Artefacts of the Dead

by Tony Black

  Valentine smirked, inwardly at first, and then gave a replete grin. Had he really once been so stupid? So naive? So utterly dispossessed of any notion of reality, the world and its workings and just how insignificant his role in it mattered? Yes, he conceded. He had been that stupid, once, and it had taken twenty more years of staring at the most blatant of life’s facts to realise it.

  He held up the mobile phone, looked at the screen for the count of a few stilled breaths and then dialled Chief Superintendent Martin’s number.

  The sound of ringing filled the line.

  A brusque voice. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Boss, it’s Bob . . .’

  A pause entered their exchange; he heard movement, the sound of clothes rustling.

  ‘I called you nearly an hour ago, what the hell have you been doing down there . . . ? Not another bloody happy hour at the Cooper Lounge?’

  Valentine held his voice in check; his tone came low and flat. ‘I think that place only opens on a Sunday . . .’

  She bit, ‘Never mind that . . . I need you back at the station. How quickly can you get here?’

  Valentine’s pulse quickened. ‘The station . . . King Street?’

  ‘I don’t think they’ve moved it.’

  He lowered himself onto the bench. He was sitting on his sports coat, but he didn’t care. ‘Is there something I should know about?’

  The chief super’s voice pitched up an octave. ‘I have Bryce, McVeigh and Collins either on annual leave or tied up on other cases, so you are back in business as of today. Unless you’re going to tell me you’re unfit or some such crap.’

  Valentine sensed a smirk creeping up the side of his face. It lingered there for a moment – exactly the time it took him to realise that if he was returning to the fray it was not for a good reason.

  ‘What’s the SP?’

  A sigh. The sound of a telephone receiver being shifted between hands. ‘We have a body in the tip . . . good enough for you?’

  Valentine’s mouth dried over, the roof first but then his tongue followed as he widened his jaws. ‘The tip?’

  ‘Battered into next week, and just to put a cherry on top, impaled on a sharp bit of 4x2 . . . up the arse.’

  ‘That’s horrific.’

  ‘If you wanted candy floss every day, Bob, you should have joined the bloody circus. Can I see you back here before close of play?’

  His reply was on his lips before he realised the chief super had hung up.

  ‘Yes, of course . . .’

  2

  The tiled floor beneath his bare feet began to feel cold after a few moments, so DI Bob Valentine started to move his toes. A tingling sensation – like low-wattage electricity – worked its way along the arch of his foot and buried itself into the thick of the heel. Had he missed something? The debates about his fitness to return to active policing seemed to have been instantly swept aside. For so long now he had held the quandary in the back of his mind, removed it to the front once in a while to examine the finer points of both sides of the argument; it had become a practised undertaking. The neural path was a deep one.

  ‘Never . . .’

  He said the word, but it didn’t sound like his voice. For a moment he stared at the cold feet below him, they were getting colder now. That meant something: he needed to move.

  Valentine raised himself from the bench. He was still holding his mobile and he placed it on the brim of the locker shelf in front of him. As he turned, he noticed the crumpled mass of his sports coat and grimaced; it was then that he caught sight of his reflection in the tall, floor-to-ceiling mirror. He saw his face first, the dark hair above his temples – still thick, that was something to hold on to – and the smooth but clean-lined block of forehead. The tight grimace of his mouth subsided as he dropped his gaze onto, first, his neck and then to the expanse of white that sat between his shoulders. He had a broad chest, a barrel some would have called it; the covering of skin was almost hairless, save one or two stray insect-legs that sprouted around his nipples and at prominent points along the line his clavicle: his chest had always looked that way, except for the thick red-brown line that ran vertically through the centre of the sternum with an undoubted surgical precision; this was a recent addition.

  Valentine let the lids of his eyes hang heavy as he tipped back his head slightly. It was a look some would have reserved for staring into the middle distance, or further yet, but the DI’s focus was squarely on the ridge of unwelcome flesh that sat as thick as his index finger. The geometric line was more than a scar; the thinner white markings where the stitching had tightened the invasive hole could be called a scar. This was something more. A scar suggested an injury, a trauma perhaps, but the object of Valentine’s gaze – and its location – proclaimed here was the point of a violent incursion, a beacon blazing the message that this was a man who was lucky to be alive.

