McAvoy puffs out his cheeks and lets out a sigh. In front of him, the traffic is still moving at a crawl. Horns are honking. Drivers are revving their engines and the music from competing stereos
blends with the sound of a distant pneumatic drill. The whole scene throbs with grinding noise. He stares straight ahead, not really seeing, jolting slightly as he realises his gaze is fixed on a group of pre-teens who are making a nuisance of themselves on the single-decker bus in front of him. They see him looking and mouth a variety of insults, punctuated by fulsome use of mid-finger salutes. Banging on the window, they laugh as if they have just committed the century’s greatest act of social disobedience, then sit down as the driver turns around and threatens to let his fraying temper snap.
McAvoy gives a little nod. Fair enough, he supposes. Makes a V-sign of his own in the pocket of his trousers and wishes that the rule book allowed him to show it. He pushes off from the wall, feeling his shirt sticking to his back. He’s sick of this heat. Sick of the oppressive grey skies, and the fact that his palms are sweaty every time he proffers one to a potential witness. He knows his hair looks nearly black at the temples, slick with perspiration, and while he is wearing enough anti-perspirant to ensure he doesn’t embarrass himself, he wishes he had listened when Roisin suggested this morning he use some of the powder she had knocked up from cornstarch and oatmeal, and which she swears by when it comes to avoiding heat rashes anywhere too painful. ‘Too late for that now,’ he mutters, as he crosses between two barely moving vehicles and jogs painfully back to the other side of Anlaby Road.
As he reaches into his pocket for the change to buy a bar of chocolate, he grips nothing but empty cloth. He’s out of money. Shit. It’s nothing new. Buying the new car cleaned out his savings, while every spare penny he can muster is going on the new house. He qualified for the mortgage without any problems.
On paper, he owns a small croft near Gairloch in the Western Highlands, five or six miles from his father’s, though he has only visited it a couple of times and sublets to an arty English couple who make their living doing complicated things with seashells. As a crofter’s son, he qualified for government subsidy and had bought the place for a steal while still a young man. The bank had considered the property sufficient guarantee to give him a larger than usual mortgage and he will be moving the family into the new house on Hessle Foreshore next weekend. He’s paying for a removals company to do some of the hard work. Paying for a proper wooden summerhouse for the back garden. Paying out too much, truth be told, but each purchase is making Roisin squeal, and if there is a better sound in the universe, he has yet to hear it.
Over the noise of the road, McAvoy hears his radio crackle. The uniformed officers still prefer to use radios, while he and his CID colleagues have made the transition to mobile phones, but McAvoy has no issue with doing things the way the uniformed sergeant coordinating the majority of the house-to-house preferred, and had taken the radio without argument. The team know who to contact if they came up with anything useful.
‘McAvoy,’ he says, into the radio.
‘Sarge, this might be nothing, but I think we have somebody for you to come talk to …’
Five minutes later, McAvoy arrives back on Granville Street. He had run the first 500 yards, then slowed when he came in sight of one of the patrol cars so he could catch his breath.
PC Joseph Pearl is waiting by the door. He’s a tall, strikingly handsome black man whom McAvoy has only met briefly, but whom he seems to remember as coming from somewhere over
Lancashire way. When he had briefed the officers, McAvoy had felt like warning PC Pearl that his colour would barely provoke a comment in this relatively multicultural area, but that he should keep his Lancashire accent under wraps for fear of abuse. Yorkshire folk have complicated prejudices.
‘Nice lady,’ says PC Pearl, nodding into the open doorway. ‘Hard to shut her up.’
McAvoy steps inside the nondescript terrace, two minutes from where Philippa Longman lost her life. He had intended to make this row of properties part of his own house-to-house, but for fear of being accused of cherry-picking, he had left it to uniform.
The nice lady in question is Lavinia Mantell. She’s sitting with her feet drawn up in the corner of a large, squashy, three-seater sofa, which dominates the small living room. On the walls are framed posters of various local theatre nights, and the carpet is a maddening swirl of purples and golds. McAvoy takes a quick look around and decides it must be rented. Lavinia has put her stamp on the place but has not gone to the trouble of replacing the vile soft furnishings or the woodchipped wallpaper. On the table in front of her is a laptop and a pile of papers, held in place by a biscuit tin, which stops the half-hearted breeze from the open window from making a mess. McAvoy recognises the salmon-pink colour of Hull Council Scrutiny Committee reports.
