Dark Winter (10 page)

Across a rutted stretch of tarmac, surrounded on all sides by iron shutters, and blackened bricks, they face one another. Perfect little seaside chalets.

Though there are lights on at number 59, its owners are not home. Warren Epworth suffered an angina attack last night and was taken to Hull Royal Infirmary as a precautionary measure. His wife, Joyce, is staying with her daughter in Kirk Ella. It is a move her daughter hopes will become a permanent measure when her father is discharged. She hopes, too, that while the house is unattended, it will be robbed. Vandalised. Burned to the bloody ground. Her parents need proof that that their community is irredeemable. They need to leave.

Tonight, the living room of the house where the Epworths have lived for forty-two years is occupied by two men.

One wears a black balaclava. A dark sweater. Black combat boots.

He has wet, blue eyes.

The other man lies on a floral print sofa. He’s dressed in an old Manchester United shirt, jogging pants and trainers. He is scrawny and unkempt, with scabbed, goose-pimpled arms and an unshaven, ratty face. There is sticky, clotted red around his lips and one of his teeth points inwards, showing a rotten, bloodied gum.

His eyes are closed.

He reeks of alcohol.

The man in the balaclava looks around the living room. At the ornate picture frames on the mantelpiece. At the smiling portraits. The newborn babies and dressed-up grandchildren. At school photos. A ruby wedding snap showing an elderly
couple holding hands and nuzzling foreheads at the head of a table strewn with presents.

The man nods, as if making a decision. Sweeps his arm along the mantelpiece and grabs the snaps. Bundles them into a black holdall at his feet.

Then he turns back to the figure on the sofa.

From his inside pocket he withdraws a yellow metal container. He closes his eyes. Breathes through his nose.

Sprays the lighter fuel on the unconscious man.

He stands back, his gloved hands balled into fists.

Watches the other man cough and splutter into wakefulness.

Sees him look up. Stare at him.

Know.

Know that he’s been living on borrowed time.

That he escaped when he should have been taken.

That the debt must be repaid.

He sees the other man’s eyes widen and shrink. Sees the panic and fury contort the muscles in his face.

‘What … where … ?’

The man is trying to stand, but his mind is foggy with alcohol. His memories are smudged and edgeless. He remembers the pub. The scrap with the other punter. The car park. The first few steps of his long walk back to his flat above the bookie’s. Then a fist in his hair. The cold, hard neck of a bottle forced into his mouth. The sudden taste of blood and vodka. The fading sight of a black-clad man.

‘Is this …?’

The layout of the house seems familiar. Horribly similar to the place he once called home. The place he set aflame because he was pissed and liked the sound of fire engines.

The place that slow-cooked his wife and children.

‘Why …?’

The man in the balaclava holds up a hand, as if urging a speeding car to slow. He shakes his head. Conveys, in one gesture, that there is no point in struggling. That this has already been decided upon.

In one swift motion he pulls a cheap yellow lighter from his pocket. He drops to a crouch, like a sprinter on the blocks, and presses the flame to the patterned carpet.

Then he turns away.

The flame runs both left and right, growing and gathering pace as the twin streams of fire encircle the sofa.

The man in the balaclava steps back and shields his eyes.

As the man on the sofa draws breath to scream, it is as if he is inhaling the flame. With a gasping gulp of air, the spitting blaze leaps towards him.

Wraps him in its embrace.

The black-clad man does not look at the burning creature. Does not pause to watch him thrash and fight against the angry cloak of red and gold that engulfs him. That fuses his polyester shirt to his skin. Fills the room with the smell of sour meat.

He picks up the holdall and walks to the door.

Leaves the burning man to wonder if this is how his family felt when the flames ate into their skin.

McAvoy lathers shaving foam upon his face and begins scraping at the bristles with his cut-throat razor. Roisin had bought it for him in a fancy boutique near Harrods during one of the frequent trips to London they had taken during their early courtship. It is a lethal-looking object, with a blade that could rob a ladybird of its wings mid-flight. She likes to watch him sharpen it on the wet leather strop that hangs by the mirror.

‘Can you see OK? Do you want to open a window?’

He turns from the mirror. Roisin is poking her head out from behind the shower curtain. He can see the shadow of her belly and breasts behind the patterned material, and feels a familiar tightening in his gut.
So beautiful
, he thinks, and the thought is so powerful he has to dig his fingernails into his palms to contain it.

