Elaine dissolves. She shrinks inwards, a creased fist of pain and despair. Her head falls forward, tears and snot pouring unimpeded down her face, and it only takes the slightest of touches on the back of her head before she is steered into McAvoy’s arms, where he feels her shudders like those of a dying animal.
McAvoy had not meant to hold her. He knows officers who have no difficulty with the professional detachment encouraged in the national guidelines, but he cannot witness pain without providing comfort.
‘Oh my God, oh my God …’
He senses her words as much as hears them, whispered against
his skin. Gently, as if she is made of shattered porcelain, he lifts her back into a seated position and tries to raise her head to look in her eyes. She ducks from his gaze and then, unexpectedly, gives a little pop of laughter.
‘Your shirt, I’m so sorry …’
McAvoy looks down at his waistcoat, and the mess of mucus and tears.
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Here, I have a tissue …’
‘Your need is greater than mine.’
She stops talking then. Just looks at him. Then she uses her wrists to dry her eyes, and pulls a paper tissue from the pocket of her skirt. She dabs her nose.
‘Don’t. Give it a proper blow,’ says McAvoy.
Elaine blows her nose. Folds the hankie. Blows it again.
‘You’re a dad, then?’ she asks, tucking the tissue away. She manages a smile, at a memory. ‘My dad always speaks to me like that. Still takes my arm when we cross the road. What you got?’
‘Boy and a baby girl.’
She looks him up and down. ‘Bet the lads won’t give her any trouble when she’s older, eh? You could snap them in two.’
McAvoy smiles. ‘She’ll be able to look out for herself. That’s what you want for your kids, isn’t it? That they’re good people. Responsible. Able to take care of themselves.’
Elaine nods and presses her lips together. ‘I think Mum did okay with us. Did her best, anyway. There’s me and my two brothers. Two grandkids now. Mine and Don’s. Don’s the middle kid, if you need to know that.’ She stops herself. ‘What is it you need to know? Really? I’m no good back at the house. Don’s wife’s such a bloody drama queen. If I go in there I’ll say something. Dad doesn’t need
all that around him. He doesn’t know what to bloody do either, but once he’s stopped making everybody cups of tea this is going to kill him too. They were together thirty-three years, you know. Got married as soon as she found out she was pregnant with me. Dad could have done a runner, couldn’t he? But he didn’t. Married her in a flash. Last time they agreed on anything was when they both said “I do” but they loved each other.’
Elaine falls silent. She doesn’t seem to know what to do with her hands so just holds them in her lap. McAvoy looks past her. The other parents in the park have drifted together and the pair of them are receiving repeated glances. McAvoy wonders if they already know what has happened to Philippa, or whether they think he is some hulking great brute of a boyfriend who has just made his girl cry.
‘Mum helped get the funding for this park,’ says Elaine, gesturing at the assemblage of brightly painted swings and slides. ‘Badgered the council until they couldn’t say no …’
McAvoy looks around him. Wonders whether it is too soon to suggest they name it after the dead woman. He tries to find something to say but finds his gaze falling on Elaine’s son, sitting on a roundabout and hoping somebody will come and give him a push. His cousin seems to have wandered off. McAvoy stands up and walks over to the roundabout. He smiles at the toddler, and then gently gives it a push, walking around at the same speed in case the child topples over and falls. He feels a presence beside him and turns to see Elaine, smiling weakly.
‘What am I going to do without her? What will he?’
McAvoy reaches down and picks up the boy. He tickles his tummy, then under his chin, and is rewarded with a delicious peal of laughter.
Still holding the boy, he chooses his words carefully. ‘Elaine, the unit I work for deals with organised crime. There is some suggestion that your mother was a little outspoken about some of the more unsavoury elements in the neighbourhood.’
Elaine’s expression doesn’t change. ‘Is that something to do with this?’
‘We don’t know.’
She turns away and stares across the grass in the direction of her mother’s home.
‘I don’t live around here,’ she says, after a time. ‘I live up Kirk Ella. Nice little place, just the two of us. I didn’t grow up here either. We’re from Batley. West Yorkshire. Dad came over here for a job about fifteen years ago and they bought this place. I can’t say I thought much of the area but Mum said the people seemed nice. She made it a lovely home. Well, you can see that, can’t you? And she was never one to keep herself to herself. Couldn’t help but get involved. She’d lived here a year and she’d started a neighbourhood association. Even ran for the city council as an independent. The papers used to come to her for a quote and she was always good value. Told them this was a nice neighbourhood but that a few rotten apples were spoiling it for everyone. She meant that too.’
