants when there’s a risk of you burping sick every thirty seconds.
Allan turns the car onto Park Avenue, his back to Pearson Park. On a hot, muggy day like this, the park will be full of foreigners playing football and students lying on towels, drinking bottles of pear cider and trying to feign interest in textbooks. Kids will be taking it in turns to laugh and cry in the swing park, grazing their knees on rocks, coming off the slide too quickly and spraining their ankles, bumping heads or falling from railings onto the woodchip floor. As a paramedic, he has been called to that park too many times to think of it fondly. He once had to pop a three-year-old girl’s shoulder back into place after she grabbed hold of a spinning roundabout. He’d tried to be as gentle as he could but she had still screamed. Her dad had still stood there crying in front of him and saying it hadn’t been his fault, it was just an accident, these things happen …
Allan burps again. Grimaces. Rubs his chest.
It’s been a normal morning. He’s given three hour-long lessons and navigated his way through the traffic from one side of the city to the other without messing up his schedule by more than a couple of minutes.
The car glides past the shabbily grand houses on the wide, tree-lined street. The Avenues is the Hull address that everybody wants if they choose to remain inside the city boundary and not head for the suburbs. The parking’s a bloody nightmare and a few too many of the three-storey dwellings have been converted into flats, but these are still mightily impressive homes and he is proud to call one his own. Allan lives on Ella Street, which is not, technically speaking, an Avenue. But it’s close enough for him to
share a postcode with those in the slightly larger properties that run parallel to his own.
There are no other vehicles around, but Allan indicates his intentions anyway. He checks his mirror and his blind spot, then slowly turns, in first gear, past a large detached house and into a row of lock-up garages. On foot, he is three minutes from home, and believes the lock-ups are well worth the tenner a week he pays by direct debit to a landlord he has never met. His car is his livelihood, and while there is on-street parking on Ella Street, there is also the occasional gang of on-street teenage wankers to worry about, and he can’t relax worrying that somebody will rip the wing-mirrors off or write ‘knobhead’ on his advertising boards.
Allan swallows again and gives another little shudder. He’s sick of tasting his own insides. He had always presumed that the condition was a result of stress, but his current job is considerably easier than the one he did for seventeen years. He has a pretty easy life. He only has another nine years to go on the mortgage, his children are doing okay at school, he gets a fortnight in Majorca every August and he doesn’t dislike his wife. They’ll still get away at Christmas too, having recently earned a minor windfall. The money they had been saving up to repoint the brickwork at the back of the house had turned out to be far more than was necessary, after Allan found a contractor who would do the job for next to nothing, cash in hand. If Liverpool would buy a decent centre forward and Cheryl Cole could be persuaded to send him a picture of her in her knickers, he would have everything he could ask for.
The row of garages is deserted, as ever. There are half a dozen on either side of the central area, all with rusty blue doors and
their numbers spray-painted freehand in their centre. Allan pulls up next to his own garage. He looks out and decides, once again, that the tenner a week is worth it. Sure, there are a few potholes in the tarmac and somebody has dumped a mattress on top of the industrial bin at the far end, but it’s nice to have a little space to call his own and where he knows the car is safe. Sometimes, when the kids have friends over and the noise is too much, he’ll come and sit here and read the paper, alone in the cool and the dark.
He steps out of the car, giving a grunt of exertion as he moves his right leg for the first time since he got in the vehicle at 8.30 a.m. He crosses the small patch of tarmac, pulling the garage key from his pocket. Puts it in the padlock and turns. Unhooks the padlock from the rusted metal loop. He raises the garage door, up and over, then reaches inside to pull the cord that brings the bare bulb on the far wall to life.
As he turns to head back to his vehicle, there is a movement in the periphery of his vision. A crunch of boot on broken stone. There is a moment in which he feels unbalanced, half-turning, feet in opposite directions, knee twisted, hands flailing. And then he feels a blow to the back of his head.
Allan pitches forward, into the empty garage. For a moment he wonders if the door has come down and struck him, but he cannot remember hearing the metallic clang. He wonders why he is considering this. Why here, now, he is giving it any thought at all.
There is another blow, and suddenly Allan is not thinking about much any more. He is on his face on a cement floor, smelling dust and diesel. Over the rushing of blood in his ears, he hears the distinctive grating of the garage doors closing. He
tries to right himself, but his limbs don’t seem to be responding to his commands. He feels fingers in his hair then hands upon his shoulders. Feels himself being turned over onto his back. His eyes flutter open, but then a fist closes around his short hair and his head is cracked back onto the floor. After that he keeps his eyes closed.
Allan feels as though he is swimming inside his own skin, oblivious and helpless. He feels his shirt being torn away, ripping from the buttons through the expensive logo. There is a pause. Nothing. No sound, no sensation, and then he feels a tightening of the skin on his chest. He wants to raise his head. Wants to see what is happening to him, but he can taste blood and his head feels too heavy and his body is not his own any more.
