‘I think I’d like to arrest everybody,’ says McAvoy. ‘But what do you think my chances are of getting a conviction?’

  ‘Where are you now?’

  ‘I’m going to look for the phone. Gerard’s phone. It might contain something real. Something I can show Slattery.’

  ‘If we’d just listened to her when she came in,’ mutters Pharaoh. ‘She knew something was wrong. When she read about the bodies in Murmansk. Two bodies. Three missing men. What if, eh? What if she and Russ really had found a rapist and killer who never stopped doing what he began with Roberta. Do you think Enid had any idea what she was stirring up?’

  ‘She was losing her senses,’ says McAvoy softly. ‘Had to leave herself notes to remind herself what was important. She didn’t know what was made up and what wasn’t. She needed to find out for sure. She agreed to help him so she could put her mind at rest. Roberta Ballantine. The boys. Chandler came along at just the right time. He printed that article to cause a reaction. He got one.’

  ‘Tell me,’ says Pharaoh, inching down the window and letting the blisteringly cold air turn the sweat upon her skin to a fine layer of ice.

  ‘She spoke to Chandler. Early on 3 January. Whatever he’d found out, he was passing it on. It was already too late by then. The killer was on his way.’

  ‘Vidarr,’ she whispers.

  ‘Vidarr?’ asks McAvoy, sounding puzzled. ‘That’s the Norse god of vengeance. Born to avenge the death of Odin – to kill the wolf that slew him. Where did you hear that name?’ She hears him playing with his phone. ‘There’s a ship at Albert Wright Dock with that name. Cambodian registered. I can request crew lists.’

  ‘Chandler’s notes. He’s got records of Vidarr’s movements going back to 1986. He stumbled onto something. Onto someone. Christ, he wrote that piece to flush him out. Ruffled all those feathers to see if he could bring him out of hiding.’

  Pharaoh opens the car door. The wind grabs it from her hand. Pushes it back against the hinges. The car shakes and she gasps for breath, hair and rain and wind in her mouth, and then Thor is pulling her clear, slamming the door shut.

  ‘There!’ he shouts, pointing across the headland. ‘The cove. With the black stones. The body was found there.’

  Pharaoh turns her back on the wind. Minervadottir appears in front of her. She gestures for her to follow, wind tugging at her clothes. Pharaoh presses the phone to her face but she can barely hear anything over the roar of the sea and the song of the gale. ‘I have to go!’ she screams, and her own voice is lost on the wind. ‘I’ll call you back!’

  She ends the call and turns into the wind. Her feet slip on the snow-covered ground and she tumbles to one knee. Thor pulls her up. She grabs his arm and he turns them both into the wind, using his huge bulk to shield her from the onslaught. Minervadottir, better used to such conditions, squats low as she powers through the gale, the glow of the lighthouse casting great black slashes onto the hard ground.

  Pharaoh trudges forward, gasping for breath. The inside of her skull feels as though it has been filled with broken glass and white noise. She flicks a glance back over her shoulder. Winces at the explosion of spume and foam; the sea sucking back in upon itself, clawing back loose stones and dead birds from the beach: an endless cycle.

  The rain stings her features, tugs at her clothes, hurling itself at her exposed inches of flesh. She loses any sense of which direction she is travelling in; mounds of brick and earth rise on both sides; thick grass awnings drape over toppled foundations where the houses have sunk into the earth. She glances up as a light shines in her face, blinking rapidly. She catches a glimpse of the rescue hut, out on the headland. She’s standing where the black, crow-like figure was captured on the artist’s camera. Minervadottir’s ghostly face appears at her side and Pharaoh feels terribly disorientated, as if the world were spinning around her.

  There is a tug at her sleeve and suddenly Thor is pulling her into the shelter of a tumbledown building, his blue waterproof coat smearing against her cheek. She smells him: a warm fireside on a cold day. She looks around her, Minervadottir’s torch throwing circles into the darkness. She makes sense of her surroundings. She’s standing in the porch of the last inhabited farm of Kalfhamarsvik. This is Hvalreki. A week ago, Russ Chandler stood here. He sought answers to a mystery fifty years old. Those answers cost him his life.

  ‘Inside,’ she shouts, gesturing further into the darkness. She smells kelp and brackish air, diesel oil and cinders.

  ‘Detective Superintendent!’ says Minervadottir. ‘There’s nothing here. This is dangerous!’

