The Dark Winter

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 groupof 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 itsembrace. 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.

Vicki looks torn between the desire to cry and to spit. She is enraged and grief-stricken. ‘Bastard,’ she says.

Again, McAvoy nods. He’s unsure what to do next. He wants to ring Trish Pharaoh and tell her, as procedure dictates. But procedure dictated he stay in the office and man the phones, and he had side-stepped that the second he had answered Vicki’s call.

‘It’s like somebody was trying to finish off what was started all those years ago,’ says Vicki, staring into her latest empty glass. She glances up and stares at him, hard. ‘Who would do that?’

In her eyes, he is a policeman. A man who can offer explanations. To make sense of it.

He wishes he were worthy of such respect.

His thoughts are consumed by Daphne Cotton’s words. By the simple, beautiful, untouched innocence of a mind that had not been contorted by the indignities witnessed by her body.

Suddenly, he wants to hurt whoever did this. He hates himself immediately, but he knows it to be true. That this crime is unforgivable. He takes comfort in the acknowledgement. The acceptance that, if he is hunting evil, he must be on the side of good.

CHAPTER 8

About three car lengths away, on the opposite side of the car park, Trish Pharaoh is leaning on the bonnet of a silver Mercedes, her face cupped in her hands. She looks like a teenage girl watching TV. Her face is set in a playful smirk, and despite the harsh weather, her make-up is perfect.

‘Get in the car,’ she says. She pulls open the passenger door and then walks the long way round to the driver’s side. She climbs inside, flashing fleshy thigh and a toned calf that disappears into tight biker boots.

For a moment, McAvoy doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know why she’s here. Was she checking up on him? Is he going to get booted off the case? He rubs a hand over his face and crosses the car park with the most dignified walk he can muster.

He slips inside the Mercedes and the scent of expensive perfume takes him in a claustrophobic embrace. He smells mandarin oranges and lavender.

‘Comfy?’ she asks, but he detects no malice.

He catches sight of himself in the darkened glass of the driver’s door and realises how ridiculous he looks, crammed into this tiny car.

‘I got your message,’ she says, pulling down the vanity mirror above the steering wheel so she can check her eye make-up as she talks. ‘Gave Helen Tremberg a ring. She said you were meeting the informant here. I thought I’d tag along.’

McAvoy has to work hard to stop himself from pushing all the air out of his lungs. Relief floods him.

‘I, I just concluded the interview, actually, ma’am,’ he says apologetically. ‘She’s at a jazz night inside and