Suddenly, in the darkness, there is a voice. A robotic, inhuman thing. He cannot make out the words, but they seem familiar, somehow. He struggles up. Raises himself on his elbows. Sees a figure, crouching at his side, an open plastic box beside him. The figure is raising its arms, frustrated and angry. The metallic voice is calling for medical assistance.
Allan tries to speak, and the bubbling sounds that come from his lips cause the figure to raise its head. For an instant, the merest fraction of a second, Allan sees a familiar face. Sees features he knows, twisted into anger and madness.
Then words, bestial and screeching, echoing off the bare brick walls.
And the figure is upon him, the plastic box gripped in its hands, the weight and the cold and the tight sensation still upon Allan’s skin.
Allan looks up, and sees the figure raise the object over their heads. For a second, he sees an image from a movie, playing
in his mind. Sees an ape, holding a club in front of a blue sky, smashing a skull against uneven rocks.
The impact of the first blow breaks his nose and fills his eyes with blood.
After that, he is not really Allan any more.
It started raining as McAvoy crossed the Pennines, a sudden downpour hitting the glass a mile before the Lancashire border. He passed into the storm as if driving into a waterfall, watching in his rear-view mirror as Yorkshire’s green and brown slopes were abruptly snatched away.
The rain felt wonderful. It was good to open the window and let the droplets run in. He has baked in oppressive heat for weeks and the cool breeze and damp air had felt both cooling and healing as they touched his flesh and drenched his clothes. By the time he reached the Chester city limits, the novelty had worn off. The car was steaming up, he was shivering inside clothes soaked with both sweat and rain, and he had the beginnings of a headache from squinting through the wall of water at the brake lights of the car in front.
He rubs his temples. Kneads his forehead. Pinches the bridge of his nose. He looks like a Plasticine man trying to disguise his identity.
On the passenger seat, his mobile phone is barking out lefts and rights, and he is grateful for its help. With the windscreen made opaque by the deluge, he would have no chance of spotting
the road signs without the metallic tones of the satnav. He’s only been to Chester once before. Fin was still in a pushchair and he and Roisin had thought he might like to see the elephants at the impressive city zoo. The boy had slept the entire time. Roisin and McAvoy had enjoyed it just the same. They’d had a picnic in the bat cave and gone home owning one more okapi than they did when they woke up. Roisin had fallen in love with the curious striped creature, half-giraffe, half-zebra. She’d felt compelled to adopt one, and still receives monthly updates on its well-being. All in all, it had been a nice day.
‘In 100 yards, turn left …’
The row of shops is a jumble of damp colours and swirled shapes. He glimpses a convenience store and a takeaway then turns the car abruptly into a quiet side road. He cruises past a school at less than 5 mph, nosing the people-carrier over a speed bump, then turns right twice more and finds himself edging down a quiet street of semi-detached homes. It’s early afternoon, so most of the homeowners are at work, their empty driveways and unlit front rooms testament to the emptiness of each property. McAvoy squints and makes out a house number on the brick wall by a white-painted front door. Consults his notes and follows the curving road another hundred yards. He pulls in outside number 17 and leans across the passenger seat, opening the electric window as he does so. He stares through the rain at Lewis Caneva’s home.
It’s an unremarkable property. Three bedrooms, a small front garden screened by tall green trees, and a boxy Fiat on the brick drive.
Craning his neck he sees a face appear at the downstairs window.
Sees peach curtains moved by a timid hand.
Sees the bone-white of Lewis Caneva’s skin.
McAvoy puts the window back up and switches the engine off. He looks at his phone, half-expecting there to be a message. There is none. Everybody back at the station is too bloody busy, fighting fires or trawling databases. Nielsen and Daniells have spent the weekend going goggle-eyed in front of computer screens, trying to come up with a list of anybody and everybody who had some involvement the night Sebastien Hoyer-Wood went through the window. They have managed to track down all the witnesses who gave a statement to the uniformed officers at the scene, and at McAvoy’s suggestion, persuaded the Ambulance Service to give them the names of the paramedics who saved Hoyer-Wood’s life. One is now living abroad and the other is a driving instructor in Hull. Daniells is trying to get in touch with him and two uniforms have been sent to his house, but so far he’s off the grid. Were Pharaoh around she would no doubt be able to rustle up some extra resources, but Pharaoh is still locked away in a meeting room with ACC Everett, the Police Federation rep and Adam Downey’s slick lawyer, trying to thrash out how best to play the case in the wake of Colin Ray’s decision to beat the shit out of his client.
Downey is still in Hull Royal Infirmary and the legal situation is a mess. He has already been charged, but without a bail hearing he is in a state of limbo. It’s likely that before the end of the day, magistrates will be instructed to give him bail, allowing him to walk free as soon as his injuries are healed. Where that leaves the case against him is anybody’s guess. Pharaoh is trying to persuade Everett they should go ahead with the prosecution of Downey. Even Colin Ray has told them he is willing to take his
punishment rather than let the little bastard go free. But Everett is unsure. He can see the headlines. He knows that Downey’s legal team will tell the court all about what one of his senior officers did to him in the cells.