  She reaches out, mud and crumbling wood giving way under her fingers. Thor shines his torch into the darkness. She glimpses broken bottles. Empty food cans. A couch, ripped open at its centre, springs sticking out like the workings of a broken clock.

  ‘Tourists!’ says Thor in her ear. ‘Students! People looking for peace.’

  Pharaoh pushes further inside. The ground is soggy underfoot. Frozen puddles form mirrored stepping stones in the darkness. She glimpses clumps of pornographic magazines. Solvent cans. An empty demijohn, label scratched off the surface. She reaches out again, low to the ground. Her feet crunch over broken glass. Smashed ceramics. She sees the remains of a kitchen table, legs blackened, half folded in on itself.

  ‘Pharaoh!’ yells Minervadottir. ‘Enough!’

  Pharaoh ignores her. Switches on the torch on her own phone. Slices white lines in the darkness. Turns back towards the door.

  Sees him.

  He’s not much more than a shadow; a silhouette of absolute darkness, hiding in the black like a shape cut from black card. Long tresses of hair catch the light as he leaps forward, a bird striking prey.

  ‘Behind you!’ shouts Pharaoh, as he lunges at Minervadottir.

  He pushes her aside, black eyes fixed on Pharaoh. She glimpses the ruination of his face. The scars and rips and tears in his cheek. The ugly trench of flapping skin where his eye should be.

  He grabs a fistful of Pharaoh’s hair and she tumbles. His feet go out from under him and he falls back; Pharaoh on top of him, her attacker on top of her, fists in her hair, bloodied face pressed against hers.

  And then they are crashing through rotten wood and broken boards and tumbling into the place beneath. The place that, for half a century, a Hull fisherman has called home.

  The impact takes the breath from Pharaoh’s lungs. She coughs, pain in every cell. Looks up just in time to see the black-clad man close his hands around her throat: thumbs interlocking, fingers becoming wings, squeezing the breath from her.

  She reaches up and grabs at his hair, hanging low. Yanks as if ringing a bell.

  He screeches, birdlike, head thrown back, and Pharaoh feels the hair rip free from the scalp.

  She hits him, hard. There’s nothing fancy about it. Just puts as much force into her right arm as she can, jabbing upwards from where she lies on a mound of wood and stone and man. She hits him again and he slithers back, hair still in her fist. More tresses come free. And then Thor is rising from the ground, pushing her aside, wrapping his huge arms around the man and pinning him to the ground. Pharaoh falls back, panting, dirt and blood on her face. Looks up into Minervadottir’s pale, shocked face. She takes a breath. Wriggles forward through the dark. Thor shifts his bulk and she shines her torch in the face of her attacker. He shudders in the light. One eye is nothing but crusted black blood. There are stab wounds in his face and neck. Chandler had gone down fighting.

  Slowly, she angles the torch. Takes it in. His trophy room. The place he has kept his curls of long, dark hair, each taken from a different girl.

  ‘Hello, Billy,’ she says.

  Pharaoh sits with her back against the wall. Thor and Minervadottir have him cuffed between them. His head lolls, hair hanging over his face like pondweed. There’s not much meat on him. He’s skinny. Fragile.

  Pharaoh has lit the only oil lamp that didn’t disintegrate when Thor smashed through the rotten timbers and into the cellar beneath. She surveys the room. The walls are painted the colour of mushroom soup and there are stains on the threadbare carpet, its once gaudy checks and zigzags trampled and shuffled into a nondescript mulch. An assortment of ornaments and paperwork is scattered haphazardly on the shelves of a 1970s dresser: tacky china figurines and age-mottled landscapes; greens and browns muddling together beneath the grimy glass. Teetering towers of paperbacks buttress the walls of the alcove by the doorway. Pharaoh scans the titles. Crime novels, mostly. A couple of red-leather hardbacks: waterways of England; ghost tales of Yorkshire; Fishermen’s Memories; memoirs of a journeyman boxer by Russ Chandler.

  She raises the lamp. There’s another door beyond. Painfully, she starts to stand.

  ‘Stöðva,’ mutters Billy. ‘Stop,’ he repeats.

  Pharaoh realises she’s been holding her breath. She lets out a lungful of air and then breathes in, wrinkling her nostrils. It catches in her throat. The place smells of disinfectant; the high, acrid tang of chemicals masking the reek of urine.

  ‘He found you,’ she says flatly. ‘Chandler. How?’

