Taking Pity (6 page)

As Colin Ray begins scrolling through his phone for a number he should know by heart, he finds himself beginning to feel like a policeman. More than that, he begins to feel like a man who just got a little closer to revenge.

•   •   •

M
IDM
ORNING
. H
EADING
EAST
.

Through the city and past the docks. Past the prison and the neighboring cemetery; the open graves of countless boarded-up factories. Past the abandoned shops and the burned-out taxi office. Past secondhand cars being flogged for cash behind chain-link fences and chipboard signs. Past the ferry terminal; the towers of the great vessels looming like shark fins above the cargo containers.

McAvoy presses east, through towns and villages that cling to this wild, flat, tongue of dirt. Through uncultivated fields and straggly patches of still-farmed land. Through air the color of smoke and a listless rain that falls ceaselessly onto this torpid, half-deserted world.

Hedon.

Keyingham.

Ottringham.

On the right, the sign to Sunk Island. McAvoy remembers reading about it when he moved here. Remembers being fascinated by the tiny hamlet that emerged as a large sandbank from the River Humber a few centuries before and which caused maps of the coastline to be redrawn.

On. Toward the coast. Toward dead seaside towns and villages that are slipping into the sea.

Toward a church where a family was killed by a boy they had never felt reason to fear.

McAvoy misses the gap in the hedge the first time he drives past it. Finds himself on the edge of Patrington and knows he’s gone too far. Turns around in the car park of a pub and heads back down the winding road. Spots the church through a gap in the high privet and swings the vehicle left onto a muddy, rutted track.

McAvoy winces as the car jolts in and out of the deep grooves that other people’s tires have left in the sodden grass. Pulls up outside a white-painted gate and switches the engine off.

Takes in the view.

St. Germain’s Church is nestled in a grove of trees, some hundred yards from the main road. It’s a tiny, towerless construction: two rectangles of old stone and stained glass surrounded by a low wall. To the right of his vantage point, an empty, grassed-over field stretches away toward the main road. The rear of the church is shielded by a straggle of denser woodland.

McAvoy kills the engine and gets out of the car.

The first thing he notices is the silence. A light rain still falls and the wind plays with the tails of his coat, but besides the rustling of the trees he can hear almost nothing. He strains his ears for the sound of passing traffic or the chatter of agricultural workers in the nearby farmland. Can’t hear a damn thing. Just the low whistle of a harsh wind, breaking around the stone statues and gravestones that dot the church grounds.

He lays his hand on the flaking paint of the gate and enters the grounds.

Despite the solitude, it does not strike McAvoy as an eerie location. It seems quite peaceful. The gravestones in this churchyard stretch back centuries. A vast tomb stands immediately to McAvoy’s left; all black railings and angular blocks of stone. Around it, headstones jut at random angles from the spongy, deep green grass. As he walks along the short, overgrown path, McAvoy sees a tall gray angel looking down at him; face serene and shiny with rain. It stands atop a square slab and seems to survey the grounds with an air of timeless ownership. It has been here for at least two centuries. Those gray eyes witnessed the events McAvoy has come here to excavate and explore. They have seen gravestones sunk into black mud and watched soil patter down on coffin lids. They have watched grief in all its forms. Seen mourners come and go. Seen the bereaved lose interest in pulling up daffodils and weeds to then honor their loved ones with handpicked blooms. Seen the living forget the men and women beneath the ground. Seen grave markers turn green. Seen headstones crumble. Slip. Fall.

McAvoy walks to the rear of the church, past newer, shinier headstones decorated with the odd bouquet of half-dead flowers and the occasional sad teddy bear, saturated and rotting among shingle and dirt.

This is where it happened.

Here, at the rear of the church.

This is where they were found.

McAvoy takes his notepad from his pocket and reacquaints himself with the names and timeline he jotted down in perfect shorthand as he sat squinting at the computer screen. Looks at the little map he copied from the photographs in the file. Looks, with soft eyes, at the little crosses he has drawn on the map of the graveyard, and the four corresponding names.

Nods.

Puts the notepad away.

Listens to the nothingness.

Tries to picture what happened here.

