A Taste of Ashes (DI Bob Valentine Book 2)

by Tony Black

  There were the streets lined with black spit, the talk of the Friday-night pint that generally ended on a Sunday, and throughout it all, the hard-worn Cumnock women who always kept a clean front step scrubbed twice a day. The town had changed now, and the changeover had been brief. The town had gone from his home to a place not fit for animals in a few short years. The idea that dole moles and junkies might ever care about their front step amused him now.

  ‘Something funny?’ said the chief super.

  ‘The old toon …’

  ‘You grew up here didn’t you, father a miner?’

  ‘Yes, on both counts.’ They stood on the edge of the field where uniformed officers were busying themselves with blue and white tape, not quite sure whether it was appropriate to tie-up bramble bushes. ‘Place is a mystery to me now, though.’

  ‘It’s bloody Cumnock, the place is a mystery to everyone. Need your head tested to stay here now.’

  ‘Or have no choice.’ Valentine turned to face CS Martin, ‘That’s the thing though, we had no choice when I was growing up, but people cared then. People made the most of the place.’

  A tut. ‘I can’t see this lot bothering their backside. We’re too far gone now, Bob. Places like this were written off years ago. You’re well and truly out of it … Come on, our stiff awaits.’

  Valentine watched and waited as the chief super negotiated a dry-stone dyke. She made noisy objections each time the stones wobbled under her hands and her coat tails rode up in comical fashion as she descended the dyke. She was still cursing when she reached the field, the grass brushing the hem of her coat and forming a wet tide line. It was a bizarre scene for the detective, so out of place, so strange to see his boss wading through a field by the town where he’d once watched his father set off for the pit with a lunch pail under his arm. He felt like he had lived two lives, that they should never have crossed, but here he was watching his present attaching to his past. If there was a message to be discerned, it escaped him; but the eerie feeling that he should be drawing some kind of meaning from the event turned inside him.

  ‘We should have brought wellies,’ CS Martin roared over the wet grass.

  ‘Wait till you get further in, you’ll be calling for waders.’

  ‘That better be a joke.’

  ‘No joke. You’ll need bloody scuba gear if you fall down one of the shafts.’

  The chief super halted her stride, turned to one of the uniformed bodies. ‘How far do we have to go?’

  ‘Just a little bit further.’ The uniform pointed. ‘Over there, where the tracks end.’

  Valentine caught up with them. ‘Tell me they’re our tracks and we’re not parading half the force through our crime scene.’

  The uniform shrugged, looked blankly ahead. It seemed too complicated a question for him to understand, never mind answer.

  ‘Christ, I knew it. We’re up to our knees in it, stamping all over potential evidence.’

  ‘Relax, Bob. I’m sure if there’s any footprints in this muck we’ve already got them cast.’

  The DI peered up to the sky, but didn’t offer a reply; he’d trust his insights into the way uniform worked over the chief super’s any day of the week. As he looked at the churned mess of the ground he knew if there had been anything of use there it was now gone. The fresh path cut through two fringes of flattened long grass that stretched all the way from the drystone dyke. Up ahead the SOCOs in white suits were shuffling about, the unearthly starkness of their appearance always made Valentine aware of the close proximity of death. The dream, or whatever it was, where he had met Bert returned to him. The message had been to look for a soldier but he knew that wasn’t what he was going to find here.

  As they reached the main area of activity, Valentine was handed a box of rubber gloves, he took a pair and passed them to CS Martin.

  ‘No thanks,’ she said. ‘I’m prepared to observe but I draw the line at poking about in fusty remains.’

  ‘Whatever you say.’ Valentine snapped a glove onto his wrist. ‘You might want the blue slippers, though, keep your shoes clean.’

  ‘Is that supposed to be a sexist remark?’

  ‘If it is I’m not aware of it.’

  ‘Women and shoes, y’know …’

  Valentine knew all about women and shoes, his wife had a theory that it was something she fixated on herself because it was the only part of her body that hadn’t grown. The DI eyed Martin but kept the observation to himself and approached the depute fiscal.

