Downey hears the front door of the taxi office bang. There is a muttering from beyond the door to his office, then it is pushed open by a tall dark man in a football shirt and camouflage trousers.
‘We knock in this country, Hakan,’ says Downey, over the lip of his glass. ‘Remember? We flush toilets too? None of that folding up the bog-roll and putting it in the bin. We’re not keen on shit samosas.’
Hakan doesn’t seem to understand. His English is good but he seems too flustered to pay attention.
‘What’s the matter?’ asks Downey.
Hakan closes the door behind him then leans against it. He’s quite a good-looking guy, though he is hairy enough to blunt a lawnmower.
‘I fuck up.’
Downey spreads his hands. He’s not worried. There’s nothing he can’t handle.
‘Police,’ says Hakan. ‘I think they follow me. I not know what do. I park. Put parcel in coat. Take coat seamstress. Seamstress has coat.’
Downey sits forward in his chair. He spits his whisky back in the glass.
‘Again, Hakan. In fucking English.’
Downey sinks lower in his seat as the driver tells him what happened. He’d been delivering a wallet-sized package of white powder to the address that had been phoned through just an hour ago. He’d been driving normally, doing as he was told. Then he saw the flashing lights in his mirror. Panicked. Started seeing a conspiracy. Every parked car was suddenly a plain-clothes officer. Every van was a surveillance unit.
‘I have coat with me. I see shop, yes? Southcoates Lane. I have idea. Put package in coat. Take coat in shop. Ask for them to fix zip. She nice lady. We talk. I go back when all quiet, yes. I do right, yes?’
Downey chews on his lip.
‘You gave the parcel away, Hakan. You gave it to a stranger. What if she looks in the fucking pocket?’
Hakan waves his hands.
‘She say she busy. I say “No rush.” I go back for it in a week, perhaps. Tell her I not need work done at all …’
Downey throws his glass at the wall. It shatters in a rain of jagged crystal.
‘Ticket,’ he says, furious.
‘Ticket?’
‘The fucking ticket, you Turkish prick,’ says Downey. ‘The ticket for the alterations shop. I’ll go for it. Christ, if she finds it. If we lose that parcel …’
Downey doesn’t finish the sentence. Everything he has could be yanked away from him with one swift tug. Being prince of the city depends on staying in the good graces of the powers behind the throne.
He drains his whisky. It burns, and tastes like shite.
He snatches the ticket from Hakan’s hand. Looks at the words. ‘Snips and Rips – alterations a speciality’.
Downey grunts.
‘Story of my fucking life.’
‘If you weren’t such a pansy you would be a hell of a Romeo.’
‘Guv?’
‘Women. They bloody love you, don’t they? One look at those big sad eyes and they’re pussy in your hand.’
‘Putty, you mean.’
‘I know what I mean. It’s just funny. They don’t know what they want to do with you, do they? Don’t know whether they want you to throw them around like a ragdoll or put them in the bath and wash their hair.’
McAvoy keeps his eyes on the road. He swallows, and is aware of his Adam’s apple rubbing against his shirt collar.
‘Do you do that? Do you wash Roisin’s hair?’
He can feel his boss staring at the side of his face. Senses that she is shaking her head slightly, and smiling with only one half of her mouth.
‘Paint her nails? Read her bedtime stories? Cut her fish fingers up for her …’
McAvoy turns in the driver’s seat and looks into Pharaoh’s blue eyes. She’s gone too far, and she raises her hands, acknowledging it. She does this, sometimes. Teases until she feels bad. He has
come to understand her pretty well these past months. He knows all about so-called ‘gallows humour’ – cops cracking off-colour gags so the misery of their jobs has to work harder to reach their souls. With Trish it’s different. Her job does affect her. The sights she sees make her cry. She never makes jokes about the dead. She just performs with the living the way she has learned to in two decades of policing. She’s Trish Fucking Pharaoh: brash and seductive, loud and maternal, hard as fucking nails. She gets the job done, and then she goes home to her four kids and crippled husband and drinks until the screaming in her head goes away.
‘Sorry. It’s the heat.’
He nods. Turns back to the road. Tries to be jolly British about the whole thing and move the conversation on to the weather. ‘It’s just so sticky, isn’t it? Back home, there would be clouds of midges in this heat. You rub your hand over your face and it comes away black with the little sods.’
‘I’ve heard. Coming back with bites is not my idea of a holiday. Not unless they’re on your thigh, anyway.’
McAvoy gives the tiniest of laughs, and that seems to satisfy her. She goes back to reading her phone.
