Taking Pity

Book 4: Detective Sergeant McAvoy

by David Mark

Genres: Police Procedurals; Crime Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

DS AECTOR MCAVOY BOOK FOUR: TAKING PITY TAKES READERS FURTHER ONTO THE RICHARD & JUDY FEATURING, SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AND KINDLE CHART-TOPPING STREETS OF HULL.

DS Aector McAvoy's family is in hiding. He has lost his way.

His boss Trish Pharaoh gives him a distraction in the form of an old case. The Winn family was killed forty years ago: were the police right about who pulled the trigger?

But McAvoy's enemies – the ruthless criminal organisation known as the Headhunters – are pitiless. They plan to take everything from those that stand in their way.

And his cold case is strangely linked with the fire that's about to rain down on Hull...

When McAvoy confronts the worst of killers and sinners, not everyone will escape unscathed.

Hooked on Hull? Then check out the fifth instalment in the DS McAvoy series, Dead Pretty...

(P)2015 WF Howes Ltd

Release date: July 7, 2015

Publisher: Blue Rider Press

Print pages: 336

Sample

PROLOGUE

MARCH 29, 1966

John Glass tips his head back, as though draining ale. Gulps down some of the late-evening sky. Sees faces form and shift in the storm clouds: unfolding like crumpled, dirty lace and drawing a veil over a full, yellow moon.

“You still don’t belong, John . . .”

Though not quite drunk, he is edging toward a maudlin, philosophical state of intoxication. These wide-open spaces still trouble him. He is a city man in city clothes, masquerading as a part of this place. He feels like a wrong note. He is a discordant presence; an intruder. This is a landscape of greens and browns, of straw and earth. He is a speck of blue. Fancies himself as a bluebottle, buzzing ineffectually against dirty glass . . .

He feels his starched collar rub at the back of his neck.

“Sober up, John. Sort yourself out.”

He scratches at the sore patch at the top of his spine with cold, clumsy knuckles and takes the top off a scab. Grunting, he raises his fingers to his face and catches the whisper of his own blood. He doesn’t like it. Drops his hands and adjusts his clothing. Winces as he feels the white material of his shirt absorb the tiny crimson droplet.

He breathes deep.

Shivers unexpectedly as he drinks down the night air with its tang of pulverized crops and churned earth.

“Another beautiful night . . .”

He lets the weather do its work.

Feels the soft kisses of falling snow. Feels a harsh wind chewing at his exposed face and hands. Feels the pleasant haze of alcohol give way to the cold grumble of sobriety.

He gives a little shake. Centers himself. Swallows a burp of beer and pickled egg.

Stares up into a sky the color of dying flowers.

Turns back to the car, trying to warm his hands on the shit-streaked bonnet without actually touching the metal.

“End of the bloody world,” he says into his chest, leaning on the open door of the vehicle and gesturing with a sweep of his arm. “Furthest you can go without getting wet.”

The driver of the vehicle leans across: his big, round face all benevolence and bewilderment.

“You say something, John?”

Police Constable John Glass screws his eyes up again. Hopes that when he opens them, he’ll be somewhere else.

“Just thanking my lucky stars, Davey. Just enjoying the view.”

Glass reaches back into the vehicle and picks up the torch from the passenger seat. As he does so he leans on his tie, the knot suddenly bunching around his Adam’s apple and bringing a chill wave of nausea up from his gut.

“Should have stayed in the pub,” he says, though he has said it several times already.

He feels a smoker’s tickle in his lungs and gives in to a fit of coughing, punctuating the outburst with curses. Takes a deep breath. Tries to cleanse his nasal passages by sticking a finger into each nostril and inhaling. Fills with the smell of Woodbines and salted peanuts.

“My own fault for enjoying myself . . .”

It took the pair of them only a couple of minutes to drive here from the alehouse, but it had been long enough for him to absorb a whole cloud of heavy agricultural smells, and for most of Davey’s sheepdog to attach itself to his navy blue trousers. Despite that, it took an effort of will to get out of the vehicle. It had seemed warm and harmless in there. Had felt like a pocket of metal certainty in this vast, flat sea of crops and earth. He looks at the open gate. At the darkness beyond. PC Glass scratches at his short hair. He rubs his fingers at his temples, dislodging his cap with the big, blunt end of the black torch. The hat slides halfway down his face and he has to make a grab for it before it falls into the thick mud. Makes a mental note to take his shoes off before he drags it through the house when he gets home.