  ‘Hello, Col,’ he said.

  ‘Ah, detective. Hello to you too.’

  The prat knew it was detective inspector and Valentine knew that he knew it but let it slide. Colin Scott fed on irritating people, the worst move was always to show they’d got to you. ‘I take it you’re done here?’

  ‘All yours, you can … do as thou wilt.’

  ‘That … shall be the whole of the law.’ Valentine’s retort put the fiscal on guard, police – even detective inspectors – weren’t supposed to be educated enough to finish his obscure quotations.

  ‘Christ, get a room you pair.’ Martin marched between them, approached the huddle of SOCOs.

  It was a patchy piece of ground, bare mostly. The grass halted about four feet away and a muddy expanse, like a dam, had pooled brown water on one side. There was clearly a source for the water somewhere but Valentine couldn’t spot it. As he moved closer to the group of uniforms and SOCOs he surmised that a flooded pit was the cause; and then he caught a glimpse of a grey-white face that was no longer human.

  The young man had deep hollows where his eyes should be and a gape of mouth that had been shaped into an unnatural droop. Valentine saw the jaw was broken, it was too wide to be a natural opening. The victim lay on his back, a bony chest exposed to the elements showed bruising, deep-coloured contusions and lighter, yellowing finger marks. He’d been beaten. Blood pooled beneath the nose, around the eyes and to the sides of the black gaping mouth. He was young, that was clear, but not the youngest corpse the detective had seen.

  ‘Just a boy, isn’t he?’ said Valentine.

  ‘Just a lad of sixteen summers,’ said Martin.

  ‘We’ve provisionally ID’d him then?’

  ‘Yes.’ She pushed past the DI, moved closer to the pale body. ‘I should have said, shouldn’t I? Must be annoying that, being kept in the dark.’

  He didn’t respond, it seemed to be a day for holding back.

  ‘It’s Niall Paton, the details match our description from the parents.’ Martin crouched down. ‘He’ll need a good clean-up before we do a formal ID. He’s been battered black and blue, obviously pissed somebody off.’

  He squatted down beside the chief super. ‘Or had something somebody wanted.’

  ‘He’s sixteen, though, what could he have had that anyone wanted, an Xbox?’

  ‘Information, maybe. Like the whereabouts of Jade Millar, or her brother, or her brother’s old army buddy.’

  Martin got up, she was still looking over the body as she spoke. ‘Careful, Bob, you’ll be making it sound like somebody on your squad knocked him off.’

  It was a low blow. ‘We’re keen to find them all, but so are one or two others.’

  ‘Like who?’

  Valentine rose. ‘Well I had an interesting chat with Eddy Harris recently, it appears one of the Meat Hangers staff has gone missing since the robbery. I’d think Norrie Leask would be very keen to find him.’

  ‘Well why don’t you ask him?’

  ‘I would, but Leask’s gone missing too.’

  The chief super removed a packet of Regal from her coat pocket and lit up. ‘Who is this that works for Leask?’

  ‘A bloke called Finnie, used to be in the army with Darry Millar and, it turns out, Tulloch.’

  ‘They were all in Tom Rutherford’s regiment?’

  ‘That’s right. Makes you wonder what Major Tom’s hiding, does it not?’

  She drew deeply on the cigarette, exhaled a long
stream of smoke. ‘That’s all I bloody need, a military police investigation on my patch.’

  ‘None of the victims are military, I think that rules them out.’

  ‘Oh, not necessarily, Bob. If there’s a military angle they have the strangest way of making it their business. And that could leave us with two unsolved murders on our books, or worse, two collars taken off our crime stats, which we can ill afford.’

  Valentine let the chief super talk herself out, she was extracting a final gasp from her cigarette when he spoke again. ‘Have the boy’s parents been informed?’

  ‘Oh, shit. No, they only told us he was missing last night.’

  ‘It’s going to be a bloody shock for them, after they’ve only reported him missing. Do you want me to let them know?’

