and dizzy and there’s a haziness to his vision where the swelling above his eye is disrupting the edges of his sight. The paramedic had wanted to take him straight to casualty for an X-ray, but McAvoy, no stranger to injury, knows that this wound brings nothing more harmful than pain. Pain can be endured.
‘Got lucky, eh Sarge?’
McAvoy turns too quickly as the voice rings out in the echoing cavern of the empty church. There is a fresh explosion of pain in his skull and he sinks into the pew as DC Helen Tremberg makes her way up the central aisle. A sickness hits him in the gut.
‘I’m sorry, Detective Constable Tremberg?’
‘They said he almost filleted you as well. Lucky break.’
Her cheeks are flushed. She’s excited. For the past hour she’s been marshalling the uniformed officers from their makeshift HQ in the verger’s office and one of the younger constables had called her ‘ma’am’, thinking her a senior officer. She had enjoyed the feeling. Enjoyed telling people what to do, and seeing it done. Already the dozen uniforms have taken the first batch of statements from the congregation, as well as the names and addresses of those currently too deeply in shock to be able to explain what they saw.
‘He hit me with the handle, not the blade.’
‘Must have liked the look of you, eh? Must have been more difficult to knock you out than to kill you. Heat of the moment, machete in your hand. Million to one that he decides to crack you one rather than slash you.’
McAvoy stares at his feet, waiting for the thudding pain to cease.
He knows how this story will be told. He has a reputation as a desk jockey; a master of spreadsheets and databases, computing and technology. To be knocked out cold at a crime scene by the prime suspect? He can hear the jokes already.
‘Your boy get home OK?’
McAvoy nods. Swallows. Coughs some gravel into his voice.
‘Roisin came and got him. The waitress from the coffee shop was looking after him. I think I’m in the doghouse with both of them.’
‘The waitress?’
McAvoy smiles. ‘Yeah, probably her as well.’
They fall silent for a moment, Tremberg letting herself look at the girl’s corpse for the first time. She shakes her head and looks away. Focuses on her notebook. Tries to get this right. She’s never had any worries about organising a crime scene or giving a report, but there’s something about McAvoy that she finds strangely disconcerting. It’s more than just his size. There’s a sadness to him. A quiet, brooding intensity that makes him difficult company. She gets on fine with the blokes at the station. She’s perfectly at ease telling jokes with the lads and can drink most of her male colleagues under the table, but there is a quality to her sergeant that makes her unsure how to impress him. He seems to take it all so personally. And he’s obsessed with getting things done by the book. With filling in forms and quoting the right sections and sub-sections, and using the politically correct references for every scumbag they come into contact with.
She knows he has his secrets. Something happened a year ago, up at the Country Park, and it cost a well- known copper his job and put McAvoy on the shelf for months. He was injured, she knows that. The faintest of scars are on his face. There are rumours of more beneath the expensive clothes he seems to wear so inelegantly. Tremberg had only joined Trish Pharaoh’s team a few weeks before McAvoy returned from sick leave, and she had been excited about having a chance to get to know him. But the first meeting was a disappointment. She’d found a small man trapped in a giant’s body. He had the personality of an unassuming, bespectacled accountant, but it was rattling around inside a colossal frame. And then there were the eyes. Those big, sad cow-eyes that seemed to be forever questioning, assessing, disapproving, judging. At times, he put her in mind of an old Scottish king, his sword across his knees and a blanket round his shoulders, coughing, wheezing, but still able to wield a claymore with enough force to decapitate a bull.
She looks at him now. Hopes to God that they make a start on this before Detective Chief Inspector Colin Ray and his trained seal can steam in and spoil the party.
McAvoy stands. Steadies himself and sees that his hand, supporting his weight on the pew, is resting on a leatherbound Bible.
‘So little mercy,’ he says, half to himself.
‘Sarge?’
‘Just makes you wonder,’ he mutters, and a disloyal blush climbs from his shirt and up his broad face. ‘Why her? Why here? Why now?’ He waves a huge, shovel-like hand. ‘Why any of it?’
‘Horrible world,’ says Tremberg with a shrug.
McAvoy looks at his feet and strokes the cover of the Bible. ‘Chapter and verse,’ he says softly, and closes his eyes.
‘She’s called Daphne Cotton,’ says Tremberg, her voice suddenly softer and less abrasive, as if, after the viewing of the corpse, her earlier bombast has been diluted by the sheer brutal sadness of the scene. ‘Fifteen years old. She’s been part of this church for four years. Adopted.’
‘Stop there,’ says McAvoy, already dizzy with ideas and questions. He has a logical mind, but things make more sense to him when they are written down and neatly ordered. He likes the process of detection. Likes the orderliness of logging things properly. With his aching head and dulled wits, he wonders how much of this will go in. ‘Daphne Cotton,’ he repeats. ‘Fifteen. Adopted. Local?’
Tremberg looks confused. ‘Sarge?’
‘She’s a black girl, DC Tremberg. Was she adopted from overseas?’
‘Oh, right. Don’t know.’
‘Right.’
They fall into silence, both disappointed in the other and themselves. McAvoy finds himself worrying about his use of the word ‘black’. Would it be more appropriate to use the procedural moniker? Is it wrong to notice her colour? Is he being a good detective or a bigot? He knows few other officers concern themselves with such subtleties, but McAvoy would give himself an ulcer fretting about such things were it not for Roisin’s ability to calm him down.
‘So,’ says McAvoy, looking back at the girl’s body and then up to the ceiling. ‘What did they tell you, the witnesses?’
Tremberg glances at her notebook. ‘She’s an altar server, Sarge. An acolyte. They hold the candles in the procession. Sit in front of the altar during the service. Take the stuff the priest hands them and put it away. Lots of ceremony and pomp. It’s a big honour, apparently. She’s been doing it since she was twelve.’ There is enough scepticism and eyebrow-raising in Tremberg’s speech to hint at a set of religious beliefs somewhere south of agnostic.
‘You’re not a regular at Sunday service?’ asks McAvoy with a faint smile.
Tremberg gives a snort of derisory laughter. ‘In my family, Sundays were for the Grand Prix. We followed F1 religiously though.’
At the far end of the central aisle a door bangs open with a sudden gust of wind, and for a moment McAvoy sees gravestones and gates, Christmas lights and uniforms, as a blue light flashes rhythmically, illuminating the darkness in sweeping circles. He can imagine the scene out there. Police constables in yellow coats fixing blue- and-white striped police tape around the wrought-iron gates. Drinkers from the nearby pubs peering over half- empty pint glasses as cars do battle in the forecourt, screeching to a halt, inches from collision; anxious drivers leaping out to pick up loved ones who had been in the congregation and who are now emerging into the cold, snow-blown square, to be led away from the horror of what they have witnessed.
‘So whoever did this knew she would be here?’
‘If she’s who he was after, Sarge. We don’t know it wasn’t random.’
‘True. Do we have anything to that effect?’
‘Not yet. I’ve got a statement here from a Euan Leech who reckons the bloke pushed aside two other servers to get at her, but in all the confusion …’
‘And the other statements?’
‘Couldn’t say. Just saw a figure suddenly appear by the altar and the next thing he was hacking her down and it was all screams. It might become clearer when they have time to get their minds straight.’
‘Nothing from the patrols yet? No sign of him?’
