Flesh and Blood, page 1
Contents
Cover
Also by David Mark
Title Page
Copyright
Praise for the DS McAvoy novels
About the author
Dedication
Prologue
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Part Two
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Part Three
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Epilogue
Also by David Mark
Novels
THE ZEALOT’S BONES (as D.M. Mark)
THE MAUSOLEUM (aka THE BURYING GROUND) *
A RUSH OF BLOOD *
BORROWED TIME *
BLOOD MONEY
INTO THE WOODS
SUSPICIOUS MINDS *
CAGES *
ANATOMY OF A HERETIC
THE WHISPERING DEAD *
PIECE OF MIND
The DS Aector McAvoy series
DARK WINTER
ORIGINAL SKIN
SORROW BOUND
TAKING PITY
DEAD PRETTY
CRUEL MERCY
SCORCHED EARTH
COLD BONES
PAST LIFE *
BLIND JUSTICE *
* available from Severn House
FLESH AND BLOOD
David Mark
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
First world edition published in Great Britain and the USA in 2023
by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE.
This eBook edition first published in 2023 by Severn House,
an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.
severnhouse.com
Copyright © David Mark, 2023
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The right of David Mark to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0937-5 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0938-2 (e-book)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.
This eBook produced by
Palimpsest Book Production Limited,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland
Praise for the DS McAvoy novels
“David Mark has put Hull on the map … and placed DS Aector McAvoy as one of the most interesting and likeable British detectives”
The Times
“Deliver[s] the kind of grisly torture and murder scenes that have rightly linked Mark’s work with that of Val McDermid”
Booklist on Blind Justice
“Polished prose, lovable recurring characters, and a stunning revelation make this a mystery to savor”
Kirkus Reviews Starred Review of Past Life
“A fine police procedural … Ian Rankin fans will be pleased”
Publishers Weekly on Past Life
“[Mark is] on the level of Scottish and English contemporaries such as Denise Mina, Val McDermid, and Peter Robinson”
Library Journal Starred Review of Cruel Mercy
“To call Mark’s novels police procedurals is like calling the Mona Lisa a pretty painting”
Kirkus Reviews Starred Review of Cruel Mercy
“Strong prose, intriguing characters, and high tension make this a standout”
Publishers Weekly Starred Review of Dead Pretty
“Excellent … weaves a complicated web of deception, betrayal, and violence as the action builds to a stunning conclusion”
Publishers Weekly Starred Review of Taking Pity
About the author
David Mark spent seven years as crime reporter for the Yorkshire Post and now writes full-time. A former Richard & Judy pick, and a Sunday Times bestseller, he is the author of the DS Aector McAvoy series and a number of standalone thrillers. He lives in Northumberland with his family.
www.davidmarkwriter.co.uk
Mam, with love, thanks and a marked absence of sarcastic comments.
PROLOGUE
St Oswald’s Church, Buckton, East Yorkshire
February 9th
2.15 p.m.
He walks with both hands behind his back, coupled at the wrist, as if wearing handcuffs. He stoops a little, but it’s habit rather than old age. He’s lived here longer than he’s lived anywhere else and has long since learned to watch where he puts his feet. This is a landscape of hidden edges and sudden dips: where loose-rooted trees and shards of hefted rock hide lethal shafts of glistening blackness. The sea waits at the foot of the crumbling cliff, taking bites out of the land with each new tide. Abandoned bungalows and teetering mobile homes stick out over nothingness; sewage pipes and electric points jut out from the wet earth like the guts of the disembowelled.
Even here, tramping along the pitted trail towards the church, he has to be careful not to turn his ankle. Lately he’s become brittle. He feels the cold. Him! A copper, once. A good one, too. He caught villains. Killers. He was never a thug the way some of his colleagues were. Never put the boot in. Clever, too, in his way. Insightful. Shrewd. A good judge of character, that was never in doubt. Could spot a wrong ’un a mile off.
Moodily, he wonders what his younger self would make of him now. Considers that wee lad, who used to plunge into the frigid black waters off the headland at Flamborough while whip-crack winds churned the surface. Him; who wore damp shorts on frigid December mornings and played football on the tops at Filey wearing metal-belted clogs, snow stuck in the caulkers so it felt like playing in skis. Him, who carried a concussed tup five miles home to their little terraced house in Skipsea in the hope that a night in front of the open fire might bring it round. Him. Tom Spink.
