Vicki Mountford nods timidly and makes to stand, but McAvoy gestures that she should remain seated. He takes the chair opposite her and, with some ceremony, removes his coat. He notices her glass. It is a straight tumbler and contains the dwindling remains of half a dozen ice-cubes, melted to the size and shape of sucked sweets.
‘Why here, Miss Mountford? Are you sure there’s nowhere more comfortable we could go?’
She rubs a hand across her round features and looks at her glass, and then towards the bar. Then she shrugs. ‘I share a house, like I said. My housemate’s got the living room tonight. I don’t like police stations. This is where I always am at this time on a Sunday. It doesn’t bother me.’ She looks at her glass again. ‘I need a drink to talk about her,’ she adds softly.
‘It must have been very difficult,’ says McAvoy, as tenderly as he can over the hubbub of the half-f bar. ‘We break the news to family, but people sometimes forget about the friends. To hear something so terrible on the radio. To read it in the newspapers. I can’t imagine.’
Vicki nods, and McAvoy sees gratitude in the gesture. Then her eyes fall to the glass again. He is wondering whether he should offer to buy her a drink when a waitress, clad in black T-shirt and leggings, approaches the table.
‘Double vodka and tonic,’ says Vicki gratefully, then raises her eyebrows at McAvoy. ‘And you?’
McAvoy doesn’t know what to ask for. He should perhaps order coffee or a soft drink, but to do so might alienate a potential lead, who so clearly has a taste for something stronger.
‘Same for me,’ he says.
They do not speak until the waitress returns. She is back inside a minute, placing the drinks on neat white napkins on the black-varnished table. Vicki drains half of hers in one swallow. McAvoy takes only the merest sip before placing the drink back on the surface. He wishes he’d ordered a pint.
‘I forgot it was Sunday,’ says McAvoy. ‘Was expecting office workers and people in designer suits.’
Vicki manages a smile. ‘I only come in on Sundays. You can’t get a table on a week night and people look at you strangely when you’re on your own. It’s music night in here on a Sunday. There’ll be a jazz band on in an hour or two.’
‘Any good? I don’t mind a bit of jazz.’
‘Different ones each week. They’ve got a South American group on tonight. All right, apparently.’
McAvoy sticks out his lower lip – his own elaborate gesture of interest. He had policed the Beverley Jazz Festival during his last days as a uniformed constable and been blown away by some of the ethnic jazz groups that had made their way to the East Yorkshire town to play a dozen intermingling tunes for drunk students and the occasional true aficionado.
‘Expensive, is it?’
‘If you’re here before six, it’s free. A fiver after that, I think. I’ve never paid.’
‘No? Must save you a bob or two.’
‘On a supply-teacher’s wages every penny counts.’
Her words seem to steer them back to the reason for their meeting. McAvoy positions himself straighter in his chair. Looks pointedly at his notebook. Softens his face as he prepares to let her tell the story in her own words.
‘She must have meant a great deal to you,’ he says encouragingly.
Vicki nods. Then gives what is little more than a shrug. ‘It’s just the wastefulness of it all,’ she says, and it seems as though some of the anguish leaves her voice, to be replaced by a weary resignation. ‘For her to go through all that and to get her life in some kind of order …’
‘Yes?’
She stops. Tips the empty glass to her mouth and inserts her tongue, draining it of the last dribbles of watery alcohol. Closing her eyes, she appears to make a decision, and then ducks down below the level of the table. McAvoy hears a bag being unzipped and a moment later she is handing him some folded sheets of white paper.
‘That’s what she wrote,’ she says. ‘That’s what I’m talking about.’
‘And this is?’
‘It’s her story. A bit of it, anyway. A snippet of how it felt to be her. Like I said, she had a talent. I would have liked to have taught her all the time but there was no permanent position at the school. We just got chatting. I’ve done some voluntary work in Sierra Leone. Building schools, a bit of teaching here and there. I knew some of the places she was familiar with. It was enough for us to become friends.’
McAvoy cocks his head. A fourteen-year-old girl, and a woman perhaps two decades her senior?
