Artefacts of the Dead

by Tony Black

  The DI’s chest tightened and his breathing was stertorous as he paced the hallway between the interview rooms. There was a stopwatch on him now, he knew that. The latest murder in Mossblown would be latched onto by the press sooner or later, but if they got to it before tonight’s news bulletins then he would face the likelihood of a full-scale press scrum in the morning. Dino had been on a melodramatic high since they’d pulled in Gillon, but that would become a crushing low if it yielded the wrong outcome. The case would be taken out of his hands – he could live with that – but any new investigation would go back to square one and there was no guarantee that his conclusions so far would be taken seriously. Valentine knew the murders of James Urquhart and Duncan Knox were connected – they knew each other – and something told him Janie Cooper and Leanne Dunn were victims of that association. He also knew that his instincts were less than worthless without any evidence to back them up, and he had nothing to place his finger on.

  ‘Right, time to give Ange a rattle,’ said the detective. He paced towards the interview room where DS Donnelly and DS McCormack had taken Angela. As he walked, he flicked through the blue folder trying to locate the one image that would deliver the most impact.

  He thrust down the handle and the door screeched loudly as DI Valentine entered the room. He took firm and impressive strides towards the table in the centre of the room where the interview was underway. The officers eyed him with caution, but the predominant feature of Angela’s look was fear.

  ‘Right, I am not pissing about with you any more,’ said Valentine, the heavy bass of his voice rattled round the room. ‘Tell me how this happened now or I’m putting both you and Gillon away . . .’ He slapped down the image of the bloodless face of Leanne Dunn.

  Angela shrieked and turned away; her hands shot up to her face and she sobbed.

  ‘Don’t start with the bubbling, love,’ said Valentine. He picked up the picture again and stuck it in front of her face. ‘Do you see anyone crying for that lassie?’

  ‘Get it away . . . get it away . . .’ She rose from her chair and took two stumbling steps towards the shuttered window frame. Her arms went out to steady her when she reached the ledge.

  Valentine followed her. ‘This is Leanne . . . You remember her don’t you . . . ? Leanne Dunn.’

  Angela sobbed harder. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then tell me where Danny Gillon’s been and what he’s been up to.’

  She looked up through her reddened eyes. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Say again . . .’

  She straightened her arms in front of her. ‘I don’t know. All right? I don’t know where he’s been.’

  ‘So you were bullshitting us?’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘Once more, loud enough for us all to hear.’

  ‘Yes. I made it up. I wasn’t with Danny.’

  Valentine turned away from her, as he paced towards the table he slapped the photograph of the corpse of Leanne Dunn back on top of the folder and paused before the officers. ‘Get her cleaned up and get some coffee into her.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Then get out on that street and start rattling cages . . . all Gillon’s known haunts. If he’s been seen in the last few days I want the where and when in writing and I don’t care if you have to smash teeth or heads to get it.’

  Valentine left the room, closed the door firmly and returned to the hallway where DS McAlister was waiting. The DS had his hands in his pockets and quickly removed them as he spotted the detective; he looked as if he was getting ready to break into a run.

  ‘Everything OK, sir?’

  He pointed to the room where Danny Gillon was. ‘Follow me.’

  Valentine’s footsteps sounded loudly on the floor as he entered the room. He closed the short distance between the door and the table where Gillon was seated with a cigarette in his hand – Valentine snatched the burning cigarette and threw it at the wall. He stood between Gillon and the table and folded his arms. He was sneering as he spoke.

  ‘Right, Danny, seems like Ange has had a change of heart . . . You’ve lost your alibi.’

  He sniffed. ‘So . . . ?’

  ‘Not good enough for you?’ He turned to McAlister and held out his hand for the blue folder. ‘OK, we’ve got more . . . Greta Milne, Angela’s neighbour, has ID’d you as the bloke knocking ten bells out of her door the other night.’ He slapped down the folder. ‘Speak to me, Danny. Now.’

