Artefacts of the Dead

by Tony Black

  Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  For Cheryl and Conner

  PROLOGUE

  The bulldozer emitted a drone, chugging noise as its caterpillar tracks pushed through the hill-high mounds of refuse. White parcels of cardboard and ubiquitous plastic carriers toppled into the broad, fresh footprint of the earth mover. A grey-to-black cloud of smoke hung in the wide trail, fresh bursts from the vertical exhaust pipe adding to a slug-line smear hugging a blue skyline. The jagged sawtooth of the Isle of Arran and the rough jut of Ailsa Craig looked a long way out at sea as the driver crunched the gears a final time and brought the vehicle to a halt.

  In the cab, a shabby portable radio – it looked like a tip-find – sat on the dash, blaring a West FM jingle as Davie ferreted for a pack of Embassy Regal. He whistled something from the terraces, a line about ‘honest men’ that had been stuck in his mind since Saturday.

  ‘What’s this, now?’ Davie clamped the filter tip in his mouth and lit up. As he did so, he eyed the fast-approaching quad bike, the orange light flashing above on its pole.

  ‘Bastard, won’t give me a moment’s peace.’ He turned the key in the ignition and felt a shudder as the bulldozer came to life again. As Davie tucked his cigarette packet into the top pocket of his shirt, he smashed a tightly balled fist into the grubby dash. ‘Five minutes, for a fag . . . I was only after a bloody fag!’

  As the crawler-tracks bit into the ground, the dozer blade caught the refuse piles and ripped them apart. A blunt line was sheared from the side of the tight-packed cardboard and plastic waste, fresh spills of carrier bags and bottles toppling to the cleared ground. A dirty cloud of fly-ridden effluvia escaped into the air but was soon swallowed up by the bulldozer’s own emissions.

  ‘I see you, I bloody well see you!’

  Davie kept his eyes front and tried to ignore the intoning from his supervisor on the fast-moving quad bike. He bit the cigarette between his teeth and tucked his head further towards the filthy windscreen. He felt the smoke rising; his eyes smarted.

  As Davie’s supervisor edged closer his driving became more erratic, aggressive almost. He clearly wanted to say something to the man at the earth mover’s controls; he wagged an arm to attract his attention, but the act merely increased Davie’s resolve to ignore him.

  ‘Aye, I can see you . . .’ He smiled to himself, the cigarette on his lips jostling up and down as he rasped. ‘Can’t have five minutes for a fag, eh. Out that trap like a bloody greyhound, you were.’

  Davie crunched the gears again and dug a fresh swathe through the crumbling debris. A broken door clattered off the edge of the bulldozer’s side-panel. For a moment it startled him; his stomach lurched, then tightened in expectation of more landslips from the same location. Nothing came, and he collected the cigarette in his fingers, sucked the nicotine deep into his lungs, then flicked the ash onto the floor of the cab.

  ‘Davie . . .’

  He heard the supervisor’s roars, closer now.

  The driver pretended to be oblivious to the commotion that was rapidly drawing near his open side-window. It was one small victory he was allowed in the game of life: to be able to play dumb and irritate the boss. He was never normally in a position to put one over on his supervisor, but he pretended to be ignorant; after all, that’s what was thought of him.

  ‘What’s that . . . ? Slow down, is it?’ Davie felt a glow in his cheeks as he slammed the gears again and forced the dozer blade deeper into the rubbish tip. What would he want, anyway? A few more hours out of him moving this muck; a weekend shift at time-and-a-half when it should be double-time. No chance.

  ‘Keep up, mate,’ he rasped beneath his breath.

  Still, he didn’t seem to be giving up. Davie saw his supervisor haring over the mounds of trash, sending the scavenging gulls back to the sky to circle and squawk. Up and down the terrain he went, in and out of the garbage gulches. He wasn’t normally so committed. A niggle started in Davie’s conscience. He allowed himself another gasp on the cigarette; the grey-white ash had formed itself into a slender poker-point and threatened to fall on his lap at any moment. He squinted to the left, towards the high-revving quad bike. He was still there, still moving, still at speed.

  ‘What’s he up to?’

  As the bulldozer’s blade cut through a fresh stack of high-piled black refuse sacks, splitting them open and spilling the contents, a flurry of brown rats ran for cover. Davie watched the rats; he knew they were smart creatures and held a grudging respect for them, even if they did churn his guts. The sight of them running from the bulldozer always made him leap in his seat, try to catch a glimpse of a long tail being caught in the caterpillar tracks: he’d never seen a single one caught yet. As he raised himself, his gaze was drawn to the horizon. He kept a hand on the wheel as he eased the earth mover down the gears. The noise from the gulls and the quad bike, the revving of the engine and the crunching of the gears, all faded into oblivion as he stared through a gap in the fly-splattered windscreen.

  ‘What the hell is that?’

  In the midst of the collected detritus of Ayrshire’s homes sat an unfamiliar object. Davie craned his neck and thinned his eyes to better discern the sight before him.

  ‘Wha—?’

