Sorrow Bound (34 page)

She bursts out laughing and McAvoy finds himself smiling out of politeness. He wants to put a hand on hers and make her tell him the bit that matters most, but there is something so brittle about the mask she wears that he fancies any contact would break her.

‘The last transcript,’ he says, as kindly as he can. ‘It was missing from the bundle you sent me.’

Maria nods. She looks serious for a moment. ‘I couldn’t send that. I wanted to. I wanted you to understand about Sebastien. I wanted to help you. But I couldn’t just send that to a stranger. That was where our lives changed. It would be like posting somebody a broken heart …’

McAvoy stays silent. Just looks at her and hopes she’ll choose to help him.

‘He wasn’t crippled by the end,’ she says, quietly. ‘Sebastien.’

‘I’m sorry?’ says McAvoy, as he feels his heart begin to race.

‘When he was first arrested and they nearly killed him and those interfering bastards saved his life. He was hurt. He was crippled. But you have to remember, he was a medical man. A physiotherapist. He knew just what to do and how much to show the people who were looking after him. He was months ahead of where he should have been, but we didn’t know that until he stood up and put a knife to Dad’s throat.’

McAvoy closes his eyes.

‘That last session,’ says Maria, into the cloth of the sofa. ‘The alarm went off over in the main hospital while Sebastien was still at our house in Dad’s office. We don’t know if Sebastien set
it up or just took advantage of the situation. Either way, Angelo and Mum and me were in the living room watching TV when the door of Dad’s office burst open and Sebastien came out with a knife to Dad’s throat. We screamed. We didn’t know what to do. He was
the cripple
. He couldn’t walk. Couldn’t talk in much other than grunts and dribble. And now he had a knife to Dad’s throat and was standing in our living room.’

McAvoy rubs his hand across his forehead, pushing the sweat back into his hair.

‘What happened?’

‘You know what happened.’

There is no gentle way to ask the question, but McAvoy still manages to drop his voice to a whisper. ‘He raped your mother, didn’t he?’

Maria gives a little snort.

‘He’d have liked to take his turn with all of us. The way he looked at us …’

She stops and looks away.

‘He’d have fucked Dad if it wasn’t that he seemed to get so much pleasure from ripping his heart out.’

There is silence in the room. McAvoy tries not to picture the scene she has placed in his head but the image is too vivid, the colours and shapes in his mind too intense. He sees it all too clearly.

‘Jesus,’ he breathes.

‘He knew how to play us all,’ says Maria, softly. ‘Knew we wouldn’t move. He made us sit there. Made his wife and children watch as he held a knife to Dad’s throat. He just laughed in Dad’s face. He’d have started doing star-jumps if he thought it would have helped him make his point. Dad just seemed to deflate. It
was like we saw something leave his body. He just seemed to crumble, there in front of us, when he realised he had been played all along. We just sat there crying as he told Dad everything. The names. The places. All his victims. And Dad, open-mouthed and wet-eyed and pitiful, losing all faith in himself and knowing, in his soul, just what he had exposed his family to.’

McAvoy says nothing. Just listens to his own breathing.

‘It was the fire that ended it,’ says Maria, pulling at the flesh below her chin and staring up at the ceiling. ‘We smelled smoke. Saw flames. We heard people banging on the door. Sebastien reacted first. Dropped to the floor like he’d fallen from his wheelchair. And then there were people in the room and we were being evacuated to safety and Dad was telling us not to talk.’

‘Why didn’t he say anything?’

Maria looks at him kindly. ‘His reputation. The reputation of the hospital. He’d said Sebastien was ill. Said he could make him well. He would have been exposed as a fucking idiot.’

‘But after all these years …’ begins McAvoy, before a sudden flash of temper takes him. ‘I went to see him. Your father. He stuck to his story. Told me Sebastien had been ill …’

Maria rubs her cheeks. ‘He’s taught himself to believe what he wants to. We don’t talk about it. Nobody ever talked about it. Not even Mum, when she was dying. That’s probably why Angelo and me had to do our own digging. We were so angry. Our whole lives seemed so broken and it was all Hoyer-Wood’s fault. We dug up everything we could on him. Found Dad’s files. When we learned that he should have died that night in Bridlington it was like our hearts had been ripped out. What happened to us shouldn’t have happened. Sebastien should have died. He should never have entered our lives.’

