As he crosses the car park and heads for the back door of the police station, he stops short. Somebody has called his name. He turns, and sees a woman standing by a beaten-up old Fiesta in the car park. She looks tired. More than that.
Warily, McAvoy crosses to where she stands.
‘Can I help you?’
He takes her in. Short, unnaturally red hair. Blackheads across her nose. Scarring to her hairline and below her ear. One of her teeth is markedly whiter than the others and clearly false. She’s wearing a plain, round-neck T-shirt and there are home-made iodine tattoos on arms that bear scars. She has lived, this woman. Lived almost unto death.
‘You’re McAvoy?’
He nods. Extends a hand. She looks at it, and seems to recoil.
‘I’m Ashleigh,’ she says. She opens her mouth to speak again, then closes it.
McAvoy waits, then gestures at the police station. ‘Would you like to come inside? We could get a coffee …’
‘You’re looking into the deaths, yes? Yvonne. Philippa. Allan.’
McAvoy stops speaking. Holds her gaze. ‘I’m on that team, yes.’
She nods. ‘You know about Hoyer-Wood, yeah? You know how they’re connected?’
McAvoy wants to get her inside. Doesn’t want this chat to take
place in a car park, with sweat on his clothes and the broken glass and dog shit of the city streets on his shoes.
‘We’re investigating several lines of enquiry. Could I ask you to come inside, Miss …’
She pulls a face. Waves a hand, telling him to be quiet. She takes a breath, and he can see her shoulders shake. ‘Is he doing it again? Is he well again?’
‘I’m sorry, could you explain …?’
She puts her hands in her hair and scratches her face, leaving white lines among the broken blood vessels and acne.
‘I think I know who’s doing this.’ She pauses, and her hand makes a tight fist. ‘He tried to do it to me.’
McAvoy freezes. Then he reaches out to take her elbow. She lets him do it. Turns her face to his and lets him look into her brown eyes. Then she speaks again.
‘That bastard raped me. That night in Bridlington when he nearly died. It was my bloke who nearly killed him. It was that night I got these scars. And whoever’s killing these poor sods wanted to start with me.’
11.40 a.m.: fifty feet away.
Helen Tremberg sits in the front seat of her blue Citroën and tries not to let the tears that fall from her eyes bleed into her voice.
She’s not touching the mobile phone to her ear, and she is holding it with the cuff of her blouse. It’s an unconscious thing. The phone is her own. She’s not trying to reduce the chances of leaving evidence. She just somehow doesn’t want her skin to be tainted by this phone call. She wants as little of herself as possible to be involved.
She speaks again. Wants to bite her tongue in half as she does so.
‘So, you can see why I thought you should be told.’
The young woman at the other end of the line sounds confused and afraid. Helen can’t blame her. She should be.
‘The other officer made it clear that I was really helping out by making a statement. I didn’t want to. I just wanted it to be over and done with. It was horrible, y’know? My dad warned me about setting up my own place but I thought nobody would want
to rob a place like this. And I didn’t go through the pockets. I don’t do that. I’m trying to run a professional business and …’
Helen lets her talk. Melanie Langley seems a nice girl. Helen finds it hard to imagine her kicking a robber in the bollocks. Reckons she has a friend she can rely on for that sort of thing.
‘The thing is, there have been some complications. Legal issues. I won’t bore you with the details, but the thing is,’ Helen tries not to stumble over her words, ‘Adam Downey has been released on bail. Obviously we are very keen to secure a conviction in this matter and I shouldn’t even be calling you but I feel I have a duty to your safety. Adam Downey is a very dangerous man with dangerous friends. I’m deeply concerned that if you don’t withdraw your statement, he may take it upon himself to ensure that you do.’
Mel stays silent for a moment, then there is a snuffling noise. ‘How can this be happening? I didn’t … I mean, it wasn’t even … please, what should I do?’
