Fire of Lies Page 3

  ‘Paul left the Lambwath just before ten p.m.,’ continues Pharaoh. ‘We’ve seen the CCTV. He’d been his usual self, sounding off and bigging himself up to anybody who would listen and plenty more who wouldn’t. Well, according to the landlady at the Trawl, he never arrived. He wasn’t missed because he wasn’t exactly the sort of person you looked forward to seeing. It was a normal night, so she says. Few drinks after they closed and the regulars toddled off home. When Paul didn’t come to work the next day there was no fuss. It was a week before anybody even remarked on him being missing but even then nobody went to check. The only person who was concerned was an online friend who’d noticed that Paul had stopped posting pictures on this mountain bike Facebook group they were both members of. Paul knew his stuff about bikes, apparently. Anyway, the guy went and knocked on his door. No answer. Place was deserted. After a while, he called the police. Eventually, CID got in touch with his family up in Bridlington. They’d heard nothing. His bike was fished out of the river not far from Myton Bridge – under a quarter of a mile from the Trawl. But everybody in the pub was adamant he hadn’t been in.’

  ‘Could he have fallen off his bike?’ asks Fin, thoughtfully. Then he slaps his head. ‘Not unless he fell into the barrel.’

  Pharaoh smiles at him. He looks ashamed of himself; appalled at the stupidity of his suggestion. If McAvoy could see his face, it would be like looking in a mirror.

  ‘There was talk of suicide,’ says Pharaoh, reaching down to pick up her handbag. She finds her electronic cigarette and sucks so deeply on it that her eyes seem to cross for a moment. ‘He had no real pleasures,’ she says, through a cloud of vapour. ‘Wouldn’t be the first person to get pissed and jump in the river.’

  ‘Or fall,’ says McAvoy.

  Pharaoh nods. ‘Aye, that was a theory. But then we found him in a barrel. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but my money is on him not being a willing participant in the last moments of his life.’

  The silence in the room is broken only by the sound of Pharaoh’s daughters tapping at their touchscreens.

  ‘Forensics,’ says McAvoy. ‘Tell Fin about the forensic discoveries.’

  Pharaoh puts her sunglasses back on and takes a breath. ‘Well, by the time our science officers got him to the lab it would be fair to say there wasn’t much useful stuff left. He wasn’t much more than mince in a pair of trousers. He’d completely putrefied in the barrel. Cause of death was almost impossible to ascertain but, thankfully, the private team we use are pretty bloody good. Inside what was left of the cranial cavity there were shotgun pellets. They’ve gone off to a team of experts that the experts use when they’re not sufficiently expert, who cost a fortune. All we know so far is that the angle of the shot suggests he had his head against a firm surface and that it was “possibly” fired using a left-handed stance. We’re clinging to that like it’s an oil drum in the ocean. We don’t know if there was water in his lungs because most of his lungs blew up all over the nude couple.’

  On the sofa, Lilah lets out a laugh. She has taken the action figure from Pharaoh and is playing with it, saying ‘boom’ and miming an explosion.

  ‘Lilah, have some respect,’ says Roisin. ‘That’s your brother’s toy.’

  ‘That’s all?’ asks Fin, disappointed. He has begun watching a lot of true crime documentaries and remains constantly nonplussed by the twentieth-century technology available to his father and his colleagues.

  ‘It’s gone to another team of specialists,’ says Pharaoh, in the tone of voice she uses when asked difficult questions by her bosses. ‘They’ll be looking for more samples. Plant fibres . . .’

  ‘So who might have hurt him?’ asks Roisin. ‘You said he talked a lot?’

  McAvoy coughs a little, and puts his hands up to Lilah. She comes and joins him on the floor, pressing her head against his beard.

  ‘Over the past two weeks we’ve got statements from every regular who drinks in each of those pubs,’ says McAvoy. ‘We’ve cross-referenced them with the HOLMES system and come up with a rogue’s gallery of petty criminals and violent individuals. We’ve heard whispers about arguments he may have had and spoken to the people involved. Every avenue ends up in the same place. He was, in the words of the fine people of Hull, “a bullshit artist”. He told tall stories. People got sick of him and told him to be on his way. He’d been banned from a load of pubs. He was full of vinegar and had a temper and loved telling people about his dad’s old knife and what he’d do to people who wronged him. It was a sad life,’ says McAvoy, and his eyes grow dark as he considers this. ‘Really, he was lonely. Didn’t know how to talk to people. He probably just needed a friend.’