Home
, he thinks. Why did I call the Highlands ‘home’? Roisin is
home
. The kids are
home
. What did I mean by that? What would Sabine make of it …
McAvoy gets annoyed with himself and curtails the train of introspection. Concentrates on driving, his hands where they should be at a precise ten-to-two on the steering wheel. Looks out through dead flies and dust. It’s a boring road, all bland fields, four-house hamlets and dead farms. It seems popular with boy racers intent on risking their lives on hairpin bends, and McAvoy has winced several times in anticipation of a horrific smash as
souped-up Vauxhall Corsas and Subarus tore past him at 90 mph.
The journey is giving him the beginnings of a migraine. He’s been squinting for half an hour. The windscreen wash is empty. He is staring through grease and dirt, smeared into a khaki, blood-speckled rainbow by the wipers that squeak across the glass.
‘I’m getting a stuffy nose,’ says Pharaoh, giving a sniff.
‘It’s the rape fields,’ says McAvoy, waving a hand in the direction of the luminous yellow crops either side of the winding B-road.
‘
Rape Fields
? Think I rented that from Lovefilm …’
‘Rapeseed, Guv. A lot of people are allergic to it. Really, you should plant a blue crop called borage nearby to counteract it, but the European Union didn’t insist, so nobody does. A lot of people think they have hay fever when they don’t. Gives you runny eyes, a stuffy nose …’
‘You seem fine.’
‘I’m not allergic to it. Penicillin and coconut, that’s me.’
‘Yeah?’ Pharaoh takes a handkerchief from her bag and tries to blow her nose. ‘Fuck, one nostril’s blocked.’
‘Sea air will help.’
‘So will a vodka.’
A minute later they are drifting through the centre of Hornsea, a seaside town half an hour from the outskirts of Hull. It’s not really a resort. Holidaymakers head for Bridlington and Scarborough, and though the place does have a few guest houses and some amusement arcades jangle and bleep on the seafront, they’re more for listless local teens than to satisfy any deluge of tourists. It’s a presentable, quiet place that’s doing okay for itself and doesn’t make much noise. It’s a jumble of coffee shops, curiosity shops and estate agents, with ornate awnings and
Victorian roofs, huddling together between the new all-night mini-supermarkets and chain pubs.
McAvoy parks outside a strip of attractive townhouses, opposite a large white Art Deco building with huge bay windows. He can tell they’ll offer awesome views of the bay. Having spent the past few weeks mired in real-estate dealings, he instinctively wonders how much the view adds to the asking price.
‘He’d better be bloody in,’ says Pharaoh, getting out of the car.
McAvoy purses his lips, blows out a stream of silent concerns, closes his eyes, and becomes a detective again as they walk up to the red-painted front door. Darren Robb lives in Flat 3, and works from home as a website designer. Elaine has given them a brief sketch of his background; told them he’s a bit of a useless lump who likes computer games and crisps. A quick search of the police database has come up with nothing exciting in his file. He once got a caution for urinating in a side street off Holderness Road, but having been to Holderness Road, McAvoy finds it hard to think of that as much of a crime.
It is Pharaoh, as the senior officer, who is allowed the honour of leaning on the doorbell. She does so for a full ten seconds. McAvoy turns back to the street. There are houses both to his left and right, but directly in front of this building is a swathe of stubby grass. The view to the sea is unimpeded. Some kids are kicking a football around. A mum with a pushchair is lying on the grass reading a magazine. The kids who were leaning by the sea wall are now squatting in a rough semicircle, eating chips from polystyrene cones. Normal people, normal day …
‘Hello.’
The voice is made tinny by the intercom.
‘Mr Robb?’
‘Aye.’
‘This is the police. Can we come up?’
There is a pause.
‘I didn’t do it.’
Pharaoh gives a little laugh. Rolls her eyes.
‘Okay then, we’ll be off.’
After a moment, the door clicks open, and both officers step into the wide hallway. The corridor is bare brick and linoleum, leading down to a ground-floor flat with a black front door. To their left is a set of stairs with a black handrail.
‘Up,’ says McAvoy, needlessly, and begins to climb.
Darren Robb is standing in the doorway of Flat 3. He’s shaking with so much nervous energy that he puts McAvoy in mind of a stationary car with its motor running. The information they have on him suggests that Robb is forty-one years old, but there was nothing in the files about him having put on a stone each birthday. The man is enormous. Grotesquely fat. He’s wearing grey jogging bottoms and a black T-shirt which is stretched almost to breaking point over fleshy arms, tits and belly. His skin has the mottled, waxy hue that makes McAvoy think of bodies pulled from water. His round head is bald on top and close-cropped at the back and sides, while his face, locked as it is in a mask of worry and annoyance, is all fleshy lips and blackheads. McAvoy briefly pictures Elaine, and wonders how the hell she fell for this monstrosity. Pharaoh is clearly thinking the same thing. As she reaches the top of the stairs, he hears her laugh.
