Cold Bones, page 11
part #8 of DS Aector McAvoy Series
Christina Merry Oh my goodness, my head is full of images of those buggers! Rory and Gerard were unholy terrors but their hearts were always in the right place. Here’s a memory that will put a smile on your faces. There was a family on Westcott Street who fostered children and never had enough money to go around and Rory and Gerard would always be dipping into their pockets to pay for them to have days out here and there or get new clothes. And they didn’t like people who were bullies to their kids or their wives. Maybe I shouldn’t say it on here but does anybody else remember Big Gerard nailing that bloke’s hand to the lock gates after he broke that bain’s arm? He was hanging up there and crying like nobody’s business and there wasn’t a soul would help him down. Some of the bobbers took pity on him in the end. I remember the lady from the social saying that the pair of them thought they were Butch and Sundance but maybe that was a time for cowboys, eh? Sorry to hear about Joe. He was a good-looking lad.
Napper Acklam It wasn’t just Gerard nailed that bastard to the lock gates. I held his legs so he’d stop kicking! That’s shitty about Joe. He was a grumpy bastard but he was a hard worker. Lost touch after he left the area but sounds like he made a decent age. Nearly met his maker plenty times back in the day. I still owe him a pint or two for what happened on the BP. It were him and Alf that stopped me going the same way as Rory and Mick and young Billy. Pulled me out by my hair, which I didn’t thank him for at the time! Raise a glass to his memory for me.
Gary Hendricks Those were the days, eh Napper? Surprised you’re still around, you old bugger. Heard you’d got yourself all civilised. You’ve got me remembering now! What were that young lad’s name who went over off Skagi?
Napper Acklam Civilised? That’ll be the day. Drop me a line Gary, we might need a bit of extra help getting the Holst ship-shape, if you can still wield a blowtorch.
Calvin Deverill You’re right, Gary – the deckie learner was lost too. It were proper tragic. He’d been through some hard times before he came to Hull. I remember the lady from the social asked Rory and Gerard to look out for him. Anybody remember her? She drove a blue and cream bus and looked like a film star. Big pals with Mags Lowery. Mags B, as we knew her. She knew your dad too.
Stuart Highsmith The social lady is still around. Still kicking arse. I saw her on a documentary about Bransholme years ago but she crops up now and again on the radio and in the paper, talking about politics and stuff. Can’t have been an easy job, coming to take your bains away. I heard she had that campervan so the kids could sleep on the journey to wherever she was taking them. Wasn’t her decision who got taken – she was just doing her job. She used to get her hair done at Nadine’s, I think.
Amanda Mongos Hi, this is Amanda from Radio Humberside. Jackie Morris . . . am so sorry to hear of your loss. I interviewed one of the survivors from the Blake Purcell incident a couple of years ago. I’ll try and find the audio file and see if there is anything that can help. The ‘lady from the social’ sometimes volunteers in the Help the Aged shop in Beverley where I’m always popping in to look for books. Her name is Enid Chapel. She might have some memories to share. xx
Amanda Mongos Sorry I’ve been so long in reply Jackie. I’ve lost that audio I’m afraid but I know a journalist who may have covered the incident at the time. I’ll try and dig out his details and ask him to get in touch, if that’s okay. Sorry about Joe. I’ve seen his photo and he was a good-looking chap. Will DM you. Xx
McAvoy looks up at the sound of a cough – the sort of cough that demands an answer. ‘Will you be wanting anything else?’ asks June pointedly.
‘Detective Sergeant McAvoy,’ he says softly. He fishes inside his jacket for his lanyard. Shows it to the chorus of surprised faces, mouths opening. ‘Shall we start all that again?’
Chapter 11
Skagastrond, Iceland
4.37 p.m.
‘Have you fed him?’ asks Pharaoh without enthusiasm.
‘Who?’
‘The goldfish, obviously,’ she says, a smile threatening the corners of her mouth.
‘Oh, I thought you meant Dad.’
‘Your dad? You can eat him, love.’
