A Bad Death: A DS McAvoy Short Story Read online

  The DS Aector McAvoy Novels

  Dark Winter

  Original Skin

  Sorrow Bound

  Taking Pity

  Dead Pretty

  A Bad Death:

  A DS Aector McAvoy Short Story

  David Mark

  www.mulholland.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Mulholland Books

  An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  1

  Copyright © David Mark 2015

  Extract from Dead Pretty © David Mark 2015

  Illustration on p.5 © artEAST 2015

  The right of David Mark to be identified as the Author of the

  Work has been asserted by him in accordance with

  the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

  means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be

  otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that

  in which it is published and without a similar condition being

  imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

  to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  eBook ISBN 978 1 473 61976 0

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Contents

  The Witches Alphabet

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Epilogue

  Dead Pretty

  Mulholland advert

  Every man is guilty of the good he did not do.

  Voltaire

  Prologue

  Four years ago . . .

  The storm pulls the plastic garrotte tight around the trunk of the half-dead sycamore. It is a noose of blue and white police tape which has already eaten through the rotten bark and into the living flesh of the tree; throttling this throat of pale wood.

  Owen forces himself to look away before he imagines himself guilty. Hides his face with his hand before he sees himself squeezing the life out of her squashy fat neck with his trousers around his ankles and her trainers leaving footprints on his skin.

  This is where they say he did those things.

  This is where she said that he hurt her.

  This is where the bitch lied.

  He checks his watch, wiping rain from its face and from his own, and looks up. Damp leaves and rotten branches form a ragged canopy above this patch of woodland where the ground is too rocky for the trees to grow. Beyond, the sky is all ripped tissue and hard slate.

  He looks down.

  Amid the mulch of timber and twigs, there is evidence that this place has seen violence. Polythene evidence bags. The page of a notebook, littered with crossings-out. The prints of size-ten shoes, forming fish-shaped hollows in the mud. They took pictures. Maybe one of the men and women in white suits asked why they couldn’t find anything. More likely they didn’t care.

  Beyond the clearing, the tall trees are bending like bones under stress. The tangle of intertwined branches is doing nothing to halt the sheets of rain that scythe down like the blade of a guillotine.

  The Humber Bridge Country Park.

  Five miles from Hull, East Yorkshire.

  Through the trees comes a charcoal figure: skinny and small, as if made of twists of tarred knotted rope. He’s hunched up inside a dirty, camel-coloured raincoat and the thin cigar at his lips is unlit. He sucks on it anyway, turning the stub into a mulch of tobacco, brown paper and spit.

  ‘Fucking hell, Owen,’ shouts Tony, as his feet slurp at the path. ‘This is bloody horrible. Where you planning for the summer? Self-catering in Helmand?’

  Owen feels as though he is seeing him for the first time.

  Tony has never been attractive. He’s a rat in a raincoat; all bad skin and yellow teeth. His whole being seems to have taken on the hue of a chain-smoker’s fingers. Owen’s dad would have said he looked jaundiced. Would probably have given him some herbal remedy to fix it.

  Here, now, Owen sees the truth of his former friend. Tony is more than ugly. He has a feral quality to him. His movements are those of a half-mad animal, a thing raised on violence and nourished on scraps of rotten meat.

  Do it now, he thinks. Grab him. Smash your fist into his nasty little face. Make it make sense.

  He feels the comforting pressure of the gun inside his jacket. He’s never fired one before. Hopes that he will not blink when he has to pull the trigger, that it doesn’t kick the way the Albanian man warned him when he made the purchase in the little pink pub round the back of Hull Prison a year ago.

  Do it . . .

  Instead Owen smiles. Waves.

  Tony comes closer, unsure whether to stick out his hand. He settles on a smile and a gesture at the heavens.

  ‘Lovely day for it,’ he says.

  ‘You alone?’ asks Owen.

  ‘Who the hell else would be out on a day like today?’

  Owen nods and feels the rain run down his face.

  Then he looks up. Into him. Through him. Through Tony H. The man who killed her. Who killed them all. He feels that if he just stares hard enough, he’ll see it playing out in the little man’s eyes. See his confession. His fantasies. His memories of what he did.

  Owen shivers in the cold.

  ‘We gonna get under a tree or something?’ Tony asks. ‘Got a few questions for you. Weird place to meet. I’d have chosen somewhere with fewer memories.’

  ‘I’ll bet,’ Owen says, and the effort of speech weakens him. He is reluctant even to let go of a breath. He doesn’t want the strength that has got him here to escape on to the breeze.

  ‘You’re not looking well,’ Tony adds. ‘You OK?’

  Owen blinks raindrops from his eyes and tries to remember what he was supposed to say.

  ‘You killed Ella Butterworth,’ he mutters, in a spray of mist. Then, more forcefully: ‘I know, Tone. I know what you’ve been doing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How many more?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Your old number. It was in her phone. Messages about watching her. Liking what she was wearing. You killed her.’ Owen pauses. Grinds his teeth. ‘How many more?’