Helen presses her lips together. She feels tears drip onto her collarbone. She is disgusting herself more every second she stays on the line. She knows she should confess all to Pharaoh. To McAvoy. She knows that she did nothing wrong. Not until now. But she cannot bear the thought of that video being seen. And more, the man who called her had known so much. He had seemed so absolutely certain when he told her how easily her career could be smashed. In the past couple of days she has told herself that perhaps she is doing Mel a favour by persuading her to withdraw her statement. She has no doubts that Downey’s employers will stop her from talking one way or another. Yet she still finds herself abhorrent. She can smell the stench of corruption on her skin. It is choking her. Inside the little car,
with its misted windows, her senses are full of her own vile lies and it makes her want to gasp for air.
‘Miss Langley, I would get in a great deal of trouble if it was discovered I was making this call. My advice would be to call the investigation team and simply tell them you are no longer sure what you saw. Then perhaps you should spend a few days somewhere else. Do you have a friend you could stay with? Your parents?’
Mel just snivels. She doesn’t deserve this.
‘Miss Langley, I have to go. I hope you understand that if the situation changes, we will of course require you to tell a court what you saw. But at this moment, your safety is paramount. I hope I won’t need to be in touch again.’
She ends the call, then opens the car door and throws up all over the rutted concrete. She’s barely eaten, so the vomit is just acid and water. She sticks her fingers down her throat and tries to bring up more.
Through tears, with the taste of acid and lies on her tongue, Tremberg looks across the car park. Between two vehicles, she can see Aector McAvoy talking to a short, hard-faced woman beside a little car. McAvoy is leading her into the station. He has an arm on her elbow, as if she is a refined old lady who needs a little help with the steps. Looking at him, the smell of vomit in her nostrils, she realises how much she wants to be like him. He doesn’t manipulate. Doesn’t strategise. He won’t have thought to ingratiate himself with the woman by taking her arm. He won’t be trying any psychological tricks. He’ll have taken her arm because it’s the right thing to do. It’s what she needs, in this place, at this time. Helen wouldn’t have thought to do that, and if she had, she’d have been too unsure of herself to see it through. She wants to be a good policewoman. She wants to
catch villains. But nothing feels as clear as it used to. Her own investigation is currently stalled, Ray’s suspension leaving her small team of detectives with little or no direction. Shaz Archer looks like a lost puppy without her mentor. She’s spending most of her time on her mobile phone, talking to Colin and trying to find out what is going on.
As she heaves spittle onto her dowdy shoes and feels the hot emptiness in her belly, Helen is suddenly overcome with a need to prove her worth. She suddenly needs to remind herself that she is a good person who has simply been trapped into doing a terrible thing. She wipes her mouth and pops a piece of chewing gum onto her tongue, then checks her reflection in the rear-view mirror and manages to take some of the darkness from under her eyes with a stick of concealer. She sniffs, then steps over the vomit and crosses the now empty car park. She uses her electronic card to open the doors then heads for the major incident room.
Keep it together, keep it together, keep it together …
As she enters, Ben Nielsen is in the middle of an extravagant stretch. His shirt is riding up to reveal a belly with a Hollywood six-pack. He’s a keen sportsman who hits the gym twice a day, though his stamina seems to be used for bedroom athletics rather than anything on a playing field. He’s very good with the ladies. Helen looks at him and has to swallow down spittle and bile as she realises that such a man could easily be put to use by Downey’s employers. She has begun to think of them as talent spotters. Businessmen adept at spotting rising stars. Without realising it, she has mentally christened them Headhunters.
‘All right Hell’s-Bells? You bored?’
Helen manages a smile. Nielsen looks a little wide-eyed, as if he’s been staring too long at a computer screen.
‘We’re a rudderless ship, Ben,’ she says, sarcastically. ‘Without Colin’s example and leadership, we’re lost in a fog. I thought I’d see if I could be of any use to you.’
Nielsen raises a suggestive eyebrow, then laughs. Nothing will ever happen between him and Helen. They’re friends, and she knows too many of the places that his penis has been to want to go near it herself.
Nielsen smiles, sitting forward in his chair. He leafs through the pile of papers on his desk then hands a list of names to Helen.
‘The big man’s asked me to look into those buggers. The family of the shrink who looked after Hoyer-Wood. You know where we’re at with that, do you?’
‘I’m in the dark, Ben.’
Nielsen quickly fills her in. She nods as he outlines McAvoy’s theory.
‘And the pathologist says that’s feasible, yes? That her chest could have been caved in by repeated compressions? Like CPR? Fuck, that’s awful.’