On the laptop screen, Sophia Pharaoh gives her mother a mischievous look. She looks like her mum. Dark hair, blue eyes and tanned skin, though she does her best to cover her complexion with a pale foundation so as to better emphasise her thick black eye make-up. She has a stud in her upper lip and two rings in her eyebrow. Her dreadlocked hair tangles in her dangly silver earrings, all skulls and crosses, and the message on her vest top, visible beneath an open black hoodie, is an instruction for ‘haters’ to ‘go fuck themselves’, which her mother considers sound advice.
‘Is it cold?’ asks Sophia. Behind her, Pharaoh’s other three daughters are pretending to be perfect children; heads stopped over homework. Pharaoh knows that as soon as the laptop closes they will go back to their pillow-fight tournament. Pharaoh’s money is on her youngest, Amber. She’s been known to pad her pillow with a tin of beans.
‘Cold?’ asks Pharaoh. ‘Iceland? No, it’s bloody toasty.’
‘Do you miss us?’ asks Sophia, raising her mug of hot chocolate to her mouth. A melted marshmallow leaves a creamy splodge on the tip of her nose and Pharaoh feels her heart lurch at the thought of her daughter out there in the world. She loves her so much she’s tempted to lock her in a cellar until she dies.
‘Miss you loads, love. And those other sods pretending to be angels behind you. How’s everything else?’
Sophia rolls her eyes. ‘Ro phoned just before you did. We’re fed and watered. There’ll be baths and bed. No scary movies and no ultimate fighting championships. I told you, I can cope. I’m not a baby any more.’
Pharaoh nods, declining to tell her daughter about the marshmallow on her face or the smudge of chocolate on her lips. Behind her, Amber throws her hands in the air, devastated that there will be no mixed martial arts taking place in the living room after they’ve all pretended to finish their homework.
‘I’m just a call away,’ says Pharaoh. She wants to reach into the phone and hug her children. They all seem so far away. ‘Oh, and Soph, if you speak to Roisin again tonight, keep your lips closed about where I am, yes? Hush-hush, and all that . . .’
‘You already said.’ Sophia smiles. ‘Any message for Aector?’
‘Why would there be a message for Hector?’ asks Pharaoh, bristling.
‘Because he’s your mate,’ says Sophia sweetly, and Pharaoh feels a sudden heat prickling in her cheeks. ‘I doubt he’ll call, anyway. Busy with something out Beverley way, I think. Did you hear?’
Pharaoh curses as the picture on the screen freezes: Sophia motionless, eyes half closed, lip drooping as if pulled down by the silver stud. Pharaoh looks at the message on the screen, urging her to rate the quality of the call out of five. She stabs a solitary star into the box and tosses her phone onto the sofa. She stares up at the ceiling for a while. A patch of coffee-coloured damp is spreading out from the apex of the front window and the near wall. She tries to make a picture out of it; to let it form a shape, cloud-like, in her imagination. A dragon, maybe? A bird? The ruffled edges could be wing-tips, she decides; the mottled patterns a feathered breast. She becomes aware of herself. Feels a moment’s embarrassment at being, as her grandfather used to put it, off in fucking la-la land.
She pulls her reports towards her.
‘Roberta Ballantine,’ she says, under her breath, and drains her glass. ‘What on earth happened to you, eh?’
She spends the next half an hour reading through witness statements from the night that Roberta disappeared. Begrudgingly, she starts to realise that the reason Chandler’s article was so short on actual facts was because the investigation was lacklustre at best, and dangerously incompetent at worst.
She looks again at the report at the top of the scroll: a pitiful summation of all efforts made by the investigating officers in the twelve months after Roberta was reported missing. The officer in nominal charge was a Detective Inspector Richard Peach. Pharaoh didn’t know the name when she started reading. Now she’s unlikely to forget it. She feels a desire to track him down and headbutt him in the throat.
medical records are incomplete . . . efforts made by DC Burkeman to secure psychiatric files from earlier sectioning under the Mental Health Act had proven fruitless . . . admission and initial assessment during hospitalisation for septicaemia in 1981 show high levels of drug dependency and sexual trauma consistent with having worked as a street prostitute, for which she was arrested several times . . .