‘Did she ever name names?’
‘I don’t think she knew any,’ says Elaine. ‘Everybody on this estate knows how to buy a bit of this or that, but Mum was no threat to anybody’s business. Not really. She was probably a nuisance, if anything. She used to give your lot hell about the lack of police patrols and not seeing any policemen on the streets any more but it was busybody stuff, really. She wasn’t some supergrass. She worked in a bloody late shop, for goodness’ sake …’
‘And she always walked home? It’s quite a hike.’
‘That’s my fault,’ says Elaine, kicking at a clump of grass that is pushing through a crack in the spongy surface of the park. ‘We started this health challenge a couple of years ago. You have to do a certain amount of steps each day and enter the number on this website and it tells you how far around the world your team has got. She was well into it. They gave us pedometers and we both lost a bit of weight chalking up the miles. I packed it in when I got pregnant but Mum stuck with it. Said she wanted to be able to say she had walked to Mexico. Worked out that if she walked to and from work for her shifts and did a big walk on a weekend, she could be there before she was sixty.’
‘So anybody who knew her would know she always walked, yes? Anybody waiting for her would know.’
Elaine reaches out and takes Lucas, holding him like a teddy bear.
‘This isn’t anything to do with drugs or gangs,’ she says, softly. ‘It can’t be.’
‘Do you know anybody who would want to harm her?’
‘She was a good person. My best friend …’
‘Elaine, this is a very early stage in the investigation but we need to build up as clear a picture of your mum as possible. Did she have any enemies? Had she ever been threatened?’
The dead woman’s daughter shakes her head. ‘She was everybody’s friend. She was a lifesaver. There was …’
Elaine stops herself, her hand raised to her mouth.
‘Darren,’ she says, softly.
‘I’m sorry?’
Elaine puts down her son. Tells him to go play.
‘My ex.’
‘Elaine?’
She grabs a handful of her fringe, eyes suddenly alive with more than tears.
‘Shit, I didn’t think …’
McAvoy takes her shoulders and turns her eyes to his. Tries to make it okay.
‘Elaine, you can tell me.’
She sobs, and covers her mouth with her hand.
‘He said if he ever saw her again he would kill her. That he would tear her heart out the way I tore out his …’
‘Lemon-scented.’
Helen Tremberg walks back to the car and pokes her head through the open window.
‘Sorry, Ma’am?’
Sharon Archer punches the steering wheel with the flat of her hand. When she speaks, it is through bared teeth and unmoving lips, and for a moment, she takes on the look of a psychotic ventriloquist.
‘I said lemon fucking scented.’
Tremberg nods, pressing her lips down hard on the smile that is threatening to become a snigger. It is an act as hard as calling a woman two years older than herself ‘Ma’am’.
‘Sandwich, or anything?’
Archer’s eyes flash fury as she turns.
‘Do I look like I’m in the mood for a fucking snack?’
Tremberg turns away and heads for the pharmacy that represents the only high-street name on this little parade of independent shops and salons. She pauses for a moment to look at the display of cupcakes in the window of a bakery, but an angry blaring of the car horn indicates that Archer is watching
her in the rear-view mirror and is not in the mood for waiting.
‘Okay, okay,’ she mutters, accepting that for now, there is no time for cake.
It’s cool inside the brightly lit store and for the first time in days, Tremberg’s skin goose-pimples as the sweat turns cold upon her bare arms. It’s rare that she exposes any flesh while on duty but today she has acquiesced to a short-sleeved blouse, which she has not tucked into her pinstripe trousers.
‘Wipes, wipes …’
She finds the right shelf, and pretends she can’t see the lemon-scented ones. She picks the packet with the most overtly chemical smell, then heads to the counter, where a short Asian lady gives her a bright smile.
‘It’s two for one,’ she says, conspiratorially. ‘Special offer.’
Tremberg shrugs. ‘They’re for my boss. She can make do.’
The lady grins, and Tremberg hands over the five-pound note Archer has given her. ‘Put the change in the charity box,’ she says, crumpling the receipt.
‘We don’t have one.’
‘Then get yourself an ice cream.’