Nielsen nods. ‘Aye, our killer’s not squeamish. So, can I leave those names with you? It would be a big help.’
Helen nods, already jotting down important names, dates, times and places from the brief synopsis Nielsen has just given her. She needs this. Needs to work. Needs to atone. She crosses to her own workstation and starts bringing up databases. For the next forty minutes, the incident room is silent, save for the occasional groan or muttered phone call from Nielsen.
Soon, Helen is lost in work, her face lit by the glow of the computer monitor. She acquaints herself with Caneva’s children. His daughter, Maria, is now twenty-eight years old and lives in West Yorkshire, alone. She has one police caution to her name,
having been involved in a protest about the building of an incinerator in a Holderness village. A Google search shows that she has been active in several campaign groups for environmental issues and is a registered nurse. She has a Facebook page, but has not used it for several months and only has a dozen friends on it. Her profile picture is a photograph of a cat. Helen makes a note of her discoveries but fancies she has drawn a dead end. She turns her attention to Maria’s younger brother, Angelo.
A moment later, Helen is nervously jigging her legs and tapping a pen on her teeth. She wonders if she has struck gold. Angelo Caneva was sentenced at sixteen years old to a stretch in a young offender institute in North Wales, half an hour from Chester, where his father now lives. He was sentenced for petrol-bombing a minibus, but had been getting into steadily worse trouble with the police over the previous eighteen months. The family lived in London at that point. His worsening behaviour coincided with his mother’s suicide.
Helen pulls up a web browser and tries to find any reports on the inquest into his mother’s death. She finds only a few
In Memoriams
that mention her name, and one paragraph in a London freesheet that said a verdict of suicide had been recorded.
Helen pulls a face. She wants more. The details of the court case are sketchy and she can’t find any newspaper reports on it because Angelo’s name would not have been mentioned in any press cuttings due to his status as a minor. She examines the date of the sentence. Notes that it was passed at a Crown Court rather than a Youth Court. She alters the boundaries of her web search. Finds the local paper for that region. Keys in a few choice words and waits for something to happen.
Helen lets herself smile for the first time in days. Angelo Caneva was jailed almost a decade ago for petrol-bombing a minibus carrying patients from a local private medical facility for physiotherapy at a nearby spa. It does not take Helen long to ascertain that Hoyer-Wood was a patient at that facility at that time. Nobody was hurt in the incident, which occurred more than a hundred miles from Angelo’s London home, but the charge was arson with intent to endanger life. The boy’s solicitor offered little mitigation. He said his client had refused to cooperate in the preparation of reports, and could only tell the court that Angelo had been slowly unravelling since the death of his mother. He told the court the boy had been a clever and diligent pupil at a high-class boarding school before his expulsion for continued misbehaviour, and that his father was struggling with business debts and the responsibility of raising two teenagers alone. The judge had given him six years.
Helen feels hungry, suddenly. She nips to the vending machine and comes back with two packets of crisps and a can of pop. She has almost forgotten the phone call to Mel. Has almost put Mark and Downey and the Headhunters from her mind. She suddenly feels like a detective.
Her mouth full of crisps, Helen punches a phone number into the landline on her desk and finds herself speaking to the hassled receptionist at the young offender institute near Wrexham where Angelo Caneva was an inmate. After introducing herself and stressing that she is part of a murder enquiry, she manages to get the governor on the line. He has a Liverpool accent and sounds less busy than his colleague. Helen tells him what she wants. Who she is. Asks him if he remembers Angelo Caneva.
‘Posh lad? Yes, I remember Angelo. Didn’t really fit in. We had problems.’
Helen tries to keep the excitement from her voice. ‘Were you governor then?’
‘No, senior warden. Angelo was nice enough, though he looked proper soft compared with some of the lads we get. He had the hard time you’d expect, really. He liked books and drawing and just being left alone. Took him a while to warm up but he got the hang of doing time. Served just over three years, I think. Never went to mainstream prison. Is he in bother again?’
Helen bites her lip, not knowing whether she should give too much away. ‘We would love to speak to him in connection with the current enquiry. He’s not a suspect, you understand. He just might be able to shed some light on a few things.’