Dead Pretty: The 5th DS McAvoy Novel (DS Aector McAvoy) Read online

  They sit in silence for a while, only rousing themselves when Lilah wakes and uses Daddy’s leg to right herself and starts bumbling off down the slope to where her brother is running towards them, holding a branch as long as himself. From this distance, he’s a kilted Highlander, charging through the heather and the thistles with a claymore in his hand: a miniature of his father.

  McAvoy is about to stand up and charge towards the boy, pretending to be an English invader dead set on having his innards sliced open by the noble Scotsman’s blade. He knows Fin will like that. Wishes only that the boy wasn’t spoiling the overall effect by wearing a Ross County football shirt and a pair of Bermuda shorts.

  ‘Your phone,’ says Roisin, nodding at his pocket as she hears it ring. ‘The work one.’

  He answers with his name, rank and unit, briefly recalling the days when a call from work would set his heart racing with excitement. Here, now, he simply knows that something bad has happened and it is about to interrupt his day.

  He nods into the phone. His eyes darken. The colour seems to leach from his skin. He looks up at the sky, at the blue overhead, and the grey to the east.

  He takes his keys from his pocket and starts walking up the hill to the car.

  Towards Hull.

  And an appointment with another dead girl.

  Chapter 2

  The two men sit in the front seat of the unremarkable Ford Focus and stare at the convertible parked in the drive at the far end of this quiet, nondescript cul-de-sac on the outskirts of Grimsby.

  Inside the sports car, a teenage girl and a curvy middle-aged woman are screaming at one another. The younger one looks like she is ready to do bloody violence. The older one looks tired. Like she’s been through a washing machine at too high a temperature. Wrung out, and sad.

  Inside the Ford, the two men do not speak. They have exhausted their conversational resources and have learned to feel comfortable in one another’s silence. They could be father and son.

  The older man smiles as the teenager and the old tart go at it like dogs fighting over a chicken leg. He hopes there will be hair-pulling. Perhaps a top ripped open and an exposed breast. They’ve had little to entertain them since they pulled up. They listened to the radio for a while but could only get local stations. They don’t give a damn about what’s happening locally. They’re a good way from home. Couldn’t care less if the whole east coast fell into the sea.

  The teenage girl is getting out of the car now. Her face is flushed and there are tears on her cheeks. She looks like she slept in her clothes and her hair is a mess, but both men have fucked worse. They’ve fucked younger, too. This one’s maybe fifteen. A good deal older than the Eastern European girls that their boss keeps in the back room at his casino and whom they get to enjoy when they are being kept waiting and have read all the magazines in the foyer.

  ‘Nice to see,’ says the one called Teddy, as he sips from a bottle of Lucozade. ‘You’d have thought a copper’s kid would be less highly strung. Gives me hope. No better than the rest of us when you strip it all away.’

  He passes the Lucozade across to the man called Foley, who shakes his head without taking his eyes off the scene before him. In his lap sits a wooden figurine. It’s carved from cherry wood and exquisitely beautiful. It is no more than the height of a chess piece but breathtaking in its detail. He picks it up and compares it with the older woman from the convertible. The similarity is obvious, though the figurine shows a sultriness that the reality does not currently live up to. The figurine is also unclothed, while the old strumpet in the sports car looks like she got dressed in the dark. Foley holds it up for closer examination and rubs the pendulous breasts. He’s pleased he took the box. He hadn’t been able to resist. It had been left on the doorstep by a good-looking man with designer stubble and a flat cap. There was no note. No name. Foley had wanted it. Foley had taken it. And now it belongs to Foley.

  ‘Copper kids are probably more fucked up than the rest of us,’ he says, moodily. ‘Can’t be easy, knowing what the people in authority are like when they’re at home. Must be terrifying. You grow up watching your mam or your dad fall over putting their socks on or reading a map the wrong way or picking up the ketchup by the top and spilling it all over the floor. You get to see them as a person – y’know, a real, crap specimen, like the rest of us. How are you supposed to believe they turn into a superhero when they leave the house? Must give you a few issues. Must make you almost want to rebel to see how they respond.’

