Artefacts of the Dead

by Tony Black

  The bedroom was in blackness; only the orange fizz of the street lamps burned beyond the strips of blinds. He lowered himself down on the edge of the bed and placed a hand on Clare’s bare back. She murmured for a moment and then patted his side of the bed.

  ‘Clare, I need to talk to you . . .’

  ‘Tomorrow. I need to sleep.’

  ‘It’s important.’

  ‘Can’t it wait?’

  Valentine got into the bed and drew up the duvet. ‘I’m not doing this for me.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Taking on this case . . . I can’t explain it.’

  ‘Well, good. We can talk tomorrow.’

  Valentine reached over to turn on the bedside light; Clare grumbled and sat up.

  ‘Right you have my attention, can we get this over with?’

  ‘About earlier, when you saw the case files, I knew you wouldn’t be pleased.’

  She tutted. ‘And you knew why.’

  ‘Clare, please, I’m trying to explain . . . I feel like I’ve changed, been through some kind of life crisis after . . .’

  ‘It was a crisis all right, you nearly died, Bob! Jesus Christ, you nearly left me a widow and . . .’ She looked away.

  Valentine’s emotional-response signal flared. ‘And who’d have cleared your Visa bills then . . . Was that what you were going to say?’

  He watched his wife raise a hand to her thinned lips. ‘That’s not what I was going to say at all.’

  ‘I’m sorry. That was a low blow.’

  Clare looked towards the ceiling and shook her head. ‘I couldn’t tell you when I last bought a thing.’

  Valentine sighed. ‘I don’t want to bring that up again . . .’ He ran his fingers through his wet hair and turned away from Clare. ‘I’m just not myself at the moment.’

  ‘You’re bloody right you’re not. I don’t understand you any more, I used to think I did. I look at you now and I . . .’

  He interrupted. ‘You just don’t see where I’m coming from. I feel I have this new chance and that I should make a difference. I can’t properly explain it, Clare, I feel like a different man.’

  Clare put her head in her hands. She held herself on the edge of the bed for a moment and then she turned to face her husband. ‘Well, you’re certainly that. You just look through me and the girls now. There was a time when you wouldn’t have put us second best to some vague notion or late-flush of ambition . . .’ She met his gaze for a second but couldn’t hold it. ‘Oh, just forget it. Forget everything.’ Clare reclined in the bed, turned over and switched off the light.

  As the darkness of the room enveloped Valentine, his spirit shrivelled inside him. He thought about reaching out and touching his wife’s bare shoulder, saying sorry again and trying to talk. But he didn’t want to be rebuffed. He lay down on the bed and closed his eyes, but knew sleep was going to be hard to find in his current state of mind.

  7

  Valentine arrived at King Street station before the early shift had sorted itself out. He saw the youngish bloke who sometimes filled in for Jim behind the frosted glass, but he avoided eye contact. The bloke was one of those he didn’t know but who would definitely know him, or of him. It was becoming tiresome being a kent face. Valentine caught the desk sergeant grabbing a sly stare – he likely wondered what he was doing there – but he held himself in check and kept to his early morning rituals of shuffling papers and pinning up rotas.

  On the stairs, Valentine thought about the rest of the murder squad. They would now be heading up the A77 on their way to the morgue in Glasgow – to the dead place. Under normal circumstances, Valentine could take or leave a visit to the morgue but today would have traded places with any one of them. Of course, he didn’t like the accompaniments of the trip – the place seeped into the very fibre of your clothes and hair and colleagues came to sense it on you. A few liked to remark on the observation, but he could never understand the fascination that people who dealt with the dead every day had about an exaggerated storage facility. There were no souls stirring in the air; the dead did not sit up and speak or reveal their secrets.

