His bile rises. He swallows it down.
The woman’s chest has been caved in. The bones of her ribs have been snapped, splintered and pushed up and into her breasts and lungs. Her upper torso is a mass of flattened skin and tissue, black blood and mangled organs. Her white bra, together with what looks like the remains of her breasts, sit in the miasma of churned meat. For a hideous moment, McAvoy imagines the noise that will be made when the pathologist disentangles them for examination.
He turns away. Takes a breath that is not as deeply scented with gore.
He turns back to the horror, and flinches.
Though it shames him to have considered it, McAvoy finds himself in mind of a spatchcocked chicken; split at the breast and flattened out to be roasted.
He feels Pharaoh’s hand on his shoulder, and looks into her face. She nods, and they step outside the tent.
‘Bloody hell, Guv,’ says McAvoy, breathlessly.
‘I know.’
He breathes out, slowly. Realises that the world has been
spinning a little, and waits for the dizziness to pass. Forces himself to be a policeman.
‘What sort of weapon does that?’
Pharaoh shrugs. ‘I reckon we’re after a bloke on a horse, swinging a fucking mace.’
‘That can’t have been the cause of death, though, can it? There must be a head wound, or a stab somewhere under all that …’
‘Pathologist will get to all that. All I can say for certain is it wasn’t suicide.’
McAvoy looks up at the sky. It remains the colour of dirty bathwater. He feels the perspiration at his lower back and when he rubs a hand over his face it comes away soaking. Although he knows nothing about the life of the woman in the tent, the little he knows of her death makes him angry. Nobody should die like that.
‘Handbag? Purse?’
Pharaoh nods. ‘The lot. Was only a few feet from the body.’
‘What time?’
‘She was found a couple of hours ago. Bloke on his way to get the morning papers. Saw her foot sticking out and phoned 999.’
‘Regular CID can’t have had a look, then …’
‘Came straight to us.’
‘Guv?’
Pharaoh makes a blade of her fingers and waves them in front of her throat, suggesting he cut short his questions. As head of the Serious and Organised Crime Unit, Pharaoh is used to the infighting and internecine warfare that pollutes the upper strata of Humberside Police. Her unit was established as a murder squad, set apart from the main body of detectives, but budget cuts and personnel changes have left the team with no clearly
defined role. At present, Pharaoh and her officers are loosely tasked with investigating a highly organised criminal outfit that appears to have taken over most of the drugs trafficking on the east coast. Its emergence has coincided with a marked spike in the incidents of violent crime, and both McAvoy and Pharaoh know for certain that the gang’s foot soldiers are responsible for several deaths. Their methods are efficient and brutal, their favoured weapons the nailgun and blowtorch. Pharaoh’s unit have locked up three of the outfit’s significant players but so far the information they have managed to glean about the chain of command has been pitiful. Ruthless, efficient, single-minded and worryingly well informed, each tier of the gang seems to be insulated from the next. The soldiers have little or no knowledge of who gives them their orders. It is an operation based on mobile phones and complex codes, which has recruited a better class of muscle through a combination of high reward and justified fear.
‘This is down as gang-related?’ asks McAvoy, incredulously. It is the only way the crime would have come straight to Pharaoh.
Pharaoh gives a rueful smile. ‘She runs a residents’ group. Spoke out at a recent public meeting about street dealers ruining the neighbourhood.’
McAvoy closes his eyes. ‘So what do we know?’
Pharaoh doesn’t need to consult her notes. She has already committed the details to memory.
‘Philippa Longman. Fifty-three. Lived up Conway Close. Past Boulevard, near the playing fields. There’s a uniform inspector from Gordon Street with the family now. Philippa worked at the late shop that you passed driving in. Was working last night, before you ask. And this would have been on her way home. Somebody grabbed her. Pulled her behind the trees. Did this.’
‘Family?’
‘Our next stop, my boy.’
‘Bloke who found her?’
‘Still shaking. Hasn’t got the taste of sick out of his mouth yet.’
‘And we’re taking it, yes? There won’t be a stink from CID?’
Pharaoh looks at him over the top of her sunglasses. ‘Of course there will. There’ll be a stink whatever happens.’