On the night of March 29, 1966, Police Constable John Glass was alerted in Patrington to shots having been fired from the church grounds in nearby Winestead. He had presumed that this was a troublesome young man from a nearby farm cottage whom he had spoken to before about using firearms without supervision. PC Glass and a resident of Patrington drove to the scene. It was dark and beginning to snow. A short time later, PC Glass found the first body. Soon, he discovered three more. He had also found Peter Coles, sitting on a gravestone, cradling a shotgun, and mumbling about how sorry he was. Glass had arrested the lad and instructed his companion to drive to the nearest telephone and alert his superiors. Uniformed officers and a team of CID men from Beverley Police were at the scene within the hour. By morning, Peter Coles had been charged. Following his initial statement to PC Glass, he did not speak again. A search of the house he shared with his grandmother led to some unsettling discoveries. A notebook beneath his bed was filled with scribbled fantasies about the pretty, blond teen whose face he had just blown off with a shotgun. A search of an outbuilding revealed a cache of underwear he had stolen from his neighbors’ washing lines. A series of interviews with nearby villagers revealed that Peter Coles had always been a peculiar, unhinged kind of boy whose mother had left him when he was just a toddler and who had been brought up by his grandmother in one of the cottages belonging to the nearby manor house. The manor house and the surrounding farmland had been owned and operated by local businessman Clarence Winn. And Peter Coles had just killed Clarence Winn; his wife, Evelyn; his son Stephen; and his daughter, Anastasia. Only the eldest son, Vaughn, had survived the massacre, having left a day earlier to return to the North East, where he was working. Vaughn later provided identification of his mother’s and father’s bodies. His brother and sister were too disfigured by the shotgun blasts for him to be allowed to see them.

After being remanded into custody at York Crown Court, Peter Coles was quickly declared mentally unfit to stand trial. He was sent to an institution in Shropshire. He has been in mental hospitals ever since.

McAvoy pulls on the stubble beneath his lip and breathes deep. He looks around him at the attractive, peaceful scene. He finds it hard to picture what occurred here. In front of him is the low, mossed-over gravestone upon which Peter Coles had sat and confessed. To his right is the sloping patch of grass where Clarence Winn was found with a hole the size of a pumpkin blasted from his back to his front.

Why had they been here? What had they been doing at this remote spot on a hushed, snow-filled night?

McAvoy opens his notepad again. Refreshes his memory. Flicks through the pages and pulls a face. He returns to the car and opens up the laptop, accessing the files of saved witness statements and photographs. He has only just dipped a toe into the investigation and already he feels that the info he has been sent is a little thin for a case of this size. Things seem to be missing. There are gaps. Entire witness statements seem to have vanished from the files. And the numbers for the evidence log are blurred and indecipherable. McAvoy senses he is going to go to bed tonight with a headache.

Slowly, reading as he goes, he returns to the rear of the church.

According to witnesses, Clarence was in the habit of taking a walk each night with his pet spaniel, Digger. Sometimes his wife would accompany him. On this night, his children had clearly decided to come, too. This was rare, but not unheard of. Stephen was sixteen years old; his sister two years younger. Still young enough to enjoy their parents’ company and the thrill of a walk in the moonlight. And unlucky enough to stumble upon a deranged young man with a shotgun, out taking potshots at passing airplanes.

McAvoy leans back against the church wall. Lets his eyes slide shut and tries to see it. A family, wrapped up against the cold. Laughing. Sharing stories. Missing the older brother, who had just said his good-byes. Bumping into a dangerous, excitable boy holding raw power in his hands. Had they spoken? Were there pleasantries exchanged before he raised the shotgun and blasted Anastasia Winn in the face from a couple of feet away? Certainly the family knew him well. He had been raised alongside the oldest boy, Vaughn. Had been friends with him during their adolescence. Had even worked occasional shifts as a laborer on the farm and was a regular visitor to the manor house, where his grandmother would pop in most mornings for a cup of tea with Evelyn. There had been no bad blood between them. Clarence had even defended Peter to PC Glass when the boy had gotten in trouble for using his shotgun on the church grounds. Had that been the tipping point? Had Coles feared getting into trouble for letting down Mr. Winn? Winn was a big man. Had he threatened the boy with a slap for being silly? Or had the sight of Anastasia set off something primal in the boy? Had the throbbing steel of the gun in his hands chimed in his troubled mind with the soft flesh visible between Anastasia’s knee socks and her skirt? Had he simply wanted her?

