“It’s Sunday morning, lad. I’m busy.”
“Oh, yes?” McAvoy tries to sound chatty. Can’t help but be curious.
“Picking up the lads, as it happens. Football match.”
“Yes? Who’s playing?”
“We are, you daft bastard. Bridlington away.”
McAvoy vaguely recalls some conversation he had with Colin Ray when he first joined the unit. Remembers that the older man coaches one of the divisional police football teams. Remembers, too, the detective chief inspector’s expression when he told him he was a rugby and boxing man, and did not follow football.
“Are you driving?” McAvoy is about to offer to call him back when it is safe to take the call.
“What do you fucking want?”
McAvoy feels the blush. Wishes he could talk to people with some degree of comfort or aplomb.
“One of Alan Rourke’s past associates. He’s a real villain. A Giuseppe Noye. He’s also the godfather of Ronan.”
A pause at the other end of the line. “Noye?”
“Yes. Armed robber.” He thinks for a second about whether to reveal more. Realizes he must. “Traveler.”
Ray gives a bark of a laugh. “You don’t say.”
McAvoy falls silent. “I thought it might be worth checking out, that’s all.”
He has done his best to maintain an interest in the Rourke investigation, but knows only that the old armed robber kept his trap shut during the interview. Gave “No comments” all the way. Young Ronan gave only slightly more. Lost his temper, shouted and screamed his way through questioning. Neither Ray nor Archer had managed to get a useful word from either of them, and though they made a fuss when both were given bail, they had expected little else. Ronan gave his address as Rourke’s place, and the older man was put down on paper as being his current guardian. Social services went away happy. And Ronan fucked off the second he walked out of the door.
“I know the name Noye,” says Ray quietly, appearing to be struggling with a memory. “Fighter, isn’t he? Bare-knuckle stuff.”
McAvoy isn’t sure how to respond. Starts Googling Noye’s name for something to distract himself. “A boxer? I don’t think . . .”
“Traveler fighting,” says Ray. “Bare-knuckle stuff. I think he’s part of that crowd.”
McAvoy finds a link to the gypsy’s name. Clicks it. Feels himself closing down inside as he presses play on a video showing Noye stripped to the waist, knuckles taped, pounding right hand after right hand into the ribs of a younger man while a crowd of lads form a rough circle around the fight. A muscular man in a white T-shirt tries to separate them. To keep some kind of order. He is struggling.
“That’s illegal.”
“Piss off, lad,” says Ray. “Everything fun is illegal. And the gyppos have been doing this shit for centuries. Straighteners, they call them. Honor fights. Big business now. They’re arranged like pro fights. Big crowds. And the DVD sales are massive.”
“I’m watching him fight now,” says McAvoy. “How can I be watching an illegal fight? I just clicked one button . . .”
Ray gives a joyless little chuckle. “I’d love to see the world like you do, lad. Fucking hell.”
McAvoy pauses the video, just as the camera zooms in on Noye’s snarling, blood-spattered face. His bound knuckles, too, are caked in red.
“The interview,” says McAvoy. “Ronan.”
Ray laughs again. “Fuck all so far,” he says. “Had to sedate the little bastard. Every time he went in his cell he lost it. Started bouncing himself off the walls. Not happy with you.”
“Me?”
“He’s feeling a bit miffed that you put him down like a sack of shit.”
McAvoy isn’t sure whether to preen or be humble. “I’m a policeman.”
Ray says nothing for a moment. Then, as if it hurts him to say it, adds, “You did good, by the way. Taking him down. I lost my feet. Little shit got me right in the jaw. Landed on a rib. Hurts like hell . . .”
McAvoy knows that if he were to speak, he would spoil the moment, so simply nods. “Any news on Pharaoh?” he manages.
“Back tomorrow, so she reckons,” says Ray, equally glad to have had the subject changed. “She could have strung this out for months, silly cow. Obviously needs to come and make sure we can still wipe our arses.”
McAvoy lets the other man talk. He is wondering what Pharaoh’s return means. Whether he has done enough wrong to get more than a telling-off. Whether he will be able to get the report back from the tech unit in time to present her with evidence of the need for a genuine murder inquiry. Whether he should just do what he’s been told. Wonders, for a moment, why he is not trying this hard to catch the two shaven-headed thugs who have outmuscled the Vietnamese and caused a spike in the violent crime statistics.
