Pharaoh has had to hit the ground running. In the wake of Doug Roper’s departure the Chief Constable decided the bad-boy’s old team should become an elite unit, specialising in serious crime. A unit within the greater body of CID, run by an experienced, reliable hand and staffed with the best officers from within the Humberside boundary. Nobody had expected the job to go to Trish Pharaoh, the sassy, determined ‘token woman’ from across the Humber. Detective Chief Inspector Colin Ray had been the bookies’ choice for promotion, with his protégée Sharon Archer as his number two. Instead, Trish Pharoah had been hand-picked by the Chief Constable, who needed something attention-grabbing to put in a press release. Brought her over from Grimsby and told her to make waves. Ray and Archer were drafted into the team as Pharaoh’s deputies, and neither took to the roll with good grace. Rumour had it the top brass told them on their first day that their new boss was a mere figurehead – a lightning conductor positioned to take the heat when it all went wrong. Told them that, in reality, they were the unit’s leaders. Pharaoh had different ideas, though; saw a chance to build something special and set about picking her team. But for every officer she recruited, Ray brought in one of his
own. The unit was soon laced with intrigue and duplicity, split between Ray’s old campaigners and Pharaoh’s more forward-thinking, hand-picked specialists.
McAvoy falls into neither camp. His business cards declare him a member of the Serious and Organised Crime Unit, but he is nobody’s blue-eyed boy. He requested the transfer himself. Used up his thank-you from the top brass. Slid into the unit as a muted reward for nearly getting himself killed in the line of a duty that nobody had asked him to burden himself with.
In truth, he is somewhere between an ambassador and a mascot; an educated, well-spoken, physically imposing emblem of the brave new world of Humberside Police – tailor-made for giving talks to the Women’s Institute and local schools, and a valuable asset when putting together year-end reports on the force’s new software requirements.
‘What’s going on, Daddy?’
As McAvoy stares out across the square, the smell of snow grows suddenly stronger. He’s heard it said that it can be too cold for snow, but a childhood spent in the harsh and unforgiving embrace of the Western Highlands has taught him that it is never too cold for flakes to fall. This sudden plunging in temperature will harden the ground. Catch the snowfall without letting it settle. Cause the wind to rebound. Build a blizzard that will blind his young eyes and turn his fingers to blue stone …
In the back of his throat he tastes the metallic tang again, and for an instant wonders at the eerie similarity between the flavour of changing weather and the sharp, bitter taste of blood.
And then he hears screaming. Loud. Piercing. Multi-voiced. This is no drunken reveller, tickled by a boyfriend, chased by a pal. This is terror, unleashed.
McAvoy’s head snaps towards the direction of the sound. The movement in the square stops suddenly, as if the men, the women, the families moving on its surface are mere music-box ballerinas, spinning to a graceless, abrupt halt.
He stands, extricating his frame from the cramped confines of the table, and stares into the mouth of the church. He takes two steps and finds the table legs still blocking his thick shins. He kicks out. Knocks the table to the floor. Begins to run.
McAvoy sprints across the square, sensing movement on all sides. ‘Get back,’ he shouts, motioning with his arms as curious shoppers begin to jog towards Holy Trinity. His breathing becomes shallow, as adrenalin begins to pump into his veins. He feels the blood fill his cheeks. It is only as he runs through the open metal gates and into the shadow of the double doors that he remembers his son. He pulls up like a lame horse, all arms and legs and knotted, tumbling limbs. He stares back across the square. Sees a four-year-old boy sitting in front of an upended table, mouth open, crying for his daddy.
And for a moment, he is torn. Truly motionless with uncertainty.
A figure bursts from the doors. It is clad in black, head to toe.
There are fresh shrieks as this shadow springs forth from the open-mouthed House of God: a streak of silver in its left hand, stains upon its handle, damp upon its breast …
McAvoy has no time to raise his hands. He sees the blade rise. Fall. And then he is on his back, staring at the darkening sky, hearing running footsteps. Distant sirens. A voice. Feeling hands upon him.
‘You’ll be all right. Stay with me. Stay with me, lad.’
And harsher, stronger, like a firm black pencil stroke among shading and blurs, another voice, drenched in anguish …
‘He’s killed her. She’s dead. She’s dead!’
