Cold bones, p.14
Cold Bones, page 14
part #8 of DS Aector McAvoy Series
‘The phone numbers,’ he says, scrolling through the digital document. ‘A landline, I’m sure. I know that name.’
‘You were right about the place having been cleaned out,’ continues Parekh. ‘There are lines in the carpet under the bookshelf dug a good couple of inches into the carpet. The unit isn’t that heavy. So the bookshelf is used to holding more books. There’s no bin liner in the bin. No rubbish in any of the wheelie bins. There’s a kitchen composter out the back for peelings and eggshells and such. You can tell it’s been raked through. I’m not here to speculate, that’s not particularly scientific, but somebody’s been through here looking for something.’
McAvoy tugs the hair beneath his lip. ‘Tyre tracks?’
Parekh pauses. ‘We may have struck lucky there. Expensive. Very particular. We’ll cross-ref those with the DVLA databases and see what we whittle down.’
McAvoy rubs at his forehead, trying to physically push his thoughts into some kind of order.
‘You were right about the rocking chair,’ says Parekh admiringly. ‘It’s been moved from another room. You can see where the casters dug into the carpet. She’d have struggled to carry it. Would have struggled to do very much, if I’m honest. She was frail. Bathroom cabinet is full of medicine. Heart condition, arthritis, fibromyalgia. She was taking a small dosage of Exelon too.’
‘Alzheimer’s,’ says McAvoy.
‘Mild dementia,’ says Parekh, clicking her tongue around the word. ‘Sophie’s chasing up medical records.’
‘By the bed,’ says McAvoy, a thought occurring. ‘The jam jar full of fag-butts.’
‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ says Parekh. ‘Better probably. Maybe she’d been a smoker and used it to keep reminding herself how bloody vile cigarettes are. I had an uncle did something similar. Although that was more to do with earwax and nail-biting. Long story.’
McAvoy frowns. ‘Madeleines,’ he says, under his breath, as a thought bubbles up. ‘Scent memories. A whole story, hidden in your olfactory bulb.’
‘You’ve lost me,’ says Parekh, in a way that suggests she’s not used to the experience and doesn’t really like it.
‘Proust’s “madeleine moment”,’ he explains, taking care not to sound like a smart-arse. ‘The scent of a single madeleine dipped in tea . . . it’s the start of the book. It evokes this whole memory, places him back in another time, lurches him back to childhood. The whole novel takes place from that point.’ He sags. ‘People use scent to trigger memories. I read about it – how people keep little boxes of specific smells that help to anchor them in a specific time. Enid was a clever person. Perhaps it was something she was trying.’
‘Oh. Well, right,’ says Parekh, in a way that suggests she has filed this piece of information away in a drawer marked ‘irrelevant’. ‘Maybe park that one for later, eh?’
As McAvoy begins to politely say he will catch up with her later, she politely shushes him and tells him to hang on. He stays quiet, listening as Parekh has a muffled conversation with one of her team. She’s gone more than a minute but when she comes back on the line there is a whisper of heightened enthusiasm to her voice.
‘There’s something under the nail of her index finger on her right hand. Keep your eye on your screen, it’s coming across.’
McAvoy does as instructed. Opens the images as they ping through. He frowns, trying to make it out. Stuck between the pale skin of Enid Chappell’s wrinkled fingertip and the pale pastel of the nail, is a fragment of dark fabric, an iridescent sheen to its surface that reminds McAvoy of a bird’s throat, or a puddle of spilled petrol. He opens up the accompanying video clip, capturing the way the fragment shimmers when the light changes.
‘Tell me what I’m looking at,’ says McAvoy.
‘Fish skin,’ says Parekh simply. ‘Treated and tanned by the looks of things. We’ll run it through the system, find out what it’s from. Don’t know if it will help unless you secretly suspect you’re looking for a mermaid but it’s intriguing, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I feel like my head’s caving in,’ mutters McAvoy, and Roisin gives him a pitying look.
‘Sorry,’ says Parekh. ‘Did you get anywhere with that shorthand, by the way?’
McAvoy scratches his beard, realising that it had been on his list of things to do. ‘I’ll see what sense I can make of it,’ he says sheepishly. ‘Anything in the hen-house?’
‘I never thought I would say this but we’re dusting the frozen chickens for prints. The necks were pulled, that’s clear.’
