The Dark Winter

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.

CHAPTER 9

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.