eight fooking fires in the previous couple of years and that his neighbours all reckoned he was a pyro-bloody- maniac. We can’t win. Wasn’t easy, letting him go.’
‘And the neighbours? The people who spoke to the papers. Would any of them have been bitter enough about him walking to go and finish the job?’
Linus shrugs. ‘You know estates like this. Doesn’t take much to get people hot under the collar. But I don’t reckon I know any of the locals with the balls to walk into Hull Royal and cook a burns victim in his bed. Let alone still walk out again. I reckon you’re on a hiding to nothing, son.’
McAvoy crosses to the window and opens the crumpled metal blinds with his fingers. Looks out on an estate as grey and miserable as school mashed potato. Two children of no more than seven years old are playing on the only equipment in the little swing park not to have been vandalised beyond use. The joy of seeing the two boys laughing with glee as they push each other around on the roundabout is tempered by the fact they are both smoking.
‘Not exactly Tenerife out there, is it, lad?’ laughs Linus as McAvoy turns away from the world beyond the glass and returns his gaze to the sergeant’s sweaty, flabby face. ‘Sometimes you have to wonder if these poor dead nippers got off light.’
McAvoy says nothing.
The silence is broken by the unmistakable sound of McAvoy’s mobile phone vibrating in his pocket. Glad of the distraction, but concerned that it may be Pharaoh ringing for a lack-of-progress report, he pulls the contraption free. It’s a number he doesn’t recognise.
‘McAvoy,’ he says.
‘It’s Russ Chandler, Detective Sergeant. You came to see me …’
‘Mr Chandler. Yes. Hello.’
‘I suppose this call is a pre-emptive strike. When do you want me in?’
‘Mr Chandler, I’m afraid I don’t-’
‘I’m not daft, Sergeant. I know how these things work. Are you sending a car, or …?’
‘Mr Chandler, can we start again? You and I have concluded our discussions, unless you’ve remembered anything further regarding Fred Stein.’
‘Stein?’ Chandler sounds astonished. Angry, even. ‘Sergeant, whatever game you’re playing, it’s not necessary. I’m willing to cooperate.’
Tremberg looks at McAvoy and mouths ‘What’s happening?’ at him. He simply screws his eyes up in response. His mind is a mess of headaches and confusions.
‘Cooperate with what, Mr Chandler?’
There is silence at the other end of the line. It sounds to McAvoy as though the other man is drawing a breath, settling his thoughts.
‘Mr Chandler?’
‘You must have checked his phone records.’
‘Whose phone records?’
‘Christ, man. Jefferson. The bloke who got cooked. I spoke to him, OK. But that’s where it ends. I was nowhere near Hull when it happened. Remember that …’
‘You spoke to him? Why?’
‘The book, remember. About survivors. We spoke about it. He was one of the names I’d approached when I started researching it. Just early stages, like I told you, but he phoned me a few days ago. Wanted to know if I was still interested. Said he was short on cash …’
‘He contacted you? When was this?’ McAvoy’s trying to keep his voice steady.
‘I couldn’t be sure. Not long after I came to this bloody place. I was out of it for the first few days but when I started picking up my messages, he was on there. He reckoned I’d tried to contact him again that week, but that wasn’t true. Him and the Grimsby woman. At least, I don’t think it was true. You have to remember, I was in a bad way …’
‘Which Grimsby woman, Mr Chandler? You mean somebody from your research?’
‘Yes, yes,’ he says testily, dismissively, as though only the facts that he’s already divulged could be of any interest. ‘Angela something-or-other. Only one that the Bar-Room Butcher didn’t manage to bump off.’
McAvoy is pacing now, trying to keep pace with his thoughts and fears. He knows something significant is happening. He can smell violence. Blood.
‘The rapist? From years back?’
‘Aye, more your neck of the woods than mine. You must remember.’
McAvoy remembers. More than a decade ago, in the Borders of Scotland, a lorry driver by the name of Ian Jarvis had got his kicks waiting in the toilets of public houses then stabbing to death and raping any woman who happened to wander in. Liked to carve his initials on their privates, too. He bumped off four ladies before some of his DNA was found at one of the crime scenes and he was picked up while at work on victim number five in the toilets of a downmarket public house in Dumfries, not five minutes from the neat semi-detached where he lived with his wife and three young children. His last victim had survived. Given evidence against him from behind a screen. Helped put him away, and doubtless rejoiced when he was found hanging in his cell less than three weeks into the first of his many life sentences. By that time, she had put herself down for a council housing exchange and taken the first offer she’d received: three rooms with no view on the seventh floor of a Grimsby tower block
‘And you’ve been in touch with her? You’ve spoken to this woman recently?’
‘No,’ he says impatiently. ‘It was just a voicemail. She said she was returning my call. But I don’t remember making any bloody call.’
McAvoy is shaking his head frantically. His face has gone the same steel grey as the estate beyond the glass.
And knows, knows without question, that Angela Martindale is next.
CHAPTER 15
The glass is empty, but she raises it to her mouth anyway. Sips at nothing. Wets her lips on the last trickle of froth and works a yellow-stained tongue around the rim.
Whispers under her breath, into the glass, misting it with her slurred prayer: ‘Come on, lads.’
Puts the pint glass back down on the varnished counter with a thud. Hopes somebody will notice she’s out of drink and offer to fill the void. Become one of her gentlemen and buy some of her precious time.
‘Another, Angie?’
It’s Porthole Bob this time. Window-cleaner famed across town for never bothering to work his shammy into the corners.
‘You’re a smasher, Bob,’ she says, and nods at the Bass pump. ‘Pint, if you don’t mind.’
Bob raises his own glass at Dean the barman, busy loading bottles of alcopops into the empty fridge down the far end of the bar. ‘When you get a moment, Deano.’
It’s a proper pub, this. One of the last boozers on this busy shopping street on the outskirts of Grimsby town centre not to have been bought out by one of the chains. There are only half a dozen punters in today, and none are drinking together. Three old boys that Angie vaguely remembers nodding hellos to in the past are sitting in a loose triangle, each at different tables. They’re talking about a boxer she’s never heard of, and each has his day’s budget laid out on the cracked varnish of the circular table tops. All are on their last pint of the day, and are making it last: delaying the indignity of wrestling themselves into overcoats and scarves and tottering through the wind and snow to the bus stop.
The other customer is a muscular man in a black jacket and scarf. He’d tapped on the cider pump when he walked in, and handed over his money without a word. He’s barely touched the drink. Has barely looked up from the
‘Bloody freezing. I’ve packed it in for the day.’
Porthole Bob. He’s rubbing himself warm, having just walked in through the blue-paint and frosted-glass front