He fastens his tie.

Buttons his collar.

Pulls a packet of chewy toffees from the deep pocket of his long blue coat.

Switches on the torch and sweeps it downward to illuminate the patch of mud that is sucking at his shiny black shoes.

He points the torch back toward the car. Notes that the silly bastard has squashed a little patch of flowering snowdrops under the back tire. Makes a note to tell Davey off when he gets back, then decides he probably won’t bother. The lad’s done him a good turn. He would have hated to have cycled down here. Not at this hour. Not in these conditions. Not to this place, beneath a sky heavy with darkness and snow.

“Move it, lad,” he tells himself. “Get the job done.”

PC Glass is thirty-one years old and a decent enough copper. He’s done an adequate job looking after this patch of rural East Yorkshire. The locals tolerate him. He knows the villains. He’s taken only a couple of punches since he left his native North East, and they were thrown while in drink. He is a person first and a policeman second. He accepts people for what they are. Their vices tend to mirror his own. He likes a few pints after work. Likes a grope of a pretty girl and knows that if he gets a slap he has gone too far. Likes avoiding the taxman now and then on the odd box of imported cigarettes and brandy. He does what he’s paid to do. He stops trouble. He keeps the peace. He enforces the law, if it’s helpful. And he sometimes leaves a pint of bitter on the bar so he can go and attend a report of gunplay at a half-abandoned church in the middle of bloody nowhere.

“Bloody spooky, lad. Watch yer arse.”

Glass is muttering to himself as he approaches the gate of the small gray-brick church that has stood on this patch of ground for more than six hundred years. In this light it gives off little air of majesty. It is a squat, angular building surrounded by a low wall made of stacked stones. At its front is a long, stained-glass window, which looks oddly liquid against the stone. To the rear is a copse of woodland; all charcoal branches and spindly limbs.

“Christ.”

Glass bunches his fists and shakes his head as the gate to the churchyard creaks. Above him, something large and feathered rustles the uppermost branches of a tall tree, then beats at the air with a sound like skin on skin.

“Hello,” he says, more to himself than to anybody else. “Police.”

Glass swishes the torch. His feet have found the shingle path to the wooden front door of the church. To his left, the beam illuminates a flash of color. He glances at the snowdrops and daffodils that spring from the thick grass around a rectangular tomb. Sees lichen on gray stone. Sees old iron railings, punched deep into soft, wet earth.

“We know it’s you, Peter. Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble. But this can’t go on . . .”

Glass’s words are met with silence. He sighs. Flashes the torch to his right. Sees newer headstones, fresher pain. Reads names and dates chiseled into granite, and lets his torch beam linger on the soggy posies nestled against cold, unfeeling rock. “Peter?”

From the rear of the church, Glass hears the soft chink of stone on stone.

“Peter? You’re not in trouble, I told you . . .”

Glass means his words as he says them, even though he cannot rule out giving the simpleton a clip around the ear before sending him home. He’s had to deal with the lad before. Given him warnings, tellings-off, and a couple of rough shoves in his efforts to get him to act a little more civilized and a lot less of a prat. He thought he’d been making headway. Thought the slow-witted farm boy may have turned a corner and started behaving himself and working hard. No such luck. Glass had been halfway down his fourth pint when word reached him. Peter bloody Coles. Taking potshots at airplanes from the grounds of St. Germain’s Church out at Winestead.

Glass scowls as he pictures himself not twenty minutes before, perched on a bar stool in his civvies, supping ale and telling Colin the barman that Jimmy Greaves was no certainty come the World Cup and that Jack Charlton could keep his temper and do a job in defense if he was managed the right way. It had been a pleasant enough bloody evening. He’d planned another pint, then home to Enid and the boy. She’d promised toad-in-the-hole with onion gravy for his evening meal. Was going to cut the accompanying white bread and margarine into triangles to make it posh. Would probably have come and sat on his lap once the nipper was in bed and let him press his face to her ample bust until his legs went numb. Then the big bloke in the army boots had tapped his shoulder and told him what he’d heard at Winestead.

