Taking Pity Read Online Free PDF Page A

differ. Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy has scars. A livid furrow runs from his left eyebrow to his cheek, bisecting a faint, jagged line that travels from the corner of his mouth to disappear into the permanently damp hair at his temple. Fire has made its mark upon his back. A blade has carved a trench into his clavicle. The puncture wounds upon his shoulders still need to be redressed each morning and night. He’s six-foot-five, with limbs like railroad ties and huge, broken hands. He looks the way his people have for generations. He may be a crofter’s son from the banks of Loch Ewe but it would not take much effort to imagine him wielding a broadsword and cutting soldiers in half.
    While McAvoy hates the image he projects, Fin finds his father’s appearance fascinating. Even got himself into trouble at school for drawing a particularly accurate portrait of his dad when his class was doing a project on heroes. He’d told his teacher his dad was a detective. A knight in shining armor. And he’d used a red crayon to show the gruesome toll that such work has taken on him. McAvoy hadn’t told the boy off. Had been too busy blushing at being thought of as a hero.
    McAvoy readjusts the covers around Fin’s sleeping form. Brushes his hair back behind his ear and breathes the boy in. These are the hardest moments. After tea. After Fin’s shower. After a story and a kiss and some memories of Mammy. By eight p.m., Fin is always softly snoring and McAvoy is alone with his loneliness.
    Several months ago, McAvoy’s new home was partially destroyed in an explosion. Roisin’s best friend, Mel, took the brunt of the blast. Blameless, guileless, she had done nothing to deserve the destruction wreaked upon her slim body by the shrapnel and flames. Roisin had been concussed by falling masonry and suffered gruesome wounds to both legs. Despite that, she had managed to crawl to their baby daughter, Lilah, and had been cradling her among the smoke and flames when the fire crew pulled her out of the wreckage. She’d bitten one of the paramedics to the bone when they’d tried to take Lilah from her grasp. The firefighters found Detective Constable Helen Tremberg, too. Her wounds were worse. It was touch and go whether she would survive. Touch and go whether she would ever wake up to explain why she had been in McAvoy’s home, or accept his pitiable sobs and embraces for saving his wife and child.
    McAvoy was a patient in the same hospital as the survivors. He’d needed a blood transfusion and microsurgery on the nerve damage to his shoulder and neck. Had needed to be told on half a dozen different occasions what had happened at his home. Had collapsed in the same heap of snot and tears each time Trish Pharaoh explained that his loved ones were okay. They were going to be fine. But they couldn’t come home . . .
    McAvoy tears his eyes from Fin and takes up his position in the corner of the room. He should probably have said no when the insurers told him they had found him accommodations fewer than five hundred yards from the ruin of his family home. Should probably have left this place when the insurers began to find fault with his policy and warned him he was almost certainly not covered for the damage. McAvoy should probably find a low-rent flat for himself and Fin. Somewhere with a bed long enough for his body. Somewhere with a kitchen and a bath. But to do so would suggest that he was starting a new chapter. That he was putting down roots as a single father. That the way things used to be were dead and buried. So they stay in their little room. They live out of carrier bags. McAvoy washes their clothes under the showerhead and he ensures Fin eats a good complimentary breakfast each morning over at the pub. He’s still paying the mortgage on a house that structural engineers have condemned. He’s still on sick pay from work but is drowning in debt. He can barely afford the petrol for the school run. Has begun to experience