  ‘Maybe,’ says Pharaoh, shrugging. ‘Maybe he was a wanker. That’s what they called him, you know. Wankerpaul.’

  McAvoy shakes his head and she mouths an apology. He tries to minimise the bad language. At the boarding school he attended, anybody heard swearing was forced to eat a bar of soap by the housemaster. He still cannot hear cursing without flinching at memories of that taste of Coal Tar Soap.

  ‘What about at the last pub?’ asks Roisin. ‘The one they say he never arrived at. Any bad sorts?’

  Pharaoh holds up a Barbie doll. ‘Shania Oxley,’ she says. ‘Thirty-three years old. Mother of one. Landlady there since 2013. Got a community service order in 2009 when she attacked her then partner with a screwdriver at the photocopying shop where he worked. Court heard she had been under a lot of stress. Clean as a whistle since then but quite a character. She’s now shacked up with this gentleman . . .’ She holds up a figure of Disney’s Aladdin . . . ‘Matthew James, aged twenty-eight, served two years a while back for witness intimidation when one of his friends was up on a manslaughter charge. Big guy. Looks like a wrestler, now I think about it. Spends most of his money on a souped-up Subaru.’

  Fin has started writing in his sketchpad. He nods to tell Auntie Trish he’s keeping pace. Behind him, McAvoy smiles. He’s thinking about Shania – all ample curves and flirty smiles and twitchy, suspicious eyes. She talked with him for more than an hour. They discussed her life – ex-boyfriends, broken dreams; the strange twists of fate that led her to a job counting pork scratchings behind a stained bar-top in Stoneferry. She didn’t tell him anything useful but he saw a good soul beneath the layers of defensiveness. She even managed to make him blush. His eyes had strayed to the cheap tattoo of a rose on her left breast – a handful of poorly executed lines and shades that seemed to have been put there to cover a sharp white scar.

  Pharaoh holds up a Spider-Man and a Minotaur. ‘Of the other regulars who might have still been in after half ten on a weeknight, everybody has an alibi except these two,’ she says, looking at the toys accusingly. ‘Alan Mee, aged fifty-one. Works as a gardener for the city council. Told our DC he left the pub about eleven thirty without ever having seen Paul. Said he went straight home, but the CCTV at his apartment block doesn’t show that at all. When reinterviewed he said he got it wrong and had stayed with his buddy, Gordon Tiernan, the other regular. Forty-odd, father of twelve, listed his occupation as unicorn-rider when questioned. He found the whole thing funny. Didn’t like Paul, thought he was a prick and wouldn’t weep to know he was dead, but never saw him and certainly never killed him.’

  ‘You believe him?’ asks Fin.

  ‘That doesn’t really matter,’ says Pharaoh. ‘The pub cooperated. Forensics spent two whole days in there. Yes, there was blood. Yes, we found DNA belonging to Paul Rouse. But as they said, he was a regular. He cut himself when helping Shania change a barrel one night. Very circumstantial.’

  ‘And the welds on the barrel?’ asks Roisin.

  ‘Pretty well done, if not professional,’ says McAvoy, enjoying the fact that her mind throws up the same questions he’s asked along the way. ‘Somebody who knows the basics at least. A good amateur mechanic, perhaps.’

  Roisin sucks her teeth. ‘The child,’ she says. ‘You said “mother of one”.’

  ‘As
leep upstairs,’ says Pharaoh. ‘Jay, if you’re interested. Nine years old. Seems to be going off the rails a bit at school from what we could see on Mum’s Facebook page. Gone from a good pupil to a terror. Plenty of screams and exclamation marks and questions about why she bothers.’

  ‘Nine isn’t usually the tearaway time,’ muses Roisin. ‘Not in my experience anyway. Though if he saw something or heard something and is too frightened to say anything then maybe that’d explain it. He might be the weak point for his mother – especially if she’s living with somebody who could’ve done it, and knows how to work a blowtorch.’