Shots.

More than one.

Said he knew it was a farming community and that it was probably nothing important but thought he should tell the authorities or he wouldn’t be able to sleep . . .

Glass had got young Davey to run him home. Changed into his uniform and splashed cold water on his face. He could have gone in his street clothes but the chief constable would have a field day if word got back to him.

Curse of the rural bobby, Glass had said to himself as he pulled on his shiny black shoes and halfheartedly slipped on his tie. They always know where to bloody find you . . .

He coughs. Adds some authority to his voice.

“Peter? I thought we were past this, son. I’ve told you, haven’t I? It’s not me. It’s not even your gran you should be thinking of. It’s the bastards at the RAF base. They’ll come down on you like a ton of bricks. What if you hit a plane, eh? Or put a window through in the church? Peter . . .”

As he talks, Glass finds his feet leaving the gravel. His shoes sink into springy grass, speckled with fallen snow.

“Peter?”

The young man is sitting with his back against a gravestone, chucking pebbles at a tomb. A shotgun lies uncocked and doglegged across his knees. He looks up at Glass’s voice. Holds up a hand to shield his eyes as Glass raises the torch beam.

Through a veil of tumbling snow and gathering darkness, Glass sees the dirt on the young man’s hands. Sees, too, the splattered color on his face. Across his neck. Upon his lips.

Glass feels his chest tighten. Smells his own blood inside his face; behind his nostrils, in his mouth.

“It all went bad,” says Coles, looking down at the ground. Then he raises his face and tries to catch a snowflake on his tongue. He looks straight at Glass, then past him, to the dark tangle of trees. “Am I going to prison?”

Glass follows the young man’s eyes. Squints and raises the torch.

The body is draped over a half-fallen gravestone, arms dangling to brush the longest blades of grass that push upward from the corpse-fed ground.

“Oh, sweet Jesus . . .”

Steam rises like a freed soul from the holes in the back of the corpse’s head.

Glass raises a hand to his mouth and fumbles with the torch. It drops to the ground, and rolls gently down a slope of wet grass. Its beam exposes the second body. This one is female. Young. Shapely. Half-dressed, and with her blouse ripped open and the bra pushed up.

Stumbling, slipping, Glass reaches the corpse. Her face is in shadow, and it is only as he retrieves his torch and shines it upon her that he sees that most of her head is missing.

As he recoils, he smells blood and gunsmoke.

The girl’s body is only a signpost to the next dead. In snow and blood and darkness, PC John Glass staggers from one body to the next.

Veiled by tumbling snow, the world turns dark.

“Does it matter if I’m sorry?”

Peter Coles’s voice is small and childlike against the nighttime silence.

John Glass is too consumed with the blood rushing in his head to hear the boy’s repeated question. But in the darkness of the sheltering trees, his words are heard by another.

Tall, powerful, the figure watches silently as the policeman slips and falls over first one body and then the next; his clothes matted with dirt and blood and brains.

The man’s answer, when it comes, is little more than a breath.

“Sorry doesn’t matter. This is how it had to be.”

He slinks back between the dark trunks of a forest nourished by bones.

Fades into the snow and the night.

ONE

MONDAY MORNING, 10:14 A.M. A meeting room in the Charing Cross Hotel.

The heart of London, and a long way from home.

It’s a place of comfortable, high-backed chairs. Expensive carpets. Pictures of ships in chunky frames. Tartan curtains framing windows made murky by a hard rain thrown down from a sky the color of rancid meat. The whir of a dozen laptops and the distant swish of tires through dirty water. The honk of angry motorists and the soft thunder of trains rattling through the station next door. The rattling breath of smokers and the unsubtle glug of liquid down the throat of a buxom, dark-haired, middle-aged woman in biker boots and a black dress . . .

Detective Superintendent Trish Pharaoh lowers the cup. The coffee tastes of cigarettes and perfume. Extra-strong mints and vodka. Cardboard and sweat. It tastes of her mouth.

She wipes lip gloss from the plastic lid. Sits her takeaway latte down on her sheaf of papers and reaches over for a china cup filled with strong tea. Grabs a Jammie Dodger from the plate in the center of the long varnished table. Curses under her breath as the cookie crumbles around her bite. Brushes crumbs from her face and her damp clothes with a hand that smells of cigarettes. Of cold coffee. Of gin.