  A clamour of voices broke from the shower cubicles and a group of recruits, white towels circling their waists, burst into view. Valentine drew back his shoulders and stood before them for a moment.

  ‘Sir . . .’ said the first to see him.

  He nodded back.

  ‘Sir,’ the others followed.

  The DI reached for his grey sports coat and started to shake it out; he had creased it when he sat down, but the call had taken him by surprise. He was still in a state of disbelief, his thoughts swaying between his readiness to return to the station and the particulars of the murder that Marion Martin had relayed to him.

  He smirked to himself. They called her Dino, after her namesake, but also because it was a dog’s name, and she was of the ilk that station smart-arses loved to ridicule by appointing them a derogatory moniker. As he amused himself, he glanced at the mirror – one of the recruits was nudging the other, drawing a line down the centre of his chest with the tip of his finger. Valentine didn’t need to second-guess what was passing between them.

  ‘Want a better view, lads?’ He turned and put his hand on his hips.

  The recruits looked away; as the DI eyed them fully now he saw they were only young lads. Two big shots – chancers – and an ‘aye man’ – the type that’s there to nod and gravely intone ‘aye, aye’ while the others boasted and prattled about themselves.

  ‘No, I was just . . .’ said the nudging recruit.

  ‘I saw you.’ Valentine stepped forward. ‘You were drawing attention to this . . .’ he pointed at the thick line of darkened flesh in the centre of his chest.

  The recruits looked away. The air in the changing rooms seemed to have altered. If there had been a pitch of bravado, it had been flattened by the steamroller Valentine was now driving over their egos.

  ‘Don’t for a second think this is some badge of honour.’

  ‘No, sir.’ The voices were weak, meek. The three lads stared at the water dripping from them as it fell to the tiled floor beneath their bare feet.

  Valentine raised his voice. ‘Look at this . . .’ – he tapped his chest – ‘I’m not proud of it.’ He raised his voice, flitted looks between the three. When he felt sure he had their full attention, he spoke up again. ‘When I was first in uniform, an old sergeant of mine said your tongue’s more useful than your baton . . . Just you remember that.’

  The DI kept a firm stare on them for a moment longer and then returned to his locker and began the slow ritual of dressing himself. He never felt comfortable bawling out those beneath him in rank, but he was an experienced enough police officer to know when a mind was receptive to a lesson that might make the job a little easier.

  On his way out, the ‘aye man’ turned his head away but the two chancers painted thin smiles on their faces and nodded like they had somehow all now become friends. Valentine looked through them and continued to the door as if he had never spoken a word.

  In the car park the sun was high in the sky, painting a hazy red wash over the day. The DI’s cheeks flushed as he walked into the heat, and then he cut his stride as the unusually clear a
nd bright light silhouetted the frame of a black dog. The animal stood statue-still, its ears pinned up with angular precision, obviously perfected for the earnest task it had currently set itself. Valentine was gripped by the beast – he had never seen a stray hereabouts – and then suddenly it bolted. The dog crossed the grass at speed, slowed only by the paving flags it had to cross before jinxing round the wall and out of sight. Valentine wondered what strange secret of nature the animal had been privy to. He found himself looking around, trying to discern a clue as to what the dog knew, and then he shook himself and headed for the car. He had been thinking far too much about that sort of thing lately, he told himself. ‘Pack it in, Bob,’ he muttered as he pointed the key in the direction of the Vectra.

  As he started the engine his old preoccupation returned, and he tried to douse it with logic: he was entering into a murder investigation. He needed his attention to be on that, not the events of these last few months, not his self-doubts.

  ‘Dogs in the street . . .’ he told himself. ‘What next?’

  As he engaged the clutch and started out of the car park, he turned his attention to the words the chief super had uttered: ‘You’re back in business.’

