Artefacts of the Dead

by Tony Black

  A car’s horn blared.

  The detective engaged the clutch and slowly rolled the vehicle forward. As he got out the car, he resisted the desire to have a low word with the driver of the vehicle behind him – a man in his thirties wearing a Glasgow Rangers top and with a seething, petulant grimace above hands flagging aggressively towards Valentine. He knew the type, identified him straight away as one of the gruff Ayrshire lot – evenly balanced with a chip on each shoulder. They betrayed their true selves with the continually simmering rage that was a hair-trigger for a tirade, or even violence. They were common; the talking heads said their problem was a combination of a drink culture, poverty, a criminal subculture and west-coast genes . . . whatever they were. Valentine knew he had west-coast genes, but he was not one of their stripe: they were the unhappy, the let-down, the dissipated, the trapped, all bitter in the knowledge that their lot was their lot and nothing they did in this life would change it, ever.

  The man still gesticulated; he pointed a finger at Valentine and mouthed words behind the windscreen that he couldn’t hear but could definitely make out. To the others – McAlister and Donnelly, even Rossi – it would have been enough to see a warrant card flashed and a threat to have him locked up in the cells for the night, but Valentine had moved beyond those days. He had reached the stage of opting for the easy path – ignorance. If nothing else, it kept him from unnecessary conflict, and he was all for that.

  On the road out to Maisonhill, the sun’s fading light bounced off the rooftops and clouds began slow white trails across the blue sky. The last dregs of commuter traffic hissed by as Valentine drove, his eyes focussed on the road but his thoughts intent on other matters. Ayr, the town, was dying. What had once been a bustling centre of activity had fallen into decline. Boarded-up shops and crumbling, derelict buildings lined the periphery, their paintwork peeling, windows shuttered, a fresh canvas for graffiti artists. From the Sandgate, at the foot of the High Street, the ruins marched, stopped occasionally by a branded charity chain or a new pound store. There was no inward investment, nothing to restore pride or even alleviate the wounds of recession. Ayr was moribund – an historic township on its knees, coughing and wheezing as it entered its death throes. It would only take one more high-profile store closure – a big name like Marks & Spencer perhaps – to deliver the coup de grâce and see Burns’s Country turned into a ghetto populated by zombified drug addicts and an underclass of the impecunious and hopeless. It was pathetic, in the true sense of the word, thought Valentine; he felt nothing but the deepest pity for Ayr and its inhabitants, and a growing shame to count himself amongst their number.

  The detective massaged the back of his neck as he worked the wheel with the other hand, but the action provided little benefit. Soon the window was wound down, and then to follow it, the radio turned on, then off again.

  ‘Christ al-bloody-mighty . . .’

  He was allowing his thoughts to play tag. And he knew why.

  As Valentine pulled into his driveway, he killed the engine and sat listening to the components cooling beneath the bonnet. He inhaled deep breaths but resisted a glance towards the front window. He became momentarily, dimly aware of a figure in the front room, but he refused to acknowledge it.

  The sound of the seatbelt being pulled into the inertia reel jolted the detective, pressed the fact that he was home – Chloe and Fiona would be in there, and also Clare. He opened the door of the car and eased himself out. It was still warm, perhaps even warmer outside than inside the car. Valentine tugged the knot of his tie free and loosened off the top button of his shirt as he moved to the back door of the vehicle to retrieve his case and folders. The dark patch on the back seat stared out at him as he lifted the items and for a moment it held his attention. He stared at the marked fabric, the blotch of ingrained staining – no scrubbing or chemical wonder-product had been able to shift it. Why not? He knew what it was – where it had come from, the black mark the size of his head he carried everywhere with him now – surely it should have been removable. At least, by this time, shouldn’t it have faded?

  ‘Bob . . . Are you coming in?’ It was Clare.

  ‘Yes, of course. Just picking up a few files.’ He slammed the car door and directed the key ring, which locked the vehicle with one click.

  ‘What are those?’ Her tone was pitched higher.