  The sudden high-pitched din of the quad bike revving to a halt at his side broke the spell, but only for a moment.

  ‘Davie . . . get out the way!’

  He heard the call, but didn’t register any interest.

  ‘Davie . . .’

  He sensed movement beside him, his supervisor gesticulating with his arms wide in the fly-thick air.

  ‘Yeah, yeah . . .’ he said, flagging his boss aside. Workplace rules were abandoned in times like this: those rare occasions when the outside world stepped inside and levelled everyone to the same status. This moment was far more important than any bawling his boss was capable of delivering. Davie wasn’t sure what it was that he was seeing – the shape was too indistinct – but he knew this much: it wasn’t something you should see on a council rubbish tip.

  ‘Davie, Jesus Christ . . .’

  He let the bulldozer roll a few yards, clearing the now-established route through the wasteland, towards the shape. It seemed to be a collection of familiar objects, but none in the right order. There was a central pole, like a flagpole or a spike in
the earth, but there was something attached, tethered.

  ‘Stop!’

  He rolled the bulldozer further forward. It was a tangle, like a tangle of limbs – arms and legs – was it a scarecrow? Had someone dumped a tailor’s dummy?

  ‘Davie, please!’

  He depressed the brake and stilled the engine. The sun was high in the noon sky, a rare wide blue offering that filled the line of rooftops and stopped just shy of a shimmering yellow band of sunlight. Davie cupped his hand above his brows and stared front. No, it wasn’t a dummy.

  ‘Christ above . . .’

  At his side, Davie suddenly felt a whoosh of air as the cab door was swung open and his supervisor jerked a hand towards the dash to grab the keys from the ignition.

  ‘What in the name of God are you playing at, Davie?’

  The driver turned to face his interrogator; his lips parted and the lower of the two suddenly became heavy.

  ‘Is that . . . ?’

  ‘Yes, it’s a body!’

  ‘A what?’

  His supervisor’s eyes widened; the red shine of exertion showed in their corners.

  ‘A body! A man’s body . . .’

  Davie’s words faltered now. ‘On the tip?’

  ‘Yes, yes . . .’

  He hung out of the cab and pointed with both his arms in the direction of the corpse, pale white against the bright blue of the sky.

  ‘It’s a dead man . . . Can’t you see someone’s put a bloody great spike through him?’

  1

  The antiquated-looking exercise bike in the corner of the gymnasium was about all DI Bob Valentine could bring himself to tackle. There was a noisy game of five-a-side going on beyond the wall; the shouts and roars of rowdy recruits would once have proven too tempting an opportunity to go and knock off some arrogance, show them who was boss – after all, he had once been a very useful inside-left – but those days were now over. Reluctantly, he stuck to the bike and the slow revolutions of the pedals that emitted a whirring, hypnotic burr from the gyroscopic wheel.

  The DI’s brow was moistening. It had been – what? – ten minutes of low-impact cycling. The doctor had called for more, much more, but it didn’t seem right to push himself. He didn’t like getting out of breath, didn’t like straining the muscle in the centre of his chest that was forced to do all the work. He knew his heart had been through enough. He watched as stiff arms attached to prominently knuckled hands gripped the handlebars. His hold was weaker, less sure than it had once been. He couldn’t imagine hauling himself over the Tulliallan assault course now. His whole body seemed to have attenuated; it was as if some vital force within him had been removed, supplanted with a strange, ethereal mist that he had yet to adjust to, or even comprehend. He knew it was there, could almost see it, certainly he sensed it, but the old mind patterns – they hadn’t altered – refused to acknowledge it.

  ‘How you doing, Bob?’ The voice seemed to come from nowhere, an eruption amidst the plains of his thought.

  ‘All right, how’s it going?’ He drew the reply from a store of stock answers. The man’s face still hadn’t registered with him.

  ‘You’re still with us then?’

  Valentine had to search deeper for an answer to that question: did he mean at the training academy or did he mean in the land of the living?

  ‘Yeah, for now.’

  He eased off the pedals and leaned back in the saddle of the bike. For some reason he found himself folding his arms over his chest as he took in the broad man in the red Adidas tracksuit. He looked older than himself, a bald head with short-trimmed grey hairs sat above jug-ears and eyes deep lined with creases as straight as the radial of an Art Deco sunburst. Fulton, his name was Fulton, he remembered now.

  ‘Don’t know what their plan is for me . . . long term.’

  Fulton thinned his eyes; the folds on his face deepened and he became jowly as he dropped his chin – he looked like a pug-dog for a moment. ‘Right . . .’ he nodded, and the image was so complete he might have been sitting on the parcel-shelf of a Ford Mondeo.

  What was he doing here, thought Valentine? It was the incident, he knew that. The incident that he had been unable to alter, could do nothing to halt. Except, perhaps to have been a little more lucky. But he had never been that.

  ‘So, we could be keeping you, then?’ said Fulton.

  Valentine shrugged. ‘Who knows?’