Pharaoh opens up an email and pings a message across to a former colleague now working as a DI with the National Crime Agency. Helen Tremberg owes her plenty of favours and now seems a good time to call one in. Tremberg responds almost immediately. Tells her she’ll do what she can.
Reassured, Pharaoh scans the rest of the document. There’s a list of witness statements at the bottom of the briefing note. Among those who gave a statement was one Bernard Acklam, identified by DCI Peach as a ‘person of interest’ with an extensive criminal record. Pharaoh skims through the file until she finds Acklam’s witness statement. It’s short and does not seem to have been given with much enthusiasm.
I know the family from years back. I fished with Rory Ballantine, Roberta Ballantine’s brother. After Rory’s death at sea in 1970, I have stayed in close contact with the family and I suppose you could say that I became something of a surrogate father to his children. I always tried to do my best by Roberta but she was a troubled person and had lots of problems after Rory’s death. I know she struggled with drug addiction. A lot of people tried to help her and it did seem like she was getting herself back together.
On the night she was last seen, I had been drinking with three former crewmates in the Vauxhall Tavern. I think we may have gone on to other pubs as well but I had a lot to drink and don’t remember much. I was informed the following day that Roberta Ballantine had been in the Star and Garter until around 10 p.m. and then left the pub and headed down Division Road towards the docks. I have no reason to believe any harm has come to her and a drinker who overheard her talking with an old schoolfriend, Jean Tatler, said that Roberta had been talking about a fresh start. I presume she has moved back to London. As for the coat and the blood, that could be anybody’s. Yes, I do own a part share in that ice factory but it has been derelict for some time. As far as I am aware, the coat used to belong to Rory’s wife, Margaret Lowery. It was given to Roberta as a gift but I don’t know if she ever wore it or how it came to be at my premises.
Pharaoh flicks through the remaining statements. There’s none from any Jean Tatler. The crewmates mentioned by Acklam all say the same thing. They were drinking, didn’t see Roberta, and believed she had returned to London to make a fresh start.
Pharaoh feels her eyes start to close. Her thoughts are a rumbling hiss in the centre of her skull; waves disturbing a shingle beach. She shakes her head, angry with the world in general and lazy, judgemental, can’t-be-arsed-to-do-the-job-properly wankers in particular. She adds Peach’s name to the mental list of people that she intends to put up against a wall come the revolution. She’s starting to think she will run out of bullets before she runs out of people deserving one.
Drowsily she reaches for her cigarettes and knocks over her wine glass. It rolls off the coffee table and onto the floor, landing by the leather satchel at her feet. She reaches down and picks up the glass before the smudge of red wine can trickle over the lip of the glass and stain the contents of the bag. She pulls out the buff folder from within. Swallows painfully, and opens the thin file.
She looks at the picture on the opening page.
Two bodies, bleached bone-white. Scraps of skin cling to brittle ribs: a broken arm jutting out from beneath a pile of stones, tattered ribbons of clothing patterning faded flesh. The picture was taken in Murmansk in 2012 when the Russian authorities were first informed about the bodies of the English sailors buried beneath the stones. Humberside Police had been tasked with helping the Foreign Office procure DNA samples from blood relatives of men lost at sea in the thirty-six-month period before 1970, when the villagers in Murmansk had found them. It had been a big task and Pharaoh was grateful not to have been a part of it. Barely gave it any thought at all until she was asked to go and mollify an angry old lady who was standing in the reception of Clough Road police station and demanding that Area Commander Slattery come and listen to what she had to say.
Pharaoh starts to read. Falls asleep before she can reach the end of the first paragraph.
As unconsciousness takes her she experiences a moment’s perfect memory. Recalls the old woman’s face. Long white hair, thin lips, sharp features. Blue eyes, sparkling as if with frost. Pea-green raincoat tied at the neck with a black and yellow scarf. She’d smelled of patchouli and woodsmoke and her fingers were arthritic and all but fused into clubs. She’d struggled with her papers but refused Pharaoh’s offers of help. Refused to give her name either. She just thrust the copy of the Hull Mail at her and hissed that if the police weren’t going to help her she would do it herself.