“Trish? Anything to add?”

Pharaoh turns her eyes to the man opposite. Soaks him up for an instant.

His name is Detective Superintendent Nick Breslin and he’s high up in the Metropolitan Police’s Secret Intelligence Service. He’s younger than her. Slicker. Maybe six feet tall. Slim, but with muscle definition beneath his smart checked shirt and plum-colored suit. He looks box fresh. Clean. Looks like he’s thought about every inch of his appearance, from the simple gold wedding band to the frameless spectacles. Looks like a man who will be chief constable before he’s forty-five. The sort of man who insisted she be at Grimsby Train Station at 6:10 a.m., shivering her arse off and facing a day in a city she hates. This “symposium” is his baby. It’s a “meeting of minds.” A chance to share information. A place to “push the envelope” and do some “blue-sky thinking.” Pharaoh hasn’t seen any blue skies in years. The only envelope she wants to push is a big square cardboard one—right down Breslin’s scrawny throat.

She turns her head back to the image on the big pull-down screen at the far end of the room. Looks at injuries she has seen too many times before. Looks at the face of a man who died in agony. Flicks her gaze over congealed blood and fingers curled inward in pain. Studies black ink and purple bruising. Absorbs the tar-black ruination of the dead man’s chest and the stripes of bone that peep out from behind the churned, burned flesh.

“There’s no doubt,” she says. “Our boys. Our bastards.”

Breslin nods and sucks his cheeks. Gives her some twinkle.

“I believe you refer to them as the Headhunters?”

Pharaoh meets his expression. Manages a smile in return.

“One of my officers came up with it. It kind of sums them up. That’s what they do. They talent-spot. They look for people on the up and they recruit them. It’s run like a business. Like a consultancy.”

Breslin nods again. Looks down at the folder in front of him and makes a note with a ballpoint pen.

“To use your corporate analogy, it seems they have their eyes on a lot of hostile takeovers.”

Pharaoh wonders if he wants a gold star. Of course they’re fucking expanding. They’re branching out, moving up, and taking over. That’s why she and all the other poor bastards are here.

She looks around the long, high-ceilinged function room. Narrows her eyes at the other senior officers who have been dragged away from catching killers and rapists to sit eating cookies and drinking coffee in a hotel she could never afford to stay in. They all look similarly wrung out. All soaked through and pissed off. They have better things to be doing. They all run CID units the way they choose to and have been around long enough to remember when a meeting such as this would have been conducted through a fog of blue cigarette smoke and to the sound of whiskey glasses hitting stained desks. To Pharaoh, this all feels too polished. Too anodyne. Too far removed from the nature of what they do. She wants somebody to swear or shout or break wind and laugh about it. She wants to feel like she’s in a room full of coppers who use words like “bastards” when talking about the bad guys and “poor bitch” to describe a victim.

Breslin steeples his fingers and looks at the dozen men and women who sit around the oval table. He beams like a politician. Turns to his left and whispers something in the ear of the woman sitting next to him. She hadn’t introduced herself when they were doing the meet and greet at the start of the session. Breslin had simply said that “Anne” was here to help. She had a “watching brief.” She was a “great asset.”

Pharaoh considers her. Young. Short brown hair. Looks classy and sexless in a round-neck, long-sleeve shirt and cream jacket. Her scarf looks expensive. Her jewelry, too, though it’s subtle and not designed to catch the eye. There’s an intelligence to her, and Pharaoh fancies that this is somebody she wouldn’t want to be playing poker against.

Breslin looks down at his notes again. “Arthur. You had something you think may be relevant?”

A stocky, fifty-something man with luxuriant white hair and a blue suit gets to his feet. He gives a nod and a civilian officer clicks a button on the laptop in front of her. The image on the screen changes. It shows a strip of shingly beach on which a male forearm, wrapped in cling film, is sitting next to a yellow evidence marker.

