Artefacts of the Dead

by Tony Black

  Valentine managed to bring himself within their ambit without either of them noticing him. He raised himself on his toes for a moment or two, scanning the pictures of the crime scene – close-ups of the victim’s facial contusions and wider shots taking in the sweep of the landfill site. They were colour photographs, they spared no detail and yet their content had failed to derail the women’s pub chatter. There was a time and a place for everything, and Valentine knew the time had come for the girls to meet their new boss.

  He folded his arms and made a deeply guttural noise that might have been taken for throat clearing by an imbecile, but to anyone with a modicum of intelligence it yelled trouble.

  ‘Oh.’ The taller of the two spoke first; she had the decency to appear embarrassed.

  The other officer fronted it out, painting a wide smile on her face and presenting an open hand to shake. ‘Hello, sir, I’m Kirsty Duchar.’

  Valentine kept his eyes on the PC, then lowered his gaze towards her hand and spoke. ‘Do you believe in miracles?’

  The girl’s smile faltered, slackened a little. She kept her hand out, directed towards the detective, but a few seconds more and she would be in the avenue of looking very silly.

  ‘Winged horses . . . angels . . . alien intervention in human affairs?’ said Valentine.

  The smile dropped off her face completely. ‘I–I . . .’ the proffered hand began to tremble a little. Her head stayed front, but her gaze lunged towards her friend as if she was begging for help.

  Valentine kept still; his voice was low and calm but backed with a confidence that boomed like a marching band. ‘Because you’ve as much chance of seeing any of those in here as me remembering your name, love. By the end of today this room will be chock-full of uniforms like yours, and if we’re here next week you can think of another number and double it.’

  He unfolded his arms, placed one hand in his pocket and with his other he gently lowered the PC’s outstretched arm. ‘I’ll call you “love” or “dear” if I’m in good fettle . . .’ He paused and glanced at the other girl – she had her gaze fixed firmly on her shoes. ‘If I’m not in good fettle I’ll call you what I bloody well like and you can bet that’ll not be something you’d like to repeat to your granny.’

  He raised his head, but kept his steely gaze on the pair of them. He appraised them for what they were – a pair of daft lassies. He had been young and daft himself, it wasn’t a crime, but this was a police force and he was conducting a murder investigation. There were far too many new recruits who saw the job as a stepping stone to middle management; they spent a few years on the force to make their CVs look interesting. Valentine had nothing against people bettering themselves, he had nothing against ambition, but he had everything against wet-nursing other people’s children through the adult world he lived in. The job required more diligence, more respect, and if that wasn’t made clear from the outset then some painful shocks were likely to be had along the road.

  ‘I’m a moody bastard, in case you hadn’t guessed,’ he said. ‘And the mood between me calling you “love” and calling you out is me pointing to the coffee machine and expecting you to read my mind.’

  He pointed to the coffee machine.

  The officers turned away and started to disassemble the filter from the coffee jug.

  ‘Milk, one sugar,’ said Valentine.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  As he walked around the table the detective ignored the flurry of activity, but was grateful for the lack of bawdy conversation. He’d set the tone; he knew they’d call him a bastard for it, but they’d think twice about trivialising his investigation. If they had any nous, he thought, they might even think about what they were there for in the first place.

  Valentine leafed through the photographs from the crime scene. The first one to strike him was of the victim’s face – the expression he wore looked different from how the detective remembered him. It was strange, he seemed almost contented, but it was the camera playing tricks. The next picture was a close-up of the main entry wound – it would take a perverse mind to be contented by a wooden spike inserted where the sun didn’t shine, he thought.

  ‘Jesus Christ.’ He took the pictures and started to tack them to the noticeboard.

  ‘Your coffee, sir.’

  ‘Put it on the table.’

  The girl retreated, looked as deferential as a punkah wallah. The image poked at Valentine for a moment, but there was no retreating from his earlier stance now; that would merely make a mockery of him and what he had said. He raised the cup of coffee and placed it to his lips; it was warm and welcome.