  In the canteen, Valentine paused with his finger over the button for black coffee, removed it, and selected white tea. If he was being honest about his tastes the caffeine would have been more welcome, but he knew his nerves would soon be tested enough by Chief Superintendent Marion Martin. He took his tea, his case notes and briefcase, and made for the corner of the large, open room. The tea was hot but not scalding. He rested the styrofoam cup on the lip of the folder and watched as his fingers commenced an involuntary tattoo on the tabletop.

  The detective’s synapses were sparking with a familiar preoccupation now: he despised the games people played with their lives – never talking the truth to power – always toeing the line, even if it meant suffering for it. His meeting with Dino would be a farce, he knew that too. It would play to a script because that’s what the world dictated of such scenarios. We were all slaves, and few of us contented; knowing it made him no better than the rest of the world. We all shuffled into the corner when the light of authority shone on us. Just once Valentine wanted to be in an assured position: to be able to speak his mind cleanly and clearly and know that the consequences mattered not an iota. It was all a dream, of course – even those who had the chance to speak up, the retirees and the escapees, they held back for fear of perhaps losing the gold watch and the Fraser’s hamper that the wife was so chuffed with. The exchange that awaited him now would be no different. He was old enough and experienced enough to know that he was more likely to get the outcome he desired by playing dumb. Power liked dumb: it meant pliable and he was all for that – he would be as pliable as putty to get his way.

  ‘Bob . . .’ His name came uttered under breath. As Valentine looked up he saw the chief super stationed at the door with her coat slung over her shoulder, a broad flank and hip pointing in his direction; it was a look Mae West might have worn had she missed her calling and wound up a scrubber of floors.

  ‘Oh, hello.’ He rose from behind the table and collected his possessions. A sliver of grey liquid evacuated from the rim of the white cup as he raised his tea.

  ‘Leave it, Bob, I’ve some good stuff in my office.’ The wink she tailed off her remark with seemed wholly unnecessary to Valentine – unless the intention was to see him fetch up his last meal.

  He smiled – deeply ironically – and followed in the chief super’s wake; she stretched out with a purposeful stride that looked strong enough to rip the carpet from its fixings. Valentine swallowed a threatened laugh that a sudden cartoon image pressed on his mind of her tearing the place apart like a spinning Tasmanian devil. Was she really so macho, he wondered. Did she go home at night to wrestle with her children and blast tirades at the football results on the television? He didn’t know why he was suddenly so concerned with the person beneath the veneer, though he had a sneaking suspicion that it was all part of the same broader reassessment he was making of life. These patinas of familiarity were being excoriated daily.

  ‘Shut the door, Bob,’ said the chief super. She walked over to the window. A jug kettle sat on top of a small filing cabinet. She raised the kettle, shook to test its water content, then pressed down the red button. ‘Coffee or tea?’

  Valentine lowered his briefcase beside the chair in front of the chief super’s desk. ‘Tea’s good for me, thanks.’ He didn’t really want a drink; he wanted the rigmarole over with. He wanted away from the cold, clinical office that didn’t contain a breath of life between its walls. He wanted to stride down to his incident room and get to work on the case – to find out who the poor sod with the expensive dentistry and the large stick up his backside was. But he knew it was never going to be that simple. The chief super wanted to put him through the mill, she wanted to test his mettle – perhaps for no other reason than she could and the simple act of the assessing would, as a direct consequence, assert her authority.

  ‘So how’
s Clare?’ she said. It seemed a standard opener, a starter for ten.

  ‘Fine, all good, thanks.’ His voice sounded like someone else’s to him. His words were of the sort of slippery dinner-party patois that he despised.

  ‘She’ll be glad to have you in one piece, I suppose . . .’

  He smiled, reaching over to collect his cup of tea. She droned on, something about the girls – she didn’t know their names – and how it must have been a terrible shock. She used the words ‘terrible shock’ like their father receiving a cold blade in the heart had been no more than another day at the office.

  ‘Fifty pints of blood . . .’ She jerked herself back in the chair, retrieved the note from the file she was reading. ‘That can’t be right, surely?’

