Throwing himself out of the way.
Feeling his skin of his shoulder open up and the blood spray and then lashing out with his boot.
Surviving. Ducking the blade, where others had fallen …
PART TWO
CHAPTER 10
‘You only had three pints, Hector,’ Pharaoh had chided, standing in the doorway of the incident room like a head teacher on the lookout for truants and laughing as McAvoy had raced up the stairs, red-faced and panting, his bag tangling on the banister and yanking him backwards as if lassoed. ‘I’d love to see you after a session at my place sometime. You wouldn’t get out of bed for a fortnight.’
She had been wearing a knee-length red leather skirt and a tight black cardigan that accentuated her impressive chest. She was heavily made-up and her hair was perfect. She had outdrunk McAvoy by a ratio of 3:1 last night, but were it not for the dark semi-circles beneath her eyes, she might have just returned from a holiday on a sugar daddy’s yacht.
‘Ma’am, I’m so sorry, the traffic and Fin, and …’
‘Don’t fret,’ she’d said with a smile. ‘We muddled through without you.’
‘On the radio,’ he panted. ‘House fire? Orchard Park.’
She nodded. ‘Given it to the lads at Greenwood. We can’t spare the manpower. Sergeant Knaggs is taking it on. I think he was a bit upset when he took my phone call and realised there still wasn’t room for him on Daphne’s case.’
‘Straightforward, is it?’
‘Not sure. Whoever got roasted, it isn’t the homeowner. He’s in hospital already. One of the decent ones from the estate. Nice old boy. His wife’s staying with their daughter out in Toryville. Kirk Ella, I think. Apparently she sounded over the moon when she heard the house had gone up in smoke. Less so when the uniforms mentioned they’d found a barbecued human being on the sofa. No bloody idea who it might be. I very much doubt we’ll ever get a chat with him, anyway. Ninety per cent burns. No face left. Internal organs all but cooked. There was definitely an accelerant used, but forensics can’t say much more. He’s in the new unit at Hull Royal Infirmary but they’re probably going to move him over to Wakefield. Don’t know why. Unless they’ve got a wetsuit made of skin to zip him into, he’s had it.’
McAvoy nodded. He was vaguely interested in the Orchard Park fire, but if he was honest with himself, he had dismissed the victim as a drug addict or a burglar the second he heard the story on the radio. A shame, but not a tragedy. Worth somebody’s time. But not necessarily his.
‘So I missed the post mortem?’
‘Count your blessings,’ she said. ‘Even Colin Ray kept his trap shut.’
‘Upshot?’
Pharaoh hadn’t needed to look at her notes. Just reeled it off, emotionless, staring into his eyes without really looking at him. ‘Eight separate slash wounds, each to the bone. The first severed her clavicle and collar bone. An overhand hacking motion with the right hand. Six more slashes in the same area, splintering the clavicle. One spar of bone punctured her thorax. A final thrust, as she lay on the floor, right to the heart. She’ll have been dead by the time he pulled the blade out.’
McAvoy closed his eyes. Steadied his breathing. ‘He meant to kill her, then? The final thrust, that’s just so …’
‘Final,’ Pharaoh nodded. ‘He wanted her dead. We don’t know who he is, why he wanted to kill her or why he chose to do it in a packed fucking church, but we know he was pretty bloody determined.’
McAvoy watched as she pressed her forehead into her knuckles. Worked her jaw in circles. Screwed her eyes shut. She was getting angry.
‘What else?’
‘Proof of what your young lady told you last night. Evidence of old scarring to her collarbone. Same side. Pathologist could barely see it under the mess of new wounds, but it was there. This had happened to her before.’
‘What are we going to do with that information, ma’am? Have you alerted the team?’
She nodded. ‘We don’t know what it means, but it’s something to look into. Such a tiny number of people knew about it, it could be a horrible coincidence, but I find that hard to believe. Colin Ray gobbled it up like a pork- pie. As soon as I mentioned it, he’d made up his mind. This was some African refugee, finishing what they started. Went out of here grumbling about foreigners finishing their dirty business in Yorkshire. I don’t think he really got the right end of the stick.’
McAvoy kept quiet. The same idea had occurred to him.
‘According to the toxicology reports, she had no more alcohol in her system than a sip of communion wine. She had a bit of a cold. And she was a virgin.’
She’d turned away, then, unable to keep it up. ‘It’s incident room phones for you,’ she said over her shoulder, heading for the stairs. ‘Call yourself office manager if you like. Just make sure the PCs and the support staff don’t say anything stupid. I’ve got to go back and see the family, then the
That had been two hours ago, and the morning has been dire. The first three phone calls he’s taken have done little to lift his spirits.
His thoughts drift to Fred Stein. There is something about all this that seems not just peculiar but almost eerie. He understands guilt. Knows how it feels to survive an attack when others have been less fortunate. But to redress the balance in such a dramatic, almost contrived manner? To tag along with a film crew? To bring your own lifeboat? He doesn’t know enough about Fred Stein to assess his personality, his capacity for self-hatred, but in his experience ex-trawlermen are not usually given to such extravagance.
He slips out into the corridor and leaves a message for Caroline Wills — the documentary-maker who had managed to lose the star of her show seventy miles off the Icelandic coast.
He walks back to his desk. The incident room is taking shape. The filing cabinets have been lined up against the far wall, the desks arranged in neat twos, like seats on a bus, and the map stapled to the board by the grimy window has more pins in it than yesterday. Definite sightings, possible sightings and best-guesses. One uniformed officer is talking softly into a telephone but from his body language, it doesn’t look like an exciting lead. McAvoy has received a dozen texts from Tremberg, Kirkland and Nielsen keeping him apprised of their movements. Nielsen is finishing off the witness list, and losing patience. They saw, but didn’t see. Heard, but weren’t really listening. Witnessed the aftermath, but couldn’t say where the killer had come from, or where he went.
Sophie Kirkland is up at the tech lab, working her way through Daphne Cotton’s hard drive. So far, she’s found that she liked to visit websites featuring Christian doctrine and Justin Timberlake.
He’d be loath to admit it, but McAvoy is bored. He can’t get on with any of his usual workload because the files are back at Priory Road, and despite his reservations, the officers are using the database in the manner he had hoped, so there’s not even any cleaning up to be done on the system.
The mobile phone rings. It’s a withheld number. McAvoy sinks into his chair and answers with a palpable air of relief.
‘Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy,’ he says.
‘I know, son. I just rang you.’ It’s DCI Ray.
‘Yes, sir.’ He sits up straight. Adjusts his tie.
‘I take it Pharaoh’s still busy?’
‘I think she’ll be preparing for her interview with the