  Gillon looked at the wall, and his eyes latched onto the point where the cigarette burned on the floor. For a moment, Gillon’s mask of assurance slipped and he looked alone, without a friend in the world. An almost imperceptible tic started in his left temple and then he wiped away at his mouth with the back of his hand.

  ‘I want a lawyer . . .’ he rasped.

  Valentine shook his head. ‘You give me what I want.’

  Gillon looked up; a grey tongue flashed on his parched lips. He shrugged. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Everything, Danny . . . From start to finish.’

  The pimp turned away again, his shoulders drooped now. He seemed to be physically shrinking before Valentine’s eyes.

  ‘I want to know, if I tell you . . . then none of this comes back on me.’

  ‘Danny, I’m not trading favours here. You start speaking or I walk out that door. It’s your choice.’

  Gillon took a deep breath and looked at the table. As he started to speak he sounded like he was reading from a prepared manuscript detailing his confused thoughts.

  ‘See your murders, the guy from the bank and the other one . . .’

  ‘Knox?’

  He nodded. ‘Aye, well, Leanne knew them.’

  ‘What do you mean “knew them”?’

  Gillon fidgeted on the chair. ‘I want to know I’ll be looked after if I talk.’

  ‘No deals, Danny.’

  He slumped closer to the table. ‘She knew them from way back: well, the Knox one from when she was in that home place . . .’

  ‘She knew him as a child?’

  He nodded. ‘She might have known them both, then.’ He looked uncomfortable, as if detailing secrets that the dead would have preferred to take with them. ‘They used to come round, like years back, when Leanne was . . . you know.’

  ‘When she was working as one of your prostitutes?’

  He crossed his legs and started to finger the hole in the knee of his jeans. ‘Well, not really . . . She was only young.’

  Valentine moved away from the table and retrieved the chair he had been sitting on earlier. ‘Let me get this straight, Danny: you procured an underage Leanne Dunn for Duncan Knox and James Urquhart?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t like that. She wasn’t working properly then . . . Just them, she knew them both from before.’

  Valentine’s palms started to sweat. ‘So your involvement was what? Estate agent . . . ? Hotelier? This went on in your property, I take it?’

  He grimaced. ‘She went to work there in the end, yeah.’

  The DI watched as Gillon avoided all eye contact. He was trash, worse than that. Valentine wanted to raise him from the chair and clamp his hands around his neck. He spoke about a young girl’s life being ended before it had begun as if it was a just another transaction. He cared more about his shabby van or being kept in cigarettes than he did Leanne.

  ‘Was Leanne the only girl you got them?’ said Valentine.

  ‘I didn’t get a girl for them. Look, it wasn’t like that . . . I don’t deal with beasts.’

  ‘Was there another girl, Danny?’ The anger in his voice was unmistakeable.

  ‘No. No way . . . Never.’

  Valentine let the pimp’s blood cool. He looked agitated, pensive as the DI spoke again. ‘Who killed Urquhart and Knox?’

  ‘I don’t know who did that . . . How could I know that?’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘Of course I don’t.’

  ‘But you seem to know a great deal, Danny . . . Why am I on
ly finding this out now?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Valentine leaned forward and flattened his palms in front of him. ‘I mean you’ve known about these paedos for years and never told a soul. Where they paying you hush money?’

  ‘No. I kicked them out. I didn’t want any part of it, but they kept coming round to see Leanne behind my back. I told her it wasn’t bloody on, but they had some hold over her.’

  ‘What hold?’

  ‘I don’t know, just a hold; she said they were her keepers.’ Gillon seemed tired, his voice trailing now. He had the look of a man who felt repulsed by the discovery of his involvement with people he had nothing but contempt for. His self-esteem was slipping and sliding like lacustral sludge beneath him.

  ‘Why didn’t Leanne come to the police?’

  He snatched an answer. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  Gillon looked up from his misery. ‘She wanted to. I–I . . .’