  Pharaoh growls and turns to McAvoy. Then she reaches into her handbag and pulls out a £20 note. ‘I know you won’t accept this so I’m going to give it to a charity of my choosing,’ she says, prissily.

  ‘What’s this?’ asks Roisin, lightly, cocking her head.

  ‘A little bet,’ sighs Pharaoh. ‘Your darling man said that you would come to the same conclusion as we had before five p.m. I said it would be six.’

  Roisin enjoys the admiration and then deflates a little.

  ‘You’re into her Facebook? What else did you see?’

  McAvoy starts picking at the carpet, shifting his weight. He has scars across his back that sometimes pain him without warning, and he keeps his face locked in an inscrutable expression as he talks so as not to cause anybody any concern.

  ‘Ben Neilsen and I have been through all the pictures and profiles of the Facebook users who have “liked” the Trawl’s page. We found about a dozen pictures taken inside at club nights and quiz nights and nights when there’s been some kind of act on. The men Pharaoh mentioned – they’re in the background in every picture. We’ve identified most of the others too.’

  ‘Right . . .’

  McAvoy pulls his phone from his pocket and calls up a file of JPEGs. He hands it to Fin, who passes it to his mother like an usher in a courtroom.

  ‘You can see Shania in that one,’ says Pharaoh, without looking up. ‘Her boy is sat at the bar doing his homework. That’s his dog at his feet – not a mountain lion, in case you were wondering.’

  ‘Cute lad. So, what am I looking at?’

  ‘The men behind him.’

  In his mind, McAvoy can clearly picture the image his wife is staring at. He’d allowed himself a grin when he discovered it late on Friday afternoon, hunched over his keyboard at the SOU offices on Clough Road, having worked his way through so many Facebook pages he was confident he’d never need to see another picture of a cute cat or an inspirational slogan ever again. The image was in an album belonging to Alan Mee’s daughter and taken in October the year before. It was a poor photograph. Mee was barely in shot at one side of the frame and the blurry picture had also captured half of an old man, sitting alone and holding a pen over a copy of the Racing Post. In the centre were two men, standing at the bar, three feet from the boy.

  McAvoy had recognised them at once but got confirmation from three officers in regular CID. They were Ronnie Bond and Dave Albert and eighteen months previously they had been the main suspects in a series of Post Office raids across East and South Yorkshire. The raids were loud and brutal and the weapon waved in the faces of the terrified cashiers was a sawn-off shotgun. Humberside CID did some good work building a case against them but found no trace of the stolen money or the weapon at their properties. They wore balaclavas during the raids so there were no witnesses. Still, CID matched fibres from Dave Albert’s car to a wound left in the cheekbone of a sixty-two-year-old sub-postmistress who had taken too long to empty the till. One of the men had stamped on her face and fractured the orbit of her eye-socket. CID brought them in for questioning twice and they treated the whole thing like the lark they clearly thought it was. Before they could be charged, Dave Albert came off the Clive Sullivan Way flyover at 73 mph. He and his Peugeot 306 were equally mangled in the impact and he died four hours later at Hull Royal Infirmary. After his death, the CPS took the view that Ronnie Bond would never be convicted when he could blame everything on his fallen comrade and enquiries were wound up. Bond has kept his head down ever since, but nobody mentioned him as a regular at the Trawl. To Pharaoh, that was significant.

  ‘He’s massive,’ says Roisin. ‘Muscles like yours, Aector.’

  ‘Bigger, I’d say.’ Pharaoh grins, poking her tongue out at her sergeant.

  ‘So this is your suspect?’

  ‘He drinks there. He’s a nasty bastard. He’s scary enough to ensure nobody mentioned his name during the initial investigation and he clearly knows where to get his hands on a shotgun.’

  Roisin nods. ‘Yes. So, what’s next? I mean, what are you going to do?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Pharaoh smiles, and keeps her eyes fixed on Roisin’s. ‘That’s rather where I thought you’d come in . . .’

  Chapter Four

  It’s a little after nine p.m. and inside the smallest room in the Trawl, Alan Mee is trying to get a laugh out of the ragged collection of drinkers assembled around the L-shaped bar. It’s a dim space, lit only by the two unbroken bulbs in a dusty, plastic chandelier that bleed out a weak illumination that bounces off the bottled spirits and the smeared glass behind the bar. Only the creamy-white head on Mattie’s pint of Guinness identifies where he’s deposited his drink. From where Shania sits, she can see the direction of her partner’s eyes and she can tell he isn’t really listening to Alan as he holds court and picks on a friend who has a reputation for being tight with his money.