‘Yes,’ he says, nodding as well in case she can’t hear his voice over the sound of the gushing water. ‘It’s OK.’

She pulls her head back behind the curtain and he watches her silhouette change shape as she tips her head back and rinses her hair. Watches her slowly turn, play with the
shower-head and direct the stream of water at her shoulders. Watches her reach for the posh soap and lather her arms. Her belly. Sees her soap her thighs. Between her legs. Her small, tender breasts.

McAvoy is still deciding whether to reach behind the curtain and stroke the curve of her hips when she abruptly cuts the water off. She whisks the curtain back and stands there in the bathtub, dripping water. So unaware of her own beauty.

‘I’m sorry I fell asleep,’ she says, shaking her hair like a wet dog and holding out her hand so he can help her from the bath. ‘What time did you get in?’

McAvoy can’t meet her eyes. She has to nod her head and raise her eyebrows before he crosses the lino floor and encloses her small, wet hand in his. Takes her weight as she climbs from the tub.

McAvoy leans in and kisses her wet face, catching her at the corner of her mouth. She smiles, pleased, and kisses him back, her damp body rubbing against his chest. ‘You should have joined me in there,’ she whispers, nodding at the bathtub. ‘I could have made up for last night.’

‘It’s better in theory,’ he says, as relief floods through him.

‘Oh yes?’ Her voice is flirty. Playful.

‘The shower, I mean,’ he says between kisses. ‘We end up slipping, remember?’

They share a laugh at the memory of their last attempt to share a cubicle. The difference in their height meant that while Roisin nearly drowned, McAvoy was bone-dry from the chest up.

Her hands move down his body. Her lips move to his neck.

She sniffs.

‘Dolly Girl by Anna Sui?’

She pulls away, looking at him quizzically. There is shaving foam on her face.

‘I …’

She sniffs again, and grins, then smears the shaving foam across her upper lip so that it looks like a moustache. She leans up on tiptoes, and kisses his soap-lathered mouth.

‘Whoever she is, she has good taste.’

Then she returns her lips to his skin.

‘Roisin, it was work, I couldn’t …’

She shushes him. Pulls his head down so that she’s looking up into his eyes. ‘Aector, the day you cheat on me is the day the world turns into a Malteser. Not a giant Malteser, just a regular-sized one that we all have to try and balance on. Now, I can’t see that happening any time soon. So shut up. Kiss me.’

‘But …’

Her tongue slithers between his cracked, dry lips.

‘Daddy! Telephone!’

The door flies open and Fin bursts into the bathroom. He slips on the wet lino and lands on his bottom, dropping the phone, which skids away like a hockey puck. Fin giggles, making no attempt to get up, even as his Buzz Lightyear pyjamas start to absorb the water.

McAvoy reaches down and picks up the mobile from the floor.

‘Aector McAvoy,’ he says into the receiver.

‘Is this a bad time, Sergeant?’

It takes him a moment to place the voice. It is tremulous
but unmistakably middle class. ‘Mrs Stein-Collinson?’ he asks, and screws his eyes closed, chiding himself for failing to call her back last night.

‘That’s right,’ she says, relieved to have been recognised. ‘You sound busy. Who was that who answered?’

‘My boy,’ he says.

‘He sounds a character,’ she says, and her voice is full of smiles.

‘I’m terribly sorry I didn’t call back last night …’

‘Oh, I understand,’ she says, and he imagines her waving away his protests with a wrinkled, manicured hand. ‘That poor girl. Have you made any progress? The radio has been so vague.’

McAvoy wonders how much he can say. Finds solace in ‘We’re following up some useful lines of inquiry.’

‘Good, good,’ she says distractedly, then pauses.

‘Have there been any developments?’ he prompts.

‘Well, that’s the funny thing,’ she says, and her voice becomes excited and conspiratorial. ‘I got a call tea-time yesterday from the lady who was making the documentary with our Fred. She’s back in this country and felt she should get in touch.’

‘Do you remember the lady’s name?’

She stops, as if unsure whether to go on. McAvoy, practised in nudging conversations along, lets her take the breath she needs.