‘I wouldn’t have picked you out for living on the second floor, Mr Robb. Can you imagine if you were a ground-floor guy? You might lose your figure.’
If Darren Robb is offended, he gives no sign of it. He just stands in the doorway, all but blocking out the light, jiggling up and down like he’s driving over cobbles. He turns his gaze on McAvoy, realises he has no chance of getting past the big man, and seems to sag. He steps back into the flat, vaguely waving them in.
The door opens into a tasteful apartment. The floor is natural wood and the sofa is cream leather. A black-and-white cowhide serves as an island between the pine coffee table and the large flat-screen TV, and the walls are decorated with colourful landscapes, all purple mountains and shimmering lakes. The big bay window gives the kind of view that would cost a million in Brighton, and McAvoy crosses to it, looking out over the grassed area and down past the sea wall to the grey ocean. It moves as if being sifted for gold in a prospector’s pan. As he hears the sound of Pharaoh plonking herself into the sofa, he gently moves aside one of the velvet curtains that hang to the floor, and spots the binoculars that sit on the windowsill. McAvoy looks again at the sea, wondering whether Robb enjoys watching the waves and the gulls, following the spirals of the kittiwakes and the razorbills. Then his gaze falls upon the woman with the pushchair on the grass. McAvoy decides not to make up his mind about the man until later.
‘I didn’t do it.’
Robb is standing by the far wall, between the door to the kitchen and a closed serving hatch set into the brickwork.
‘Didn’t do what, Mr Robb?’ asks Pharaoh, sweetly.
‘Philippa. I didn’t do it. I couldn’t.’
Pharaoh looks up at McAvoy. Pulls a theatrically confused face. ‘Has the body been formally identified, Sergeant?’
McAvoy shakes his head.
‘Identity released to the media?’
‘No, Guv.’
‘So, Mr Robb, what the fuck are you talking about?’
Robb raises his hands to his head. If his hair were long enough, he would be pulling at its roots. His breath is shallow and ragged. Suddenly, he starts forward and drops onto the arm of the chair, his T-shirt rolling up to reveal a stomach that appears to have been boiled in onion skins and leaves.
‘Elaine’s Facebook. Somebody posted how sorry they were. It’s had five “likes” …’
Pharaoh runs a hand through her hair and scowls.
‘And you put two and two together? Big leap.’
He shakes his head, frantic now. ‘Radio said there’d been a murder, near where Philippa worked. I used to do that walk with her, now and again, when we were together like. Me and Elaine. I started that whole weight-loss thing with her. Couldn’t keep it up–’
‘Get to the point, Mr Robb.’
‘Elaine’s brother, Don. He has a Twitter account. Said this morning his mum was missing. Was asking for help on there. He only has a few followers so I don’t know what he was expecting –’
‘Oh for fuck’s sake.’
‘And I tried to phone Elaine and some copper answered. Family Liaison, or something …’
Pharaoh kicks out, a biker boot catching the corner of the coffee table. There is a bowl of glass beads at its centre, and they give a little tambourine sound before settling back.
‘Don doesn’t know I follow him. On Twitter, I mean. I use a different name. Same with Elaine’s Facebook. And her friends.
Shit, I know all this sounds shite for me, but, look, I haven’t done anything wrong …’
Pharaoh waves a hand to silence him. She looks at McAvoy then rubs her hand across the back of her neck. It comes away damp.
‘Mr Robb, if you sit quietly for a moment, we can get this over with quickly. Now, as I should have said at the door, we are investigating the murder of Philippa Longman. Her body was found this morning, not far from where she works. Somebody had caved her chest in and left her for the birds. It was one of the most unpleasant things I’ve ever seen, and though I never met Mrs Longman when she was alive, my sergeant and I have just been sitting with a family that is so broken, they’ll never be whole again. And your ex-partner, Elaine, has given us reason to believe you had made threats against Mrs Longman. She told my sergeant here that you threatened to rip out her heart. Now, we couldn’t tell whether anybody had ripped out her heart because it was too much of a fucking mess. We’ll have the post-mortem results back this evening. But I think that means you have some questions to answer, okay? I don’t want to hear about Facebook, or who’s following who, or who’s been Tweeting or Twatting or whatever it is people do for fun when they should be drinking and watching
X-Factor
. Just tell me where you were last night, where you were in the middle of the night, and why I shouldn’t get this big bugger here to slap the cuffs on you while I kick you in the knackers. Got it? On board? Fire away.’