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-full 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
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
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. ‘
‘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