  Tony’s face, so practised in deception, twists into a mask of confusion. He looks baffled. Hurt.

  ‘Was it because she wouldn’t go near you? She looked at you and saw a dirty ugly bastard and decided not to let you near her?’

  Owen feels his temper rise as he looks into the emotionless eyes of his fellow journalist. Unbidden, memories rise. He finds his mind filling with the photograph of the dead girl. Her father had given it to him in a hand wet with tears. Owen sees her smile. Sees the kindness in her eyes and the light upon her skin. She died in her wedding gown, stabbed forty-seven times through the stomach, chest and fac
e with a weapon that has never been recovered. Five miles from here, the degenerate who found her body and took it home is standing trial for her murder. But while the man in the dock is guilty of much, he did not kill her. Nor did he kill the five other girls, all butchered by a man who took as much pleasure in writing about their deaths as he did in hacking them down.

  ‘You were freelancing in every city where they died,’ says Owen, locking his teeth. ‘You couldn’t resist it. I’ve seen the aliases you used for the by-lines. I’ve seen the addresses where the cheques were sent. It was you, you fuck. That night, the night she died . . . you made me forget. You knew I’d drink the lot, you bastard. You knew I’d wake up next morning not knowing what my own bloody name was, let alone whether you slipped out in the night. She was beautiful, Tony. But you couldn’t just look, could you. You had to have her. And when she said no you started hating her, like so many others. You stalked her. You sent her anonymous messages from a phone that only a few people know you own. And you hunted her down. You never thought I’d put the pieces together. But I know. That copper showed me her mobile phone history. He doesn’t believe Cadbury killed her any more than I do. I recognised the number, you prick!’

  Owen feels his hands becoming fists. Forces himself to breathe.

  ‘She’d done nothing,’ he says, and pushes his long hair back from his face. It exposes the ugly red wound, held together with tape, that he suffered just hours ago on the floor of the custody suite at Queen’s Gardens Police Station. He feels a sudden urge to lift up his shirt and show Tony the other bruises that he suffered at the hands and feet of the young detective constable who really wanted to show his boss what he could do.

  Owen stares into Tony’s eyes. Sees himself, staring back, and the swaying trees and the warring branches and the tumbling, tumbling rain.

  ‘Owen, wait . . .’

  ‘You dirty, dirty bastard.’

  ‘Easy now . . .’

  ‘You didn’t deserve to touch her. To breathe the same air. For you to be the last thing she saw . . .’

  And Tony unleashes himself. Drops of red explode like dying stars in his eyes, as blood vessels burst with the enormity of his fury.

  He barrels towards Owen and takes him in the middle with a strength that he does not look as though he possesses. Tony’s body is a pestilent, fragile thing; all tissue and twigs. But there is a venom inside him that makes him strong and he takes down the bigger, younger man in one angry jerk. The breath escapes from Owen’s lungs in a rush. His hands fly up and the gun lands wetly on the sodden path as they thump on to the ground, Owen’s head smacking back with a dizzying thud.

  Tony is astride him, forearm beneath his chin, pushing down on his windpipe, staring into him.

  Then deeper.

  A more terrible aspect to his face than anything Owen’s mind has ever conjured.

  Spitting poison, spraying rage.

  ‘You’re right, you soft cunt! I didn’t deserve to touch her. Didn’t deserve to touch any of them. Not like you. Not like a handsome bastard who doesn’t know what he’s got. Not worth fucking trying because I can already see it in their eyes. That knowledge that they’re better than me. They think it’s a game. Winding me up. Getting me going. Slagging around in their short skirts with their tits out, begging the world to look at them. Well, I looked. I fell for it, time and again. And then I ended it. It became something more important than a fuck. Whatever happens, the most important thing anybody will remember about these pretty girls is the way they died. And every time their deaths are spoken of, they’ll be talking about me. Nobody else can ever have that. Nobody!’

  Spit froths from Tony’s purplish, blubbery lips and lands among the raindrops on Owen’s face as hands tighten around his throat and squeeze the breath from his body and the thoughts from his mind. Thunder roars in his skull.

  His vision dwindles to a point, like an old TV being switched off; everything spiralling down into one tiny blob of colour.

  Desperately, he reaches around on the forest floor, fingers scrabbling for a branch. For something solid.

  Tony slams his spare hand down on his forehead.

  Again.

  Again.

  Owen feels as though his own tongue is halfway down his throat, as though his eyes are going to explode. He tries to get an arm free but there’s nothing to hit. Tony’s all bony elbows and sharp fists, wet clothes and loose skin. It’s like fighting a long-dead corpse.

  There is a solid meaty thump, and then the pressure is gone; the figure on Owen’s chest disappears in a blur and slithers on to the wet ground.