  DC McAlister was the first of the officers to show, sauntering through the door and nodding to Valentine. ‘Morning, sir.’ He moved towards the table and picked up a paper cup. ‘Coffee, nice one.’

  Valentine turned back to the board and started to loosen off his collar. ‘What are your thoughts today, Ally?’

  The DC laughed. ‘Oh, no . . . Caught me with that already. Not making any guesses.’

  Valentine smirked. ‘How’s the sweep-up going?’

  ‘They got the lion’s share of the tip bagged last night, take a wee while for them to sift through it . . . You know Dino’s going to do her nut when she hears about that.’

  ‘Leave her to me.’ Valentine lowered his cup. ‘I’m the one calling the shots. How many uniforms have you got sifting through the rubbish?’

  ‘Plenty, about twenty at least.’

  ‘Double it.’

  ‘What, sir?’

  The DI tilted his head towards McAlister. ‘You’re not going to make me ask you twice, are you?’

  ‘No, sir.’ He placed the paper cup on the table and reached for the telephone. As he spoke into the receiver, Valentine returned to the folder containing the photographs and looked for the accompanying paperwork.

  There was a list of items that the SOCOs’ photographer had seen fit to draw attention to: scrapes on the wall of the tip; red markings that may have been blood on a sheet of corrugated iron; a fresh splinter of wood that had detached from the wooden stake. He matched the list to the pictures and tacked them to the wall.

  McAlister raised the paper cup to his lips and nodded approvingly. ‘That blood splatter’s in for testing.’

  ‘Know it’s blood, do you?’

  ‘Looks like it.’ He took another swig from the coffee cup, then altered his voice to a more matter-of-fact tone. ‘Right, that’s the Stigs’ Department doubled.’

  Valentine smirked. ‘Tell me about the door-to-door last night.’

  McAlister sighed. ‘Well, it didn’t turn up much. There was a white van in the locus around 9 p.m. and . . .’ He put down his cup again and removed a spiral-bound notepad from his jacket pocket. ‘Yeah, around 9 p.m. and it was seen again about 9.30-ish. It could have been a delivery – y’know, no one in and he’s leaving it with a neighbour.’

  Valentine scrunched his brows. ‘At 9 p.m. . . . working late for a delivery man. Did anyone get a number plate?’

  McAlister shook his head.

  ‘Nobody ever does,’ said Valentine. ‘Right. Check it out, check if anyone on the street got anything delivered, or a tradesman called between 9 and 9.30. You know the drill.’

  ‘Way ahead of you, sir. Got uniform on that this morning. Got the whole area gridded off and being checked.’

  ‘Good.’ Valentine knew they were searching for the slightest lead, anything. A chance encounter, a strange-looking manoeuvre in the street, just something that stuck out as unusual and could be examined more closely. This was the vital time: the chances of solving the case depended on the information that came in during the first forty-eight hours. After that, clues withered, got washed away, and singularly human traits like memory and waning interest came into play.

  Valentine and McAlister were returning to the folders when there was a thud on the swing doors of the incident room and a rush of movement sent a gale to upend the paperwork.

  ‘Do you wa
nt the good news or the bad?’ It was the chief super, marching towards them as the doors passed each other in an out-of-sync motion that caused a chain of jarring, clattering collisions.

  Valentine sensed McAlister turning towards him, but he looked away at the quick-stepping chief super.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he said.

  ‘ID on your corpse from the tip.’ She spat the information in a staccato burst. ‘Oh, and you’ll love this as well . . . he’s a banker wanker!’

  Valentine let himself pause for breath, for a moment to digest the sudden turn of events. As he watched the chief super draw up to within inches of his stance, he became aware of her heady perfume. He didn’t like the scent, it was overpowering. ‘And the bad news?’

  She reached out and flicked Valentine’s tie. ‘You’ll need to smarten yourself up . . . The news hounds are on the sniff.’