  As Valentine turned towards the house, he caught his wife’s stare full on. There was no hiding the fact that he was carrying case notes; she recognised the familiar blue files, knew he had been to King Street station. He halted where he stood, brought the folders up to his chest and dipped his chin towards the rim.

  ‘Well . . .’

  He didn’t get any more words out. Clare turned from him. He watched her blonde hair flounce off her shoulders, catching a momentary tail of sunlight, and then she was gone. The front door of his home stood open wide and the long, carpeted corridor lay in darkness, a clear, untrammelled route but not a welcoming one. Valentine’s shoulders tensed. For a moment he stood unmoving, like he had been carved from stone, and then he turned his head towards the sun-warmed street and shook himself.

  Inside the house, Clare sat on one of the kitchen’s bar stools with a long cigarette in her fingers. She seemed content to ignore her husband, staring out into the garden through the open window as he walked in and placed his case and folders on the worktop. He watched her for a moment as she poked the inside of her cheek with the tip of her tongue – her angry gesture – and then he reached out for the cigarette.

  ‘Come on, you don’t need that.’

  Clare recoiled quickly. Her eyes burned like match tips. ‘Just bloody leave it!’

  Valentine watched as his wife jerked away the cigarette and showered the distance between them with a trail of amber sparks from the burning tip.

  ‘OK . . . It’s only you I’m thinking about.’

  She huffed loudly, rolling her eyes towards the ceiling. ‘Is it really?’

  Valentine squinted towards her. It was quite a performance from Clare; he’d been deprived of the petulant turns of late and her sudden return to form was a shock. ‘I don’t get it.’

  She rose. ‘No, you don’t, that’s for sure and certain.’

  Valentine recognised the fact that he had walked into one of Clare’s ambushes now. It didn’t matter what he said, or how he said it, almost certainly it would be the wrong thing. In their battles she had covered the entire house with lethal tripwires and he knew when he had sprung one. He didn’t want to upset Clare either, he was grateful for how she had acted these last few months, but the return to their familiar routine now felt like everything they had been through was for nothing.

  ‘Clare, I have a job to do . . .’

  She bit. ‘Not that job.’ She dangled the cigarette over the blue folders; her voice quivered above the jumble of words. ‘You said after what happened you’d be . . . what was it? Put out to grass!’

  Valentine watched his wife paint on a knowing smile; two sharp arrow-tips appeared either side of her mouth. It was the look she wore when pointing out that she had outsmarted her husband, outmanoeuvred him. It was the glib look of a smart-arse, the kind of expression that, outside of the immediate family, no one would contemplate trying on him.

  ‘I do what I’m told, Clare.’ The reply was weak, and he regretted it the second it came out. What was worse, however, was that it was a blatant lie and he knew that Clare would see that.

  She exhaled a long trail of smoke and started to stub the cigarette in the ashtray. Valentine waited for some kind of rebuttal, but none came, and that was worse. Clare knew when the situation had gone beyond words because the silence said so much more.

  ‘Clare . . .’ As he spoke, the mobile phone in Valentine’s pocket started to ring. He ignored it for a moment. ‘Clare . . .’ His wife started to move away from him as he looked at the caller ID. ‘I’m sorry, I have to get this.’

  Clare steadied herself on the rim of the sink and
looked out towards the garden. She bit down on her lower lip for a moment and then began to speak. ‘I was an idiot to think anything had changed.’

  Valentine watched his wife walk from the kitchen and close the door behind her; it bounced loudly off the jamb and swung open again.

  In a second or two, Chloe’s head popped from the living room. She glanced at the blue folders. ‘Oh, back to work!’

  Valentine gave a weak wave to his daughter, then retrieved the swinging door and enclosed himself in the kitchen. He pressed a green button on his ringing phone and spoke. ‘Hello, boss.’

  ‘Well?’ the chief super’s voice came shrilly down the line.

  ‘White male, middle to upper, with a serious grudge against him.’

  ‘ID?’

  ‘No, not yet anyway . . .’

  She cut in. ‘Why no ID?’

