The Dark Winter

CHAPTER 3

McAvoy slows down to 20mph. Squints into the darkness as the wheels of the boxy saloon throw up muddy streaks against the spray-jewelled glass. His eyes are eerily keen, but the December gloom enfolds him in a damp fist. Concentrating, he glimpses the eyes of song thrushes roosting in the lower reaches of the hedgerows. Can see the dead, rotting stems of cow-parsley and flaxweed sticking out like broken spears from the muddy, tyre-worn boundary of the road. Fancies that a rabbit is streaking across the wet gravel to his rear; a moment of fur and exclamation mark of tail, glimpsed in the foggy glass.

It is already 6 p.m. The drive back from Beeford, twenty miles up the coast from his North Hull home, will take an hour in these conditions. He will have to pass his own front door on his journey back to the central police station, and the thought makes him irritable, but a recent order from the Chief Constable’s office forbade the overnight use of pool cars without prior written approval, and McAvoy assumes there must be a good reason for the directive, and will ensure it is enforced.

A gap suddenly opens up in the hedgerows to McAvoy’s right and he gently swings the lumbering vehicle into the space for which he has been searching. In daylight, in spring, he imagines the scene around him will be a watercolour of ploughed brown soil and swaying blonde corn; but in this Stygian dark, this feels a lonely place, and it is with relief that he spies the brooding hulk of the tall, slate-grey farmhouse as the car grinds over firm, reassuring gravel and up the private drive.

A security light blinks on as McAvoy ramps up next to a muddy 4x4 in the oval parking area. An elderly woman is standing at an open back door. Despite the quizzical expression on her face, she has an attractiveness about her that the years have not diluted. She is straight-backed and slim. Subtle adornments — designer reading glasses, Swarovski crystal earrings, the softest trace of blush-coloured lipstick — gild soft, neatly composed features. Her short bobbed hair looks as though it is drawn in pencil. She is wearing a sleeveless body warmer over a burnt-orange sweater, with navy-blue, neatly pressed slacks tucked into thick walking socks. In her hand she holds a wine glass, containing just the faintest puddle of red.

McAvoy opens the car door into a gust of wind that threatens to pull his tie from around his neck.

‘This is private property,’ the woman says as she reaches down for a pair of wellington boots that stand by the door. ‘Are you lost? Were you looking for the Driffield road?’

McAvoy feels colour rising in his cheeks. He slams the car door shut before his notes, loose on the passenger seat, can start playing games with the wind. Quickly, he calls up her name from memory.

‘Mrs Stein-Collinson? Barbara Stein-Collinson?’

The woman is halfway out into the driveway, but her name stops her short. A look of concern freezes her face. ‘Yes. What’s wrong?’

‘Mrs Stein-Collinson, my name is Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy. Might we go inside? I’m afraid I have-’

She shakes her head, but her denial is not directed at the policeman. It is as though she is aiming the gesture at a vision. A memory. Her face softens, and she closes her eyes.

‘Fred,’ she says, and her next words do not sound like a question. ‘The silly sod’s dead.’

McAvoy tries to catch her eye, to hold her gaze in the earnest, comforting way he does so well, but she is not paying him any attention. He turns away, oddly embarrassed, though it is more at the cack-handed way he has handled this, the only mission for which his superiors feel he is suited. He watches the snow fall inconsequentially onto the gravel. Sniffs politely as the cold makes his nose run.

‘Found him, have they?’ she asks at last.

‘Perhaps we could-’

Her sudden glare cuts him dead. She stands there, snarling, her head shaking, her glasses slipping down her nose as her countenance turns hard and cold. She spits out her words, as if taking bites out of the air.

‘Forty years too bloody late.’

‘Would you mind taking your boots off? We have a cream carpet in the kitchen.’

McAvoy bends down and starts unfastening the soggy, triple-knotted laces. Lets his eyes sweep the little cloakroom from his vantage point at knee height. No wellingtons. No dog baskets. No rubbish bags or newspapers waiting for the next bonfire or tip-trip. Incomers, he thinks instinctively.

‘So,’ she says, standing above him like a monarch preparing to bestow a knighthood. ‘Where did they find him?’

McAvoy looks up, but can’t make eye contact without straining his neck, and can’t unpick his laces without looking at them. ‘If you’ll just give me a moment, Mrs Stein-Collinson …’

She responds with an irritated sigh. He imagines her face becoming stern. Tries to decide if it will do more harm to give her the details from this most inappropriate of positions, or to make the poor lady wait until he’s removed his boots.

‘He was about seventy miles off the coast of Iceland,’ McAvoy says, trying to inject as much empathy and compassion into his voice as he can. ‘Still in the lifeboat. A cargo ship saw the vessel and the search teams went straight to the scene.’

With a tug, he pulls off one boot, coating his thumb and forefinger in thick mud. He surreptitiously wipes his hand on the seat of his trousers as he begins work on the other.