  9

  It was one of those strange, seemingly disconnected groupings that the human mind made. Since the winter months – these two years past – Valentine had known his home in Ayr’s Maisonhill needed a new boiler. It wasn’t a consideration, something he just fancied: it was a necessity. The boiler broke down, repeatedly. In the summer months it wasn’t too much trouble, but in the winter it was a disaster. He recalled the first time that it had broken down he had received a quote of several thousand pounds to replace it and he’d decided to delay. It wasn’t that he couldn’t afford the outlay, as such; it was about choice. He chose to let the girls go on their school holidays instead, and he chose to pay off Clare’s store cards and spiralling Visa debts. It was about this time, he recalled, watching a banker on Newsnight trying to justify his CEO’s £20 million pay packet while at once handing redundancy notices to ten thousand office staff. The hypocrisy struck him as breathtaking, yet to the banker it was all in a day’s work.

  Valentine felt the same anger surge in him again now – but it seemed to be suffused with a stronger charge. He knew he was balancing his lot against that of others, and that was never a wise move: there were always better and worse off; the process of comparison only made you bitter or egotistical. He could see, however, he envied no one. It was one particular issue that galled him: what was ‘all in a day’s work’ for that banker? He conceded he didn’t know, but he doubted it came close to wrestling with junkies, delivering late-night death knocks, retrieving decapitated heads from bramble-strewn side roads (as he had done), or being knifed in the heart by a little scrote who wanted to make a name for himself.

  It irritated Valentine that he had to postpone a replacement boiler for his home while earning his keep in an honest and honourable fashion. It gored him deeper that there were others who needed to place no consideration on their spending while at the same time foreclosing on the livelihoods of thousands. As he rolled over these thoughts, the detective had an urge to laugh out. He resisted, but only because he knew the joke was on him. He was bemused by his repeated indignation at the world’s injustice.

  ‘When was it never thus?’ he said.

  ‘What’s that, sir?’ DC McAlister glanced over from the driver’s side of the car.

  ‘Nothing . . . Just thinking aloud.’ Valentine closed the blue folder that was sitting on his knee and rested his elbow on the window’s edge. The road out to Alloway was quiet, only the odd 4x4 on the way back from the school run. He remembered when the girls were younger, how he would catch them counting the Ayr number plates whenever they were on the road out to Alloway. The scenery certainly changed the closer you got to the big houses.

  ‘Did you catch the look on Dino’s face when she came in with the news . . . ? Thought she’d nabbed a string of sausages.’

  Valentine removed his face from the breeze blowing in from the window. Outside, the sun was a dull copper penny being bullied from the sky by bulky rain clouds. ‘That’ll be short-lived, knowing her.’

  McAlister stole a glance at the DI. ‘Yeah, she’s rarely pleased for long.’

  ‘I mean if you think this is going to be an open-and-shut case, you’re deluded. It’s never simple where money’s involved.’

  McAlister rounded the bend at Alloway Church and depressed the clutch as he took a lower gear. ‘At least we have an ID.’

  Valentine sneered over the brim of his nose. ‘We’ve a report of a missing person who fits the bill – let’s wait and see if the family formally identify him.’

  McAlister over-revved the engine and then managed to grind the gears; he was shamed enough to look embarrassed. ‘Sorry, boss . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, I think we’ve already drawn enough attention to ourselves driving a mere Ford around here.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s Beemer country.’

  The officers drove past the small, thatched cottage that had once been the home of the poet Robert Burns and had since been transformed into a tourist attraction. The stone walls were painted white and a large plaque sat above the door. To the rear was a decorative garden and a large gift shop. A car park sat to the side, where touring coaches dislodged day-trippers close to a kiosk with the price of entry on a turnstile.

  ‘You should know there’s money in muck, Ally.’

  ‘Yeah, well, we see enough of it . . . Muck, that is.’

  ‘Not the money, that’s for sure; look at the size of these houses.’