  There was no denying the fact that he felt good about that. He needed to get back to what he was best at. He was a murder-squad detective and nothing that had happened changed that.

  ‘No Bryce, McVeigh or Collins, eh . . .’ He let his thoughts turn to words as he drove back to Ayr. ‘King Street must be like the bloody Mary Celeste.’

  The steering wheel was still warm after sitting in the glare of the sun; he gripped lightly as he spun the wheel through his palms. It was good to be driving back to the station, to be back on the proper force – not messing around with wet-behind-the-ears recruits and has-beens. The likes of Bryce would be falling over themselves to get a murder case like this, so why was he filled with apprehension? He was going back to the place he knew best – the sharp end. The thought made his throat constrict slightly, but he brushed it aside; there really was no place for doubts now.

  3

  The road into Ayr was tightly packed with cars. It was that time of the evening, thought Valentine, but then he remembered when the rush hour in town had lasted only ten minutes. He had left the A77 to take the arterial road towards the airport and, after travelling only three car lengths, found his vehicle hemmed in by open fields on one side, all the way to the town of Troon, and by runways on the other, reaching to the outskirts of the village of Mossblown. Ayrshire was a collection of small villages interspersed with fertile farmland, the produce of which was famed the world over. Beef, potatoes, dairy: the region served our tables well. Industry was less prevalent now: a lone paper mill, a shoe factory and some light engineering works were all that remained of a once bustling ‘Silicone Glen’, and mines with a hundred years of coal. You couldn’t look back, Valentine knew that; the district he had grown up in was gone. He tried to imagine how it might feel to be a school-leaver now and have his expectation of life reduced to a supermarket job or a seat amongst the battery hens in a call centre’s serried ranks. It was no life for a man, but then it had not been a man’s world for a long time. Was that such a bad thing? He doubted it, but at the same time felt a drifting, deepening nostalgia for a lost era when he knew his place and felt comfortable there.

  The tailback on the road told him he was not getting to King Street station in time to meet with Chief Superintendent Marion Martin. She wouldn’t be pleased, but he held to the knowledge that she would have no choice: experienced staff were a luxury in short supply. The journey from Tulliallan had given the DI time to think, to take in the news that he was an investigating officer once again. It had also allowed him to regain perspective; he had no room for self-doubt in a murder investigation. He was either on his game – one hundred per cent – or he was assuredly off it. The victim deserved as much. Throughout the length of his time on the force, the ability to apply himself fully had never before been an issue; it was what he was there for. Valentine had had cause to question his choices, from time to time, but he had never doubted his duty. His father – a miner who had channelled his considerable vehemence into deterring him from joining the police – had taught him that duty was everything. It was never so much expressed as shown. The Calvinist dirge sang to him still.

  The queue of cars nudged ahead a few inches and Valentine released the clutch; the tyres almost completed a full revolution before the brake went on again. The slow, jerky progress persisted all the way to the Heathfield Road traffic lights, which showed red just to affirm their role in the road’s hesitant drama. As he was stopped again, Valentine found himself drawn to a black limousine. It was a long, angular Mercedes driven by a man in a dark coat and tie. The driver possessed the time-worn mournfulness of an undertaker. His hands fed the steering wheel slowly, carefully. His eyes shifted almost imperceptibly as he gauged the camber of the road on the turn. There was something about the way the man negotiated his movements – the practised reverence for the cargo of a single pine box behind him – that made Valentine’s nerves tense. He didn’t know how many people he had known who were now dead; he had lost count of the corpses he had seen – cadavers on mortuary slabs had long since ceased to be anything more than meat to him – but the image before him of a slow-moving hearse jolted a new impulse.

  ‘Poor bastard.’ He ran the tips of his fingers over his lips. He wanted to take back the words: the dead deserved more reverence. But where had this new set of mores arisen from? They were inside him, he felt them, but he had never before been struck by such an intense shift in his own make-up; the change had sneaked up on him, caught him unawares.

