The Dark Winter

CHAPTER 14

It’s only been two hours since McAvoy and Tremberg stood on the doorstep of Jack Raycroft’s home but already they are building up a pretty clear picture of the kind of man whose death they are investigating. Irresponsible, selfish, a welfare scrounger: a tabloid would need little encouragement to slap the ‘evil’ tag on him, though Tremberg put it best when she declared that ‘nasty bastard’ was a more suitable moniker for the dear departed than any of the psychological terms McAvoy suggested while poring over the limited case notes that the database had been fed.

Tremberg clicks the mouse and the computer screen fills with images of charred bodies. Both detectives sniff, and fight the urge to look away. The corpses are unmistakably those of blackened, flame-devoured children.

A rumbling belch comes from the doorway and both detectives spin round. Sergeant Linus is wrapping both of his fat, fleshy hands around a mug. He’s eclipsing the light spilling in from the corridor, and the room suddenly darkens as he yawns expansively and takes a gulp of his drink. The smell coming from the container is meaty and inviting, and McAvoy realises that the uniformed officer wedging his considerable bulk in the doorway is actually drinking gravy.

‘Was a bad one,’ says Linus, taking a slurp from the mug and then wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Never saw anything like it. Was like Pompeii in there when the smoke cleared. Could still see the expression on the youngest lad’s face. Wish I could say he looked like he was asleep. He didn’t. He looked like he was in fucking agony.’

‘Must have been awful,’ says Tremberg.

‘Fucking was.’

Tremberg waves a hand at the office, with its damp walls, out-of-date posters and threadbare carpet. ‘I take it you’re not missing CID. Cushy number here.’

Linus fails to spot the sarcasm and gives a nod. ‘Twenty years was enough, love.’

‘You got the time to fill us in?’ asks McAvoy, making it sound as though the whole investigation would stumble without a few moments of Linus’s valuable time. ‘We just need an overview.’

‘Like I said on the phone, I’m happy to help.’

Even in the first couple of hours of the inquiry, McAvoy has found it hard to escape the conclusion that the investigation into the original fire had been a haphazard affair. And he’s finding it hard not to blame the shambolic, lazy bastard in front of him; a feeling not helped by the sensation that the charred bodies of the dead youngsters are staring at the back of his head from the computer screen.

‘Well, it was pretty clear from the off that the dad was the one who’d pulled the trigger, so to speak. Bloke didn’t have a mark on him. Was tempted to put a few there myself.’

McAvoy jerks a thumb over his shoulder at the screen. ‘The forensics report suggests an accelerant was used. Lighter fluid. Early indications are that the same MO was used last night at Hull Royal. And the night before at the house yonder. You don’t think that perhaps he was innocent, do you? That whoever did the fire that killed his missus and his kids might have come back to finish the job?’

Linus appears to give it some thought. ‘Possible, lad. But like I said, I’m pretty damn sure that Jefferson did that fire. And I reckon somebody’s decided an eye for an eye is the only kind of justice he deserved.’

The room falls silent for a moment. McAvoy nods slowly and decides to stop being so bloody nice.

‘You didn’t charge him, though, did you? If he’s got the only kind of justice he deserved, it’s because you never charged him with anything. Never even came close, from what I can see.’

Linus bristles. Pushes himself away from the wall. ‘Hang on there, now,’ he begins, temper flushing his cheeks. ‘We did a thorough investigation. We just couldn’t pin it on him.’

‘Thorough?’ McAvoy contorts the word into a snarl of contempt. ‘The bloody Hull Daily Mail did a more thorough background check on this bloke. Eight fires! Eight fires at his previous addresses. That didn’t strike you as odd?’

‘We knew there’d been some little blazes, here and there,’ says Linus, waving the accusation away with both wobbling arms. ‘He’d reported them to the council, not the police. We had nothing on him except a couple of deception convictions from his younger days and a drunken assault on a copper a year before.’

‘And yet you say you had him pegged from the start.’ McAvoy turns to Tremberg. ‘I don’t know about you, Detective Constable, but when I make up my mind that somebody has killed a lot of children and his other half, I tend to be rather dogged in my pursuit of a way to lock the bugger up.’

Linus looks from one officer to the other, his many chins wobbling with righteous indignation.

He deflates slightly. Turns away. ‘Look, I never said I was bloody Sherlock Holmes …’

Again they sit in silence. Eventually, McAvoy wipes a hand across his face and pinches the bridge of his nose. He can feel a headache starting. He feels like he’s trying to complete a jigsaw puzzle and fears that more than half the pieces are still picture-side down.

‘I understand, Sergeant,’ he says, and hopes his face doesn’t betray him. ‘We all get days like that. Get weeks and months, even. We’ve all had cases where we just knew from the off that we were on a hiding to nothing. And it can’t have been easy. Roper dumped you in it. Realised it was going to be hard to make anything stick and walked away. Hardly made you feel like going the extra mile, did it?’

Linus is breathing heavily, but the gasps are coming through a half smile. He looks relieved. Pleased that this holier-than-thou Jock bastard at least understands how it is to be running uphill with the world on your back. ‘What could I do? The report said that it had been deliberately started and that accelerant was used. Fine. But Jefferson said it was the eldest boy. That he’d caught him playing with his lighters in the past. Was a case of his word against the dead. Sure, Jefferson’d been involved in other suspicious fires, but the dead lad had been at all those properties too. Knowing something and making it stick are two different things.’

‘You push him? You lay the pressure on?’

‘Course I bloody did. Had him in the interview room for hours, me and Pete May. Took it in turns. Tried to make him feel guilty. Just kept sitting there, shaking his head, saying his boy did it and that was that. Couldn’t charge him. Wouldn’t have got past the magistrates.’

‘Press gave you a roasting, though, eh?’

‘That’s what they do! The same papers that had been criticising us for spending a day and a night interrogating a poor grieving father went after us saying we were incompetent when they found out he’d reported 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.