  The normal procedure of planning regulations seemed to have been abandoned, with red-brick mansions sitting next to slope-roofed nods to modernism. Valentine knew he was entering another world to the one he inhabited, and the discomfort he carried in his gut about the case started to make itself known again. He rolled up the window and returned to the blue folder to read the notes that had been hurriedly printed off before he left the station. If this was their victim, then he was called James Urquhart and had been a former head of a stockbroker’s that had been bought out by the Bank of Scotland before the financial crash of 2008. He hadn’t hung about to get cosy with the new company but had opted for early retirement. The notes didn’t say much more, but the grainy photograph that had been taken from the Internet was a definite likeness for the man Valentine had seen at the tip with a spike in him.

  The car started to decelerate as they turned into Monument Road.

  ‘Right, I think this is us, sir.’

  The driveway was gated, and as the car slowed to a halt McAlister leaned out from his window to press the intercom button – but the gates were already in motion.

  ‘Bingo, we’re in,’ he said.

  The car’s tyres scrunched over the gravel as the pair rolled up the long drive towards the mansion house.

  ‘Looks like they gave him a hefty payout,’ said Valentine.

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘Urquhart was the boss of a stockbroker’s that was bought out three months before the crash.’

  ‘Lucky timing.’

  ‘Yeah, very.’

  As they reached the end of the driveway, a youth in jeans and a T-shirt waved them to a side entrance. The pair parked up behind a Range Rover that looked to have been abandoned after braking heavily in the loose chippings.

  Valentine was first from the police vehicle; he strode round the front of the car and nodded to the young man. The detective watched the youth dig his hands into his pockets and raise his shoulders awkwardly. He didn’t make eye contact, but Valentine was close enough to see the pitted declivities that bordered his hairline in a sad echo of once-rampant acne.

  ‘Hello, I’m Detective Inspector Bob Valentine and this is my colleague Detective Constable McAlister.’

  The pair were greeted with a nod but no introduction.

  Valentine resisted the usual politesse in favour of a more direct approach. ‘And you would be?’

  ‘Adrian.’ He removed his hands from his pockets and brought them together across his chest, pressing a thumb into the flat of his palm.

  ‘Urquhart?’

  He nodded. ‘My mum’s inside.’

  Valentine raised a hand towards the door and started
to walk. The wind was picking up and thin, dark rain clouds scythed the sky. The home was airy; some muddy footprints that looked like they had come from Wellington boots covered the floor, but everywhere else was neat and tidy. Adrian ushered the police officers through to the lounge and directed them towards his mother, who was sitting next to a ruddy-cheeked man with his arm around her shoulder. As the officers were introduced to the man called Ronnie, he removed his arm and leaned back in the sofa.

  Valentine approached the pair, which prompted Ronnie to distance himself further. ‘I’ll leave you be,’ he said, rising and turning to face Mrs Urquhart. ‘I’ll drop in again later. Just to see how you are.’

  She nodded and sucked in her lower lip.

  Valentine kept his eyes on Ronnie; he thought about engaging with him but decided it wasn’t the time or place. As the neighbour hurried out the door, Mrs Urquhart made to stand, but her balance didn’t seem to be functioning – she flounced onto the sofa’s arm and Adrian ran to her side to support her.

  ‘It’s OK, there’s no need to get up, Mrs Urquhart,’ said Valentine. He watched her steady herself on the couch once more: her face was saturnine, the droop of heavy eyelids accentuated by dark hollows above the cheekbones. A prominent white crease dissected her brow with almost clinical precision and then erased itself as black irises gave way to an expanse of white, rimmed in red. As she took in Valentine, he felt her searching stare: it was a look that spoke to you without words; it was such a knowing look that Valentine wondered if his own thoughts were as discernible as the pages of a book to her.

  He shifted himself sideways, sat down on the adjacent seat and crossed his legs. ‘Hello, Mrs Urquhart.’

  ‘Hello . . .’ She had the look of someone whose life had been a trial of hurts: not broken, or ever defeated, but a woman who had known considerable miseries and had grown to live with secrets.

  ‘I believe you called the station . . .’

  She nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you tell me when you first became aware that your husband was missing?’