  ‘What? You stopped her?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Why would you do that?’

  Gillon shrugged; his mouth had started to twitch in time to the uncontrollable tapping of his foot on the floor.

  ‘Oh come on, Danny, you must have had a reason, there must have been something in it for you . . .’

  He stayed silent. Valentine understood how the criminal mind worked. He had spent years of his life dealing with people like Danny Gillon and knew he could second-guess them. There was no need to coax out a motive or search their psyche for reasons why or how: it was all about opportunity – if it existed, they would take it.

  ‘I’m going to ask you again, Danny, because I can tell you want it off your chest . . . Why didn’t you let Leanne come to the police when Urquhart and Knox were killed?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But now you know that was a mistake . . .’

  He shrugged again. ‘I suppose.’

  ‘No suppose about it, Danny . . . If Leanne Dunn had told us what she knew about those murders, you wouldn’t be sitting here. And Leanne might not be in the mortuary.’

  He looked up. ‘I wanted money for her.’

  ‘What, who from?’

  ‘I thought . . . the papers.’

  Valentine’s palms tingled a million pins and needles pressed on the underside of his fingers as he got up from his chair and approached Gillon. ‘You went to the papers: who?’

  ‘Just some guy . . .’

  ‘Just some guy who?’ Valentine’s voice rose again; it echoed off the bare walls.

  ‘Just a hack. He said he would pay. He spoke to Leanne a few times, I thought he would pay up . . .’

  ‘A name, give me his name.’

  ‘Sinclair . . . His name was Sinclair.’

  The detective noted the name but felt a strange compunction to object. When it came, his voice didn’t sound like his own: ‘Cameron Sinclair . . . ? From the Glasgow-Sun?’

  Gillon chamfered the table’s edge with his fingernail. ‘That’s him, yeah.’

  Valentine moved his head, turned his eyes away as if he was searching for something; he found a chink of light that sat in an oblong blur beneath the doorway. ‘You spoke to him about Leanne?’

  ‘Well, aye . . . but she spoke to him too.’

  He couldn’t take in what he was hearing. As he got out of his seat and edged forwards, Valentine’s stomach cramped tiny arrows of pain jabbed at his diaphragm. His thoughts were working in reverse, moving backwards to the press conference where he’d seen Sinclair and the post he’d left on his daughter’s Facebook timeline, then through to the bribery affair that had led to DS Rossi’s suspension.

  ‘When did you last see him?

  ‘I don’t know . . . Few days ago. I spoke to him on the phone; I told him Leanne had done a runner.’

  ‘He knows she went missing?’

  ‘Yeah, I just said that.’ He leaned onto the edge of his seat. ‘I didn’t know she was dead . . .’

  The DI struggled to rein in his thoughts as his intestines tightened. Nothing seemed to make sense. He rubbed at his ribcage as he headed for the door.

  Gillon’s voice rose, assailed the room. ‘Hey, where are you going?’

  Valentine banged on the door with the side of his hand, and as it opened he turned to Gillon and pointed. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve not finished with you, not by a bloody mile.’

  The DI pushed the door and left the interview room, his mind thumbing a new index of possibilities. The feeling of getting close to a killer that had gripped Valentine when he’d first approached Gillon was gone now; he felt like he’d been dunking for apples in an empty barrel.

  DS McAlister appeared in the corridor behind him, and he fanned a lapel nervously as he spoke. ‘Well, boss, what do you make of that?’

  ‘Make of it . . . There’s nothing to bloody make of it, Ally.’

  The sharpness of the DI’s words hung between them. ‘Do we bring in Sinclair?’

  Valentine nodded. ‘Of course we do . . . Now, Ally.’

  The DS turned and broke into a jog. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And, Ally . . . Get onto his paper. I want to know what kind of copy he’s been filing lately. And if the editor’s thinking of running anything like Leanne Dunn’s last interview then read him the bloody riot act – he’ll be grateful he got it from you and not me.’