  ‘Yes, Bob, you do that.’ She held up the cigarette, got ready to flick it onto the ground; Valentine reached over and snatched the filter tip from her fingers.

  ‘I’ll put that out.’

  ‘Great. Cheers. You want to drive back too?’

  The DI nodded. ‘Why not?’

  In the car CS Martin spoke in a near-whisper. ‘You don’t think the robbery and the murders are connected do you?’

  ‘I think the robbery and the murders and the army are all connected in some way, my only problem is that I’ve got no idea how.’

  ‘This is a mess.’ She grabbed a handful of hair and leaned on the window. ‘I don’t want you to antagonise the military. If you have to ask questions, do it on the quiet, or do it through my office.’

  ‘And what about the Meat Hangers?’

  ‘Tie in with DI Harris, if there’s a likely connection, you can take his team into your squad. The way things are shaping up, you’re going to need the extra numbers.’

  34

  The temperature outside was warming, the sun high and visible for the first time in ages. Some of the school kids from the academy were already larking about in the heat, playing slapsie and chasing each other. It made the detective think of Niall Paton – he couldn’t have been much older than many of the kids, going on the picture his parents had shown him an hour earlier.

  The Patons were clueless as to their son’s disappearance and desolate at the news of his murder. Valentine had watched the mother fall into her husband’s arms and weep, repeating the word ‘why’ over and over. He had no answer for that, and he knew he had no answer for many more questions that were stacking up around him.

  The family lived in a nice house, only a few streets from where he used to live in Masonhill. That their son had hooked up with Jade Millar – a girl from Whitletts – made him curious. They had such different backgrounds, one family was stable, the other a disaster. Had they really just hit it off? What was the attraction? The detective smiled to himself, he was being naive and he knew it.

  He was biting into the sausage roll when he spotted DS McCormack approaching from the other side of the road. He raised a plastic coffee cup to get her attention, waved her across.

  ‘Some weather, this?’ she said.

  ‘Don’t knock it, if the sunshine lasts another hour that’s going to pass for our summer.’

  She looked down the street. ‘That you parked there?’

  Valentine nodded. ‘Yeah, come on. You can fill me in on your Meat Hangers visit as we go.’ They turned to negotiate the pavement and were halted by a young mum with a pushchair, a noisy toddler covered in ice cream wailed at them. ‘That looks good, son.’

  The mother smiled, pride beaming out of her.

  As they walked on, McCormack spoke. ‘It was an interesting visit, but what John Greig might have called a game of two halves.’

  ‘I’ll have the good half first …’

  ‘Well, I got in, I suppose that’s a positive given that the place is closed up. Had to rattle Leask’s accountant for the key and a tour of the records but he played along. No idea where Leask is, though.’

  ‘What’s Eddy Harris saying about that?’

  ‘He’s been on the knocker but drawing blank stares all over. If anyone does know where Leask is, they’re not saying.’

  ‘Jesus, he can’t just disappear, he’s not Houdini, this is a low-rent scrote we’re talking about here. I wouldn’t have rated Leask with the marbles. And what about his business, are you telling me he’s just put the shutters on it?’

  McCormack brightened. ‘Ah, now that’s where things get interesting. Bullough, the accountant, says the takings had been down for a long time, Leask was looking to wind up the business. The robbery would have been the final nail in the coffin he reckons because Leask had cash-flow problems.’

  ‘And he just gave this information up freely, did he?’

  A half-smile. ‘Not exactly. Though once he knew we were talking about a double murder, and that we might need to take him in for questioning, the hankie came out to dab his brow.’

  ‘OK.’ Valentine scrunched up the remainder of his sausage roll and binned it. ‘Go back to the robbery, do you know what the tally was on the take?’

  ‘A whole bunch. Can’t say for sure because the books haven’t been done for that weekend but it’s a Friday night and Saturday night’s takings which get kept in the safe because there’s no bank on those days, then you add in the Sunday night’s too, which couldn’t be banked until the Monday, only nobody works a Monday because they’re in all weekend…’

  Valentine held up a hand. ‘Right, stop there. It’s three night’s takings, is that what you’re telling me?’