“This is Lloyd Moore,” says Detective Superintendent Arthur Blowers in a broad North East accent. “Or, it used to be. Lloyd’s been the face of villainy in Newcastle for the best part of twenty years. His dad, Dermot, had the honor before him. Crime family in the proper sense. Old-school. Didn’t court the media, but those in the know knew his name. Lloyd had a bit about him. Relatively fair man, provided you didn’t upset him. Done a few minor stretches but it was always a bitch to pin anything on him. Witnesses tended to scarper or lose their bottle. Evidence would disappear. Plenty of other people intruded on his turf over the years but they never lasted long.”

“Muscle?” asks a short, stocky woman with a gray perm and glasses, whose accent ensured she hadn’t needed to tell anybody she was from Birmingham during the introductions.

Blowers sucks on his lower lip. Gives a smile that suggests a grudging respect and affection for the man he is about to describe.

“Well, that’s the thing,” he says. “Lloyd may have been the public face, but those with long memories may remember this chap.”

A new image flashes up on the screen. It’s a shot from the 1960s. Black-and-white. It shows a squat, bulldog-looking man in a double-breasted pin-striped suit and a flat cap. He’s been captured on camera coming out of a brightly lit building with two tall, intimidating men in black suits and ties. The two men look so similar they could almost be twins.

“Is that . . . ?”

Blowers gives that grudging smile again. “Yep. You know all those stories and urban myths about the Geordie gangsters turning away the London boys at Newcastle Station? It’s bollocks. This man let them in. Then he did a deal with them. And he’s been top dog ever since.”

“And he is?”

“Francis Nock. He’s eighty-one years old now, and we haven’t had anything tying him to organized crime since the seventies, but that may well be because he’s very good at it. We’ve had people in his operation before. We had one in Lloyd’s outfit until recently. And from what we can tell, Nock has been the man who says yes or no, live or die, since the sixties. For all intents and purposes, he’s a retired property developer. Suffers with arthritis and diabetes. Looks forward to his daughter’s visits from Spain. Holidays in Panama when he’s well enough. But he’s the one who Lloyd has been reporting to all these years.”

“And you think the Headhunters bumped Lloyd off to send a message to this old boy?”

Blowers shakes his head. “No, I think your Headhunters approached Lloyd and offered to back him. They wanted him to turn against the old man. I think they offered to give him the crown. And I think Mr. Nock found out about it. And Lloyd ended up an arm on a beach.”

There are exhalations from around the table.

“And who does Nock’s dirty work?”

Blowers chuckles. He clicks a button on the laptop and nods appreciatively as the screen fills with a prison mug shot. It shows a handsome man in his late twenties, with thick hair swept back from a face with cheekbones so sharp they could slice the breeze. He’s looking at the camera with soft, inquisitive eyes, and has the appearance of a big man afraid he might hurt somebody by accident. It’s a look that Pharaoh recognizes.

“This was Raymond Mahon in his prime. He was arrested in the late sixties following an incident in a pool hall, for which no charges were brought. Handsome devil, isn’t he?”

Blowers clicks the laptop. Enjoys the change on everybody’s faces as the image on the screen morphs into something new.

“This is the same man in 1976, when he began a lengthy stretch for blowing the face off a man in a Denton pub with a double-barreled shotgun.”

The assembled officers give a chorus of curses and grimace at the image on the screen.

“He served seventeen years. Other pictures were taken but we don’t have them anymore. You can probably thank Mr. Nock for that. Further images were taken upon his release and during his interactions with his probation officer, but they, too, are no longer in our possession. He’s clearly camera shy. You can see why.”

The image is hideous. One whole half of Mahon’s face looks as if it has been torn away. A glass eye pokes out from inside a cave of tangled, livid skin. His hair looks like it has been burned off on one side and grows patchy on the other. His lower lip is missing a chunk and his teeth are exposed in a grisly mockery of a smile.

“What the hell happened?”

Blowers shrugs. “Lots of urban myths. We’ve heard he did it to himself while strung out on LSD. Another story goes that it was done to him in prison by some southern gangster while he was asleep. We know he’s alive. He’s not such a mess now, but you won’t see him on the cover of Men’s Health anytime soon. We know he’s a killer. And we know that, at the moment, we can’t locate him or Francis Nock.”

“And you want to talk to them both about Lloyd?”

Blowers looks at Breslin as though he’s a toddler. “Yes, sir, that would be very helpful.”