There were plenty of theories and each was put to Peter Coles as he sat in the police interview room. But he kept his mouth shut. Whimpered once or twice, but refused to say another word.

McAvoy realizes he does not know enough about the victims to be able to feel anything other than a vague, ephemeral kind of pity for them. He wants to know them. To understand them. To feel them as individuals. As people. He looks at the laptop again and tries to find something in the witness statements that will help him get a sense of who they were. They have been dead so long, he briefly wonders if there is any benefit to any of this. The boy’s grandmother is dead. The manor house has since been sold and redeveloped. The cottage where Coles lived has been bulldozed to make way for a grain silo. The blood has long since sunk into the grass in the churchyard. There are no bullet holes in the stone. Time has healed this place. The bodies have been laid to rest two miles away in the grounds of St. Patrick’s Church in Patrington.

McAvoy chides himself for his lack of compassion. Fears, for a second, that he is becoming everything he hates.

Gets his brain in gear. Turns his thoughts to the survivor, Vaughn.

Vaughn was nineteen at the time of his family’s slaughter. Almost certainly still alive. Definitely entitled to know what could be happening to the man who killed his family.

A sudden commotion in the treetops causes McAvoy to look up, startled. Two magpies are fighting with a crow in the topmost branches of the evergreen to his right. It is an unpleasant sound; all cawing and flapping feathers and falling leaves. McAvoy suddenly feels he has seen enough. He had half entertained the notion of walking deeper into the woodland at the back of the church, but the ground looks soggy and difficult to navigate and he is suddenly aware of just how very alone he feels. He wishes Pharaoh was here, to crack jokes and connect him to the world. He senses that without her he will eventually disappear into an internal world of corpses and memories. He wants to call her. Tell her that he has begun. Wants to run some initial ideas past her. Wants to ask if she can spare a detective constable or one of her civilian workers for half a day to track down witnesses from 1966 and put him in touch with Vaughn. Wants to hear her voice.

McAvoy turns away from the landscape where four people lost their lives. The birds still squawk and flap and shake the branches as he walks back up the footpath to the gate. He’s not sure how he’s supposed to feel. Doesn’t know if he should phone the vicar and ask to take a look inside. Services are still held here twice a month. Every couple of weeks, a handful of parishioners gather within its thick walls and shiver in its cold, half-dark embrace. The font has been there since the twelfth century. Andrew Marvell was baptized within. It was erected when this part of Holderness was an important entry point to Britain and it has watched as the sea has nibbled the coastline and moved inland by inches. McAvoy doubts its embrace will bring him comfort. Nor will it help him better understand what occurred here.

The gate squeaks on stone as McAvoy leaves the churchyard. He takes a deep breath, his feet on muddy earth, his hands on the bonnet of the car. He imagines how PC Glass must have felt. Imagines this place in the darkness. Wonders if he would have kept his nerve and his head with moonlight and snow slashing patterns in a graveyard full of blood.

He climbs back into the car. Rests his head on the steering wheel. He feels cold. Soaked through, even though there is only a light veneer of rain upon his coat. He reminds himself what he has been tasked with. He has to check that things were done right. Has to check there are no embarrassing gaps in the established narrative. Peter Coles was here. He killed a family of four. And he admitted it.

McAvoy nods as he turns the key in the ignition. He has to keep it simple. Has to do what he has been asked and not let his gut take him in some unhelpful direction. He has always been a methodical, disciplined policeman. He takes the rule book seriously and can quote official guidelines the way religious zealots can quote Scripture. He knows that it would be unhelpful to start reinterviewing witnesses when they gave statements nearly fifty years ago and are no doubt in their dotage now. And yet, he feels a need to reach out and touch these events from long ago. Policing was different then. Forensic sciences were limited. There was no DNA. Fingerprint analysis was a difficult and laborious process. He cannot help but think that something may have been missed. Already he feels himself forming a picture of Peter Coles. Instinctively, he feels compassion for the boy. These days, he would have been under supervision. Social workers would be watching. There would be pills and counseling to help him better fit into the world. He would be kept a long way from shotguns. Then McAvoy thinks of the Winn family. Two adults and two teens, shot to death and left for the crows. He doesn’t yet understand this crime. Needs to get a sense of what it did to this tiny community. Needs to hear real memories and look into eyes that once looked upon a scene of slaughter.