Tom catches a glimpse of himself in a puddle as he trudges through the mist towards the church. Scowls as he takes himself in. He’d expected to start looking like his father as he approached the final chapters of his life. Instead he has found himself morphing into his mother; wrinkles in his top lip and damp, yellowy eyes. He sometimes feels genetically short-changed, having already inherited his father’s stunted stature and early onset baldness. His ruddy head is almost ovoid and protrudes from a ring of downy white hair so that from certain angles his mottled head looks like an egg not yet fully liberated from a hen. He walks bandy-legged, sucking at his lower lip like a baby with a nipple. He was handsome until a couple of years back: still straight-backed and twinkly eyed. Old bugger, now. Old and done in. Ready for it to end, if he’s honest with himself. Ready to drop off one night and not wake up. He’ll be missed, but he’d rather go before he becomes a burden. The wife’s already in and out of respite care, her mind unravelling so that she doesn’t know whether it’s last Tuesday or Christmas ’79. She’ll have to mourn him afresh every time somebody tells her that he’s gone. And there’s Trish, of course. Trish, who he loves with a quiet ferocity; Trish, who’s been something between a daughter and a best friend for the past thirty years. But she’ll be glad, deep down. She won’t want to see him infirm. Won’t want to see him wetting himself and eating pre-chewed food from a plastic spoon. No, better spare them all that. A night in front of the fire, a good bottle of malt, and enough sleeping tablets to kill a wildebeest – that’s the way to play it. Next week, maybe. Perhaps the month after. A few things to sort out, first. There’s the book to finish. He writes local history pamphlets to keep his mind active. He contributes to the occasional poetry journal. He’s written about some of the big cases he was involved with. And here’s the podcast, of course. ‘Good Murders, Bad Deaths’. He’d like to hear his own contribution. There’s still plenty of life in his ego and he can’t bring himself to check out before he makes an appearance on the most downloaded true-crime podcast of the year.
‘Rex,’ he yells: the word emerging from the good side of his mouth. ‘Rex. Rex!’
He stops himself. Spits and wipes his chin with his cuff.
Dog’s dead, yer daft sod, he reminds himself. It cost you ninety quid, remember. You asked the vet if he’d do the same for you for an extra tenner. He didn’t laugh.
He feels embarrassed. He glares at the ground as he walks. Starts working his jaw in circles, focusing his slack tongue on a point at the back of his mouth, trying to remove the bramble seed that has somehow lodged itself beneath his lower denture. He burps and has to hit himself in the chest with his good hand before the bubble of blocked belch rises up from his oesophagus. He forgot to take his antacid tablets this morning and can still taste the lamb jalfrezi he’d picked up last night from the Indian restaurant in Beverley. His skin carries an onion whiff, despite the bath he’d taken at his habitual 5.45 a.m. He still likes to rise before the sun. Listens to Radio Humberside on the wireless while he eats his breakfast. Always the same start to the day. Porridge and prunes, then a doorstep bacon sandwich. Two teas from the big brown pot on the centre of the long wooden table. Then he has his first roll-up, leaning in the doorway of the small grey cottage, its garden already given over to the sea. There’s a crack running from the back door to the front and a chicken-wire fence blocking him off from the road. He’s the last resident of the littler clifftop community: mostly retirees from West Yorkshire, spending insurance payouts and the equity from the sale of the family home to see out their days on this cold, wind-blown strip of paradise. They’ve all gone, now. All moved inland to be with family. But Tom’s stubborn. If the house suddenly slips over the cliff and drops the hundred feet to the shingly beach beneath, he fancies he’ll rather enjoy the ride.
He burps. Grimaces. He can discern something unpleasant; bitter and garlic and stomach lining. The health visitor will give him hell when she comes next month, he’s no doubt. Will prick him and prod him and take his piss and tell him he’s living wrong. She’ll tell him she can pull some strings. Get him into one of those nice sheltered flats. He’ll tell her he’ll think about it, then curse her for an interfering sow once she’s gone. He’s known too many who’ve quit the land they knew and been dead inside a month. He doubts he could survive on different air. He’d rather stay and feel dreadful than decamp and die on unfamiliar soil.
He spits, foully, onto the surface of one of the petrol-rainbowed puddles that have formed in the potholes of the pitted, broken path. His wellington boots make a noise like a horse chewing a mint. He wears long hand-knitted fell socks beneath his dark green boots and he has tucked the bottoms of his overalls into their tops, the material bunching up just below his knee so he seems to be wearing knickerbockers. He wears a long coat, its khaki material mottled to a camouflage pattern by twenty years of exposure to the elements.
Tom’s somewhere in his seventies, though he struggles to be more specific when asked. He has to go through a complicated set of sums to work it out. Has to remember faces long since dead. Fills his mind with dates that only serve to pitch him into a black gloom. Mum’s death. Dad’s death. ’91, when he met Trish. ’98: the year his first wife filled her pockets with stones and walked into the lake.
Tom glances up as a sudden sliver of light pierces the low grey-violet clouds. Wishes he had his stick. Wishes he’d brought a flask of tea and his binoculars. Wishes he had somewhere to go.