  Valentine worried at the handle of his cup; it was hot, too hot for his fingertips. He placed the cup on the desk as he looked at the chief super. ‘It was fifty, yes.’

  ‘Jesus Christ . . . How many pints are in the human body?’

  ‘I’m not sure . . . Eight, I think.’

  She leaned forward, peering over the bridge of her nose as she spoke. Her voice was a shrill whine that echoed off the walls in ways that suggested she knew how to play the acoustics to their best effect.

  ‘I can’t believe they gave you fifty pints of blood, Bob . . . Fifty! There wouldn’t be any of your own blood left in you after that, then.’

  Valentine scratched behind his ear, shuffled in his seat uncomfortably. He had spent so long reliving the trauma that it had taken concerted effort to shift the images from his mind – but here they were again.

  ‘What there was of my own blood ended up on the operating-room floor.’

  The chief super tipped her head cockily to the side. ‘Must have been black pudding on the menu that night, eh?’

  She began a laugh that mounted a full-scale assault on Valentine’s senses. He watched her meaty shoulders quaking under her already broad shoulder pads and something like pity for her lack of compassion entered his consciousness. He wanted to tell her that he had been stabbed in the heart, in the line of duty; it was not any source of amusement to him or his family. The pain of recall was nothing compared to the event, yet the prolonged agonies of its aftermath – the tears he had watched his wife and girls shed – were something he would never be greeting in even the remotest neighbourhood of laughter.

  She continued to read from the notes: ‘Left ventricle stab wound from below, through diaphragm. Angiography on arrival at A&E, followed by thoracotomy . . . Oh my God, this is just horrific reading, Bob . . . Thick-walled ventricle contracted and closed the hole. . . . Heart-lung bypass for repair . . .’

  She put down the notes and made an apse of her fingers. Had she somehow imagined that reading the medical notes embayed her with the honorific of doctor? The sudden shift in her sense of self-import suggested it. If she had been wearing glasses, thought Valentine, she would have removed them for effect.

  ‘And how are you now?’

  It took all Valentine’s girded composure to resist firing a burst of mocking laughter in her face. The detective raised his open palms, weighed the air. His thoughts had been scattered like the contents of an upturned bin. ‘Right as rain.’

  ‘Come on, don’t play the bullshitter with me. You took a knife in the heart, on the job . . . You officially died, at least twice from what I can make out.’

  ‘I’m here now.’

  She picked up her cup of tea and sipped at it. The liquid vanished like rainwater in a gurgling gutter. The taste didn’t seem to agree with her; she replaced the cup on the desk.

  ‘I can see that. What I’m getting at is, how much of the old Bob have I got here in front of me?’

  He cut in. ‘And how much was lost?’ He leaned forward, balancing the point of his index finger on the rim of her desk. ‘And how much of the old Bob was left on the operating table, is that what you’re getting at? None. Let me tell you that for once and for all. None. I am here in one piece and raring to go.’

  The chief super ran her tongue over the front of her teeth. Thoughts were queuing behind her green eyes. Valentine read the thoughts as easily as if they had been displayed in a PowerPoint presentation. She was going by the book, making sure she had done her due diligence. If there had been any other option available to her then he would still be at Tulliallan teaching new recruits how to lace their shoes and she wouldn’t be worrying about the possibility of drafting in officers from another force to work her patch.

  She rubbed at the bridge of her nose and slowly shook her head from side to side as she returned to the file in front of her. ‘It says here you had some psychotherapy.’

  ‘I was stabbed in the heart; they’re not going to let me back on the force without looking at my head.’

  The chief super’s cheeks flushed; they looked like plumped cushions as she exhaled a long, distilled breath. ‘It might be an idea to keep the therapy up for your return to active duty.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s necessary.’

  ‘I didn’t ask if you thought it was, Bob . . . I’m telling you it’s coming and you’re going to jump at it with both hands if you want to handle this investigation.’

  Valentine reclined in his chair. There was a reply on his lips, but he swallowed it.