  ‘. . . he saw a fly in his pint and pulled it out,’ says Alan, waving his bottle of Beck’s. ‘Next thing he’s holding it back over the glass and shouting “spit it out, you thieving bastard”.’

  Shania gives him a smile. She’s heard it before. Heard them all before. Every day is a copy of the last: a chain of interconnected experiences holding hands in her memory like so many paper dolls. She holds the smile long enough to please Alan. He’s a tall, bony man with short grey hair and thin spectacles. He’s been drinking in here since long before she took over. He and Gordo go back years. They were the ones who first brought Mattie and his mates into her life. One day the bar had been full of all different kinds of drinkers: workmen, lorry drivers, staff from the nearby DIY stores and tile shops. The next it had a reputation. Cliquey, that’s what people said. Intimidating. A load of hard-cases getting pissed and telling dirty jokes. That comment was left on TripAdvisor by a local man daft enough to leave his name. Shania insisted the lads send flowers to the hospital when she learned what they had done to him.

  ‘Cheer up, love,’ says Alan. ‘You look like you’ve got a drop of tea in your mouth and you’re trying to keep it warm.’

  Shania forces herself to chuckle. She has to seem like she’s OK. The whole damn thing will fall apart if they think she’s on the verge of collapsing. They’re held together by secrets; bound by lies. She tries to put on a little bit of sparkle but it dies before it can reach her eyes. She’s cold and clammy. She wishes she’d put a cardigan on but knows that if she had, she would be flapping the front of it and the sweat on her forehead would dye her hair at the temples.

  ‘You like that, Mattie?’ asks Alan, grinning.

  ‘Heard it,’ says Mattie, rolling his eyes.

  ‘Have you? I just got that one last night. Text from Gordo. Must have been taking a break from hanging out his tea bags on the washing line.’

  Shania looks at the scene in front of her. For an instant she feels curiously displaced, as if she has moved from the stage into the audience. She suddenly sees her life as it must seem to others. Herself, pink and round and miserable, polishing glasses behind the sticky and scarred wooden bar. Her boyfriend, in his white vest and his grey jogging trousers, playing some pointless but colourful game on his phone. The old boy at his usual table, reading his paper. Barely says a word save for ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, which in Shania’s mind at least makes him a proper gentleman. He was here before the lads took over the bar and he has never seemed the leas
t bit disturbed by their activities or conversation. He does his own thing. Turns up at lunchtime every day during the week and late afternoon on a weekend. Never has more than three pints. The lads have tried to get him to open up but other than offering a dissenting opinion when Alan got his facts wrong about the sequence of FA Cup winners, he rarely gets involved in the usual pub banter. Just sits at his table and reads his paper, does his crossword, writes in his journal and drinks his drink. Probably seventy, if Shania had to guess his age. Ruddy face and yellowy-white hair that puts her in mind of margarine. Blotchy blue tattoos on the back of his right hand and a loose, flabby body beneath his navy-blue suit and stripy woollen jumper. She used to wish she had more customers like him. She would not waste wishes like that now.

  ‘Ronnie’s doing all right,’ says Mattie, looking up from his game. In the corner of the bar, squashed up against the fruit machine, Ronnie is talking to a tarty-looking young woman who has been sinking vodka and coke since before Shania came down from the flat to start her shift. Shania has taken an instant dislike to her. She’s only a little thing but her black top is stretched tight over firm, perfect breasts and she has the kind of backside that rappers never shut up about. Beneath the mascara she has stunning blue eyes and her dark hair is expensively cut. No shortage of jewellery at her throat and wrists. Shania had her pegged as a traveller the second she clocked her, leaning on the bar and staring dreamily at big Ronnie, laughing at his jokes and telling him how good his biceps look in his tight white England shirt.

  ‘Should be ashamed of himself,’ says Shania, loud enough to earn a hard glare from Mattie.

  ‘Gordo will be sad he missed her,’ says Alan, pursing his lips in appreciation of the girl’s assets. ‘She might be able to understand a word he fucking says.’