anybody stop to read them.
‘Pharaoh’s not here,’ he says under his breath. ‘She knows, though. Spitting bullets and teeth.’
‘Is she on her way in?’
‘Can’t. Her husband’s an ill man. Wheelchair-bound, if you hadn’t heard. He has good days and bad days. This is a bad day. She’s trying to get somebody to watch him and the kids so she can get across, but in this weather I doubt we’ll see her.’
‘So this wasn’t her call?’
‘Are you joking? Christ, she’s going spare.’
‘She didn’t send DCI Ray?’
‘No chance. The cheeky monkey did this as soon as her back was turned. Trouble is, it’s starting to look like the right move. To the top brass at least.’
‘What?’ McAvoy stops dead in the corridor, and then has to scamper to catch up with Spink when he realises the man isn’t stopping.
‘Look, I’m just an innocent bystander, son,’ he says, shaking his head and then nodding to direct them down another corridor as they come to a crossroads. ‘Trish knows her stuff, but she’s got her enemies. She was never meant to have this job. For every woman and ethnic minority member that gets promoted to make us all look reasonable and forward-thinking, another twenty blokes from the old school get bumped to superintendent. If Colin Ray’s gone in with his size tens and managed to nab somebody we can actually pin this on, they’re not going to tell him off for going over Trish’s head.’
‘But it’s a nonsense,’ says McAvoy, the frustration apparent in his voice. ‘Chandler couldn’t possibly-’
‘Look, I’m not the one with the answers, lad,’ he says, slowing their pace and looking up from watching his footsteps to actually make eye contact with McAvoy. ‘I’m just a writer these days. A writer who happens to hear things now and then and a writer who tonight, happened to be having a mug of tea with the desk sergeant when Colin Ray and Shaz Archer brought in a little bloke holding a wooden leg and asking for you. I phoned Trish. She said she’d get here as soon as she could. Told me to let you know. I have.’
‘She asked you to tell me? Why?’
‘I don’t know, lad. Perhaps she wanted you to make them some sandwiches.’
Spink turns to walk on, but McAvoy blocks his way. ‘What have they got? What has Ray found?’
Spink looks down the corridor, as if keen to make a break for it, then appears to come to a conclusion.
‘I don’t know how much of this is bollocks and how much they can prove, but Colin’s been telling people that you and Trish have ballsed up. Failed to run a background check on a key suspect in the investigation. It turns out Chandler isn’t called Chandler at all. He’s really Albert Jonsson. Registered under that name at the clinic. Asks to be called Russ Chandler and people respect it, but he’s a non-person. Albert Jonsson, however, is very real. And he’s got a record. One count of wounding, two burglaries, obtaining money by deception …’
‘But we were going to interview him tomorrow,’ McAvoy says through gritted teeth.
‘There’s more,’ says Spink, looking away. ‘There was no chance of a warrant. Not at this hour. So Shaz Archer laid on the charm. Persuaded the night staff to do a search of Chandler’s room. They found his notebook.’
Something about Spink’s tone of voice makes McAvoy feel as though he is opening a final demand.
‘And?’
‘And Daphne Cotton’s name’s in there, son. Clean sweep.’
McAvoy’s shoulders slump forward. His head lolls to his chest. He takes a step backwards and leans his against the wall, blood rushing in his head. Could he really have been so wrong? Could he really have sat and chatted with a killer?
‘It doesn’t have to mean anything,’ says Spink. ‘I’ve seen bigger coincidences.’
McAvoy tells himself to nod, but can’t find the strength. He feels as though he’s been kicked in the gut.
‘He’s not admitted it, then?’ he asks, his voice suddenly weary and old.
‘They’re conducting the interview now. All he’ll say is “no comment”, or at least that was how he was playing it last I heard. But Colin’s persuasive. He won’t back off.’
McAvoy manages the faintest of nods. ‘Jonsson? That’s …?’
‘Icelandic, yes. Again, could be nothing.’
‘But probably not.’
‘No.’
He tries to pull himself together. Wishes, for a moment, that he smoked, just so he could busy his fingers with lighting something that would bring him a modicum of comfort.
‘If it is him …’
‘Yes.’
‘At least he’ll be off the streets,’ he says, trying to make himself feel relieved that at least a murderer would be behind bars. ‘At least we’ll have done some good.’
‘Exactly,’ says Spink, and tries a grin.
The silence stretches out.
‘It looked nothing like him,’ says McAvoy, more to himself than anybody else. ‘Different eyes.’
‘I know.’
‘And he called me,’ he says, suddenly loud. ‘He called me about Angie Martindale. Why would he do that? And he wouldn’t have had time. He called, me, remember? You’re getting this so wrong …’
‘They found a mobile in his room. They’ve contacted the mobile phone company. Should hear back in the morning. They’ll know where the signal came from. They’ll know if he took a break from carving his name on Angie Martindale for long enough to give you a fighting chance at stopping him.’
‘They think he was playing a game?’
Spink nods.
‘Cat and mouse with me the stupid Scottish pussy?’
Spink smothers a smile by wiping his hand across his mouth. ‘We don’t know anything yet,’ he says.
From nearby comes the sound of voices. Footsteps. Excited chatter. Without saying anything, McAvoy and Spink push off from the wall and follow the sound. They turn left at the next T-junction and carry on past the four pieces of Blu-tack that used to hold a laminated piece of paper bearing the words INTERVIEW ROOMS.
Outside a wooden door with a long narrow pane of glass at its centre stand Colin Ray and Shaz Archer. Ray is holding open a manila folder, nodding vigorously as Archer points into its depths with a chewed biro.
‘… would make anybody frustrated,’ she’s saying. ‘Big brain, little dick, big problems, eh Col? How many times we seen it? Can’t just go out and pick a fight, because he’s too high and bloody mighty for that, but he can dream up something like this, eh? Something that makes him that bit special. It’s all here.’
McAvoy would have been content to turn away. To walk back the way they’d come without being seen. But Spink coughs and greets the two officers with a smile.
‘Going well?’
Colin Ray’s eyes flash anger. He closes the folder as if trying to squash a fly in its pages. Flares his nostrils as if preparing to charge.
‘She sent her errand boy?’
The question is directed at Spink, but McAvoy knows it is himself to whom Ray is referring. Later, he will tell himself that it’s a good thing, that he’s now known as Pharaoh’s blueeyed boy when a week ago she couldn’t even spell his name. But now, it just makes his cheeks burn.
‘It’s my case too,’ says McAvoy, and even as he does so, wonders where the words came from.
The two senior officers share a look.
‘Well, you’re here just in time to watch it end,’ says Ray, nodding in the direction of the interview room. ‘We’ve got the bloody lot.’
‘He’s confessed?’ Spink sounds incredulous.
‘He’s giving it all the no comment at the moment,’ pipes up Archer. ‘But he’s getting tired.’
McAvoy looks at them both. Colin looks tired and ill, but the map of burst blood vessels in his cheeks and the vein pounding at the side of his head suggest he has enough fire in him to see this through.
‘You can’t seriously expect to charge him …’
‘I bloody can,’ snaps Ray, looking down at the closed folder as if it contains treasure.