  ‘Good,’ said the chief super. ‘We’ll see how you go with this. Any signs of stress, I want to know about it, do you hear me?’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  She closed the folder, returned it to the inside drawer on her desk and flagged Valentine towards the door.

  ‘Get yourself into the incident room and brief your team.’

  ‘Most of them are at the post-mortem this morning, but I’ll need to brief the others . . . and the press office.’

  She blinked her eyes towards the ceiling tiles. ‘Oh God, yes. I do not want to have the media jumping up and down about this today. Give them nothing . . . no, less than nothing.’

  ‘That’s all we have at present.’

  Valentine reached out for the door handle, and as he grabbed it the chief super called out.

  ‘Oh, Bob, what did he get for the stabbing . . . ? Young Darren Hainey, wasn’t it . . .’

  ‘What do you think he got . . . ? A slap on the wrist with a feather.’

  8

  Detective Inspector Bob Valentine’s jaw tightened as he walked from the chief super’s office; his teeth would be grinding next. He knew there were good reasons for him not to play up the emotions he was feeling – the strain it placed on his heart, that hard-pressed, overused and badly damaged muscle, was one good reason – but he also knew he had never been very good at containing his anger. It was as if there was nowhere for it to go; once created, the anger had to find an outlet, like the letting of a valve on the side of a dam – you didn’t turn the handle and expect to keep your shoes dry. He was not an angry man, he knew that much about himself; he had once been called proud and didn’t understand what was meant by that. He was proud of his job, his position, that was a fact, and when he examined his inner workings it was always this fact that seemed to be beneath most of his problems. But Valentine was getting older now and his physical diminution was a consideration he had to examine more closely. Dealing with Chief Superintendent Marion Martin suddenly felt like an unnecessary and unwelcome weight to add to the load he was pushing uphill. Throwing him under the watch of a psychotherapist was a low blow, though; anyone in his position would have objected to that, he told himself.

  Valentine halted mid-stride and checked his watch, tapped the face. As he tried to clear his thoughts and assess what he needed to do – more than bemoan his boss – he thinned his eyes into tiny slits. One of the civilian staff passed by and glanced his way; he felt his skin prickling as he made a poor attempt at a smile. He gripped tight to the handle of his briefcase and walked on. The diversion of the everyday seemed to free him from the tangle of angry thorns he’d taken from Martin’s office, but he knew there were still one or two sticking
in him. It had not been a good start to his return to active policing.

  The incident room was bare. Valentine strolled between the rows of tables towards the broad window that looked out onto the town of Ayr, collecting the view like a postcard. Amethyst clouds sat high above the rooftops, and a white chalk line from a passing aeroplane dissected the cumulus into two distinct camps: those drifting to and those drifting from the horizon. The detective felt a sickening turn of his guts as he followed the pull of familiar sights: Wallace Tower was where he remembered it, the vast carbuncle that was the multistorey car park still stuck out and the King Street bus stop was stacked full of dafties and druggies from the nearby flats. He felt like he had never been away.

  He didn’t know how long he’d been staring out the window, hands in pockets, just contemplating the day and his duties when the heavy doors clattered off the top wall and two female PCs giggled their way into view. He didn’t like the peace of his incident room being disturbed at the best of times, but today was not the day to test his better nature.

  The two young officers seemed wholly unaware of his presence at the other end of the room. Valentine felt invisible as he watched them dislodging photographs from the blue folders in their arms. They laid the pictures out – as they’d obviously been told to do by the SOCOs – but something about the manner in which they went about the duty sent the red mist swirling inside Valentine’s mind once more. He walked slowly over to the young girls; neither noticed him, and that surprised him because he felt like there was steam emitting from his ears and nostrils.

  ‘Big Rab knows what you’re like after that night in the Treehouse,’ said the taller of the two. She was clearly the more recessive, because the other one had a sharper line in riposte.

  ‘Bugger off . . . That’s the last time I take you howking for men!’