“Enjoy the match, sir,” says McAvoy. “Hope you win.”
“Enjoy whatever it is you fucking do,” says Ray, and ends the call.
McAvoy stares for a moment longer into the eyes of Giuseppe Noye. Shakes his fears away. Calls the tech unit and asks for Dan.
“Sergeant,” says the young man when he comes to the phone. “All good?”
“I was rather hoping to have your report this morning,” says McAvoy. “Superintendent Pharaoh did specify that it was very urgent.”
“I know she did,” says Dan. “I was up till three for her. She’s worth an all-nighter, don’t you think? That’s why I sent her the report.”
McAvoy closes his eyes. “You sent it to Superintendent Pharaoh?”
“Yes. And?”
“I asked for it to come to me, I said!” He sounds exasperated. Childish.
“Does it make any difference? I wanted her to know how much effort we’d gone to . . .”
McAvoy is spared the effort of trying to formulate a sentence by the sound of the doorbell. He takes the phone away from his ear and listens to the muttered conversation from downstairs. A moment later there is the sound of footsteps on the stairs.
“I’ll call you back,” he says into the phone.
He looks up, ready to smile for his wife, as the door opens. His face freezes, locked in place, color falling into his shirt.
In the doorway of his bedroom, gauze strapped to her throat, hands bandaged, dressed in jeans, a too-tight vest, and a leather jacket, stands Trish Pharaoh. Her eyebrows are raised almost to her hairline.
“Guv, I . . .”
He is suddenly aware that he is wearing nothing but shorts. That he has a laptop balanced on his lap. He shuts the screen like a guilty teenager looking at porn.
Pharaoh raises a fist full of computer printouts.
“Time for a chat?” she asks.
Her voice could shatter steel.
“Your missus is a looker,” says Pharaoh, leaning against the bedroom wall and making no attempt to look away as McAvoy pulls on a hooded sweatshirt and smooths down his hair with the palm of his hand. “Not what I pictured.”
McAvoy wonders what his wife made of his boss. What she will make of him, when she is gone.
“Thank you,” he says, distractedly. He waves an arm vaguely to indicate her injuries. “How are you?”
Pharaoh’s expression does not change. She continues to watch him with wide-eyed detachment. “Sore. Getting attacked by Rottweilers will do that to you.”
“I wish I’d been there . . .”
“I know you do.”
McAvoy stops. Stands, next to the bed, and meets her gaze. “I was worried,” he says.
Pharaoh softens. For a moment, she is an indulgent mother accepting a thank-you fridge drawing from a naughty toddler. “Daniells stepped up. Kicked one of them right in the nuts.”
“He got hurt, too.”
“Poor lamb.”
“He did good.”
“He’s not you,” she says, shrugging, and what she means by it is left unsaid.
McAvoy cannot help himself. He points at the papers she clutches. “Tech report?” he asks, wincing.
“Yes, e-mailed to me at three a.m., together with a little note from some computer geek who wanted me to know how hard he had worked on this, along with all the info I requested and assigned to my budget.”
McAvoy rubs his face. Realizes he is biting the webbing between forefinger and thumb.
“It’s the case I told you about, guv,” he says. “You suggested I have a look.”
Pharaoh runs her tongue around the inside of her lower lip. Despite her injuries, she is wearing makeup. He wonders whether she applied it herself. Why she bothered, if only to come and shout at her sergeant.
“Does the expression ‘bane of my life’ mean anything to you, Aector?”
McAvoy grabs the question like a lifeline. “
Bane
is an old English word for ‘murderer.’ That morphed into meaning ‘something that causes death.’ That’s where you get the name for poisonous plants from, like wolfsbane and henbane . . .”
“No, Aector.
You
are the bane of my life. I spend a lot of time deciding whether or not to stab you in the head.”
McAvoy stops talking.
She looks at him hard. Gives the room a quick once-over. Lets her gaze linger, for the tiniest fraction of a second, on the leopard-print silk nightdress that hangs from the foot of the bed.
“I hesitate to ask this of your big brain, but is there a landlubber word for a Jonah?”
“Are you really asking?”
“No,” she says. “But I am implying that you seem like a magnet for shit.”
McAvoy looks at the papers in her hand as she gesticulates. Is desperate to unroll them and read the hidden words.
“I thought it was important.”
Pharaoh smiles, rolling her eyes. “It is important. You were right. You’re nearly always right. Doesn’t mean I don’t think about hurting you.”