‘But the people who saved him …’

Maria waves McAvoy’s protests away. ‘I know, they were innocent. When I heard about their deaths I was sad. This was never supposed to happen. It was just a fantasy. A way to make ourselves feel better.’

‘But Angelo made it real.’

Maria sucks the inside of her cheek, then slowly shakes her head. ‘Angelo was sent to a young offender institute. It was rough for him. Really rough. He was a posh boy. He suffered. Suffered torments you wouldn’t believe. We didn’t exactly lose contact, but when I went to see him it was so hard for both of us that the visits got less and less. When he was released I didn’t even know about it. Then he turned up on my doorstep. I barely recognised him. He was scarred and tattooed and looked like death. He had a baby with him, if you can believe that. He came in and we talked and he told me he was trying to sort his life out. Said the baby was his brother’s, then giggled. I think he was high again. We talked some more and I gave him some money and my phone number and he went away. I know you think he killed these people, but I remember him as a kid and he just wouldn’t have that in him. I sent you those transcripts so you’d know more about the man responsible for everything. Responsible for our lives …’

McAvoy is about to speak again when his mobile rings. He looks anguished, but pulls it from his pocket, and is pleased to see that it’s a call from Pharaoh rather than any bad news from home.

‘Guv? I’m with Maria Caneva–’

‘I know you are, Hector,’ she says, and she sounds snappy and tired. ‘You can tell her that her brother has just abducted the
surgeon who saved Sebastien Hoyer-Wood’s life. You can tell her he’s dropped off a rotting corpse at the fucking scene.’

McAvoy presses his teeth together until he can taste blood and he hears something pop in his ear.

Another one
.

He listens for a few more moments then hangs up, telling her he’ll be as quick as he can. Then he turns to Maria. She’s heard it all.

‘If you know where he is …’

She shakes her head.

‘Who he might be with …’

She shrugs.

He feels like crying.

‘Please …’

Impulsively, she reaches out her hand and takes his. She looks at the bruised knuckles. Up past his blood-speckled shirt to his red-rimmed eyes.

‘It can’t be Angelo,’ she says, though her voice quavers. It seems as though some part of her is waking up for the first time in years.

‘Please, Maria. Does he have friends? How did he leave when he left here? Was he in a car? And the baby? Whose was the baby?’

Maria stares at the bruises on McAvoy’s skin. Then she stands and crosses to the fireplace. She pulls one of the slates from the ugly construction and pulls out a scrap of paper. She hands it to him.

‘That’s where he was staying a year ago. Some mate. I never rang it.’

McAvoy turns the paper over in his hands. It’s a phone number with a Hull code.

He holds the paper up to the light.

Sees. Sees it all.

He’s up and out the door before he can say thank you. Before he can express his gratitude to the strange, broken girl, who took comfort in fantasising about the deaths of those who saved a rapist’s life.

The echo of the slamming door is still reverberating in the room when she reaches under the sofa and pulls out her phone. She punches a number.

‘Hi. Chamomile House? I was wondering whether …’

The path is thick mud and dead leaves, a tangle of stinging nettles and brambles. Thorns whip at Helen Tremberg’s bare legs as she slips and slithers over the uneven ground, red welts and white spots appearing on her exposed skin.

It’s just gone 7 a.m. and she is a little over a mile from her home. She’s changed the route of her morning run and is regretting it. The path is almost impassable. The mud thrown up by her running shoes is halfway up her back and her ankle is starting to throb. Changing the route was a bad decision. She took a wrong turn, somewhere. Made a mistake. It’s becoming a habit.

Helen focuses on her breathing and the music. Tries to inhale in time with the beat. Holds the oxygen in her lungs for two bars, then releases it.

‘…
and it feels just like
 …’

In Helen’s earphones, Annie Lennox is screeching about walking on broken glass. As Helen loses her footing once more, she considers offering the singer a straight swap. She’d happily take the broken glass over the weeds and horse shit of Caistor’s Canada Lane.

