Artefacts of the Dead

by Tony Black

  DS McCormack seemed unsure how to interpret the detective’s words. She held herself still as the wind took stray tendrils of hair in front of her face. Valentine turned away and walked towards the blue tape.

  ‘A bloody cross.’

  He didn’t know why he had got so worked up by the sight of the small silver cross. It just seemed so out of place to him, so ridiculously trite. She was a young girl who hadn’t had a chance from the day she was born, a prostitute who pumped her veins full of poison to numb the pain of being alive: what use did she have for God? What kind of a god could even she imagine had fashioned this hell on Earth for her? How long had she suffered? He knew her story all too well because it was the story of every young girl like her. Pain in childhood, and pain in bigger portions the older she got. There was no escape, no saviour for her. As he reached the edge of the clearing, he felt his throat freezing with an involuntary welling of unwanted emotion.

  ‘Sir, have you seen the tracks?’ One of the uniforms pointed to the broad-rimmed tyre marks in the wet ground. He was tall, his shoulders looked too square for his narrow hips, but he didn’t seem the type to be concerned with his appearance.

  ‘You better get those cast,’ said Valentine. He watched the uniform dip his head and lower his gaze to the tracks. It was like watching a giraffe take a drink.

  ‘Looks like a big vehicle, sir. A large saloon or maybe even a truck.’

  The detective looked at the tyre prints; they were clear and fresh, and the vehicle seemed to have spun a little in the wet mud. ‘Looks like they were in a hurry to get away.’

  ‘Might have been the running party . . . Maybe saw them coming.’

  Valentine turned back towards the crime scene. The SOCOs had started to unfurl a white tent, and a noise like wind in a sail sent a wood pigeon scrabbling from the branches of a nearby tree.

  The detective pointed to what looked like a steep gash in the ground. ‘What’s that, there?’

  The uniform straightened his back and tipped up his head. ‘That’s like some kind of hole, sir . . . We think it’s fresh too.’

  Another interpretation made more sense. ‘A grave, you mean.’

  ‘Could be, sir.’

  The DI was tired of the lopsided conversation; he had seen enough to know he didn’t need to see any more. He turned for the car with his face set in a granite sneer. ‘Tell the others I’m going back to the station.’

  ‘Don’t you want to wait for the fiscal, sir?’

  He didn’t think the question deserved an answer. Was the fiscal going to deliver some insight? Was the fiscal going to tell him how to do his job, how to solve another murder? As he reached the road, Valentine unlocked the car and kept his head low, facing off a fierce wind, until he had reached the vehicle. He got inside just as the rain was starting up again and sat with his hands in his lap, his knees locked at right angles to the floor. As he stared out of the car’s window to the row of grim council houses he saw the stacks of chimneys stalking the grey horizon like weary sentries who wished to be anywhere but here. An old man stood in front of his home, leaning on a dilapidated garden gate with folded arms and furrowed brows. Valentine stared at the man for a moment, made an unfathomable connection with his dark eyes and felt them share a mute understanding of a world that had long ago ceased to make any sense to them both. The detective put the key in the ignition and set off.

  The road back to Ayr was lined with fields, green and bright in the divisions that were spared the cut of tractor tracks. The march of yuppie commuter homes had started to spill into the fields skirting the bypass, and the heavy machinery of clearing vehicles and dump trucks chuntered behind drystone dykes. Valentine knew he was observing a rapidly changing landscape: the fertile fields of Burns Country were giving way to bricks and mortar, to tiled roofs and tarred roads. In another decade the small town would be swallowed up, along with a few others. Ayr would be a small city then – if it wasn’t already in all but name.

  At the station, Valentine approached the front desk and called out to Jim Prentice. The desk sergeant turned and nodded; he was holding the receiver of a telephone, but the conversation seemed to be coming to an end. His facial expression suggested there was a fence that needed mending sitting between the two men.

  ‘Sorry to be barking at you this morning, Jim,’ said Valentine.

  ‘It’s all right, I know how it is.’ He clamped his mouth tight shut and removed the chair from beneath the counter. It slid out on its small castors. ‘I take it that’s another one to add to the tally?’