  ‘Well, I’d say it’s in the post . . . Expensive dental that will be somebody’s handiwork.’

  Valentine heard the chief super shuffle the phone into her other hand. A television set was blaring. He smiled to himself as he remembered Jim’s EastEnders remark.

  ‘Have you picked anything else up?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He slapped the back of his neck for effect. ‘Enough fly bites to last me this lifetime.’

  ‘Stick to the case, Bob.’

  ‘I’ll know more tomorrow, when we do the post-mortem.’

  Another interruption. ‘Christ’s sake, why’s that not being done tonight?’

  ‘The usual reasons . . . personnel.’

  ‘Well, put your foot in that pathologist’s bloody arse!’

  ‘It’s not the pathologist, it’s his team . . . They won’t be with us until first thing. After that we’ll be rolling.’

  ‘Is there nothing sticking out?’

  ‘Apart from the dirty great plank, you mean?’ Valentine regretted the incursion into humour: CS Martin didn’t posses a sense of humour.

  ‘I’m glad you seem to be enjoying yourself so much since I’ve brought you back onto the squad, Bob . . . I think you and I should have a little chat before you start enjoying yourself a wee bit too much.’

  Valentine’s facial muscles conspired to form a scowl. ‘Meaning?’

  She snapped, ‘Meaning make your way to my office first light tomorrow morning before you do another bloody thing.’

  ‘But I have the post-mortem first thing . . . in Glasgow.’

  ‘Send Paulo. Be at my desk for nine.’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  He said the words but no one heard them; she had hung up.

  6

  As Valentine walked around the mutilated corpse of the murder victim, he had the strangest feeling that he should be elsewhere. He remembered agreeing to meet the chief super, but the pressing urge to take one last look at the crime scene had supplanted that instruction. There was a heat inside his chest that shouldn’t have been there, a pressure that sent his heart rate racing. For a moment he looked around for somewhere to rest, to take the strain off his body weight, but there was nowhere. The flies had gone now. He didn’t know where, or care. It was dark, too. Night-time.

  Valentine started to run fingers nervously through his hair. He heard his throat wheezing and then his state of self-absorption exploded. ‘Who the hell let the child into the crime scene?’

  The detective felt like steel had been tipped in his spine as he pushed aside the assembled mass of milling bodies. He saw the child, a small girl of maybe five or six years old, in a bright red duffel coat. She was blonde, that pale-to-white colour like Fiona’s and Chloe’s had been, and was dancing around inside the SOCOs’ white tent like it was a kiddies’ playground.

  ‘Paulo, who let the bloody kid in?’

  Valentine felt eyes burning into him; they seemed to think he was the one that had the problem. No one seemed in the least bit bothered about the little girl. It made him wonder if they had been struck blind and dumb; was he alone in sensing the deeply inappropriate nature of the situation? It was hard to imagine a more unsettling scene – and he had seen a dog mauling at the guts of a day-old corpse that was riddled with wounds.

  ‘Get her out of here! Get her away from that body!’

  The child was laughing, smiling. She had been picking daisies and held a bunch of them in her hand. She was a sweet wee thing – a cutie, his wife would say – but she should have been away feeding the ducks or picking out a sweetie for herself; not here, not anywhere near here.

  ‘Hey, hey . . .’ He was being ignored. His indignation lit, his nostrils flared – he expected the reek of the tip’s mouldering refuse, but instead he smelled flowers, daisies. ‘What are you doing here?’

  There were too many people, too many officers and uniform, too many SOCOs. They were all trespassing on his crime scene. He was the officer in charge, but his authority was being ignored. The detective lunged out, reached for the girl that no one else seemed to have even noticed. Valentine was caught by his arms and shoulders; he was held back.

  ‘Get off me . . .’ He started to lash out. ‘Get your bloody hands off me!’

  The girl giggled. She watched the others holding Valentine back as he shouted out. He could still see her; she had bright-blue eyes that burned into him. Was she familiar to him? He didn’t think so, but she seemed to recognise him. It was all a game to her.