Helen used to walk up this overgrown bridleway with her grandad when she was a kid. They would pick elderberries in late summer. Pluck sloes from the hedgerows in early autumn. It’s an overgrown and boggy track where the treetops lean in to form a natural steeple at various points. The light is never the same two days in a row as the shifting branches and leaves flicker on the constant breeze. It leads up to the broad green pasture where Helen used to go sledging with her friends when the snows would fall and cut Caistor off from the rest of the world for a blissful few days each winter. It’s a place of happy memories and where the rich, earthy scents of the countryside combine to form a deep perfume that feels almost healing as she gulps it down.

But Helen did not fall asleep feeling proud of herself. She doubts she ever will again.

Her thoughts keep returning to the man on the end of the phone.

To Roisin.

To McAvoy.

They were her first thoughts as she woke She keeps telling herself not to be so silly. Tells herself that nobody would be fool enough to attack a policeman’s wife. Tells herself that Roisin knew what she was doing when she took that bloody money. Why the hell did she do it? She tries to harden her thoughts against her. But she cannot swallow her own lies. Cannot persuade herself there is anybody lower than herself.

As she runs, she finds her mind filling with pictures of McAvoy. She remembers their first meeting. Remembers that agonising walk from Queen’s Gardens to Hull Crown Court. It had rained the night before and the damp pavements were patterned with
the crushed shells of snails that had not got out of the way as the city’s commuters began their walks to work. McAvoy had kept stopping every five or six steps to pick up any snail he thought was in harm’s way. He filled his pockets with them then ran back to Queen’s Gardens to put them safely on the grass. Then he had run back to her, red-faced and embarrassed, while she had just stared up at him, open-mouthed, and wondered whether she should write the incident down in her notebook to be used as evidence should he ever go off the rails and shoot up a school.

The path begins to dip and the ground becomes more solid underfoot. Helen focuses on where she is placing her feet. Hears the music. Hears her own blood, pumping in her ears …

Two terriers run out from the driveway of the only house that stands on this stretch of the bridleway. It’s a large white property, with apple and pear trees standing invitingly in the centre of an overgrown garden. Helen stumbles as a Jack Russell jumps at her legs. The shaggy-looking Yorkshire terrier barks loud enough to drown out the music, and Helen feels a sudden stabbing pain in her chest as she swallows her own shout of surprise. She starts to cough, and kicks out at the nearest dog as they jump excitedly up at her.

‘Sorry, sorry, they think the whole path belongs to them …’

Helen whips off her headphones. A sixty-something woman with a healthy complexion and two too many teeth in the top row is crunching over the gravel. She’s smiling broadly, exposing so many incisors that her grin looks like it should be used by Druids as a place of worship. Helen recognises her from the pub. She tries to smile back, to say it’s okay, but can’t seem to remember how to do it. She just ends up waving both hands
around her face as though warding off a wasp, and then she gets flustered and pushes herself off from the gatepost at a sprint.

The dogs bark louder but are called to heel.

Over Annie Lennox’s voice, Helen fancies she can hear herself being referred to as a ‘stroppy cow’.

Helen staggers down the sloping path. She feels her ankle turn again as she slips on the old bricks that have been used to patch up the many gaps in the rubble and earth. She wants to be at home, suddenly. Wants to shower the dirt and the shame from her skin. Wants to slip into her plain work clothes and hide herself away behind a computer monitor. Wants to pretend. Wants to be somebody else, or perhaps a different version of herself. She’s no good at this. No use at introspection and analysis. No good at thinking about right and wrong …

The music in her ears switches unexpectedly. Her phone is ringing.

Helen slows and pulls the phone from the clip on her running shorts.

It’s from a withheld number.

Helen feels her hands tremble, as if she needs sugar or sleep. She feels a sudden desire to throw the phone into the nearby field. To change her number. To just keep running.

‘Helen Tremberg,’ she says, breathless and shaky, as she takes the call.

‘Good morning, Detective Constable. I trust you slept well?’

Helen closes her eyes. Leans both arms against the trunk of a tree and waits for her breathing to slow down.

‘You said you wouldn’t call …’

‘Indeed, indeed. And for that, may I express my sorrow and regret. You have been of considerable service to our organisation
and to further impose ourselves upon you is not something I undertake lightly. However, I do believe that the information I am about to impart to you is of considerable importance.’