  He shakes his head. ‘You give him too much credit. I found him. The article in the magazine – so many lies. I laid a trail. Brought him here. I wanted to know what he knew. He told me, gladly. Recounted all my glories. Reminded me of so many happy times. He smelled of death. He was dying. Happy to tell me what would be coming for me.’ He swivels his head, good eye glaring up at Thor. ‘You must be the man he spoke of. This McAvoy.’

  ‘No,’ says Pharaoh. ‘This is Thor. He’s a local cop. So’s the lady on your left. McAvoy’s home, in Hull. He’s still going to stop you.’

  ‘Stop me?’ asks Billy, raising his face. ‘You have me. What are you trying to stop? I’m an old man. My wounds are infected. I have been dying for a long time. Too weak to indulge my pleasures.’

  Pharaoh stands up and walks to the far end of the chamber. There’s another door, bolted from her side. She slides it open. The bedroom contains a single bed: the stripy quilt twisted around a stained, off-white sheet. The bathroom is cold and damp; dead flies stuck in a cobweb next to the bare bulb. A leather strap hangs from a nail by the mirrored cabinet; badger-hair shaving brush propped next to the tooth mug; denture grip and a splayed toothbrush poking out of an inch of dirty water. There is a wig stand by a cracked mirror. A wooden plank studded with nails, loose hairs tangled around their base. Lethal-looking fish hooks stick out from a long strip of plasticine. Loose threads pattern the enamel of the basin. She looks down at the floor. Dried blood. A fountain pen, thick gobbets of crimson crusted to its point. She angles the light again. Behind her, Billy watches her shadow on the wall. She squats down and sees it, absurd and tragic; kicked under the bed like a broken piece of furniture. She returns to Minervadottir. ‘Gloves?’ she says, and the detective obliges. Pharaoh goes back to the bedroom and pulls the false limb from the shadows. Chandler’s shoe and sock still clothe the prosthetic foot. Grimacing, she looks inside. She recalls a conversation with McAvoy, years ago, about the journalist with the false limb and his special hiding place. She slides her finger around the smooth plastic and gives a grunt of satisfaction when the panel clicks open. She reaches in and slides out the thick, creamy scroll. She read both sides before she calls McAvoy.

  ‘He’s here,’ says Pharaoh, when he answers. ‘Billy. Chandler was right. He survived. Took the identity of the farmer’s son. Killed the old man and got himself a new life. Sailed the seven seas and took his pleasures where he wanted.’

  She stops, unable to hear him. His voice is distant. Patchy.

  ‘Where are you?’ she asks. ‘Hector?’

  She looks back at Billy, trying to imagine those first moments, frozen and bloodied and somehow alive, clawing himself up the black beach. Rory’s blood, Gerard’s blood, all washed away by the frozen sea. Finding shelter. Finding a boy, around his own age. Warmth. Comfort. A new beginning. She looks at the pictures on the wall. Feels sick as she drinks in the picture of shabby normalcy: the pictures of home, the landmarks and watercolours; the snowglobes on the low table, the picture of the two boys in the frame. Pharaoh snatches it up. She turns to Billy. He’s smiling. Even through the blood and the pain, he’s grinning as if he’s won first prize.

  ‘The journalist,’ he says. ‘I saw what was left of him. He did this to me but it did him no good. You don’t get far with one leg. Not here. Not on the ice. It takes something special to survive here.’

  Pharaoh raises the phone to her ear. ‘Hector, I can barely hear you. Where are you?’

  ‘Docks,’ shouts McAvoy in her ear. ‘Gerard’s phone . . . uniforms . . . reports of a disturbance . . .’

  Pharaoh crosses to Billy. Squats down in front of him. She holds up the picture of the two boys. ‘Which one?’ spits Pharaoh. ‘Which one’s yours?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ says Billy. ‘Enid didn’t know. Roberta didn’t know. Only Mags knows which one is Rory’s seed and which is mine. After the article …well, one of them chose to seek me out. To come to the place where I was reborn. He’s my heir. I’m too old. He has his instructions.’

  ‘Enid,’ growls Pharaoh, teeth locked. ‘Why? Why that way?’

  ‘She had to know how it felt,’ he hisses. ‘To be plunged into water so cold that it seems to burn the skin. I saw it, in his final moments. The realisation. I took the braid from his hand and he knew that it was me. That he’d killed his friend for nothing. Roberta was mine. My favourite . . .’