McAvoy’s skin prickles. He does not know how to comport his face, so stands still, looking expectant. “I was right?” He is hesitant to ask which of his half-formed theories and vague gut instincts have been vindicated.
“Right about Simon Appleyard,” says Pharaoh, crossing the room and sitting down, unasked, on his bed. He stands up, in turn. He has to fight the urge to turn scarlet at the intimacy of the moment. His boss, here, in his bedroom. Family downstairs. Words to stroke his ego in her hand.
“He was murdered?” asks McAvoy, instinctively, leaning back against the wall in the position she has just vacated.
Pharaoh shrugs. “You’re right that he could have been. I’ve spoken to the pathologist again. She e-mailed me through images of the body and the postmortem exam. Pretty boy, wasn’t he?”
“His back, you mean? The tattoos?”
“Yeah, lovely work. Will have to show you mine someday. Anyway, I can see why she didn’t see it, but she’ll be getting a bollocking at some stage.”
“See what?”
“The bruise,” says Pharaoh, rustling through her papers.
McAvoy crosses back to her. Sits next to her on the bed. Catches a hint of her perfume. Notices that she is wearing open-toed shoes instead of her usual biker boots, and that her feet are not as pretty as his wife’s. Wonders why he is even thinking about such things.
“You can see it here,” she says, holding up a color printout.
McAvoy looks upon the photograph of the boy whose death has so troubled him. Simon is laid out naked on a steel table. The clinical aluminum and white of the mortuary frame the exotic colors of his body. Makes his slim frame appear almost skeletal. McAvoy stares into the mass of ink. Squints, between the eyes of the tattooed peacock feather, at the slight blur of discoloration.
“Sergeant Arthurs told me about that,” he says. “Said he was surprised the pathologist missed it.”
“Nothing surprises me,” says Pharaoh. She hands him more pictures. Simon, kneeling forward, slumped and lifeless, his skin a mottled red and blue. A rope trailing from his throat, tongue hanging forward from between open lips, a black slug.
“He had been there some time,” recalls McAvoy.
“Heater was on the whole time, too. Decomposition started quickly. She’ll have a good reason for not seeing it.”
“If it’s anything at all,” warns McAvoy.
“True,” says his boss. “But it looks like a footprint to me.”
“Or a knee,” he says, looking again at the image.
They look at each other, close as lovers on the edge of the bed. McAvoy looks away first.
“Why did you contact the pathologist, guv?” he asks.
“Boredom?” She laughs. Then her face turns serious. “No, Aector, I trust your instincts. You’ve made your usual balls-up of going about it all, but there’s something here.”
McAvoy is torn between feeling flattered and insulted. Tries to ignore both feelings and just ends up jiggling his leg. His mind is trying to work out how much she knows. Whether she is already further ahead than him.
“Dan’s report?”
“I’m pleased it came to me first. You’d have had a heart attack. But you’re right. I think we made a right cock-up looking into it.”
“I’ve spoken to his aunt,” says McAvoy. “She doesn’t know what she thinks. Doesn’t know if she wants to know. But she says he was living life to the full, if you get my meaning. And had a friend who went everywhere with him. I haven’t started tracking her down yet.”
“What else?”
McAvoy looks skyward. Realizes he has no real justification for sharing more, but does not want to hold anything back. “Two city councillors,” he says, at last. “Cabourne and Hepburn. They’re connected. They’re lovers.”
“Lovers! Christ, the way you talk. They’re both blokes, yes?”
“Yes. Hepburn’s the one who . . .”
“Yes, I know him. Character, yes? Some shady stuff in his background, but nothing he hides.” She waggles her tongue thoughtfully. “And have they got a connection to Simon?”
“Cabourne has been meeting men for sex—using the same dating site that Simon posted his details on. Simon’s phone number is on there.”
“And does Cabourne remember Simon?”
“He thinks they shared some messages but nothing ever happened.”
“But?”
McAvoy shrugs. “Hepburn knows more than he’s letting on. And I think Simon might have met somebody on that site who didn’t want his secret getting out.”
“Cabourne?”
He considers it. “I don’t know.”
They sit in silence.
“Anyway, turns out Dan’s more of a technical genius than you are. He’s got plenty more info off it than you managed.”
She hands him another sheaf of papers, made almost illegible by the amount of creases.