  A car’s horn sounded; Valentine shook himself into action and turned onto Heathfield Road. The wheel was slippy in his hands now; he wiped a palm on his trouser-front, then repeated the action for the other hand. He was past the hospital and at the next set of lights before his thought-patterns turned inside the kaleidoscope his mind had become. It was a shape he recognised, like one from the Rorschach ink-blot test that the force psychologist had presented him with not so long ago. The fact that he identified the shape – where his mind had led him – was not a solution, however; it was more like another problem to add to the growing list that now worried him.

  Valentine made a reach for his mobile phone and inserted it in the hands-free dock. It was an action designed to halt the runaway train of his thoughts. As the phone rang he made narrow apertures of his eyes in an effort to firm his concentration. He counted the drill of the line as the sun’s waxy sheen painted a yellow reflection on the tarmac of the road; the call was answered on the fourth chime.

  ‘King Street . . .’ It was Jim Prentice, the desk sergeant. Valentine recognised the voice at once.

  ‘Hello, Jim, son . . . How’s tricks?’

  ‘Oh, it’s yourself . . . To what do we owe the pleasure?’

  The DI smirked into the dash. ‘Later, Jim . . . Tell me who Dino’s got down at the tip site.’

  A gruff clearing of the throat echoed down the line. ‘The tip, oh Christ, that was some caper. Got the fellow on a plank, I hear, up the bloody arse as well.’

  Valentine hoped the station foyer was empty. He grimaced uncomfortably as he replied, ‘Aye, Jim, I’ve heard the details . . . Who’s desking the bag-ups?’

  ‘Hang on . . . What do you want that for?’

  The car ahead started to move again. Valentine engaged the clutch, then the gears. ‘Look, Jim, sorry pal, I thought I was talking to the desk sergeant. If they’ve shunted you up to divvy commander in the time I’ve been away, I’m very sorry.’

  ‘Aye, very good . . . cheeky bloody swine!’ An audible smile crept into his voice. ‘I was only asking.’

  ‘It’s my case, Jim. Dino gave me it today, so if you can tell me who’s been chalking up the scores so far, I’d appreciate it.’

  Jim sighed, and the sound of a mouse clicking passed down the line. ‘Looks like Big Paulo’
s there just now . . . Christ, he’ll not be selling many ice creams on the tip!’

  Chris Rossi was an Italian-Scot who had been fortunate, in Valentine’s opinion, to have reached the rank of detective sergeant. He was not the only one on the force with that opinion, but the DS seemed to possess an extra layer of skin that helped him retard the endless jokes that had fallen under the politically correct brigade’s radar; being Italian, it appeared, was fair game.

  Valentine knew better than to bite. ‘Is he on his own?’

  ‘No, no . . . he’s got three million flies with him.’ The desk sergeant found himself hilarious. ‘Jesus, a murder on the tip, eh? You’ve got to wonder about some folk.’

  Valentine nodded sagely. ‘What about herself, is she off?’

  ‘Aye, oh aye . . . she’ll no miss EastEnders, Bob!’

  The traffic suddenly opened; a full lane had been freed up in the wake of a bus moving off. Valentine found himself racing through the gears on the way to the crime scene.

  ‘Right, Jim, I’ll catch you tomorrow morning . . . If Dino asks, I left a message for her an hour ago.’

  ‘You bloody chancer!’

  He hung up.

  The entrance to Old Farm Road had been blocked off by two patrol cars, and uniform were already there behind a strip of blue and white tape that had twisted into a thin strand of rope with the wind. There were children patrolling the bournes of the cordon on bicycles and a scattering of women stood, backs on walls, arms folded. They were all blethering, passing comment on the goings-on. Valentine knew that if the murder hadn’t already made the television news, it would be blazoned in headlines across the morning papers. The gravity of the event of murder was never wasted on him, but a bolt twisting in his gut told him this one was going to test him – and everyone – in ways that they had never been tested before.

  The DI wound down his window and nodded to the uniform at the roadside. The PC seemed to do a double take when he caught sight of Valentine, like he was the first to greet Lazarus of Bethany. ‘Sir . . .’ He gulped the word, then steadied himself. ‘I wasn’t expecting . . .’