  The detective nodded. ‘Young girl. She’s brass, but lucky if she’s seen twenty summers.’

  ‘Well, she’ll not see another one.’ He shook his head. ‘What’s this bloody place coming too? What happened to the days of lost bikes and kids raiding orchards?’

  Valentine smirked. ‘Long gone, Jim . . . Long gone.’

  As he made his way onto the stairs, he caught sight of the chief super’s chubby ankles on the floor above him heading for the incident room. The heavy thump of her footsteps suggested that she had some important news to deliver. Valentine upped his pace and made leaps of two steps at a time. As he jogged in behind CS Martin’s thundering footfalls, he was breathing heavily.

  ‘Oh, you’re back?’ she said.

  ‘Just . . .’

  ‘Couldn’t have been there long.’ She ran her fingers through her hair as if it was an annoyance to her, perhaps even interfering with her thought processes.

  ‘Long enough . . . She’s a prostitute, a well-worked one by the looks of it, so she shouldn’t be too hard to ID.’

  The chief super raised her right hand and pinned a pile of papers to Valentine’s chest. ‘Get your laughing gear round that . . . We have an I.D.’

  ‘The prints?’

  ‘Yes indeed. We’ve pulled her up more times than a shithouse seat.’

  Valentine removed his gaze from Dino, peeled the paperwork from his chest and scanned the contents. The printout wasn’t the best quality: a grainy black and white photograph of the girl that looked to have been taken during a booking. There was no doubting her resemblance to the girl he’d just left lying in a cold field, though.

  ‘That’s her,’ he said.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Certain.’ Valentine held up the papers and slapped his other hand off them. ‘The girl in Mossblown is Leanne Dunn.’

  45

  DI Bob Valentine spread the Leanne Dunn file over the desktop in front of him. His thoughts moved quickly as his eyes took in the details, darting like an agile little fish on a coral reef. She was an Ayr girl, had always lived locally, if you could apply that term to how her days had gone. He couldn’t hide his sympathy for her; it all seemed such a tragic waste. The poverty and the deprivation she had endured since childhood had been compounded by a drug-addicted mother. She’d had little success with foster parents from an early age and ended up in care homes. He knew the types of places, had heard all the names before: they were the region’s hate factories, churning out the types of conveyor-belt criminals he was depressingly familiar with. She suffered under what the social workers called a ‘constellated disadvantage’: a life of casual drug use and less casual criminality. Her death in a field before the age of nineteen could almost have been written in the poor girl’s horoscope from the day she was born. What the detective also knew, however, was short lives like Leanne Dunn’s were remarkable in being defined by their chaos. Murder victims mostly knew their killers and the likes of Leanne didn’t mix with master criminals: they were the bottom feeders, the pond life, the scum that always left a sticky trail in their wake. He would find Leanne’s killer – he knew it – because experience had taught him that unravelling the murder of a penniless prostitute was much easier than that of a wealthy banker. Whoever her killer was didn’t know it yet, but the DI was prepared to gamble on wrapping up more than one murder now; in that regard Leanne Dunn’s short life and brutal death may yet serve some wider good.<
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  Valentine had called the other detectives back from Mossblown and now they started to appear in the incident room.

  ‘What you got there, boss?’ said DS McAlister.

  The DI took the page containing the picture of Leanne Dunn and pinned it on the board; he nodded to Phil and Sylvia as they arrived.

  ‘This is our girl in the wood,’ he said. ‘Leanne Dunn, a prostitute who is well and truly known to us.’

  ‘Local girl, then?’ said Ally.

  ‘Born and bred.’ Valentine stood square-footed before the others. ‘Right, you know what I want and you know I want it done yesterday . . .’

  DS Donnelly stepped out from behind the filing cabinet he was leaning on. ‘So, she’s Ayr: then that narrows down the options.’ He turned to Ally and showed his hands like he was testing for rain. ‘We’re talking one of Big Madge’s girls or someone like Finnegan or Gillon.’