Tremberg heads for the exit, catching a glimpse of her reflection in the mirror behind the make-up display as she leaves. She’s at ease with what she sees. At thirty-one, she’s happily single and rarely lonely, and though she may be a little more broad shouldered than she would like, there is nothing offensive about her round face with its narrow features, or her simply styled brown hair.
He’ll like it
, she tells herself.
Get up the courage to suggest a drink. And stop checking your phone!
For the past few weeks Helen has been receiving increasingly
colourful messages from a solicitor she met while waiting for a court case. His emails are the favourite part of her day and she has taken to checking her phone almost obsessively. Although she is no stranger to relationships, she is nervous about being the first to get in touch each day. It seems important to her that she is the respondent to his overtures, rather than making the running herself.
Helen emerges back into the muggy air and takes in the view. She’s never got out of the car on this stretch of road before and wonders if she ever will again. It’s no shabbier than anywhere else, and there are only a few untenanted shops. Each of the parking spaces by the side of the road is taken, and there is a steady procession of shoppers wandering from store to store, filling shopping bags with fruit and veg, bread rolls, sliced meat, saying hello over the noise of the traffic and thinking about how best to jazz up the salad they are considering for tonight’s tea. It reminds Tremberg of the Grimsby neighbourhood where she grew up. Normal folk. Normal people. Bit skint by the third week of the month, and a week in Benidorm each June. Fish and chip tea on a Friday, and six-packs of supermarket lager in front of the Grand Prix on a Sunday. The people she became a copper for. The people worth protecting.
Tremberg tries to get her bearings. Works out where she is. She’s half a mile from the prison on the road that leads to the Preston Road Estate. She has only been working in Hull for a year and has not had time to familiarise herself with every neighbourhood, but knows the PRE by reputation and is grateful that it was never her beat when she was still in uniform. More Anti-social Behaviour Orders have been handed out here than on any other estate in the city boundary, and barely an edition
of the
Hull Daily Mail
is published without it containing some report or another about teenage gangs making life miserable for ‘decent’ people.
Tremberg rarely troubles herself with the politics of her job or the social background to the crimes she investigates. She does what she’s asked, and enjoys catching villains. She’s good at it too, even if she is currently feeling less than happy in her work. As one of four detective constables on the Serious and Organised Crime Unit, she has little say in which of her senior colleagues she is paired with, but she enjoys her working days considerably more when helping McAvoy or Pharaoh. At the moment, she is working for Detective Inspector Shaz Archer, and loathing every moment of it. Archer and DCI Colin Ray are effectively leading the unit’s investigation into the spike in organised crime. Pharaoh is overseeing, but her day is so filled with paperwork and budget meetings that Ray and Archer are running the show, revelling in being top dogs.
This morning, Ray had told Tremberg to accompany Archer to HMP Hull because there was a good chance that the man they were seeing would warm to two women more than he would to Ray himself. Tremberg had seen the logic in that. It is impossible to warm to Colin Ray. He’s a walking sneer, all yellow teeth and nicotine-stained fingers; all curses and spittle and ratty little eyes.
Tremberg had accepted Ray’s orders with good grace, even though she had despaired at the thought of spending the morning with the snotty detective inspector who seems to be the only female that Colin Ray has any time for. The two are pretty much inseparable, though they make for unlikely friends. Archer is part of the horsey crowd and spends her free time playing polo and knocking back Pimm’s with people called Savannah and
Sheridan. Ray coaches football in his spare time and spends his money on greyhounds, lager and ex-wives.
Tremberg is not the sort to be jealous of her female colleagues and does not object to the fact that Shaz Archer is extraordinarily attractive. It’s her personality she bridles at. She puts Tremberg in a mind of a California high school bully in a film for teens. She holds everybody and everything in open contempt, and uses her looks to manipulate colleagues and crooks alike. Her arrest record is impressive, but Tremberg finds the way she flaunts herself distasteful. While she admires Trish Pharaoh for just being herself – for being sexy and mumsy and hard as fucking nails – with Archer it’s all strategic. Every time she purses her lips or blows on her perfect fingernails, she’s doing it to get a reaction out of somebody. She keeps miniskirts and crop-tops in her desk so she can get changed into something exotic if she’s interviewing some easily led pervert, and there are rumours she has traded her affections for confessions in the past. Tremberg knows police stations to be termite mounds of malicious gossip and had originally decided to ignore such slander about a female colleague. Then she got to know Archer herself, and decided the woman was, if nothing else, a bitch of the first order.