They have been answering phones for six hours now. Beyond the dusty, grime-encrusted windows, the sky has almost completed its subtle transition from deep grey to soft black. Above, the clouds continue to hang low and fat, but the worst of the snow is another few days away. They might get a white Christmas this year, though McAvoy, who experienced nothing else in his youth, is only excited by the prospect because he knows it will make his wife and child smile.
He and Helen Tremberg are the only two actual police officers in the room. A community support officer is sitting at one of the spare desks and Gemma Tang, the pretty Chinese press officer, is leaning over the large table by the window, crossing out large sections of a press release. She’s model-beautiful, with a backside that Ben Nielsen has frequently imagined bouncing coins off. McAvoy is giving himself eyestrain trying not to look.
In ones and twos, the officers have drifted away from the major incident room. Trish Pharaoh and Ben Nielsen are at the morgue, witnessing the post-mortem exam. The two most junior detectives are collecting witness statements from those members of the congregation too shaken up to speak coherently yesterday. Sophie Kirkland took a phone call just before lunch from a pub landlady whose security cameras had captured a fleeting image of a man in black roughly five minutes after the attack took place. She’s taken two uniformed officers with her to search the local area for clues.
Colin Ray and Shaz Archer have gone to speak to an informant. A telephone call to his bedsit home has already produced one lead. One of the punters at the Kingston Hotel has been letting his mouth run away with him. According to the snout, the bloke has always had strong opinions about foreigners and incomers, but recently lost his wife to the attentions of an Iranian pizza chef, and has been talking more and more about making somebody pay. It would be dismissed as idle gossip, were it not for the fact that a quick check on the Police National Computer showed that he’d been nicked twice for possessing illegal weaponry, and once for wounding. Even though Colin Ray is supposed to be managing the office, he’s decided that he’s best placed to follow this particular line of inquiry, and made himself scarce. Inspector Archer, never far behind, has tagged along, leaving only McAvoy and Helen Tremberg to answer the phones.
McAvoy looks back through his notes. He’s written pages of names, numbers, details and theories on his lined pad. The script is unintelligible to anybody but him. He’s the only officer who knows Teeline shorthand. He learned it in his spare time while in training, after being impressed by the speed at which a journalist had taken down the quotes of the senior officer he’d been shadowing that day. It has proven a useful six months of his time, even if it has left him open to the occasional moment of open-mouthed scorn from colleagues who wonder if he’s having a mental breakdown and filling his notebook with hieroglyphics.
The phone calls so far have been pretty weak. Despite the television appeal this morning, they’re suffering from Sunday syndrome. People are enjoying days out with their families or relaxing down the pub, and the idea of ringing a police station with information about a murder feels much more like a nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday kind of activity, so the flurry of calls that the team had expected has not materialised. It’s barely proving worth the overtime.
If nothing else, at least the incident room is taking shape; this is largely thanks to McAvoy and the relative inactivity the day has delivered. He’s brought a whiteboard in from another office and begun sketching a brief outline of the previous day’s sequence of events. His own description of the suspect has been written in the centre of the board in red marker pen.
A map of the city has been stapled to another wall. On it, drawing pins of different colours denote the definite and possible sightings of the suspect as he made his escape from Trinity Square. It is a composite of witness statements, CCTV footage, and guesswork. With it, they can surmise that the suspect travelled east through the city and past the river, before disappearing from the map somewhere near Drypool Bridge. A team of uniformed officers have walked the route, but found nothing save a footprint in the snow that matched the location given by one of the more believable witnesses. There was no sign of the murder weapon. The uniforms’ best guess was that he’d ditched it in the Hull. When Pharaoh had heard that snippet of information she had slammed her hands down so hard that one of her bangles had snapped.
The phone on his desk begins to ring. He picks up the beige, Bakelite receiver.
‘CID. Major Incident Room.’
A woman’s voice is at the other end of the line. ‘I’d like to speak to somebody about Daphne. About Daphne Cotton,’ she says. And then, unnecessarily, even more shakily, adds: ‘The girl who was killed.’
‘You can talk to me. My name is Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy-’
‘That’s fine,’ she says, cutting him off. With the tremble in her voice it’s hard to place her, but McAvoy would class the speaker as around his own age.
‘Do you have information …?’
She takes a breath, and McAvoy can tell she has been rehearsing this. She wants to get it out in one go. He lets her speak.
‘I’m a supply teacher. A year or so ago I did some shifts at Hessle High. Daphne’s school. We hit it off. She was a lovely girl. Very intelligent and thoughtful. She was a very keen writer, you know. That’s what I teach. English. She showed me some of her short stories. She had real talent.’
She pauses. Her voice cracks.
‘Take your time,’ says McAvoy softly.
A breath. A sniff. A clearing of a throat blocked with tears.
‘I’ve done some voluntary work in the part of the world she’s from. Seen some of the things she’s seen. We got talking. I don’t know, but I suppose I became a sort of outlet for her. She told me things that she kept hidden. There were things in her stories. Things a young girl shouldn’t know about. She was very shy when I questioned her about it, so I started setting her writing assignments. Helping to get out the stuff that was inside her.’
McAvoy waits for more. When nothing else is forthcoming, he clears his throat to speak.
Then she blurts it out.
‘This has happened to her before.’
CHAPTER 7
He spots her as soon as he pushes open the glass doors of the trendy pub and steps into the warm blue- black light. She is seated on her own at a small round table by the radiator near the bar. There are empty sofas and loungers near by, but she seems to have chosen the seat nearest the heater, and is all but pressing herself against its white-painted surface. She is staring at the wall, ignoring the other customers. McAvoy cannot see her features, but there is something that makes her seated form seem burdened and sad.
‘Miss Mountford?’ asks Aector, as he approaches her table.
She looks up. Her deep brown eyes are framed with red and seem to float in darkness. The bags beneath her eyes are dark, almost bruised black by tiredness. There is a silver stud in her left nostril, but her other features do not match the mental picture McAvoy had painted when he had arranged to meet her here, in this most inappropriate setting. She is short and plump, with frizzy brown hair that has been inexpertly pushed behind her ears to leave two misshapen curls running down her cheeks. She is not wearing make-up, and her short, fat fingers end in nails that are bitten almost to nothing, while her clothes — a black cardigan over a white vest — speak of a need for comfort over style. She wears no rings, though a large, ethnic wooden bangle has been wedged onto a chunky freckled wrist.
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