He comes to a stop outside the little church, half hidden behind the rise of the clifftop and shielded by huge tangles of grass and reeds and half-dead twists of bramble, coiled like barbed wire. In the next field, two stout, muttony tups are glaring at him, buck teeth working monotonously at a clump of grass.
Tom reaches out and leans on the dry-stone wall that circles the church. Looks back the way he’s come. He’s a couple of miles from home. Yew trees stand on the lip of the rise like great paper dolls. He leans forward, shifting his weight so that he is balancing on the wooden slats beneath the lych-gate. He glances at the nearest headstone: a big shard of polished black stone. At the base, dead stems emerge from an empty jam-jar. He realizes that he should have brought flowers. Should have put a candle in a bottle and let its flickering light find the shadows in a bouquet of berbera and hydrangea.
He forces himself through the lych-gate. Feels as though there is a weight tugging him down as he moves towards the plot where his dad’s bones marble the earth. He cannot help but imagine the day, surely not too far away now, when he will be lowered on mud-caked ropes into a cold hole in the earth. He wonders who will be there to see him off. Whether anybody will pour whisky on his grave the way he did for his grandfather. Whether the sandwiches they serve at the pub in Old Ellerby will contain more than single slice of ham.
Stop it, he tells himself, and hocks back phlegm and tears. Tells himself it’s just the wind, causing his eyes to run. Sings himself a little song inside his head, trying to make his feet match the rhythm.
He glances at the church, small and squat: a Monopoly house with a slate roof. The tower has axe-wound eyes. There are monsters scowling from the gutters: gurning goblins and multi-fanged beasts, writing in pagan debauchery atop virgins in flowing robes. A gull perches on the head of a howling woman, talons plunged deep into her eyeballs, tongue probing the bare behind of a leering imp. They are hideous and hypnotic and would be a Mecca for tourists if the church leaders weren’t so ashamed. The gargoyles were unearthed by a sculptor a few years back: a handsome, blue-eyed devil commissioned to undo the damage caused by centuries of salt and spray. He’d done more than they asked. He found the truth in the ancient stone, disinterred the goblins and imps that once leered down at parishioners and protected the little stone church from vengeful spirits. God and Satan, Pan and Freya, all are bound in one house of worship. There’s stained glass at the far end. On bright days it casts a multi-coloured pattern on the flagstones so that it looks as though jewels have been scattered on the floor. There’s a wooden lectern inside: hand-carved by the same craftsman who remade the gargoyles. Tom was married here. For a moment he remembers his wedding day – Gillian so nervous and shy that her teeth chattered like wind-up toys. He’d had to put an arm around her, even with her dad looking on. Had to stand at the front of the church and say his vows hugging her to his chest, promising her he’d look after her and do right, for better, for worse. He fancies he kept his word, more or less.
He grows cold as he approaches the far corner of the graveyard. He glances up and the clouds shift, allowing a shaft of barley-yellow sunlight to spear down and into the churchyard. He glances at the tombstones of men he knew. Tom has never been a sentimental man but it saddens him to think of his own grave untended. He always used to tell the family that he didn’t care what happened to his mortal remains. Used to grumble to Trish that they could fly-tip him on the front lawn for all that he cared. The joke’s worn thinner the older he’s become. He only permits himself visits to the graveyard a couple of times a month now. He doesn’t want to get maudlin. Knows too many old men who have gone funny towards the end; wrapped up in an obsession with mortality, asking big questions about whos and whys and whethers. He doesn’t want to be remembered like that. He’s still pretty good company on the three nights a week he permits himself in one of the two pubs he can get to from home. Can spin a yarn and handle his drink and hasn’t embarrassed himself in front of any youngsters as far as he’s aware. He’s happy enough to be thought of as he is. He doesn’t want to become the morbid old bastard with tears in his eyes. He doesn’t pray for much these days. Just says a few thank-yous and asks God to make sure he drops dead before his mind goes or he starts soiling himself.
He pulls a roll-up from his baccy tin, cosy in the pocket of his coat. Lights it with a match. Sucks the smoke into lungs that rattle like a saw working through wet wood.
They’ve been burying the Spinks here since the church was first consecrated.
He gulps, lustily, upon his roll-up. Feels a kind of comfortable melancholy settle upon him as he looks down at the plot where soon his own bones will rest. He’s left instructions. Best brown suit and fresh socks. The comfortable shoes with the Velcro from the specialist shop. Hair lacquered flat, the way the wife had liked it. He wants his baccy tin in his coat pocket. He wants his dentures in, so he doesn’t get to Heaven and give gummy greetingsh to Shaint Peter. He wouldn’t mind a few butterscotches in his pocket for the journey.
