Emms cocks an eyebrow. ‘Anne Montrose’s fiance.’
‘And your relationship to Major Gibbons?’
Emms gives a rueful laugh. ‘Call it brothers-in-arms. He was my best officer. Best friend, if such a thing can exist. I wanted him to come into the security business with me but we had a difference of opinion over all that. Call it a clash of ideals. He said he wouldn’t be a mercenary. I told him that we were helping people. Building something special. Saving lives. He said Anne would do that for free. It was an argument neither of us was going to win. So he stayed in the army. I set up Magellan.’
‘And Anne?’
‘He met her in some godforsaken hole in Iraq. Fell head over heels. He’s not the sort to do that, Simeon. He’s a controlled sort of chap. Keeps it all in. Has his beliefs and won’t change them. Christian man. Fell for Anne like you wouldn’t believe.’
‘So when the explosion happened …’
Emms shrugs. ‘I heard about it from another old pal. Thought the least I could do for an old mate was to keep the press away. Easily done, to be honest. Don’t expect me to feel bad for paying off a journalist, Sergeant.’
McAvoy shakes his head. ‘I don’t. I understand.’
‘Gibbo lost his mind over it. Couldn’t reconcile it. It’s hard to describe to people who have never been there. To war, I mean. Over there. Under the sun. The remoteness. You start questioning everything. You start seeing the world differently. People find religion, or lose it. Happens to the best of us, and when he lost Anne, it kind of broke him open. I don’t know what filled him up. He wouldn’t speak to his old mates. Wouldn’t go home. Even when I had her flown back to the UK … even when I got her in the private facility, got her round-the-clock care …’
Emms looks down at the photograph in his lap. Looks into the face of an old friend who lost his mind when his heart was broken.
‘Was he discharged?’
‘Didn’t get the chance,’ says Emms, looking up. ‘Chunk of metal from a roadside bomb tore through his throat not long after. He bled to death on the side of the road in Basra. Should never have been cleared for active service in the first place.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It was such a waste. Such a beautiful man.’ He reaches back. Picks up the pen-and-ink drawing from the desk. Holds it up to show McAvoy. ‘Talented, too.’
He unclips the frame and pulls out a piece of expensive, cream-coloured card. It’s signed on the back. Emms closes his eyes as he regards it and McAvoy suddenly feels intrusive and out of place.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You said.’
Silence falls in the small room. It’s only mid-afternoon but the darkness is sliding towards the floor like a blind.
‘And you still pay her bills?’
‘Wouldn’t you?’
McAvoy doesn’t have to think about it. He knows he would bankrupt himself to care for a stranger.
‘I’ll put two of the boys on a guard detail at Anne’s bedside. Just to be on the safe side. Phone me when you think this is at an end.’
To break the air of misery that’s fallen, Emms turns to the window. ‘Never stops,’ he says.
‘Sorry?’
‘The rain. I bought this house for Ellen. She always wanted to be lady of the manor. Grew up reading the Bronte sisters and fancying Heathcliff. Had this romantic notion about windswept moors and rain-lashed hillsides. And she’s got ’em. Just bloody depressing, if you ask me. She’s wanting a horse next. I think she’s got a fancy for meeting some dusky chap in riding breeches out on a hillside. She’s got a lovely mind for that kind of thing.’
McAvoy gives a smile and enjoys the feeling. ‘My Roisin’s like that. Head full of lovely pictures.’
‘Hard to measure up, isn’t it?’
McAvoy nods, and both men share a moment of something that feels uncannily like friendship.
‘Armstrong will be shivering,’ says McAvoy.
‘He’s been through worse. We’ll work him hard but there’s good money in it if you play it right.’
‘And you think his mind is right? After what happened?’
‘He won’t be in the firing line, so to speak. He’ll be overseeing one of our freight contracts. Going to meetings. Providing a bit of muscly reassurance for building contractors. Once he gets in with the lads, he’ll lose himself in the banter. Your mates are what matters, places like that.’
In the way he says it, McAvoy catches a need for something he recognises. Perhaps better than anybody else, he understands the need to be told that he’s done the right thing.
CHAPTER 23
The snow that fell in Grimsby earlier in the week has melted away. Somehow, it has endeavoured to clean the streets with its departure, and the town has a scrubbed appearance that puts McAvoy in mind of a dog emerging, blinking and bewildered, from a bath it has unwillingly taken.
The evening air is infused with the kind of subtle rain that can soak a man to the skin before he’s even realised he should put on a coat.
McAvoy didn’t expect to be back here so soon. Not back on the street where so recently he wrestled with a killer, and saved a life.
Perhaps to spare him the sight of that bloody and painful struggle, or perhaps just to tuck her beloved vehicle away somewhere slightly better protected, Pharaoh parks the sports car several streets away from the Bear.
‘Cheer up,’ she says, opening the door and filling the car with a gust of chilly, greasy air. ‘We’re on expenses.’
McAvoy pulls his collar up as he extricates himself with difficulty from the compact two-seater. His head is reeling.
Suddenly, as he wanted all along, the investigation is being done the right way.
He focuses on the barrage of new information that Pharaoh has poured into his ear on the half-hour journey from Hull.
‘They speak bloody good English,’ she says, impressed. ‘Very respectful people. Actually wanted to help. Very refreshing.’
She is suddenly a fan of the Icelandic State Police, having spent a pleasant fifteen minutes charming the pants off a couple of young detectives in a rural station — massaging their egos and explaining that their information could help catch a serial killer.
They were only too happy to help. And the information they divulged was going to make Colin Ray very unhappy.
One of the containers on the cargo ship which had been chartered for Fred Stein’s documentary had indeed been tampered with. When the vessel docked, and the missing man was reported, two officers from a small-town police station had interviewed the captain and first mate. They had taken photographs of Fred Stein’s cabin. They had interviewed the TV crew and requested copies of their film. And they had taken a brief look around the cargo bay. Even to their somewhat inexpert eyes, it was clear that one of the containers at the bottom of the stack was not in the same condition as the scores of others that towered above and around it. A ragged hole, perhaps four feet by three, had been carved into the metal door. A torchlit examination of the interior showed it to be empty, save for a dirty sleeping bag and three empty bottles of water. They questioned the captain again. Asked what could have caused the damage. Whether it looked to him, as it did to them, as if had been made using with an oxyacetylene torch. He had shrugged. Said that stowaways were a problem. There was a serial number on the side of the container that Tom Spink had managed to trace to a haulage company based in Southampton. The woman who answered the haulier’s phone was the same person who had, a little over a week before, taken the initial freight order that booked the container’s passage.