  Teddy considers his companion. He’s a skinny thing but there are muscles on him like a condom full of billiard balls. He’s maybe thirty. Younger than Teddy by a good twenty years but the pair have grown close since they were introduced to one another in the recreation room of Wormwood Scrubs and saw something in each other that they admired. Their relationship was a physical one, on the inside. Pragmatic, if not exactly tender. Since they’ve been out they have not spoken of what they did for comfort in the confines of the cell they shared. What happens in the Scrubs stays in the Scrubs. And besides, they have fucked enough girls between them, and together, to know in their hearts they aren’t gay.

  ‘You’re a philosopher,’ says Teddy, warmly. ‘Good head on your shoulders, when you’re not being a moaning little twat.’

  Foley shrugs. He’s a moody soul. He muttered and grumbled about the heat in the car all through the drive up from London but has yet to remove his padded coat, hooded jumper or the jeans with elasticated ankles that he has forced into a pair of boots.

  Teddy does not dress to impress. He doesn’t give a damn about style, or looking like a gangster. In his experience, it’s best to blend in. Teddy does this very well. He’s a bulky man, but with his receding hairline, double chin and unremarkable clothes, he rarely attracts attention. He’s wearing a pale shirt with market jeans and a pair of service-station sunglasses. He urged Foley to do the same, but the younger man had been convinced that the weather up north would be intolerable, and dressed for an Arctic winter.

  ‘Take the picture,’ says Foley, as the front door of the house slams and the older one with the dark hair starts punching the steering wheel. ‘Let him know we’re here.’

  ‘Will do,’ says Teddy, and snaps a couple of images with his mobile phone. He checks his messages. ‘Nothing new. We’re still to hang on until we hear more.’

  Foley shakes his head, pissed off and bored. ‘Can’t we just do it now? We’re here. She’s just sitting there. And that lass had a decent rack on her. So does the mum. A scare, he said. Why wait?’

  Teddy shrugs. He’s seen it all before. Has more patience than his young companion. Knows he’s on to a good thing. He puts ‘debt collector’ down on forms when he’s forced to explain his occupation. It’s a title that covers a multitude of sins.

  ‘He’s going to call her himself,’ says Teddy. ‘Explain things, and then we’ll see. She’s an important woman. Near enough to being the boss of CID. This has to be done right. Finesse, my young friend – that’s what we need here.’

  Foley broods. Teddy knows he doesn’t like finesse. He likes hitting people over the head with a golf club and stamping on their faces until he can see the pavement through their eye sockets. But he’s getting paid well to employ restraint.

  Foley lifts the Lucozade and takes a swig. Belches loudly. In response to Teddy’s pained look, he opens his window a crack.

  ‘You done a copper before?’ Foley asks, staring at a wasp crawling up the windscreen. He leans over and flicks on the wipers, cursing as the wasp flies away before it can be pulped.

  ‘Years ago,’ says Teddy, nostalgically. ‘Undercover he was. Can’t remember which prison it was in. May have been Durham. He was trying to get some pervert to open up to him and tell him where he’d left this kid’s body. Me and a lad called Fleetwood didn’t know he was a copper. We bunged the guards a fifty to let us have half an hour with one of the nonces. This poor bastard was the one who drew the short straw. He fought like a
fucking tiger. Didn’t help him though. Not in the end.’

  Foley nods appreciatively. Scratches at his groin, then slips his hand inside his jogging pants.

  ‘He get the other nonce to confess?’

  ‘Dunno, son,’ says Teddy. ‘He never came back from the hospital wing. I think he got a disability pension. Couldn’t be a copper after that. Say what you will about coppers, but one thing they all need is teeth.’

  Foley considers this. He nods at the woman getting out of the convertible and leers at her ample backside – enjoying the spectacle even more as she seems to change her mind and artfully lowers herself back inside.

  ‘This poor bitch had better start looking for a new career, then.’

  Teddy smiles affectionately at his partner. Looks at his phone and lets the anticipation build.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he says. ‘Oh yes indeed.’

  Fat bitch, fat bitch, fat bitch . . .