Staring wide-eyed into the sky, he is the first to see the snow begin to fall.
She lies where she fell, crumpled and folded on the altar steps: one leg drawn up, bent the wrong way at the knee – a dislodged training shoe hanging precariously from stockinged toes.
She is a black girl, her face and hands a rich mahogany: her upturned palms soft, the colour of churned milk. She’s young. Still in the throes of adolescence. Not old enough to buy cigarettes. Not old enough to have sex. Not old enough to die.
Nobody has tried to restart her heart. There are too many holes in her. Pressing on her chest would be like squeezing a wet sponge.
Her pure white cassock has been pulled up behind her back, creased beneath her corpse. Its thick white material hugs tight to the curve of one small, firm breast.
The girl’s blood has made her robe sodden and crimson down one side. It remains pristine on the other. Were it not for the twisted expression that enfolds the entirety of her face, it would seem as though this hideous indignity had only been visited on one side of her small frame.
It is clear she died in agony. The blood that streaks her cheeks, neck, chin and lips looks as though it was hurled at her in great wet handfuls. It settled on her in a hazy red rain as she lay here, dead and staring, gaze fixed on a distant ceiling of curving columns and hand-drawn stars.
‘You poor, poor girl.’
McAvoy stands by the altar, one big pink hand gripping the wooden back-rest of the front pew. He feels sick and dizzy and there’s a haziness to his vision where the swelling above his eye is disrupting the edges of his sight. The paramedic had wanted to take him straight to casualty for an X-ray, but McAvoy, no stranger to injury, knows that this wound brings nothing more harmful than pain. Pain can be endured.
‘Got lucky, eh Sarge?’
McAvoy turns too quickly as the voice rings out in the echoing cavern of the empty church. There is a fresh explosion of pain in his skull and he sinks into the pew as DC Helen Tremberg makes her way up the central aisle. A sickness hits him in the gut.
‘I’m sorry, Detective Constable Tremberg?’
‘They said he almost filleted you as well. Lucky break.’
Her cheeks are flushed. She’s excited. For the past hour she’s been marshalling the uniformed officers from their makeshift HQ in the verger’s office and one of the younger constables had called her ‘ma’am’, thinking her a senior officer. She had enjoyed the feeling. Enjoyed telling people what to do, and seeing it done. Already the dozen uniforms have taken the first batch of statements from the congregation, as well as the names and addresses of those currently too deeply in shock to be able to explain what they saw.
‘He hit me with the handle, not the blade.’
‘Must have liked the look of you, eh? Must have been more difficult to knock you out than to kill you. Heat of the moment, machete in your hand. Million to one that he decides to crack you one rather than slash you.’
McAvoy stares at his feet, waiting for the thudding pain to cease.
He knows how this story will be told. He has a reputation as a desk jockey; a master of spreadsheets and databases, computing and technology. To be knocked out cold at a crime scene by the prime suspect? He can hear the jokes already.
‘Your boy get home OK?’
McAvoy nods. Swallows. Coughs some gravel into his voice.
‘Roisin came and got him. The waitress from the coffee shop was looking after him. I think I’m in the doghouse with both of them.’
‘The waitress?’
McAvoy smiles. ‘Yeah, probably her as well.’
They fall silent for a moment, Tremberg letting herself look at the girl’s corpse for the first time. She shakes her head and looks away. Focuses on her notebook. Tries to get this right. She’s never had any worries about organising a crime scene or giving a report, but there’s something about McAvoy that she finds strangely disconcerting. It’s more than just his size. There’s a sadness to him. A quiet, brooding intensity that makes him difficult company. She gets on fine with the blokes at the station. She’s perfectly at ease telling jokes with the lads and can drink most of her male colleagues under the table, but there is a quality to her sergeant that makes her unsure how to impress him. He seems to take
it all so personally. And he’s obsessed with getting things done by the book. With filling in forms and quoting the right sections and sub-sections, and using the politically correct references for every scumbag they come into contact with.