  ‘Get off me . . . Get the girl. She’s playing round the corpse.’

  The little girl stood over the murder victim and for a moment Valentine caught her expression change. She looked unhappy now. He knew it was wrong; he didn’t want the girl to see the dead body, the blood. He wanted to pick her up and take her away, back to her parents, but he couldn’t move. His thoughts mashed; ideas of right and wrong collided with a surging, torrential anger as he was held back.

  ‘Get away!’ He lashed out with his arms. He just wanted to help the little girl. ‘Get away! Get away!’

  He was flailing, his heart pounding hard against the inside of his ribcage.

  ‘Bob.’

  Valentine heard his name called and the little girl slipped out of view. He saw her bunch of daisies resting on the corpse’s chest, left there like a memorial to the dead, like the child had completed a bizarre but completely innocent ritual only she understood.

  ‘Bob . . .’

  He recognised the voice now. When he saw Clare’s face, the arms constricting him let go. He pushed forward with the release and then the picture changed.

  ‘Clare . . .’ He was at home, sitting upright in bed.

  ‘Jesus, you were screaming.’

  ‘What?’ He felt lost, even though he knew exactly where he was.

  Clare sat up and turned on the bedside lamp. ‘It must have been a dream.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t a dream . . .’

  She touched his back. ‘You’re absolutely soaking wet.’

  Valentine turned away, draped his legs over the side of the bed and lowered his head into his hands. His hair was stuck to his brow.

  ‘I don’t know what the hell that was, but it wasn’t a dream . . .’

  ‘What was it, then? A nightmare?’

  Valentine turned towards Clare. His mind was still full of the images of the little girl. He knew if he held his eyes tight shut he’d see her again, but he was too scared to do so.

  ‘It wasn’t that either. I was there. I was somewhere else.’

  Clare made a sly smile and squinted at her husband. ‘Get back to sleep, Bob.’

  ‘I’m not kidding you, Clare. There was this girl . . .’

  ‘Oh, yes . . .’

  ‘No, a little girl. Like five or something. She had white hair, like the girls had at that age, and she was . . .’

  Clare started to rub at her bare shoulders. ‘She was what?’

  ‘I – I don’t know . . . Just, she had flowers and was putting them on my murder victim.’

  The mention of the case signalled a shift in Clare’s attentiveness. She turned away from Valentine and reached for t
he lamp. ‘Get some sleep, Bob.’

  As the light went out, Valentine rose from the side of the bed and made his way towards the bathroom. The brightness of the main light hurt his eyes, but in a moment he steadied himself against the cool tiles of the wall and drew deep breaths. His heart was returning to a normal rhythm now. As he opened his eyes he saw himself in the bathroom mirror. His irises were lined in red; dark shadows sat in pockets beneath them. As he removed his sweat-soaked T-shirt, his eyes were drawn towards the thick ridge of scar tissue that sat in the centre of his chest. He never liked to touch the mark – it didn’t feel like a part of him – but he allowed his fingertips to dab at the edges of the fatty tissue that surrounded the scar.

  ‘Oh, Jesus . . .’

  Valentine wondered what was happening to him. He felt like he had been given another chance at life, but he doubted whether he deserved it. Why would he be given another chance at life? What had he done to receive that great gift? He thought about Clare and how she had begged him to leave the force, to take a desk job – administration, pencil-pushing, it didn’t matter. She knew he was lucky to be alive and she didn’t want to take the chance on losing him again.

  Valentine started to run the cold tap and, slowly, to douse the back of his neck with water. The first splash made him shiver, and a few beads escaped down the side of his chest and flanked the scar that kept grabbing his gaze. He didn’t want to look in the mirror, but this alien object that signified a new right to life demanded his attention.

  He picked up the hand towel and dried himself down. As his breathing eased into a slow, steady rhythm, he reached for the light switch and clicked it to off, then he began to move back towards the bedroom and his wife. He knew he needed to attempt some type of explanation, to give Clare some reason as to why he had changed his mind, why he had gone back on everything he had told her he would do.