a sigh and give in to his hack instincts …
McAvoy’s phone rings.
‘Sergeant,’ comes a voice. ‘This is Jonathan Feasby.’
PART FOUR
CHAPTER 22
The clock on the dashboard reads 1.33 p.m. It’s getting dark. Perhaps it never got light.
McAvoy is eighty miles from home, somewhere that the road signs claim to be the heart of Bronte country.
In the distance, the moors of West Yorkshire scream with bleak foreboding. Although the grass is damp and green, he would only be able to draw this picture with charcoal. It is a rain-lashed, empty and menacing landscape, fighting against a constant wind beneath skies the colour of quicksilver.
The track veers left. McAvoy follows it.
He steers the car through black, wrought-iron gates onto a gravelled drive. The driveway opens onto a large forecourt, which borders an immaculate green lawn, lush with dew and fine rain.
Against the darkening sky sits the house. Broodingly wealthy and eccentrically frayed around the edges.
‘Take it easy,’ he says to himself, as a prickling patch of sweat forms between his shoulder blades. Wishes he looked more like a police officer. In his stinking rugby shirt, threadbare jeans and increasingly ragged designer coat, he looks more like a tramp who’s robbed a fancy-dress shop.
A movement behind him makes him turn. Another car is pulling into the driveway.
McAvoy does his best to fasten his shirt by its one remaining button but concedes defeat as it comes off in his hand.
He approaches the other vehicle, which is occupied by two men. One is perhaps in his fifties. He has greying hair and sharp, hawk-like features. The other is a younger man. Big, with a GI Joe-style crew cut.
He spins as a sound comes from the house.
A curvy, middle-aged woman in an expensive dress, black raincoat and leather boots emerges from the large oak double doors beneath the granite portico at the front of the house. She has blonde hair running to grey, cut into a layered bob. She is striking, though there is a sagginess to her face that suggests a melted beauty; that if she could just be twisted tight from the scalp, she would be vivacious and desirable once more.
The older man comes round from the driver’s side. He is wearing a pair of jeans, an expensive pink shirt and a tweed jacket beneath a padded coat. A pair of glasses hangs on a chain around his neck and his face is so closely shaven that the skin looks raw and painfully abraded.
He extends a hand as he approaches and a gold watch glitters at his wrist. He jerks his jaw out a little, as if to say hello.
‘You McAvoy?’
‘Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy. Humberside Police Serious and Organised Crime Unit. Lieutenant Colonel Montague Emms, I presume?’
The other man gives a grin. ‘Not any more,’ he says. ‘Not the rank, anyway. I’m still Montague Emms, but I hate that, so call me Sparky. Everybody else does. Even the lad Armstrong, here.’
Emms extends a hand. McAvoy finds a calloused, rough palm and fingers. Gives a subtle roll of his thumb upon the back of the proffered hand and feels a set of knuckles that have been broken and inexpertly set.
Emms gestures in the direction of the house. ‘Shall we?’
The woman in the doorway retreats inside as they approach. Emms makes a show of having forgotten something obvious and turns back to the soldier. ‘Get your stuff, son. The boys will be back soon to show you where you’re going. There’s a barn and stables down that track to your left if you want to keep warm.’
He turns back to McAvoy before Armstrong can even snap off a salute.
‘New recruit?’ asks McAvoy as they pass through the doors.
‘Possibly,’ says Emms, who, up close, is taller than McAvoy has realised. He walks with a straight back and firm, confident steps.
‘Lovely place,’ says McAvoy conversationally as they pause in the hallway. A few steps ahead, the woman is opening a wooden door set in an oak-panelled wall. She smiles at them both, pushes the door back as far as it will go, and then steps back.
‘Guess we’re going in my study,’ says Emms lightly. ‘That’s the wife, by the way. Ellen. Looks after me. Don’t know where I’d be without her.’
‘I’ve got one of those,’ says McAvoy, before he can help himself.
‘A good woman’s worth her weight in gold,’ says Emms, and the two exchange a look that suggests they share a wisdom and truism that not many other men have learned. McAvoy finds himself warming to the man.
‘Right, I’ll just go rustle us up a pot of tea. You make yourself comfortable in my study and I’ll be back in a jiff. Tea, yes? You don’t strike me as a coffee drinker.’
‘Is that racial stereotyping, sir?’ asks McAvoy, with enough of a smile to show he’s joking.
‘Ha!’ says Emms, throwing his head back.
Emms is still laughing as he strides away, turning left at a door opposite the study and leaving a trail of muddy bootprints on the wooden floor.
McAvoy has to bow his head slightly as he enters the study. The house must be at least three centuries old, and he knows from experience that doorways then were built for a smaller race.
It’s a modest, rectangular room, with a large sash window taking up almost the whole of the far wall. Two computers and three telephones sit on an antique desk, which is littered with typed documents and what look like haphazardly folded architectural blueprints.
On the desk, in an ornate gold frame, is a pen-and-ink drawing. McAvoy has to squint to make it out. A face or a form? A landscape? It seems to have been scribbled and scrawled, but upon closer inspection he sees that each and every line has been individually etched. It is a bewildering piece of haphazard beauty that McAvoy wishes he better understood.
The light from the window is insufficient to illuminate the room, so McAvoy reaches up and flips an old- fashioned metal light switch. The bulb flickers into life.
McAvoy finds himself staring at an entire wall of photographs. Squares of corkboard have been nailed up and their surfaces are adorned with snaps of smiling, grinning men in military fatigues. McAvoy examines the images. There must be hundreds of men here. Sitting on tanks. Giving thumbs-up on dusty, sun-baked runways. Overloaded with packs and guns, helmets and radio equipment, lounging in the backs of open-top Jeeps or stripped to the waist and greasy with exertion, a football between their legs and sand on their boots. Some of the images must be thirty years old. In some, the moustaches of the officers and the poor, grainy quality of the images put McAvoy in mind of footage he has seen of the Falklands War. He wishes he’d done more research on Emms’s military career before he asked Feasby to arrange this meeting. Wishes he knew what the fuck he was doing here.
‘Ah, my wall of shame,’ says Emms, making McAvoy turn round sharply as he emerges in the doorway holding two mugs of tea. McAvoy doesn’t know why, but he’d rather expected a pot on a tray, positioned between elegant cups and saucers. Instead, into his hand is thrust a mug bearing a company logo. Magellan Strategies.
‘I was just admiring …’
‘Yes, yes,’ says Emms, happily enough. ‘Those are the boys and girls who’ve served under me. Mostly boys, if I’m honest. And not all of them. But as many as I could find. Ellen thinks I’m daft. Tells me that I should have pictures of the grandchildren up in here, but I can’t bring myself to take them down.’
‘You must miss it.’
‘Soldiering? Yes and no. I did twenty-eight years. Enough to scratch any itch. And I’m still on the scene, as it were. Still got plenty to keep me busy.’
‘You set up the company when you were discharged, did you?’
‘Just about. Made the right contacts while I was working towards retirement, so to speak. But things just landed right. And it’s not just me, you understand. I had partners at first. Board of directors now we’re established.