‘Miss Mantell,’ he says, edging his way around the huge sofa and coming to stand in front of the TV. He introduces himself. ‘My colleague tells me you may have some information that would help us.’
She nods, then holds up her hands, as if urging him to wait.
She is chewing on a biscuit. She reaches down beside her and takes a swig from the mug of coffee on the floor.
‘Sorry, you caught me.’
He smiles. ‘The day biscuits are a crime, I’ll be doing life.’
She’s in her late thirties, and attractive in a bookish and careworn kind of way. She has brown hair that was probably cut into a sleek and sophisticated bob a couple of months ago but looks a little wilder now. She’s wearing Red or Dead glasses and has the sort of figure that men are perfectly at ease with, but women would like to tighten up.
‘I presume you work for the local authority,’ says McAvoy, indicating the paperwork.
Lavinia pulls a face. ‘I’m freelance. I work for whoever.’
‘Journalist?’
She shakes her head and laughs. ‘Chance would be a fine thing! No, my spelling’s terrible. Good enough for marketing though.’
‘Ah, right. Press officer?’
‘That’s what they used to be called. I’m a communications consultant, I’ll have you know.’ She adopts a haughty tone as she says it, and makes herself giggle. She raises a hand to her mouth suddenly, as if deciding that she is being overly jolly, given the circumstances, and takes on a solemn expression to make up for it.
‘I presume you’ve been told about the events of last night,’ says McAvoy, sitting down on the centre cushion of the sofa. ‘Did you know Philippa Longman?’
‘Not personally. Not really. I knew her face when your mate showed me the photo, and I’d seen her in the late shop.’
‘Did you ever speak?’
Lavinia rubs at the tip of her nose with an index finger, trying to be helpful. ‘Well, only in the shop. I think she once said the wine I was buying was nice. Something like that.’
‘Anything else?’
‘I think this was her walk home. I sometimes have a cigarette if I’ve had a really shit day, and the landlord doesn’t like me smoking indoors. I’ll sit on the front step with a coffee and a fag and I’ve said hello to her once or twice like that.’
‘And last night?’
Lavinia opens her mouth and sits forward, nodding even before she speaks. ‘Sort of. I wasn’t on the doorstep last night, I was having a fag out of the window upstairs. I hardly ever do that, but it was so bloody hot last night I couldn’t sleep and sometimes a cigarette calms me down. I was sitting on the windowsill.’
‘And what time was this?’
‘Oh, some time around midnight. Maybe a little earlier. I was reading a book on my phone. There’s just enough light from the street lamp for me not to have to put the bedroom light on, you see. I’m on an electricity meter–’
‘And you saw Mrs Longman?’ asks McAvoy, moving forward in his chair so he can maintain eye contact with her as she wriggles around on the edge of the seat.
‘Definitely. She was walking that way.’
She points in the direction the murdered woman would have had to walk to get home, and where, a few yards further on, she was torn to pieces.
‘Was she alone?’
‘At first,’ says Lavinia, reaching forward for a piece of paper from the coffee table then discarding it, distractedly. ‘As she came past the window she was. I’d looked up to drop some ash
out the window and saw her walking by. Then the next time I was dropping the ash she was with somebody else.’
McAvoy takes out his notebook from his waistcoat pocket. He will remember every single detail, but Lavinia seems the sort of person who will respond well to him taking her words as hugely important, and he holds his pen invitingly over a blank page.
‘Were they walking together, or standing still?’
Lavinia appears to think. ‘They were talking. It looked like he’d come from the other direction.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘The way they were standing. She had her back to me. He was sort of facing me. It’s the way you’d stand if you’d just bumped into somebody.’
McAvoy nods, a picture forming in his mind. ‘This was at the far end of the street, you say. Near the car park where she was found?’
‘Not more than a few feet away from the entrance.’
McAvoy makes a note, moving the notebook just enough for her to see that he is taking down her words in shorthand – the result of an intensive night class he paid for himself.
‘How long did you watch them for?’
‘It was literally a moment,’ says Lavinia, sadly. She seems to be wishing she had seen the whole attack and then taken pictures of the killer.
‘And the person she was talking to – it was definitely a man?’
‘Definitely,’ says Lavinia.
‘Big? Small? White? Black?’ He checks the door and sees PC Pearl lounging in the doorframe. Begins to explain himself to both of them. ‘These questions are crucial, you understand …’
‘I’d say average. White, I’m pretty certain.’ Lavinia looks sorry to be able to offer so little.