‘She had friends her own age, of course,’ says Vicki, as if reading his thoughts. She moves her empty glass in slow, steady circles. ‘She was an ordinary girl, inasmuch as there is such a thing. She liked pop music. Watched
Skins
and
Big Brother
, like they all do. I never saw her room but I don’t doubt there were some Take That posters on the wall. It was her writing that set her apart. That and her faith, although that wasn’t something we ever really discussed. I’m not really that way inclined. I put “creature of light” on official forms when they ask my religion. That or “Jedi”.’
McAvoy smiles. Without thinking, he takes a large swallow of his drink and feels the pleasing warmth of its passage down his throat.
‘I just leave it blank.’
‘Not a believer?’
‘Nobody’s business,’ he says, and hopes she will leave it at that.
‘You’re probably right. Daphne certainly never shoved it down anybody’s throat. She wore a crucifix but she was quite literally a buttoned-up sort of girl in her school uniform, so she couldn’t be accused of flaunting her beliefs. We only got talking because I’d been intrigued by some of the answers she’d given in class. It must have been about a year ago. I was on a three-week posting at the school. We were doing
Macbeth
.’
McAvoy screws up his face and tries to remember the passage that he had memorised for performance day at school. ‘And oftentimes, to win us to our harm, The instruments of darkness tell us truths, Win us with honest trifles, to betray, in deepest consequence—’ He stops, embarrassed.
‘I’m impressed,’ says Vicki and as her face breaks into a grin, McAvoy is dazzled by the transformation that the simple act of smiling has upon her looks. She is casually cool enough to sit alone in a jazz club, rather than too unremarkable to attract a companion.
‘I did it when I was thirteen,’ says McAvoy. ‘I had to recite that in front of a room full of parents and teachers. I still shudder when I think about it. I don’t think I’ve ever been as scared.’
‘Really? It’s never bothered me,’ she says, as the interview evolves into a chat between friends. ‘You couldn’t get me off the stage when I was a kid. I’ve never been the shy type.’
‘I envy you,’ says McAvoy, and means it.
‘I didn’t think you could be a policeman if you were shy,’ she says, crinkling her suddenly pretty eyes.
‘You just have to learn how to hide it,’ he says with a shrug. ‘How am I doing?’
‘You had me fooled,’ she whispers. ‘I won’t tell.’
McAvoy wonders if he is playing this right.
‘So,’ he says, trying to get them back on track. ‘
Macbeth
?’
‘Well, long story short, I was asking some questions of the class. Something about evil. I wanted to know which of the characters in the play could be called truly good and which truly bad. All the other kids had Banquo and Macduff down as heroes. Daphne disagreed. She put just about everybody down the middle. She said you couldn’t be one thing or another. That good people did evil things. That evil people were capable of kindness. That people weren’t always one thing. She can’t have been more than twelve or thirteen when she was saying this, and the way she said it just
intrigued me. I asked her to stay back after class and we just got talking. My contract with the school eventually became a six-month thing, so I got to know Daphne pretty well. Obviously, the other teachers knew she had been adopted and that she must have seen some hellish things, but how much was in her official record I couldn’t say.’
‘So how and when did she tell you about her time in Sierra Leone? About what happened to her?’
‘I think I just asked her one day,’ says Vicki, turning in her seat to try and catch the waitress’s eye. Without thinking about it, McAvoy pushes his own glass across the table and, wordlessly, Vicki takes it in her palm. ‘Like I told you, I’ve done quite a lot of work in countries that have seen conflict and poverty. I was walking between classes with her and she just came out with it. Told me that all of her family had been killed. She was the only one who survived.’
For a whole minute they sit in silence. McAvoy’s mind is full of this murdered girl. He has investigated lost lives before. But there is something about the butchering of Daphne Cotton that smacks of futility. Of a cruel end to a life that had been unexpectedly reprieved, and which could perhaps have offered so much.
‘Read it,’ says Vicki eventually, nodding at the papers on the table in front of McAvoy. ‘She wrote that about three months ago. We’d been talking about drawing on your own experiences to become a better writer. Putting parts of yourself into your work. I’m not sure if she fully understood, but what she wrote just tore me up. Read it.’