‘Exposure, I assume,’ she says thoughtfully. ‘He won’t have taken any pills. Won’t have wanted to numb himself to it, our Fred. Will have wanted to feel what they did. I never guessed this was what he was planning. I mean, who would? Not when he’s laughing and telling stories and buying everybody a drink …’

McAvoy wrestles the other boot free and stands up quickly. She’s already halfway through the open door, and it’s with relief that he leaves the cloakroom and steps into the large, open kitchen. He’s surprised by what he finds. The kitchen is as unruly as a student bedsit. There are dirty dishes stacked high around the deep porcelain sink which sits beneath a large, curtainless window. Splashes of grease and what looks like pasta sauce are welded to the rings of the double-oven at the far end. Newspapers and assorted household bills are scattered across the rectangular oak table that fills the centre of the room, and laundry sits in crumpled islands all over the precious carpet, which has not been cream in many a year. His policeman’s eye takes in the dribbles of wine that sit at the bottom of the dirty glasses on the draining board. Even the pint glasses, embossed with pub logos, seem to have been used for the slugging of claret.

‘That’s him,’ she says, nodding at the wall behind McAvoy. He turns and is greeted with a stadium of faces; a gallery of higgledy-piggledy photographs stuck or Sellotaped to a dozen cork boards. The photos are from each of the last five decades. Black and white and colour.

‘There,’ she says again. ‘Next to our Alice. Peter’s grandniece, if that’s a word. There he is. Looking like the cat that got the cream.’

McAvoy focuses on the image that she is pointing to. A good-looking man with luscious black hair, swept back in a rocker’s quiff, holding a pint of beer and grinning at the camera. The fashion of the man in the foreground suggests it was taken in the mid-eighties. He’d have been thirty-something. McAvoy’s age. In his prime.

‘Handsome man,’ he says.

‘He knew it, too,’ she says, and her face softens. She reaches out and strokes the photo with a pale, bejewelled hand. ‘Poor Fred,’ she says, and then turns to look at McAvoy, as if seeing him for the first time. ‘I’m pleased you came. It wouldn’t have been nice to hear it in a phone call. Not with Peter away.’

‘Peter?’

‘My husband. He does a lot of work with the police, actually. You might know him. He’s on the authority. Was a councillor for many a year until it got a bit much for him. He’s not as young as he was.’

The mention of the Police Authority comes as a slap to the jaw. McAvoy takes a breath. Tries to do what he came for. ‘Yes, I’m aware of your husband and all the hard work and dedication he put in to campaign for the police service. As soon as we heard the sad news about Mr Stein, Assistant Chief Constable Everett asked me to come and speak to you personally. We’re in a position to be able to offer you the services of a highly qualified family liaison officer and-’

She stops him with a smile that makes her look suddenly pretty. Somehow vital and colourful. ‘There’s no need for that now.’ She frowns. ‘I’m sorry, what was your name?’

‘Detective Sergeant McAvoy.’

‘No, your real name.’

McAvoy screws up his face. ‘Aector,’ he says. ‘Hector, to the English. Not that there’s much difference in how you say it. It’s the spelling that matters.’

‘Heads will be rolling for this, won’t they?’ she asks suddenly, as if remembering why this man is standing, in stockinged feet, in her kitchen. ‘I mean, we didn’t want him to go, but he said they would take care of him. He must have been planning it from the moment they got in touch with him. I mean, we knew the tragedy had affected him, deep down, but it still came as a surprise. I didn’t expect them to find him, but …’

McAvoy frowns and, without thinking about it, pulls one of the chairs from under the table and sits down. He is suddenly intrigued by Mrs Stein-Collinson. By her brother, the dead rocker. By the lady from the TV and the Norwegian tanker that plucked the inflatable from the grey sea.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Stein-Collinson, but I’m only familiar with the vaguest of details about this case. Would you perhaps be able to clarify the nature of the tragedy that your brother was party to …’

Mrs Stein-Collinson lets out a sigh, refills her glass and comes across to the table, where she removes a pile of laundry from a chair and sits down opposite McAvoy.

‘If you’re not from around here, you won’t have heard of the Yarborough,’ she says softly. ‘It was the fourth trawler. The one that went down last. Three others went down in 1968. So many lives. So many good lads. The papers were full of it. Catching on to what we already knew. It was bleeding dangerous work.’

She picks a pen from a pile of paperwork and holds it like a cigarette. Her gaze settles on the middle distance, and McAvoy suddenly sees the East Hull girl in this middle-class lady of a certain age. Sees a youngster raised in a fishing family, brought up amid the smog of smokehouses and the stink of unwashed overalls. Barbara Stein. Babs to her mates. Married well and got herself a pad in the country. Never really settled. Never felt comfortable. Had to stay close enough to Hull to be able to phone her mam.