McAvoy takes a deep breath. ‘I’m supposed to be prepping for court. Ronan Gill’s trial is only a month away and the witnesses are getting jumpy …’
Without changing her facial expression, Pharaoh reaches up and puts a warm palm across McAvoy’s mouth. He smiles, his stubble making a soft rasp against her skin.
‘I have a hand free for a kidney punch if you need it,’ she says sweetly.
McAvoy looks back at the tent. Sees, in his mind’s eye the devastation within. He wants to know who did it. Why. Wants to stop it happening again. Wants to ensure that whoever loved this woman is at least given a face to hate.
He wishes the bloody psychologist were here, now. It would be the only way she could ever understand what makes him do a job he hates. Wants to tell her that this is what he is. What he forces himself to be. Here, at the place between sorrow and goodbye.
‘Okay.’
‘Poor lass.’
‘Aye.’
‘You can hear it, can’t you? When it goes from panic, to something else …’
‘Bloody terrifying is what it is. They should play that to anybody who thinks about leaving the house without a pitbull terrier and a spear.’
McAvoy is holding Philippa Longman’s mobile phone to his ear, still inside the polythene evidence bag. He is listening to her voicemails. There are ten of them, starting with a gentle enquiry from a man with a West Yorkshire accent, wondering if she is on her way home, and progressing through an assortment of sons and daughters, increasingly desperate, asking where she is, if she’s okay, to please call, just please call …
‘Out of character, least we know that,’ says McAvoy, switching off the phone and putting it back in Pharaoh’s red leather handbag, which he is holding between his knees in the passenger seat of the convertible.
‘Getting murdered? Yeah, it definitely hasn’t happened to her before.’
‘No, I mean–’
‘I know what you mean.’
McAvoy looks out of the window. He doesn’t really know this part of Hull. They are on an estate towards the back end of Hessle Road, where those who made their living from the fishing industry used to make their homes. It’s pretty run down, but in this grey light, nothing would look pretty.
‘Tenner for the first person to spot an up-to-date tax disc,’ mutters Pharaoh.
None of the cars that are parked on the kerbs and grass verges looks younger than ten years old, and Pharaoh’s convertible draws stares as they pass a group of people lounging by a low wall that leads to a fenced-off storage yard. They are of mixed ages. Two youngsters, shirtless, with buzzcuts, lounging over the frames of BMX bikes. Three men, tattoos on their necks and roll-ups in their fingers. A woman in her late sixties, with grey hair and tracksuit bottoms, sipping from a can of lager and telling a story. One of them says something, but the convertible’s roof is up, and the words are lost in the sound of tyres on bone-dry road.
They pass a sign declaring that they are on Woodcock Street, and he vaguely remembers reading that the army had used this neighbourhood to practise their tank manoeuvres before being deployed to Afghanistan. He wonders if that was true.
‘Up here. Playing fields.’
Ahead, several acres of untended grass stretch away: a play park in one direction, and some form of stone memorial in the other. A police car sits abandoned in the road, among half a dozen vehicles parked haphazardly around a corner terraced house. The cars look as though they have arrived at speed and been abandoned.
Pharaoh and McAvoy step from the car. As McAvoy arranges his clothes and makes himself a little more presentable, he peers over the wall that marks the boundary of the park. Old gravestones have been laid against the far side of it, their inscriptions mossed over and names lost to wind and time.
‘Shall we?’
McAvoy takes a deep breath. He has done this too many times. Sat in too many rooms with too much grief; felt too many eyes upon him as he made his promises to the dead.
They head towards the house. It sits on the far side of a low flower bed which carries nothing but dry earth and hacked-back stumps. Beyond that is a footpath, its surface a camouflage pattern of different tarmac patches.
‘Poor lass,’ says McAvoy, again, pushing open the gate.
The house where Philippa Longman lived is the nicest in the row. Freshly painted black railings edge a driveway of neat bricks, upon which sits a tastefully varnished shed, with double locks, and a child’s plastic playhouse. There are two hanging baskets by the double-glazed front door, and the front window carries posters for a charity coffee morning and a reading initiative at a local nursery.