McAvoy unfolds the pages. Looks at Daphne Cotton’s words.
They say that three years old is too young to form memories, so perhaps what follows is the product of what I have been told, and what I have read. I truly cannot say
.
I cannot smell blood when I think of my family. I do not smell the bodies or remember the touch of their dead skin. I know it happened. I know I was plucked from the pile of bodies like a baby from a collapsed building. But I do not remember it. And yet I know that it happened
.
I was three years old. I was the second youngest child in a large family. My oldest brother was fourteen. My oldest sister a year younger. My youngest brother was perhaps ten months old. I had two more brothers and one sister. My youngest brother was called Ishmael. I think we were a happy family. In the three photographs I have, we are all smiling. The photographs were gifts from the sisters as I left to meet my new parents. I do not know where they came from
.
We lived in Freetown, where my father worked as a tailor. I was born into a time of violence and warfare, but my parents kept us cocooned from the troubles. They were God-fearing Christians, as were their parents, my grandparents. We lived together in a large apartment in the city, and I think I remember saying prayers of gratitude for our good fortune. From history books and the internet, I know that people were dying in their thousands at a time when we were living a happy life, but my parents never allowed this horror to penetrate our lives
.
In January of 1999, the fighting reached Freetown. When I ask my memory for pictures of our flight from the bloodshed and carnage of that day, there is nothing. Perhaps we left before the soldiers arrived. I know that we went north with a group
of other families from our church. How we reached Songo, the region of my mother’s people, I cannot say
.
I remember dry grass and a white building. I think I remember songs and prayers. I remember Ishmael’s cough. We may have been there for days or weeks. I sometimes feel I have let my family down by not remembering. I pray to God the Father that I remedy this sin. I ask for the memories, no matter how much they will hurt
.
When I was old enough, the sisters at the orphanage told me that the rebels had come. That it had been a bright, sunny day. That the fighting was beginning to die down elsewhere in the country, and that the men who passed our church were fleeing defeat. They were drunk and they were angry
.
They herded my family and their friends into the church. Nobody else came out alive, so nobody can say what happened. Some of the bodies had bullet holes in the backs of their heads. Others had died from the cuts of machetes
.
I do not know why I was spared. I was found among the bodies. I was bleeding from a cut to my shoulder. I think I remember white people in blue uniforms, but this could be my imaginings
.
I tell myself that I have forgiven these men for what they did. I know that I am lying. I pray to God each day that this lie becomes truth. He has granted me a new family. I have a good life, now. I feared at first that the city with which Freetown is twinned would be its mirror image. That the pages of its history would be written in blood. But this city has welcomed me. My new parents never ask me to forget. And I have never felt as close to God. His temple embraces me. Holy Trinity has become His warm and loving arms. I felt content in its
embrace. I pray that I will find the strength to please Him and be worthy of His love
…
There is a lump in McAvoy’s throat and cold grit in his eyes. When he looks up, Vicki’s eyes are waiting to meet his.
‘See what I mean,’ she says, biting her lip. ‘The waste.’
McAvoy nods slowly.
‘You spoke to her about it?’ he asks, his voice hoarse and gravelly.
‘Of course. She never knew much about what happened. Just what the nuns at the orphanage told her. She’d been rounded up with her family and shepherded into the church. Some were hacked down with machetes. Others shot. Some raped. Daphne was found by a United Nations force, in among the bodies. She’d been hacked with a machete but survived.’
McAvoy balls his fists. He is struggling to take this in.
‘Who else knew about this?’
‘The details? Not many. I don’t even know how much she told her adoptive parents. They know her family were killed, but as for what happened to Daphne …’
‘Have you shown this to anybody else?’
Vicki purses her lips and breathes out. ‘Maybe one or two,’ she says, and her eyes dart away again. It is the first time that she has looked as if she has something to hide.
McAvoy nods. His thoughts are a storm.
‘Do you think it’s connected?’ asks Vicki. ‘I mean, it’s too big a coincidence, isn’t it? A church. A knife. It was a machete, wasn’t it?’
Without thinking, McAvoy nods. He realises he does not know if the information has been made available to the
public, and then back-pedals. ‘It could be,’ he says.