  It had almost been lost, under the slam of the door and the tinny sound of shit music bleeding from her headphones, but there had been no mistaking the mumbled insult as Sophia grabbed her bag (condoms, cigarettes, tampons, a bra and the perfectly sensible knickers she’d been wearing when she left) and stomped towards the front door of the unremarkable semi-detached house on the Scartho estate in Grimsby.

  Detective Superintendent Trish Pharaoh sits for a moment in the driver’s seat of her sports car. Feels hot tears pricking at her eyes. She can’t decide whether she wants to run after her eldest daughter and slap her until she’s purple, or go and gorge herself on medicinal red wine and Maltesers.

  Pharaoh sniffs. Sucks at her cheeks for a moment. Flips down the rear-view mirror and winces.

  Fat bitch, fat bitch, fat bitch . . .

  She’s forty-six. Dark-haired and curvy. 5 foot 4 inches when she takes her biker boots off. The darkness under her eyes looks like bruising and there is a fine spray of burst capillaries across her cheeks. She’s tried to tie her hair back but wispy strands have escaped from the ponytail and are curling up like tiny snakes around a forehead that looks like it has been grooved using a pizza-cutter. There is red in the cracks in her lips. Her eyebrows need plucking. She smells of tobacco and roll-on deodorant, of the clothes she slept in and which she has no intention of taking off today.

  Pharaoh hates her reflection so intensely that she’s tempted to rip the mirror off and smash it. She resists. Can’t afford to have it repaired.

  Slowly, she steps out of the vehicle and into the warm spring evening. There’s a twinge in the back of her left leg and the base of her spine. She turns to look at the car as she closes the door and sees herself staring back in the darkened glass. Sees the full effect. She wishes she’d put a bra on, that she were wearing something slimming, instead of the jogging pants and man’s shirt that she woke up in. Wishes she’d brushed her teeth or eaten a mint before she turned up at the big house near the airport and grabbed her eldest daughter by the hair. Trish could have played the thing a little more deftly. Could have been the cool mum she used to be, giving her little girl a wink as she waited for her to pack her things and disentangle herself from the sleeping bags and beer cans and pizza boxes. Could have told her she’d known all along that she wasn’t staying at her friend’s house and had in fact gone to a party with older boys. But she didn’t. She went in all guns blazing, stinking of last night’s booze, demanding to know if any of the slumbering lads had put their hands on her child. She might even have flashed her warrant card. She made damn sure she stepped on the bare thigh of some tattooed halfwit who dared to look up from the floor and tell her to chill. More than anything, she could have waited until she got into the car before screaming at Sophia that she was a dirty little scrubber who was going to be Aids tested as soon as the surgery opened in the morning.

  Pharaoh closes her eyes. Shakes her head and wonders just how much her daughter hates her right now. She isn’t even cross any more. She did worse when she was young. As she considers this she wonders if, in fact, it is true. Was she a bad girl? She was a big sister herself. Spent her teenage years making packed lunches and cooking teas and walking her younger siblings to and from school. She did her homework, most of the time, and always cleaned up if she threw up in her bedroom. She had been entitled to the odd grope behind the Spar in Mexborough, hadn’t she? Did that make her a tart? She didn’t think so at the time; isn’t sure now. She’s been told she dresses like a whore but she’s been called most names at one time or another and has never been one to give much of a shit. But Sophia? What the hell is she rebelling against? Is she still a virgin? Oh God, please let her still be a virgin.

  Pharaoh remembers her own first time. Andy, he was called. Curly hair and breath that smelled of smoky bacon crisps. He pawed at the fastenings of her bra as if he were wearing oven-gloves. He’d done her from behind in an abandoned council house three streets from the police station where she would one day work. Didn’t even take his trainers off. It hadn’t lasted long but he’d said she was good at it. Told his friends too, and they told everybody else. She didn’t mind too much. It was nice to have a talent, and anybody who used the word ‘slag’ within earshot quickly discovered that she was even better with her fists than she was at moving her hips. She never gave it away cheaply. Soon learned that having a large chest and pretty eyes and a vaguely exotic look were damn good assets when coupled with a brain as sharp as piano wire. And reputation didn’t really matter. She’d never had to lie to her parents because there was nobody to tell her off for the truth. Her mum was too busy trying to keep a roof over their heads. Her granddad seemed to go straight from bright-as-a-button to full-on demented the moment he took early retirement. Life was bloody hard. She’d been bright enough to go to whichever university she chose, but Pharaoh turned down the offers. Hadn’t had the money or the inclination. She became a copper, like her granddad, who spent twenty-three years as a community policeman in the days when an ASBO came in the form of a clip around the ear or a good hiding behind the bins. Police Constable Patricia Pharaoh; good in the sack and hard as nails. That seemed enough, once. It hasn’t been in a long time.