‘Lies,’ she’d spat, fire seeming to dance on her blue irises. ‘Where is he, eh? Where’s the one that bloody matters?’
At the time, Pharaoh had thought the old woman was referring to Slattery. She’d bristled accordingly. Had felt as though her rank and ability and maybe even her gender were being criticised. She’d started to tell the old lady that she would be delighted to listen to her; that she was an experienced detective and could arrange for her to talk to one of her best officers. Pharaoh went to get tea from the machine and by the time she returned the old lady had disappeared out of the double doors. Pharaoh had checked with the desk sergeant. Had she given a name? Any more information? When she went outside, the old woman was gone.
Pharaoh’s eyes close. Her fingers continue to twitch at the file on her lap.
As she sleeps, each dream seems to pull her further beneath a frozen sea.
Chapter 12
The Almshouses on Pickering Road, West Hull
6.15 p.m.
The view through the kitchen window is an unfinished watercolour: the sky a dismal, featureless black. McAvoy finds it unsettling, as if his reality were being somehow erased. He is used to craggy clouds and splintered sunsets: skies that look like crushed elderberries and pulped sloes. Today the sky feels empty, leached of colour. Even the darkness is hiding behind a veil of ash.
A memory rises. He can see his father’s bathwater: all sweat and dirt and carbolic soap. For an instant he is a child again. Seven years old. Rough bristles against his skin – the low heat from the peat fire slowly turning his face from pink to crimson. There are tears in his eyes: mud and sheep blood under his nails and on his cheeks. They’d found a ewe in a ravine, two legs broken at horrible angles, an anguished bleating emerging from its bloodied mouth. Duncan hadn’t been able to do what was required. It fell to McAvoy to draw his pocket knife across the animal’s throat. He’d held the animal like a child as its life-force splashed the snow. They’d walked home in silence. It was Duncan who’d told their father what he’d done. Here, now, he remembers the look in the big man’s eyes, sorrow and pride and an aching wish that things were somehow different. Remembers his dad’s big, warm hands, massaging soap into his red curls. He realises he will remember that scent until his dying day, will always be able to put himself back in that place, that time, by taking a whiff of peat smoke and coal soap.
He slams the door shut on his memories before they start to consume him.
‘Bastards.’
McAvoy turns away from the window. Neilsen’s dad, Trev, is sitting at the kitchen table with a copy of the Hull Mail in one hand and a red pen in the other. He has a mug of tea at his elbow, stewed strong and orange. The remains of a bowl of apple pie and custard is congealing on the circular table. He’s lost weight since the last time McAvoy saw him. He’s wearing two sweatshirts beneath a padded lumberjack shirt. Grey bristles sprout erratically across his throat and beneath his nose. Neilsen had warned McAvoy not to mention it. Still likes to shave himself, he’d confided. He’s shit at it, but he won’t let the nurse near him with a blade. Says that’s a man’s job.
‘Who’s that, Mr Neilsen?’ asks McAvoy.
‘Who’s what, lad?’
‘Sounded like somebody hadn’t impressed you. Bastards, you said.’
Trev looks up from the newspaper and glares at McAvoy. His blue eyes wallow in yellow, rheumy tears. He keeps inserting a fingertip into the crevices, pushing his glasses up and down his nose, wetting the tip of his finger as if chalking a snooker cue.
‘You’re our Ben’s mate,’ says Trev, smiling in sudden recognition. ‘You got a tea? Can we make you a sandwich? There’s some bacon about to go off, I think.’
McAvoy holds up his mug. He’s already made himself a tea. Made one for Trev, too, who has already recognised him six times in the past twenty minutes. He’s running out of things to do. He has fiddled with cups and saucers and knocked up coffees and biscuits for Neilsen and his sister. McAvoy performed his tasks with gusto. He was sweating by the time he carried it all through to the bedroom next door. It felt like entering a mausoleum. He pictures the scene beyond the kitchen wall. Neilsen’s mum: parchment skin and grey lips, shrunken inside a floral nightie and encased within two quilts and a rough blanket. The whole house smells of ointment and air-freshener but it’s worse in the room where she will die. The curtains are drawn and the only light comes from the pink lava lamp on her bedside table.
