The Dark Winter

CHAPTER 2

She lies where she fell, crumpled and folded on the altar steps: one leg drawn up, bent the wrong way at the knee — a dislodged training shoe hanging precariously from stockinged toes.

She is a black girl, her face and hands a rich mahogany: her upturned palms soft, the colour of churned milk. She’s young. Still in the throes of adolescence. Not old enough to buy cigarettes. Not old enough to have sex. Not old enough to die.

Nobody has tried to restart her heart. There are too many holes in her. Pressing on her chest would be like squeezing a wet sponge.

Her pure white cassock has been pulled up behind her back, creased beneath her corpse. Its thick white material hugs tight to the curve of one small, firm breast.

The girl’s blood has made her robe sodden and crimson down one side. It remains pristine on the other. Were it not for the twisted expression that enfolds the entirety of her face, it would seem as though this hideous indignity had only been visited on one side of her small frame.

It is clear she died in agony. The blood that streaks her cheeks, neck, chin and lips looks as though it was hurled at her in great wet handfuls. It settled on her in a hazy red rain as she lay here, dead and staring, gaze fixed on a distant ceiling of curving columns and hand-drawn stars.

‘You poor, poor girl.’

McAvoy stands by the altar, one big pink hand gripping the wooden backrest of the front pew. He feels sick 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?’

‘Not a sausage. Too windy to get the chopper up, and too late now anyway. But with the amount of blood he’s covered in, somebody will have spotted him …’

‘OK,’ says McAvoy. He turns away from the girl’s body and looks into Tremberg’s face. She’s a very average-looking woman, compared to his Roisin, but she has a face that he reckons an artist would enjoy. Thin, elfin features sit in the centre of a round, broad head, like a gourmet meal in the middle of a large, plain plate. She’s tall and athletic, perhaps thirty years old, and dresses in an inoffensive, nondescript fashion that makes her neither a sex object to the male officers nor a threat to the more Machiavellian women. She’s funny, energetic and easy to get along with, and although there’s a slight tremble to her lips that betrays the adrenalin running through her body at the thought of being involved in the hunt for this killer, she is otherwise masking it with an aplomb McAvoy finds admirable.

‘The family,’ he says. ‘Were they here?’

‘No. They usually are. The verger said they were friends of the church, whatever you think that means. But no, she was here on her own. They dropped her off and she was going to make her own way back. That’s according to one of the other acolytes. An older lad. Wants to be a priest. Or a vicar. Don’t know the difference.’

‘But they’ve been informed, her parents. They know?’

‘Yes, sir. Family liaison have been contacted. I thought you’d want it to be our first port of call, soon as you got your faculties together.’

McAvoy gives a thin smile. He’s pleased he is standing up. Were he sitting down, his legs would be jiggling up and down with a feeling that a less specific man would call excitement. McAvoy does not think of it as such. It is not even nervousness. It is a feeling he associates with the beginning of things. The potential of the blank page. He wants to know about Daphne Cotton. Wants to know who killed her, and why. Wants to know why he, Aector McAvoy, was spared the blade. Why there were tears in the man’s eyes. Wants to show that he can do this. That he’s more than the copper who brought down Doug Roper.

He looks at his surroundings, at this majestic, aweinspiring place.

Will it be the same? he wonders. Can the faithful sit in their pews and praise the Lord and not remember the time a killer leapt from the congregation and slaughtered one of the acolytes as she held her candle and attended the priest? He screws up his eyes. Rubs a palm over his features. When he opens them again he is staring at a great golden eagle, its wings folded in repose. He wonders at its significance. Why it stands here, on a tiled floor, at the top of the nave, facing the gothic stairs that lead to the lectern. Wonders who chose this bird, for this place. Feels his mind beginning to race. To analyse. This murder in a church, less than two weeks before Christmas. He contorts his features, as he remembers that moment, not yet two hours ago, when the song of the choir flooded across the square and warmed the hearts of those who heard it. Thinks of how Daphne Cotton must have felt in those awful moments, when the protective embrace of her faith, of her congregation, was punctured by a blade.

‘The car’s outside, Sarge,’ says Tremberg eagerly, gesturing to the door with her head. ‘Ben Nielsen’s on his way here to oversee interviews. We’ve got child specialists en route to interview the choirboys. They probably had the best views, poor sods …’

As McAvoy starts walking towards the door, the phone rings in his inside pocket. A tremor of anxiety floods him. He should have called in. Should have logged this straightaway with the top brass. Stamped his brand on the case. But he was lying on a stretcher in the back of an ambulance, letting an inexperienced DC run the show.

‘Detective Sergeant McAvoy,’ he says, and stops walking, already letting his head drop.

‘McAvoy. This is ACC Everett. What’s going on down there?’ The voice of the Assistant Chief Constable is tense and stern.

‘We’re on top of things, sir. We’re on our way to see the family now …’

‘We?’

‘DC Helen Tremberg and myself, sir …’

‘Not Pharaoh?’

McAvoy hears himself gulp. It feels as though he’s swallowed ice water on an empty stomach. His guts start to cramp.

‘Detective Superintendent Pharaoh is on a course this weekend, sir. I’m duty senior officer …’

‘Pharaoh phoned in, McAvoy. Cancelled the course the second she heard. This is a murder, Sergeant. In the city’s biggest, most historic church. The church where William Wilberforce was baptised. A teenage girl, hacked up by a lunatic in front of the congregation? This is all-hands-to-the-pump time, man.’

‘So do you want me to fill her in after I’ve spoken to the girl’s family?’

‘No.’ There is a finality to Everett’s voice that makes a mockery of his own belief that this could be his investigation.

‘Yes, sir,’ he says defeatedly, like a schoolboy told he has not made the team. Beside him, Tremberg turns away, popping two pieces of gum into her mouth and chewing angrily as she realises what is happening.

‘No, I was ringing about the other matter, McAvoy. The one I telephoned about earlier,’ Everett continues with barely a pause.

‘Yes, sir, I got the message but-’

‘Well, never mind that now. Other things have come up. But now you’re free of having to lead the investigation you can do something else for me. A favour, actually.’

McAvoy’s eyes are closed now. He’s barely listening.

‘If I can, sir.’

‘Excellent. I’ve had a call from a pal of mine at Southampton. It seems an old chap from their neck of the woods has had an accident while making some documentary out at sea. Terrible. Terrible. He’s from this area originally. Still got family. A sister, out at Beeford. Normally, a uniform would drive by and break the news, but this lady, well …’ Everett starts to stumble over his words. He sounds like a shy man making a speech at a wedding. ‘Well, look, she’s the wife of the Police Authority vice-chair. A very important lady. She and her husband are big supporters of a lot of the initiatives the community policing programme are hoping to see through over the next few years. And you always have such a fine way with people …’

There is a rushing sound in McAvoy’s ears. His heart is thudding. He can smell his own blood in his nostrils. He opens his eyes to see Tremberg walking away from him, an air of contempt to her gait. She’ll find her way into Pharaoh’s team.

Do what you do best, McAvoy. Be the gentle, decent soul. Do Everett’s bidding. Keep your head down. Get on with your job. Earn a wage. Love your wife …

‘Yes, sir.’