  Owen is on his knees, retching, massaging his throat. Through blurred, watery eyes, he makes out Tony pulling himself to his feet. He’s reaching inside his dirty, sodden coat.

  Pulling out the murder weapon.

  It’s a kukri: a curved blade used by the Gurkhas of the Nepalese armed forces. Pictures of it have been appearing in the Hull Mail for months. Tony wrote most of the articles.

  Owen squints at the weapon. Sees Ella Butterworth’s blood on the blade.

  He hears a sound behind him.

  The policeman is sprawled out like a toppled statue, trying to find his feet on the sloping, slippery surface, a look of panic on his broad face . . .

  McAvoy.

  For a second, Tony seems unsure in which direction to advance, whether to finish off the copper who pulled him from his prey, or gut his best friend before he can get his breath.

  McAvoy finds his feet and hauls himself up, emerging from the puddles and the dirt and the leaves. He’s big enough to snap Tony in two. Seems almost big enough to pull one of the oaks from the ground and smash it on the murderer’s ratty head.

  ‘Stop,’ he shouts.

  He’s holding the gun in a massive white fist. The barrel shakes and trembles. There is absolute terror in his eyes.

  Owen looks at the young policeman, with his red hair and his cheap suit and the look of earnest willingness in his eyes. He doesn’t belong here in the blood and filth where people like Tony wade.

  As he looks at him, Owen knows, to his very bones, that it is not in McAvoy’s nature to pull the trigger.

  Tony laughs. Gives Owen a glance and a wink, as if they’re still old pals in the press room making fun of the new boy. Then he runs at McAvoy.

  He slashes down with the kukri. McAvoy raises his hands in a boxer’s stance and the blade hits the metal of the gun. It falls from his hand. He steps back and loses his footing as Tony hacks at him. The blade digs into his collarbone like an axe into firewood. Tony has to yank it hard to get it free. McAvoy is on his back, a look of broken-hearted bewilderment upon his big, trusting face. Tony chops down again.

  McAvoy jerks like a dying fish as the rainbow of thick blood arcs upwards and patters on to the earth.

  Tony turns back to Owen, his face crimson, eyes wide and terrible.

  He picks up the gun.

  He points it at Owen’s chest. Gives a shrug that could almost be apology. Pulls the trigger.

  The bullet thuds into the tree trunk and Tony yells as he totters off balance. McAvoy’s shove in the back of the knees has cost him his shot.

  Owen’s eyes follow the gun as it pinwheels through the rain and bounces off a branch to nestle on a pillow of sycamore leaves. He takes half a dozen desperate, frantic paces, and dives for it. He swivels and focuses, eyes on the man who has taken everything from him.

  The last time Owen pulled a trigger he was a child and the weapon was a shotgun. He killed a wood pigeon and the guilt never left him.

  He does not have the capacity to take a life. But he knows how to save one.

  He pulls the trigger.

  Tony’s mouth opens as his eyes turn black and for a moment he has the look of a shark, crashing upwards through sea and spray to close his jaws around something fragile. Then his knees give way.

  He collapses amid the mulch of the clearing, a dark stain spreading outwards from the ruination beneath his belly,
as he clutches himself and hisses on the forest floor. Blood seeps through his fingers from the ragged, hanging wound between his legs.

  Gasping for breath, Owen crawls to where McAvoy kneels, one hand pressed to the gash at his collarbone. His face is a mess: more meat than skin.

  ‘Is he dead?’ McAvoy asks, and the effort seems to lighten his skin tone by several shades. He is the colour of dirty chalk.

  ‘No,’ says Owen, his throat raw. ‘But he’s going to need a needle and thread to fiddle with himself in prison.’

  ‘You didn’t kill him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘I’m not a killer.’

  McAvoy’s breathing begins to sound unnatural. He blinks, furiously, as the rain hits his staring eyes. Owen wonders what the big man can see, here in this place between life and death.

  ‘Roisin,’ he says, and the word becomes a sob. ‘I wanted it to work . . .’

  ‘You’ll be OK,’ says Owen, and wishes he meant it. ‘Where’s your phone? Your radio?’

  McAvoy says nothing, and Owen has to scrabble through his pockets. He finds the phone in the inside pocket of his jacket. Pulls it out with fingers dripping blood. He dials 999. Looks down at the dying policeman and wonders whether Doug Roper will give a damn.

  They sit in the rain, wind tearing at their skins, their wounds, listening to Tony’s sobs and curses.

  Owen holds up McAvoy’s phone. The picture on the screensaver is a beautiful, dark-haired girl with hooped earrings and too much lip gloss. If he knew her name he would call her.

  He presses his hand on the ugly trench of ruptured skin on McAvoy’s front. Feels splintered bone. For a second he is troubled by a selfish, disloyal question: what will happen to him? Only McAvoy believed him. Only McAvoy promised to help clear his name if he helped catch a killer in return. But McAvoy is dying. And Doug Roper wants Owen in the ground.