‘The lifeboat,’ she says suddenly, with a voice like a finger jabbing at a map. ‘The lifeboat they found him in. It shouldn’t have been there. The TV lady got talking to the captain when they docked and he didn’t know where it came
from. Somebody had brought it with them. And it wasn’t Fred. The TV crew were with him the whole time. I’m sure there’s a simple explanation, but it just seems …’

‘Odd,’ he finishes, and he can hear relief in her accompanying exhalation.

‘Do you think there might be more to this?’ she asks, and her voice is a mixture of excited curiosity and puzzled sadness. ‘I mean, nobody would want to hurt Fred, would they? It’s just, what with him surviving all those years ago. I don’t know, but …’

McAvoy is no longer listening. He’s staring at himself in the mirror. All he can see through the steam and the mist is the scar upon his shoulder. It is the shape of a blade.

Thinking of a church. Of bloodied bodies and a crying baby, nestled in the arm of a butchered parent.

The inequity of it all burning in his chest.

He cannot help but remember. Despite all he has done to bury the image, he cannot help but let the picture flash in his mind. Cannot help but see himself, months before, stumbling backwards, feet slipping on the mud and dead leaves, as Tony Halthwaite, the killer nobody believed in, swung a blade towards his throat.

Cannot help but shudder, now; seeing the steel again, arcing down towards an exposed jugular with practised precision.

Remembers seeing Roisin’s face. Fin’s. Finding one last gasp of instinct and energy.

Throwing himself out of the way.

Feeling his skin of his shoulder open up and the blood spray and then lashing out with his boot.

Surviving. Ducking the blade, where others had fallen …

‘You only had three pints, Hector,’ Pharaoh had chided, standing in the doorway of the incident room like a head teacher on the lookout for truants and laughing as McAvoy had raced up the stairs, red-faced and panting, his bag tangling on the banister and yanking him backwards as if lassoed. ‘I’d love to see you after a session at my place sometime. You wouldn’t get out of bed for a fortnight.’

She had been wearing a knee-length red leather skirt and a tight black cardigan that accentuated her impressive chest. She was heavily made-up and her hair was perfect. She had outdrunk McAvoy by a ratio of 3:1 last night, but were it not for the dark semi-circles beneath her eyes, she might have just returned from a holiday on a sugar daddy’s yacht.

‘Ma’am, I’m so sorry, the traffic and Fin, and …’

‘Don’t fret,’ she’d said with a smile. ‘We muddled through without you.’

‘On the radio,’ he panted. ‘House fire? Orchard Park.’

She nodded. ‘Given it to the lads at Greenwood. We can’t spare the manpower. Sergeant Knaggs is taking it on. I think
he was a bit upset when he took my phone call and realised there still wasn’t room for him on Daphne’s case.’

Daphne
, noted McAvoy. Not
the Cotton case
. Pharaoh was really feeling this one.

‘Straightforward, is it?’

‘Not sure. Whoever got roasted, it isn’t the homeowner. He’s in hospital already. One of the decent ones from the estate. Nice old boy. His wife’s staying with their daughter out in Toryville. Kirk Ella, I think. Apparently she sounded over the moon when she heard the house had gone up in smoke. Less so when the uniforms mentioned they’d found a barbecued human being on the sofa. No bloody idea who it might be. I very much doubt we’ll ever get a chat with him, anyway. Ninety per cent burns. No face left. Internal organs all but cooked. There was definitely an accelerant used, but forensics can’t say much more. He’s in the new unit at Hull Royal Infirmary but they’re probably going to move him over to Wakefield. Don’t know why. Unless they’ve got a wetsuit made of skin to zip him into, he’s had it.’

McAvoy nodded. He was vaguely interested in the Orchard Park fire, but if he was honest with himself, he had dismissed the victim as a drug addict or a burglar the second he heard the story on the radio. A shame, but not a tragedy. Worth somebody’s time. But not necessarily his.

‘So I missed the post mortem?’

‘Count your blessings,’ she said. ‘Even Colin Ray kept his trap shut.’

‘Upshot?’

Pharaoh hadn’t needed to look at her notes. Just reeled it off, emotionless, staring into his eyes without really looking
at him. ‘Eight separate slash wounds, each to the bone. The first severed her clavicle and collar bone. An overhand hacking motion with the right hand. Six more slashes in the same area, splintering the clavicle. One spar of bone punctured her thorax. A final thrust, as she lay on the floor, right to the heart. She’ll have been dead by the time he pulled the blade out.’