Breslin waves Blowers back to his seat. He flicks through his notes again. Tries to find the right facial expression. Leans over to Anne and gets no reaction to whatever it is he whispers in her ear this time.

“Fucking hell,” says Pharaoh under her breath, but with enough gusto for it to be heard by all.

“So, just to recap . . .” says Breslin, looking at each of the officers in turn. His focus lingers on a haggard, round-bellied detective chief inspector from Nottingham. The man is still sweating off last night’s ale. He’s an unhealthy green around the edges and has a whole spaghetti loop crusted onto the lapel of his supermarket suit. His name’s Melvyn Eades and he’s a bloody good thief taker. He’s also a man with a temper, a limited vocabulary, and a pathological hatred for southerners. Pharaoh likes him. His presentation to the other officers had been quick, and to the point. Two bodies on his patch. Both tortured almost to death. Hands nailed to their knees and a blowtorch used on their bare chests. Finished off with a nail to the temple. The bodies were thrown from a moving vehicle in the early hours of the morning. Dumped, like rubbish, on a cobbled street near the entrance to the city’s castle. Both men had ties to Andy Hadrian, who had been looking after the city’s cocaine and firearms needs for as long as anybody could remember. Hadrian had played the hard man in the interview room. Given them nothing. But Eades had a man on the inside and a bug in the bastard’s phone. Hadrian wasn’t just rattled. He was fucking terrified.

Despite his presentation being cut short by an unhappy Breslin, Eades had at least managed to give the little symposium its first bit of positive news. Something was causing the Headhunters a little disquiet. Rumor was that they had recruited someone to the firm who was doing things very much his own way. Somebody was refusing to follow instructions. They had stopped listening to the voice at the other end of the line. They were causing the organization a little upset. And that could only be a good thing.

Eades rolls his round head on his fat neck and sniffs noisily.

“To recap, sir, you’re on the money. They’re taking over existing firms. They’re looking at which outfits make money, and then they’re telling the man at the top that he now works for them. He can pay them a cut of his profits, or they’ll go to his number two and make the same offer. They’ll give demonstrations of what they can do. Andy Hadrian’s not an old man. He’s got years ahead of him. He’s got kids. He wants to live to have grandkids. He can keep his lifestyle and his life if he just bows his knee. I think he’ll do it. He’d rather have these people on his side than against him.”

Breslin whispers to Anne yet again. Nods. Turns back to Pharaoh.

“And we’re certain they started out in Humberside?”

“East Yorkshire, actually, Nick.”

“Sorry?”

“No such place as Humberside.”

“But you’re with Humberside Police . . .”

“Yeah. Stupid, isn’t it?”

Damp, tired, hungry, and hungover, Pharaoh wants this meeting to be over. She wants to tip the rest of the Jammie Dodgers into her handbag and run for the train. She wants to get home. Back north. Back to her four daughters and semidetached house. Back to catching killers and putting an arm around those who need it. Back to her shitty bloody life and all the things she’s good at.

“We don’t think that perhaps they were operating elsewhere but your team was just the first to come into contact with them?” asks Breslin with a little more steel to his voice.

Pharaoh sighs. Takes a handful of her hair and wrings it out onto the carpet.

“It started in Hull. Or at least that’s where they got good. We reckon it was no more than a year ago. Couple of blokes turned up at a cannabis plant run by the Vietnamese. Held a phone to the foreman’s ear and he got the message from their boss that he now worked for somebody else. Next thing, every dealer who got their supply from anybody else was finding themselves on the wrong end of a nail gun. The new firm recruited. Picked some rising stars. Couple of serving dealers. Some muscle. Even got a big name in the traveler community to join them. We had some successes. Put some away. But we haven’t scratched the surface. They’re too well-connected—”

Breslin holds up a hand. Looks down at the papers in front of him.

“I understand one key prosecution had to be dropped following allegations of assault by one of your senior officers.”

Pharaoh bites her cheek but can’t keep the sneer from her face.

“That’s not strictly true, Nick. DCI Colin Ray was suspended following an accusation from a suspect. The prosecutors were still debating the merits of bringing charges when the other incident took place. Fortunately for all concerned, that suspect is no longer an issue. Or a p