‘Please,’ he says softly, and there is suddenly no affectation or falsehood in his voice. He will tell himself later that it is presumptuous, but in this moment, he feels he knows her. ‘Carry on.’

‘By the time the Yarborough went down the papers had had a bellyful of it. We all had. It didn’t make the front page. Not until later. Eighteen men and boys, pulled down by ice and wind and tides seventy miles off Iceland.’ She shakes her head. Takes a drink. ‘But our Fred was the one who survived. Worst storm in a century and Fred walked out of it. Managed to get himself into a lifeboat and woke up in the back of beyond. Three days before we heard from him. So I suppose that’s why I’m not crying now, you see? I got him back. Sarah, his wife. She got him back. Papers tried their damnedest to get him to talk about it. He wouldn’t have a bit of it. Didn’t want to answer any questions. He’s only a couple of years older than me and we were always close, though we knocked lumps out of each other as bairns. It was me that took the phone call to say he was alive. The British consul in Iceland hadn’t been able to get Sarah so he called our house. I thought it were a joke at first. Then Fred came on the line. Said hello, clear as day, like he was just in the next room.’ Her face lights up as she speaks, as if she is reliving that moment. McAvoy notices her eyes dart to the telephone on the wall by the cooker.

‘I can’t even imagine it,’ he says. He is not serving her an idle platitude. He truly cannot imagine how it would feel to lose one that he loved, and then to have them restored.

‘So, we got him back. The hubbub died down soon after. Sarah asked him to give up the sea and he agreed. I don’t think he took much persuading. Took a job at the docks. Worked there for nigh-on thirty years. Retired with a bad chest. Every once in a while he’d get a phone call from a writer or a journalist asking him for his story, but he’d always say no. Then when Sarah died, I think he got a glimpse of his own mortality. They only had one daughter, and she upped and left when she was a teenager. He suddenly had itchy feet. I honestly think if somebody had been willing to take him on he’d have gone back to trawling, though there’s none of that these days.’

She begins to stand, but a pain in her knee makes her reconsider. McAvoy, without being asked, returns to the work-surface and grabs the wine bottle. He refills her glass, and she says thank you without a word passing between them.

‘Anyway, not so long back he rings me up, telling me this TV company’s been in touch with him. That they’re doing a documentary on the Black Winter. That he’s going out with them on this cargo ship to lay a wreath and say goodbye to his old mates. Of course it was completely out of the blue. I’d barely thought about all that in years, and I think to him it had just become a story. He said once he felt like it had happened to somebody else. But I suppose he must have kept it all inside. For him to go and do this.’ Her bottom lip trembles and she pulls a tissue from her sleeve.

‘Perhaps they were paying him for his story?’

‘Oh, I’d say that’s guaranteed,’ she says, suddenly smiling and giving the photo-wall a quick glance. ‘He always knew how to make money, our Fred. Knew how to spend it too, mind. That’s trawling for you, though. A month away grafting then three days home. A wodge in your pocket and a few hours to spend it. The three-day millionaires, they called them.’

‘So that was the last you heard?’

‘From him, yes. We got a phone call from the woman at the TV company three days ago. We must have been listed as his emergency contacts. Said he’d disappeared. That one of the lifeboats was missing and that Fred had got himself a bit upset talking about it all. That they were looking for him. That she’d keep us informed. That was the end of it. All seems bloody silly to me. After all those years. To end up dead in the sea, just like his mates.’ She stops and looks at him, her blue eyes suddenly intense and probing. ‘It sounds awful, Hector, but why didn’t he just take pills? Why do all this song and dance? Do you think he felt guilty? Wanted to go like his mates from ’sixty-eight? That’s what the telly lady seemed to be hinting at, but it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing he’d do. He’d do it quiet. No fuss. He liked to tell a story and spin a yarn and charm a lady, but he wouldn’t even talk to the papers when all this happened, so why would he want a dramatic bloody exit now?’

‘Perhaps that’s why he agreed to be filmed? Because they would be passing the area where the trawler went down?’

She breathes out, and the sigh seems to come from deep within her. It is as though she is deflating. ‘Perhaps,’ she says, and drains her drink.

‘I’m terribly sorry, Mrs Stein-Collinson.’

She nods. Smiles. ‘Barbara.’

He extends a hand, which she takes with a cold, soft palm.

‘So what happens next?’ she asks. ‘Like I said, I don’t think he’s been taken care of particularly well. He’s an old man, and they let him wander off and do this! I’ve got plenty of questions …’

McAvoy finds himself nodding. He has questions of his own. There is something scratching weakly at the inside of his skull. He wants to know more. Wants it to make sense. Wants to be able to tell this nice lady why her brother died, forty years after he should have done, in the exact way that nearly claimed him as a young man.

He knows he shouldn’t promise that he will stay in touch. That he will find out what happened. Knows he shouldn’t give her his home phone number and tell her to call if she has any more information. Any questions. Just to talk.

But he does.