  ‘And the Saturday alone usually totals ninety grand.’

  ‘We’re talking a six-figure sum, which is not to be sniffed at.’

  ‘The insurance payout would dig Leask out of a big hole, let’s put it that way.’

  They’d reached the car, Valentine pointed the key at the door. ‘Hang on, if Leask was doing an insurance job, then why the vanishing act? Surely he’d just hide the loot and wait for the Man from the Pru showing up with a cheque. It doesn’t make any sense, as it stands.’

  McCormack opened the car door. ‘That’s exactly what I thought.’

  ‘So it only makes sense if Leask’s plan has gone awry, if someone’s done a number on him.’

  ‘Do you think that’s what happened to James Tulloch?’

  Valentine got in the car, sat behind the wheel. They were both staring into the packed street as he spoke. ‘I have honestly no idea, Sylvia. I wouldn’t even like to speculate.’

  ‘I hear you. The options are limitless aren’t they?’

  ‘They’re up there.’ Valentine turned the key in the ignition, flicked on the blinkers. ‘We’ll have to start narrowing them down. How did you get on with shaking up the staff at the Meat Hangers?’

  ‘I didn’t. There was no one there, it’s padlocked up, remember? What I did get, though, was the full staff list, and Bullough confirmed that it’s up to date.’

  ‘He could be very useful to us, make sure he’s kept on pins.’

  ‘Oh, I have. Gave him the don’t-leave-town-without-letting-us-know speech.’

  ‘Right. Let’s get back to the station and run those through the national computer. If there’s a name on there with a record we might be lucky.’

  ‘We haven’t been so far.’

  ‘Well that has to change some time, Sylvia.’

  35

  Darry Millar sought out the bar by following a faded tartan carpet that was held together by spillage stains. The yellowing woodchip on the walls was scuffed and scarred but looked fresh compared to the original dado rail, a sallow shade of yellow that might once have been magnolia. Above the door it had said guest house but he knew it wasn’t an accurate description: they wouldn’t get away with doss house, though. At the bar – which smelled of damp raincoats and cheap whisky – he removed a ten-pound note from the pocket of his jeans and placed it on a sodden bar-towel.

  ‘What can I get you?’ The barman stooped as he spoke.

  ‘A pint, please.’

  ‘Heavy?’ />
  ‘Yeah, that’ll do.’

  There was a television playing in the corner of the room, it was the news but he’d missed the headlines, they were onto the sports preview now. The barman stared, half-hypnotised, at the screen but managed to turn off the tap as the pint glass filled.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Erm, yeah, any food on the go?’

  A huff. ‘We do lunches, but the kitchen’s shut now.’

  ‘What about a sandwich or something?’

  ‘There’s a garage up the road might have something. I can do crisps.’

  Darry handed over his money and asked for two bags of crisps. It wasn’t much but he’d have to take something back to Jade. As the barman returned Darry was sipping his pint, the taste soured as he caught sight of a familiar face on the television screen.

  ‘Turn that up!’

  The barman pointed a remote control at the corner of the room. The speakers crackled as the volume increased.

  ‘The body of a young Ayrshire man was found in a shallow grave near Cumnock today …’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Darry.

  ‘You know this lad?’

  He looked at the barman. ‘No. No I don’t. Just seems awful though. I mean, not a nice way to go.’

  ‘There’s no nice ways, son.’

  He raised his pint, changed tack. ‘There’s the drink.’

  As the barman walked away, returned to his seat at the other side of the till, Darry listened to the rest of the broadcast.

  ‘Niall Paton, a pupil of Belmont Academy in Ayr, was sixteen years old. Police say they are treating the death as suspicious and following a definite line of inquiry.’

  Darry couldn’t finish his pint, he took the crisps and returned to the room where Jade was waiting. As he opened the door she had her mobile phone to her ear but switched it off immediately.

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘Nobody. I mean, I was just checking my credit.’ She put the phone in her pocket. ‘Did you get anything to eat?’