Pharaoh reaches up to knock on the door, but it opens before she can do so. In the hall is a Family Liaison Officer that McAvoy remembers having met before. He is pushing forty, with receding hair and slightly crooked teeth, set in a face that always looks to be squinting against harsh light. He’s a nice enough guy, who understands what he is there for. His job is not to heal these people or make sense of things. He’s just there to show that the police are doing something. That these people matter. That this death is important …
‘They’re in the lounge,’ he says, his accent broad Hull. ‘Husband. Jim. Nice old boy. Two sons, one furious, one falling apart. Couple of daughters-in-law. A neighbour. A sister, too, if I got the family tree straight. Eldest daughter bolted about twenty minutes ago. Took the nippers to the park, I think. Boy and a girl. A cousin, too. Was all too much. Inspector Moreton and PC Audrey Stretton are holding the fort. Family know Mum isn’t coming back. They know that we found a body that matches her description. They had called her in as missing about five this morning.’
Pharaoh nods, turns to McAvoy, and without a word passing between them, he turns away from the house. The FLO opens the door to the living room and as Pharaoh continues inside, McAvoy hears the soft patter of emotionless conversation, pierced by a wet, choking wail …
He makes his way over to the entrance to the playing fields and follows the footpath through the long, straggly grass to the play area beyond a line of oak trees.
Quercus robur
, he remembers, unprompted, and has a sudden image of sitting at the kitchen table, breathing in peat smoke and wood shavings, mopping up potato soup with a hunk of soda bread: his dad washing pots at a deep stone sink and softly imparting facts over his broad shoulder at his eight-year-old son. ‘
They call it “petraea” in some places. Flowers in May and leaves soon after. Sometimes they have a second flush of leaves if it’s been a bad year for caterpillars. They call it Lammas growth. Can you spell that? You write it down and I’ll check it. Best charcoal for making swords, the oak. Burns slow. They use the bark for tanning, Aector. High-quality leathers, especially
…’
He shakes himself back to the present. Looks ahead. It’s a modern swing park, with a protective rubber surface and plenty
of padding. He remembers mentioning to Roisin that parks seem a little too safe these days. Said he couldn’t see the point of bubble-wrapping all of the equipment when children have such a habit of banging their heads into one another. He had predicted crash helmets becoming compulsory on roundabouts within five years.
There are several adults in the play park but McAvoy spots Philippa Longman’s daughter straight away. She is pushing a child on a swing, and between each shove she is raising her hands to her face to cuff away tears that have turned her fleshy cheeks red and sore. She is wearing a denim skirt and a green vest top, her hair pulled back in a ponytail to leave a severe fringe at the front. It doesn’t suit her. Hers is a warm, open face that looks as though it hides a pleasant smile.
She sees McAvoy approaching. Immediately identifying him as a policeman, she gives a slight nod and then grabs the swing to halt its momentum. She lifts the toddler out and gives him a gentle pat on the bottom, before pointing at a climbing frame where an older child is dangling upside down. She tells him to go play with his cousin. He wobbles off, and the woman extends her hand.
‘Elaine,’ she says, and her voice catches. ‘Elaine,’ she says, again.
‘I’m Aector,’ says McAvoy, taking her hand in his. It’s cold, tiny and birdlike in his large, fleshy palm. ‘I’m a detective.’
‘The house is over there,’ says Elaine, waving, vaguely. ‘They’re all in there. Crying and bloody carrying on. I couldn’t take it.’
McAvoy recognises her voice from Philippa’s answering machine. She had left the most messages. By the last, her voice was just a staggered breath, broken up around the word ‘please’.
‘People are different,’ says McAvoy, leading Elaine to a bench that overlooks the park. ‘Some need company, others needs space. It’s agony whatever you do.’
Elaine meets McAvoy’s eyes. Holds his gaze. He watches as tears spill afresh.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ says Elaine, looking away. ‘Last night I had a mum. The kids had a grandma. It was all normal, you know? I watched a DVD and had a bottle of white wine and I tucked in my son and I went to bed. Dad woke me up, ringing. Mum hadn’t come home. Was she with me, had I heard from her, did I know where she might be. I rang her, as if he hadn’t already tried that. Nothing. Phoned her work and there was nobody there. I got Lucas up and we went to her shop. Walked her route. Christ, I must have walked right past where she was bloody lying …’
A shudder racks her body.
‘What if he was doing it as I walked past? What if I could have saved her …’