‘Age?’
‘Not old. Not young, either.’
‘And they were talking. Not arguing?’
She shakes her head. ‘They didn’t seem to be. They looked like they had just stopped for a natter.’
McAvoy closes the notepad around his pen. ‘Could you show me your room, please, Miss Mantell? PC Pearl, could you please ask a uniformed colleague to stand at the point Miss Mantell has described? Thanks.’
Lavinia looks surprised, but also quite pleased that there is more of this rather exciting aspect of her day still to come. She stands up, straightening her flared pinstripe trousers and white strappy vest. She leads him through the living-room door and into an L-shaped kitchen, then up a flight of stairs, covered with posters from foreign films.
‘You like the arts?’ he asks, as he follows her up.
She turns back. ‘I do a lot of work with theatre companies, and in a perfect world that’s all I’d do. That, watch films and smoke cigarettes. Not a perfect world, is it?’
Lavinia pushes open the door to her bedroom and scurries inside, throwing the duvet over the unmade bed and picking up a few items of laundry from the floor to stuff in a wicker hamper next to an open wardrobe. It’s a bit of a mess, but comfortably so.
‘There,’ she says, pointing, rather unnecessarily, at the window. ‘You have to reach up to blow the smoke out or dock your ash.’
McAvoy crosses to the window. A young WPC is talking into her radio and crossing to the spot McAvoy has requested. Behind her, he can see the edge of the white forensics tent and behind that, the bridge across the railway lines that would have led Philippa Longman home. He sits on the windowsill and looks
out through a single-glazed pane, smears on its surface and dead flies at its edges.
The WPC has come to a halt as instructed. McAvoy squints. He does not know the officer. Could not, now, pick her out of a lineup. He turns to Lavinia. ‘Can I borrow you for a moment, Miss Mantell?’ He pushes himself back against the wall and invites her to lean past him. He gets a smell of medicated shampoo and Impulse body spray. Could count the freckles on her bare right shoulder, should he so choose. ‘Describe the officer for me, please.’
She squints, theatrically. ‘It’s a woman,’ she says. ‘Brownish hair. Young.’
‘Anything else?’
‘I can’t tell you the colour of her eyes, no.’
They both stand, unsure whether to be pleased or not with how the past few minutes have gone. Eventually, McAvoy smiles and gives her a card. ‘An officer will take a formal statement. In the meantime, if you remember anything else, please give me a call.’
She looks at the card with its variety of numbers. Work. Personal. Email. Home.
‘Do you think you’ll catch him?’ asks Lavinia, looking up. ‘It’s not very nice, is it? That sort of thing happening where you live. I mean, you get yobs and boy racers and the odd fight after Hull Fair or the football, but somebody being killed like that? I mean, it could have been me. It could have been anyone.’
McAvoy holds her gaze, then breaks away and crosses back to the window. ‘It couldn’t,’ he says, softly. ‘He wanted her. She knew him.’
8.48 p.m. Hessle foreshore.
A wide strip of grey-brown water, separating East Yorkshire from Northern Lincolnshire; the bridge overhead a loose stitch of concrete and steel, holding two counties together.
Aector and Roisin McAvoy: standing on the strip of muddy shingle, smiling indulgently as their son throws dirty pebbles at the rotten timbers sunk deep into the sucking sands.
He breathes deep. Catches the scent of sun cream and citrus. Her skin lotion and cigarettes. He wants her, as he always wants her. Wants to wash himself, lose himself, in her movements, her affection …
He breathes in again. And there it is. That faint chemical tang. The merest whiff of disinfectant and grey steel, still suffusing his skin. The post-mortem. The mortuary. That ghastly tapestry of guts and innards made art by the precision of the incisions and stitches.
If Philippa Longman suffered in her final moments, the wounds are as naught compared with the indignities wreaked upon her corpse by Dr Gene Woodmansey. He was a lot more tender, more dispassionate about it, than whoever tore her
ribcage open, but there is no tender way of slicing up human flesh, and McAvoy’s hour at the mortuary had been vile. McAvoy has witnessed post-mortem exams before. He saw enough animal corpses and butchered enough cattle in his youth not to be rendered nauseous by the pathologist’s work. He is not the sort of officer who would rather do anything than visit the mortuary. He has seen fellow officers volunteer to break the news of violent death to the victim’s family rather than visit that anodyne, sterile cathedral of human deconstruction, with its grey walls and floors.