  A hand was extended, placed on the DI’s shoulder; it made Valentine flinch, he didn’t like the contact. It felt invasive, it felt threatening. He knew in his mind it was nothing of the sort, but he couldn’t alter how he was feeling at any given moment. There was thought, reasoning, for after the event, but in the moment . . . Hadn’t someone said ‘the heart has its reasons that reason knows not of’?

  He rose from the exercise bike. ‘Right, well, I better be going . . . hit the showers.’

  Fulton smiled, a wide rictus that made him look more of a fool than the PT instructor’s garb. ‘Aye, aye . . . hit the showers.’ He leaned forward to slap the DI on the shoulder, but somehow inferred that it would be an intrusion on Valentine’s space. He retreated a few steps, grinned again, then said, ‘Catch you later, Bob.’

  ‘Yeah . . . see you later.’ He raised a hand and waved the instructor off. He watched him pace a few steps towards the door and waited to see if his suspicions would be proved right: they were. The man turned and put a stare on Valentine that he took as the last look of the utterly perplexed.

  ‘See you, Fulton . . .’

  The DI had made the same impression on Fulton as he was having on everyone lately: they thought he was losing it. Maybe he was. He shook his head and made for the changing room.

  Tulliallan academy was housed in a nineteenth-century castle but it felt more like any other college or learning institution to Valentine. The sweep of the place, its history, was wasted on him. He didn’t like the blonde-wood gymnasium and he didn’t like the in-house Starbucks or the two trendy bars that would look more at home in some overpriced boutique hotel. He felt like a fraud just being there, but then what was the option?

  A door opened and a stream of smiling, gallus recruits poured into the corridor, pinning Valentine where he stood. They seemed wholly oblivious to him as he held up his elbows and shrunk into the wall, waiting for the crowd to pass. When the mass of bodies had evaporated before him, Valentine lowered his arms and took deep breath.

  ‘Christ.’

  He felt like he’d just stepped out of the path of a juggernaut, but he was deceiving himself. He was overreacting. As he made a point of placing his hands in his pockets, Valentine gripped fists – weak fists, not the fists of anger he had been known to clench in the past, but more of determination. He didn’t want to carry on like this. He didn’t want to be a shadow of his former self.

  In the empty changing room, he rested his head on the locker door and sighed.

  ‘Together . . . keep it together, man.’

  He repeated the paean to himself over and over until he heard the hinges of a door swinging open; he was no longer alone. The armour needed to go on. He drew back his shoulders and retrieved the key from his shorts. The contents of the locker were neatly packed, his grey dogtooth sports coat on the hanger, his trousers beneath. He removed them one by one and then placed them on the bench behind him. Last to come out were his black shoes, Dr Martens – he had got used to them on the beat. He placed them on the floor and then retrieved his mobile phone from the locker. He’d missed a call.

  The sound of showers running started as he checked his messages.

  ‘Martin . . .’ He shook his head. ‘What the bloody hell does she want?’

  Chief Superintendent Marion Martin had been the officer responsible for Valentine’s secondment to Tulliallan. She had kept a close eye on him since the incident, but all his requests for a return to the detective’s role had been steadfastly rebuffed. A list of options, reasons why she might be calling, raced through his mind: being pu
t out to grass at Tulliallan on a permanent basis topped the list.

  Was this what his career had come to? he wondered. His mind spooled back to the youth he had burned up in pursuits he now questioned. Had the effort, the exertion, been worth it? Certainly, he would not chase the same chimerical dreams again. Ambition had been his flaw. The desire to make something of himself, measure his worth against others on the force had filled his life, once. But life was too short for that, surely. Yet Valentine still measured himself against the likes of Martin. Who was she? A careerist, an underwhelming police officer who had fashioned an overachiever’s job and responsibility for herself. And what did she have that Valentine didn’t, aside from a nice rack and the positive-discrimination policymakers on her side. The answer didn’t matter, because the answer counted for nothing. He knew those like Martin had success for one reason – because it was there for them.

  Valentine knew success, the dizzying high-wire type, wasn’t on the way to him. It didn’t come down to ability, achievement, worth – nothing like it. That success was random and disparate; it arrived at the doorstep of some who no more deserved it than desired it. When it fell to people like Martin it engulfed them, changed them completely, took over their personalities and made them anew. She was fighting to sustain an image of superiority – an outward expression of the opposite – and everyone on the force knew it. She was merely acting like the chief superintendent that she imagined herself to be, or thought she should be. The reality was not even a consideration for her. The thought of such a waste of a life struck Valentine as tragic.

  The time you had was too precious, he had learned this only recently, but it had struck him instantly and decisively. He couldn’t be jealous of Martin’s success, or anyone else’s, he knew this viscerally, but part of him – the old part, the Valentine before he had learned life’s lessons – still wanted to roll up sleeves and compete. In his youth, the young boy with the lionheart who strutted with his chest out through the lower ranks thought the garlands of success were his right. He was better than everyone else, the competition, so why wouldn’t he be conceded the privilege of lofty regard?