She knows he has his secrets. Something happened a year ago, up at the Country Park, and it cost a well-known copper his job and put McAvoy on the shelf for months. He was injured, she knows that. The faintest of scars are on his face. There are rumours of more beneath the expensive clothes he seems to wear so inelegantly. Tremberg had only joined Trish Pharaoh’s team a few weeks before McAvoy returned from sick leave, and she had been excited about having a chance to get to know him. But the first meeting was a disappointment. She’d found a small man trapped in a giant’s body. He had the personality of an unassuming, bespectacled accountant, but it was rattling around inside a colossal frame. And then there were the eyes. Those big, sad cow-eyes that seemed to be forever questioning, assessing, disapproving, judging. At times, he put her in mind of an old Scottish king, his sword across his knees and a blanket round his shoulders, coughing, wheezing, but still able to wield a claymore with enough force to decapitate a bull.
She looks at him now. Hopes to God that they make a start on this before Detective Chief Inspector Colin Ray and his trained seal can steam in and spoil the party.
McAvoy stands. Steadies himself and sees that his hand, supporting his weight on the pew, is resting on a leatherbound Bible.
‘So little mercy,’ he says, half to himself.
‘Sarge?’
‘Just makes you wonder,’ he mutters, and a disloyal blush climbs from his shirt and up his broad face. ‘Why her? Why here? Why now?’ He waves a huge, shovel-like hand. ‘Why any of it?’
‘Horrible world,’ says Tremberg with a shrug.
McAvoy looks at his feet and strokes the cover of the Bible. ‘Chapter and verse,’ he says softly, and closes his eyes.
‘She’s called Daphne Cotton,’ says Tremberg, her voice suddenly softer and less abrasive, as if, after the viewing of the corpse, her earlier bombast has been diluted by the sheer brutal sadness of the scene. ‘Fifteen years old. She’s been part of this church for four years. Adopted.’
‘Stop there,’ says McAvoy, already dizzy with ideas and questions. He has a logical mind, but things make more sense to him when they are written down and neatly ordered. He likes the process of detection. Likes the orderliness of logging things properly. With his aching head and dulled wits, he wonders how much of this will go in. ‘Daphne Cotton,’ he repeats. ‘Fifteen. Adopted. Local?’
Tremberg looks confused. ‘Sarge?’
‘She’s a black girl, DC Tremberg. Was she adopted from overseas?’
‘Oh, right. Don’t know.’
‘Right.’
They fall into silence, both disappointed in the other and themselves. McAvoy finds himself worrying about his use of the word ‘black’. Would it be more appropriate to use the procedural moniker? Is it wrong to notice her colour? Is he being a good detective or a bigot? He knows few other officers concern themselves with such subtleties, but McAvoy would give
himself an ulcer fretting about such things were it not for Roisin’s ability to calm him down.
‘So,’ says McAvoy, looking back at the girl’s body and then up to the ceiling. ‘What did they tell you, the witnesses?’
Tremberg glances at her notebook. ‘She’s an altar server, Sarge. An acolyte. They hold the candles in the procession. Sit in front of the altar during the service. Take the stuff the priest hands them and put it away. Lots of ceremony and pomp. It’s a big honour, apparently. She’s been doing it since she was twelve.’ There is enough scepticism and eyebrow-raising in Tremberg’s speech to hint at a set of religious beliefs somewhere south of agnostic.
‘You’re not a regular at Sunday service?’ asks McAvoy with a faint smile.
Tremberg gives a snort of derisory laughter. ‘In my family, Sundays were for the Grand Prix. We followed F1 religiously though.’
At the far end of the central aisle a door bangs open with a sudden gust of wind, and for a moment McAvoy sees gravestones and gates, Christmas lights and uniforms, as a blue light flashes rhythmically, illuminating the darkness in sweeping circles. He can imagine the scene out there. Police constables in yellow coats fixing blue-and-white striped police tape around the wrought-iron gates. Drinkers from the nearby pubs peering over half-empty pint glasses as cars do battle in the forecourt, screeching to a halt, inches from collision; anxious drivers leaping out to pick up loved ones who had been in the congregation and who are now emerging into the cold, snow-blown square, to be led away from the horror of what they have witnessed.
‘So whoever did this knew she would be here?’
‘If she’s who he was after, Sarge. We don’t know it wasn’t random.’
‘True. Do we have anything to that effect?’
‘Not yet. I’ve got a statement here from a Euan Leech who reckons the bloke pushed aside two other servers to get at her, but in all the confusion …’
‘And the other statements?’