  Ally nodded but Valentine halted him from speaking. ‘Dunn was street brass according to her record, so that rules out Madge. I want all known bedsits, flats, bloody lay-bys used by Finnegan’s girls and Gillon’s looked at by uniform right away. I want the word out on this that I’m taking them all in, every last one. I want no brass in Ayr in any doubt that we will bust heads on this.’

  DS McAlister seemed pensive, deep in thought, as he pushed his way to the front of the board and stood there.

  ‘What is it, Ally?’

  He pointed to the board. ‘Here, sir: the tip murder, we were trying to trace a white van.’

  ‘And?’

  McAlister turned to face the team. ‘Danny Gillon drives a white van.’

  DS Donnelly nodded. ‘He does too . . . Calls it his shagging wagon. And, boss, we had something like van tracks out at Mossblown as well.’

  Valentine stepped away from the board and cut a path through the squad as he made his way towards the desk with the rest of the notes. When the DI collected the page he was looking for, he picked up his sports coat and started to slot his arms into the sleeves. His voice came loud and firm, followed by a wide-eyed trawl of the room: ‘Right, Ally and Phil, I want you to take Danny Gillon’s place right away. Get the word out to uniform too: I want all his known haunts dug up, and while we’re at it every pub on the port . . . The Ship, Smugglers, the Anchor, the Campbelltown; anywhere I’ve missed, try there too.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The pair moved towards the door.

  ‘Sylvia, you’re with me . . .’ said Valentine.

  ‘Yes, sir.’ She gripped the strap of her bag and turned to follow the DI as he made his way to the top of the stairs. ‘Where are we going?’

  At the first rung of steps, Valentine locked eyes with her. ‘Leanne Dunn’s last known address . . . It’s in Lochside.’

  DS McCormack tipped her head towards her shoulder and gripped the banister as the DI started to descend the stairs at speed. ‘Right behind you, sir.’

  The officers trailed the marked cars out of the station car park. A man with a dog made a sour look as he was flagged from the road, he leapt back to the pavement and the dog was jerked fast to his side by a tight leash. The persistent rainfall of earlier had diminished, but the road was still wet, and waterlogged potholes became short-lived geysers as the car’s tyres crossed them. Valentine spun the steering wheel awkwardly and gunned the engine to keep pace with the marked cars. The houses and flats they sped past sat shrunken beneath an oppressive grey sky. A few heads turned, mouthed some words, but soon moved back in step with their drudge trails towards the town’s centre. No one was heading to Lochside, it seemed, apart from the police officers; the grim council scheme was a place you went when all other options were no longer open to you.

  Valentine glanced towards his passenger. DS McCormack’s eyes flitted about the streets, eager for information. As they turned into the final road before Leanne Dunn’s flat, an old man gave them a gummy smile then halted in the street and delivered them a V-sign salute.

  ‘That’ll be the welcoming party,’ said McCormack, a smile sliding onto her face.

  ‘We’re as welcome as a dose of the clap around here.’ He turned sharply into the parking area outside the flats and a spray of water was evacuated from a deep declivity in the road. As he parked up and exited the car, Valentine felt the tips of his fingers pulsating after the rapid friction of his movements. He broke into a jog as the uniforms congregated outside the door to the flats.

  ‘What the bloody hell are you waiting for?’ he called out.

  The uniforms exchanged blank glances amongst each other.

  ‘Put the door in for Christ’s sake!’

  An officer in a high-visibility stab-vest and protective helmet swung a small battering ram in front of him and charged the door. The rotten wood splintered and the weak lock retreated from the jamb as if backed by explosives. The squad piled onto the stairs.

  ‘Right, up to the next flight,’ said Valentine.

  The sound of their boots on the stone steps sounded like an army manoeuvring. A door opened and a head popped out, then quickly retreated. The action was mimicked several times as they approached the flat that had been occupied by Leanne Dunn.

  ‘That one . . .’ Valentine brought the black mass of bodies to a halt outside the door. He moved to the front and battered with the heel of his hand. There was no reply. He made way for the officer with the battering ram once more.