‘And the mess? The feathers and blood?’
‘Somebody pulled too hard,’ says Parekh. ‘Or hard enough, if a bloodbath was what they were after.’
‘So there would have been blood traces on the perpetrator . . .’
‘Yep. Your mermaid will definitely have some chicken blood on them. I’ll be back in touch when I have more,’ says Parekh. ‘I do like the way you say “perpetrator”. And I must say, it’s never dull in this part of the world.’
McAvoy ends the call. Looks at Roisin, curled up at the edge of the sofa. ‘Going or staying?’ she asks. ‘I want to know if it’s worth being horny.’
He grins back at her, reaching out and taking her hand in his. ‘I’ll brief the team first thing. It’s an early start.’
‘So that means an early night.’ Roisin smiles. She lets him pull her to her feet. Leaps up, nimbly, and wraps her legs around his middle.
Chapter 14
Skagastrond, Skagi Peninsula, Iceland
8.16 p.m.
Pharaoh pulls on her walking boots, grimacing as her bare feet touch the cold, wet fur inside. She only brought two pairs of socks and they both got soaked in the walk to the hire car. They’re busy stiffening over the radiator. She fancies she will need to employ a meat mallet to get them back on. She takes her padded coat from the hook and grabs her hat from the top of the pile of boots that cover the dirty floor. She feels the temperature drop as she closes the inner door behind her and steps out into the entranceway. The snow she kicked off earlier hasn’t melted yet. The sleeves of her coat are still stiff with frost. She takes the keys from the hook on the wall and uses both hands to yank the front door free from the frame. The cold crashes upon her like a wave. She tries to turn her back to the wind, looks up through the hazy gloom at the great flat-topped mountain that offers this horseshoe bay what little shelter it enjoys.
Christ, she thinks. Are the people who live here just taking the piss? She makes a mental note to ask the question of the witness she’s meeting in an hour. She hopes it will get them off on the right foot.
She screws up her face as she picks her way down the steps, taking care to step into the boot prints that she stomped into the soft snow when she arrived. The gale pushes her in several directions at once and for a moment she feels as if she were playing some Victorian parlour game – blindfolded and spun by unseen hands. It is all she can do to keep her feet.
‘This is fucking ridiculous,’ splutters Pharaoh, eyes wide, half laughing, as she wrenches at the door of the little red hatchback. Ice has formed on the windscreen and around the door frame and it takes a feat of strength to tug it open. She stumbles inside, slamming the door closed behind her. The silence is overwhelming – as if a switch has been flicked. She pulls at the stupid hat, her hair static and wild. She turns on the wipers and winces as they scrape painfully over the icy glass. She’s amazed that they even made it this far. She’d hired the Suzuki Swift because it was the cheapest model available but she came to regret the economy during the 170-mile journey from Keflavik Airport. At times it seemed the gale was trying to pick up the little car and hurl it into the mountainside.
Pharaoh takes a breath. There is none of the new-car smell that she had enjoyed for the first hour of the journey. The vehicle now smells of stale coffee and cigarettes, sugar-rich food and her own wet clothes. She turns the key in the ignition. Musty air screams from the blowers, turned up full. She feels out of sorts, struggling to remember whether it’s breakfast-time or midnight. She had passed through something approaching daylight for a couple of hours earlier today but that brief spell of hazy illumination seemed like an aberration. When the darkness returned it felt like a restoration of the correct order of things, as though daylight were a charlatan, an impostor not to be trusted.
‘I’m sorry about earlier,’ says Pharaoh, through gritted teeth, as the satnav erupts into colourful life. ‘Let’s not mention it again, eh?’
Pharaoh takes the gadget’s silence for assent. It was her only company on the long drive and there were several disagreements. There is only one main road in Iceland and it follows the perimeter of the island. Pharaoh had simply pointed the car north and followed everybody else, passing through the European sophistication of Reykjavik inside an hour and on into a landscape that felt like the dark side of the moon. She had convinced herself that the satnav was being pessimistic in its prediction of her arrival time. Had told it so, in no uncertain terms. The phrase ‘cynical twat’ had been widely employed. Sitting in its black plastic cradle on the windscreen, it manages to exude an air of smugness.