  Billy’s voice has grown louder, as if he were speaking to somebody in another room. He stares past her, at the pictures on the table. She changes her angle and squats down. Picks up a small music box, black feathers and a silver key. There is a microphone transmitter on its base; a fisheye lens concealed beneath the feathers.

  Pharaoh throws the table to one side. Searches beneath the rubble. ‘Where?’ she hisses, into Billy’s missing eye. ‘You wanted to watch, didn’t you? And your boy – he wanted to make his daddy happy.’

  She stuffs her hands into the pockets of his black coat. Pulls out a sleek black phone.

  On the screen, a man in a black mask stares at her, hair lustrous, face a mass of leather and scales. He’s framed against a smashed window: six white rectangles and spikes of jagged glass. She sees the shape of a big man behind him, beard and grey-flecked hair.

  ‘Hector,’ she says, raising the phone to her ear. ‘Hector, for fuck’s sake!’

  ‘Trish?’ he asks, just as McAvoy’s phone goes dead.

  ‘Do it!’ screams Billy behind her. ‘Vertu sonur föður þíns!’

  She watches the man with the black braids and the silver hook.

  Watches him make his father proud.

  Watches McAvoy crash through the broken window frames and tumble into the darkness beneath.

  Chapter 33

  Blake Line Building, St Andrew’s Dock, Hull

  8.08 p.m.

  McAvoy lies on the ground like a discarded toy, his coat spilling out around him. He thinks he’s alone. Feels alone. Hasn’t seen any of the anglers who use this spot after dark. No Travellers parked up on the area of hard-standing by the main road. No rat-faced teens slinking under the metal shutters to rub each other in the dark and suck aerosols from polythene bags.

  He realises he is looking at the world from a crooked angle. Blinks, painfully, until things make some kind of sense. He grinds his teeth. It feels as if a bomb has gone off inside the carefully ordered library of his mind. He screws up his face, trying to focus.

  A flash of memory. A shape.

  The gleam of something cold and hard. The sensation of falling. Glass in his face and hair.

  He hears sirens. They cut through everything else – a sharp, precise scalpel-slash of a sound.

  McAvoy clamps his teeth together. He becomes aware of the pain in his head. The sirens are getting louder. He is staring past the gaudy illumination of the Chinese restaurant, up towards furniture shops and burger bars, electrical stores and the petrol station. The Humber Bridge is a series of charcoal slashes on the grey-black paper of the sky. He tries to stand. Topples forward. Half turns and looks up into the black eyes of the man he came to find.

  Vidarr.

  His face is a mask of rippling silver-black leather. His hands are clad in black. Long dark braids hang down to his shoulders.

  ‘You don’t have to,’ grunts McAvoy. ‘It doesn’t need to be like this.’

  The man strides forward and kicks McAvoy in the ribs. It feels as though his whole skeleton vibrates with the impact. He catches a glimpse of the great black boot as it slams into his guts, again, again. He tries to roll to his feet but the other man is too strong. He slams his fist into McAvoy’s jaw. Takes a handful of his beard and stuffs his other hand into McAvoy’s mouth, trying to wrench his jaw apart. There is nothing in his eyes.

  McAvoy feels the man’s weight on his chest and the tearing, popping agony as the hinge of his jaw begins to creak . . .

  His hands close around a piece of broken brick. He swings, desperately. Feels the rock strike bone. The pressure eases for a mere heartbeat and McAvoy drops the brick. Swings again: a fist this time. Slams both hands into his attacker’s chest and pitches him back onto the dark ground.

  Dizzy, half-blind, McAvoy struggles to his feet. Vidarr moves more quickly. Skips through the darkness and launches himself at where McAvoy teeters, clumsily, on the sea wall.

  For a moment it feels as though the world is coming apart like damp paper, and he pitches forward, only half registering the sudden flood of hot wetness on his collar. He sees the water. Black coffee and quicksilver. He lurches forward, feels the sea wall against his ribs, his hip, as if the ground were trying to push him into the ocean, and then he is slithering down hexagonal stones, tumbling down the sloping wall and into the water.

  The cold is agony. He cannot tell whether his eyes are open or closed. He takes a desperate gulp and chokes as water floods inside him. He kicks desperately, feels the toes of his boots catch the wall. He pushes against the slimy surface but cannot find the strength to propel himself upwards. He reaches out, frantic, clawing at the water as if it were a net he could climb. For a moment he fancies that the water has taken on a human shape; that it has been transformed into a pale and phosphorescent assemblage of limbs . . .

 

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