  ‘She’s not in!’ The words came from the flat next door. An old woman with a cardigan clutched tight to her chest stood half in the lobby, half out.

  Valentine raised his hand to halt the uniform. ‘Wait . . .’ He approached the woman. ‘What’s that you say?’

  Her hair was as white as cotton wool, sitting in limp curls around her heavily lined face. The long fingers worrying the seams of her cardigan were attached to liver-spotted hands. Her voice came quieter the second time she spoke. ‘She’s not there, hasn’t been for days.’

  The detective approached the old woman. ‘This is Leanne Dunn we’re talking about?’

  She pinched her mouth, tightened her lips as if she was preparing to whistle. ‘I don’t know what her name is . . .’

  Valentine removed the printout with the photograph from his pocket. His hand trembled a little from his recent exertions, but the woman didn’t seem to notice. ‘Is this her?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes.’

  He looked back to the team and ordered them to go in. The sound of the wood splitting in the door caused the old woman to shrink further into her property. The detective stepped forward and adjusted his vision to take her in again. ‘Can I ask, when did you last see her?’

  She looked perplexed; her face became a ligneous mask and then her eyes flickered as if she sensed it was safe to proceed. ‘There was a man round asking me that yesterday . . . He was screaming like billy-o.’

  ‘A man?’

  She nodded again; she was relaxing some now. ‘He’d been round before.’

  The sound of the officers in the next flat came through the thin plaster walls, and Valentine felt a sudden pang of sympathy for the old woman who’d had to endure the noise generated by the previous occupant. Is this how his country rewarded their elderly? A rathole flat in a drafty and decrepit ruin with prostitutes turning tricks a few feet away and their pimps shouldering the door whenever it took them? As his mind totted up the column of new facts, he knew at once who he was dealing with. ‘A tall man, quite stocky?’

  ‘Yes, he’d be about thirty or thirty-five . . .’

  The thought that he was getting close to Gillon coalesced with an earlier emotion: there were three murders on his books and the disappearance of a schoolgirl from twelve years earlier. He didn’t dare to think that he was close to a quick solution for those unsolved cases, or even getting close to finding the connecting link that might lead somewhere – a pointer to evidence or an indicator of what might have gone on. Right now all he had was questions and precious few answers. But the more he thought of Gillon, the more he felt he was t
he ice chilling his veins.

  He turned for the other flat. ‘Thank you . . . I’ll send an officer round to get your details.’

  As Valentine was entering Leanne Dunn’s flat, he was distracted by movement in the corner of his eye. When he turned, he spotted someone on the steps, staring at him through the stanchions. She knew she had been recognised immediately and slunk back, running down the stairs.

  ‘Hey!’ Valentine’s voice came like a howitzer. He ran to the top of the stairs and called again. ‘Stay where you are.’

  The thin girl in the tight blue dress froze on the spot. As the detective reached her, he took the last few steps slowly, then circled her like a lion taunting prey.

  ‘Where do you think you’re going, Angela?’ he said.

  The girl folded her arms, but seemed uncomfortable in the stance and unfolded them again quickly. As Valentine took her in, her lazy left eye drew the attention from her other features. She could have been described as pretty once, he was sure of that, but her looks had long since left the vicinity. No celebrity fitness video or cosmetics regimen was going to return them either; she’d gambled with what she’d been given and lost it.

  ‘I’m not saying nothing . . .’

  Valentine’s chest was rising after the exertion of chasing her; his breath was heavy as he spoke. ‘You know the drill, Ange: you can say what I want to hear now, or you can say it down the station.’

  She shook her head. ‘You’ll get me killed, you will.’

  ‘Oh, really . . . Like Leanne, you mean?’

  Angela screwed up her features. ‘What? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘That right? Funny you should say something like that when I’ve just seen Leanne cold as stone out in the wilds of Mossblown.’

  Angela’s mouth opened a little, but the corners stayed closed, stuck together by a heavy application of red lipstick. She stared at the detective for a few seconds then pressed her hand to the wall as if she was looking for support.