  Pharaoh tries to put a grin on her face. Spots the gap in her smile and feels her stomach heave. Christ, she forgot to put her tooth in. She’s been screaming at teenagers with her hair wild and a hole in her smile. Fuck! She left it in the glass of water by her bed. The permanent implant simply won’t stay in. She’s okay with the falsie but does have a tendency to click it with her tongue when she’s thinking. The three younger kids think it’s kind of cool. They can tell their friends that their top-cop mum had her tooth knocked out by a gangster in a gunfight at Flamborough Head. They’re proud of their mum, even now. They like that their male friends go coy around her and won’t trust themselves to wear jogging pants if she’s wearing a top that offers a view of her cleavage. She needs her girls right now. Needs the people who matter to tell her that she’s ace, and pretty, and not the incompetent tart that the newspapers are labelling her as, as they revel in Humberside Police’s biggest fuck-up for years.

  Not so long ago, Pharaoh was their blue-eyed girl. Her department’s clean-up rate was being lauded at Association of Chief Police Officers get-togethers and the techniques they used to bring down a criminal gang were being exhibited as examples of best practice to other police forces. The Grimsby Telegraph even ran a profile on her and she was approached by a documentary team keen on profiling strong women in male-orientated environments. Pharaoh told them to piss off. She had no desire to be a poster girl for feminism. She’s never seen herself as that kind of woman, never seen herself as much more than a copper really. She’s experienced misogyny, but she’s never met a sexist bastard who couldn’t be made to change their opinions when you have one hand on their bollocks and the other around their throat. Pharaoh got where she is by catching villains. Got her team to respect her by scaring the pants off some and putting her motherly arms around others. One of the newspapers said that if she were the England footba
ll manager, the country would have a couple more World Cups under its belt and Gazza would never have turned to drink. She liked that. Didn’t agree, but liked it nevertheless.

  Pharaoh flattens her hair down. Tries to act like everything’s okay. It is, really. She still has her job. The shitstorm will blow over eventually. The Chief Constable is defending her in public, even if she’s in no doubt that he’s calling her a silly cow behind her back. She’s still in charge of the Serious and Organised team and has managed to get rid of the two bad apples who threatened to scupper the unit before it got off the ground. Shaz Archer is head of the Drugs Squad now. And Detective Chief Inspector Colin Ray is probably drinking himself to death under a bridge. It’s months since he last sent Shaz a postcard from his beach house in Turkey, containing badly spelt instructions that she pass on his best regards to half a dozen of the good old boys, and to tell Pharaoh and McAvoy to go fuck themselves. Her unit is doing its job well. She can’t beat organised crime but since the apparent demise of the Headhunters organisation and its boss, she has at least managed to contain it. She can’t think of the crime outfit without wrinkling her nose. They were utterly merciless; a group of professionals who moved in on existing crime families and demanded payment in exchange for access to their skills. They left bodies everywhere. Turned her stomach with their creativity. But Pharaoh and her team brought them down. There have been no nailgun attacks in nearly two years and the drugs trade seems to be back in the hands of morons and muscle. Does the Reuben Hollow case matter? Is it worth getting in a state over? She needs to drink less. Smoke less. To start taking care of herself and her girls . . .

  There is a shout from inside the house and the thud of a slamming door. Pharaoh realises that Sophia has taken her frustrations out on one of her younger sisters. Olivia, probably. Her youngest is a tenacious little sod who isn’t remotely scared of her big sister’s hormones and temper tantrums. They spend half their lives pulling one another’s hair out while the middle two eat crisps and drink pop and place bets on the outcome. She knows she should go in and break it up. Wonders if the riot squad owe her any favours.