The tyres make a dreadful crunching sound as Pharaoh eases the vehicle forward. The mist on the windscreen is clearing in places but the rain is still coming down hard and she has to curse and squint her way onto the road. It takes her another ten minutes to get herself pointed in the right direction. Even in broad daylight on a sunny day she would struggle to tell the houses apart. In the pitch darkness, buffeted by rain and savaged by the gale, it is only through luck and perseverance that she eventually spots the blurry outline of the elegant white church and realises she has made it to what passes for the centre of Skagastrond.
The lights are still on at the petrol station. It’s a cheerful little rectangle of colour against the blackness of the sea and skies. Along with the little supermarket across the road, the petrol station serves as the town’s principal pub, restaurant and community centre. She pulls herself out of the car, slams the door and runs through slush and puddles and hard snow into the bright warmth. She gives a mad grin and a gloved thumbs-up to the woman behind the counter. She’s a dumpy, half-melted sort; a body made of spheres beneath several strata of madly patterned woolly jumpers; a face that looks like a sock full of socks. Behind her are glossy photographs of the fast food on offer. Pharaoh unzips her coat. It had been an impulse buy in TK Maxx: all synthetic fur and puffy ridges, like a collage made from pieces of sleeping bag. It would have been ideal for a winter spent in Grimsby. In Iceland, it may as well be made of paper.
The woman behind the counter stands still, face inscrutable. Pharaoh approaches the counter.
‘You still serving?’
‘You are English?’ asks the woman. ‘How you like Iceland?’
Pharaoh nods, smiling. She’s been asked the question a dozen times already. She likes the way that every resident takes their duties as host seriously. Every Icelander she has met is very keen for her to like the place.
‘Not sure about the weather,’ says Pharaoh. ‘I don’t think I’ll go home with a suntan.’
The woman smiles back. ‘Some days are better than others. Don’t plan anything, that’s the best advice. Hope, but never expect.’
‘Quite a dispiriting motto,’ muses Pharaoh.
‘Concentrate on the “hope”,’ says the woman, shrugging.
Pharaoh looks up at the menu. ‘That price. The decimal point is correct, yes?’
The woman gives a tight grin. Pharaoh ambles along to the edge of the counter, dispiritedly searching for a familiar chocolate bar among the jumble of colours and consonants on the racks. She selects something in a golden wrapper and places it on the counter. She looks around, angling her neck. There must be some bottles somewhere . . .
‘Round the corner, by the refrigerator,’ says the woman helpfully. ‘Alcohol, yes?’
Pharaoh gives her a look, one eye closed, head cocked. Back home, the gesture would have been accompanied by the sound of chairs scraping and the sudden rush of footsteps. A thought occurs to her and she turns back to the woman. She leans on the counter, her manner chummy as a gameshow host. ‘A mate of mine said you did some local speciality here. He said I should try some spirit of yours. Can’t remember the name.’
The cashier closes an eye, as if looking through a telescope. ‘Your friend was here a week ago? New Year? We drink everything at New Year. What was it like, the drink?’
‘You might remember him,’ says Pharaoh, keeping it light. She knows the case file almost off by heart. ‘Sixties. Bald. Little goatee beard. Probably not dressed properly, silly bugger.’
The lady’s manner changes. Her eyes flick towards the door.
‘I might have a picture,’ continues Pharaoh.
‘Was he English?’ asks the lady quietly. ‘English like you?’ Her manner softens. She leans forward, voice low. ‘A man died here. Up the coast road . . .’ She stops herself, shivering. ‘He fell from the cliffs, they think. One of our customers found him. She tried to save him but he was too cold. He had been in the water too long.’
‘Bloody hell,’ says Pharaoh, looking shocked. ‘That’s awful. But no, it couldn’t be.’
‘No.’ The lady smiles, nodding, cautiously at first then more enthusiastically. ‘No, no, we get many customers. It will be somebody else’s sadness, I’m sure. Too many people still die – they don’t listen. I see tourists playing on rocks as the water comes in behind them. They climb down cliffs and into holes or slip on rocks looking for the perfect waterfall or hot spring. We had an American man who scalded himself to death in hot mud because he didn’t listen. It’s an easy place to hurt yourself – an easy place to disappear.’
‘So I’m told,’ says Pharaoh. ‘I’ve been doing some reading on the area as it happens. Grim history. Lots of blood. Trolls and witches and magical chests full of gold.’