  48

  DI Bob Valentine knew his options were rapidly running out. He couldn’t count on Danny Gillon to reveal any more information, and what he had revealed was something and nothing. The nothing part of it was already knowledge to Valentine, of a sort, though the confirmation that Urquhart and Knox were connected through Leanne did little to further his understanding of the murders that had been committed. The something – that Cameron Sinclair had been probing the case’s seedy underside – was, he supposed, to be expected. It would take a wilful naivety on his part to assume the Rossi affair and Sinclair’s own suspension from the Glasgow-Sun would thwart his ambitions any; he was in too much of a hurry and too rash a man. Quite what the consequences of Sinclair’s actions had been remained unknown – the detective knew it wouldn’t be without recrimination, but questioned how far he would go.

  The part that puzzled Valentine the most was Gillon’s revelation about the length of time Leanne had been known to Urquhart and Knox. If he was to be believed then she had been abused in care when she was still a child, and the timing was close to the disappearance of Janie Cooper. Was there a wider paedophile ring in operation? If there was, and he felt certain of it, then it was on his patch and had some history. The roots would go deep. Valentine scrunched his eyes and tried to process the thoughts that were galloping through his mind. There would be another case now: a cold investigation of the children’s home and the broad sweep of Urquhart and Knox’s associations. He could see the helical strands of the cases intertwining, but he knew he must separate them. It was impossible to process so many possibilities, so many ‘what ifs’ and ‘wherebys’. The detective’s main target had to be the murder investigations that were in hand and the rest would have to wait, but the cries of justice for the children burned like a fierce acid corroding him from the inside.

  The skies outside King Street station were already darkening as Valentine stood at the window stroking a deep ache inside his ribcage. He watched an old man navigate the road as the wind picked up, blowing a stray newspaper that attached itself to the man’s leg. Another man, younger, made to wrestle the paper from him; the scene was almost comical, had the quality of slapstick, but the detective felt too raw to be amused. He turned from the window and walked back towards the main incident room. DS McAlister stood by his desk, deep lines standing out on his forehead as he crossed the floor towards the board.

  ‘What’s that you’re sticking up, Ally?’ said Valentine.

  McAlister turned round to face him. A dull glaze had settled on his eyes. ‘The Sinclair stuff, sir . . .’

  ‘Give me that.�
� He snatched the papers from his hand. ‘We’ll keep that to ourselves for now.’

  ‘But . . .’

  Valentine cut him down. ‘No buts about it, Ally, if Dino gets wind of Gillon’s ramblings then she’ll be on us like a dog on chips.’

  McAlister bowed to superior wisdom. ‘I called the paper . . . spoke to the editor.’

  ‘What did Jack have to say for himself?’

  ‘Hasn’t heard from Sinclair since his suspension over the bribery allegations.’

  ‘Did you believe him?’

  He shrugged. ‘Well, I’d no reason not to. He didn’t go as far as calling Sinclair a square peg, but I got the impression he was a bit surprised that I seemed so interested in him.’

  ‘Just because he’s a public schoolboy doesn’t make him as pure as the driven snow, Ally.’

  ‘I know. Anyway, Phil and Sylvia checked out his flat and he’s not there. They’re going to check a few hacks’ drinkers on their way back.’

  ‘He’s not there?’

  ‘Aye, he gave a forwarding address of a guest house in Queen’s Terrace, but he was only there for the one night.’

  Valentine cached away a mounting frustration. He raised himself onto the edge of the nearest desk and listened to the hammering inside the smithy of his mind. ‘Right, get onto all your touts, even the ones you haven’t seen for a while, and find him. Bloody Ayr’s not got that big and he isn’t the invisible man.’

  ‘Yes, boss . . .’ He stood splay-legged for a moment and then eased himself onto the adjacent desk. ‘What’s going on, sir?’