Free Taking Pity by David Mark Page B

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