‘We are a strange people,’ says the lady proudly. ‘Even those who go to church still blame the pixies for their misfortune and many of us still fear the anger of trolls. Not all admit it, of course. We try and be . . . what’s the word? Cosmopolitan? But when your child is dying, or your house is ablaze, or your livestock fall sick, that’s when you discover what you believe in – not when you’re sharing cocktails and talking to your rich friends on the harbourside in Reykjavik.’
Pharaoh finds herself warming to her new acquaintance. She threads her way between the tables and the counter. There is a small grocery section at the far end of the shop: packets of thickly sliced meat and plastic-wrapped joints; a spinning rack of postcards showing the same half-dozen images – Icelandic horses, abandoned farmhouses, the lighthouse at Kalfhamarsvik. In a cubby-hole almost out of sight of the door she finds a shelf full of lagers, spirits and wine. She selects a Merlot and a bottle of vodka with a picture of an Icelandic pony on it. Pharaoh hopes she hasn’t picked up some form of equine liniment by mistake. Wonders whether she will still drink it if she has.
There are three tables by the big front window, plastic chairs bolted to the floor. At the nearest, a healthy-looking couple are sharing olives from a pot and splitting a bottle of dry white. At the next, a red-faced, bald-headed man in overalls and a camouflage jacket is pouring strong lager into a coffee cup and reading a book with a picture of a raven on the cover.
Pharaoh selects a large packet of crisps from the rack by the till, settles up and takes her purchases to the table at the far end of the room. She drops her snacks and her bottles on the table. She pours a measure of vodka into a coffee cup and knocks it back. Feels the delicious burn and the golden warmth spreading through her. She pours red wine into the empty cup and opens her crisps. Shoves in a fistful and takes a long swallow of Merlot.
She fiddles with her phone as she eats. There’s a good Wi-Fi signal here and there are plenty of messages waiting. No shortage of emails to wade through on her Humberside Police account. Briefing notes, budget queries, holiday entitlements, maternity cover . . . she saves all the correspondence about actual investigations until last, treating them like a dessert to look forward to after the dutiful blandness of the main course.
An hour later, she rises to use the bathroom. She splashes cold water on her face and tries to ignore her reflection. When she comes back she begs a notepad and pen from the woman behind the counter, who gives her name as ‘Lilja’ when Pharaoh finally introduces herself as ‘Trish’. She loses herself in paperwork. Jots down dates. Ages. Numbers. Eventually she purchases a new phone cable from the rack by the till and plugs it straight into the wall. Her phone grows warm in her hand. It vibrates several times while she reads. Calls from home. From work. The kids. None from McAvoy.
Eventually, Pharaoh becomes aware of a change in the tone of the air. She looks up. The handsome couple and the camouflaged man have disappeared without goodbyes. Three people now sit together at the table by the door. A man with a black beard and short white hair faces Pharaoh; a vision in huge spectacles and multi-coloured hemp. Across the table his two companions are angled to face each other. Both women. The younger of the two is dressed more conservatively – Canadian Goose puffer jacket thrown over the back of her chair to reveal a sensible woollen jumper and multicoloured neckerchief. Her companion is around Pharaoh’s own age but she has the look of a punk who has never given up hope of revolution. Her hair is shaved on both sides to reveal intricate tattoos on her scalp; black and purple dreadlocks are piled atop her crown. She has the footprints of a bird tattooed on her cheekbones and studs puncture her ears, eyebrows, nose and lips. She’s dressed in an orange jumpsuit under a black leather jacket and as she sips from a can of lager, Pharaoh feels like a geeky kid standing next to the coolest girl in school. She gives her a nod. A moment later, the stylish punk is standing at her side, smiling nervously, holding out a tattooed left hand, her lager still in her right.
‘Hello. I’m Tamsin. I presume you’re Trish?’
Pharaoh takes the hand. She feels the hard silver of her rings, the coarse skin of her knuckles. She glances at the hand, the slim wrist; both patterned with the same mesmerising ink: runes and Nordic prose interweaving to form feathers upon her flesh so that it seems her skin ripples as it catches the light. Her fingers are corseted with silver jewellery – a Tree of Life bookended by reflecting skulls and a wolf-head, mouth open.
