by Tony Black
‘OK, son, tell me what’s what. Not the nightclub on Arthur Street is it? I heard it on the radio on the way in.’
Ally kept walking towards his car. As he pointed the keys the sidelights flashed. ‘No, that’s a hold-up, would you believe? DI Eddy Harris is all over it.’
‘Flash Harris, that fits … It was a jeweller’s last week, Ayr’s turning into bloody Dodge City. OK, so what have we got, then?’
‘Hard to say what the situation is at present, boss. All we know is it’s a bloke who’s taken a blade in the back and his claret’s all over the kitchen floor. We taking my car, yeah?’
Ally’s casual tone was customary among the squad but didn’t fool Valentine. He knew if they had a murder on their patch then every one of his team would be focused – it didn’t stop him teasing the DS. ‘You make it sound like one for that Kitchen Nightmares show.’
Ally allowed himself a grin, by the time they got inside the car he had upgraded to a laugh. ‘Those celebrity chefs are a joke, think they’d try on that hard-man patter in real life? Wouldn’t be five minutes before some psycho was tenderising the Botox out their face.’ The car’s engine spluttered, the wheels turned on the tarmac.
Valentine spoke: ‘Am I going to have to batter the details of this case out of you, Ally?’ They were at the bus garage, turning onto the Sandgate. ‘Where are we going for a start, son?’
‘Whitletts, boss.’
The DI nodded. ‘It just doesn’t get any better does it?’
‘No, sir. It’s the junkies isn’t it? I heard some statistic the other day that nearly forty per cent of the houses up there have a drug dependent.’
‘Is this a drugs killing, or are you just trying to make me think you actually read the background reports that cross your desk?’
‘I don’t know much more than I’ve told you.’ The King Street station came into view, lights glowing inside creating the appearance of industry. ‘Looks busy, boss. Think we’ll be burning the midnight oil tonight?’
Having to pull a late shift at the station on the night his eldest daughter had made her stage debut, as the rest of the family were celebrating, crushed Valentine. The feeling passed quickly, though, as his sense of duty was renewed by the situation. There had been a murder in his hometown, and that was something he could never ignore. Whatever was stacking up at home, none of it compared to the need for justice. That would never change because it was the other side of his devotion to his family: if anything happened to them, he would expect no less than the kind of retribution only someone like him could deliver.
‘Ally, when’s the most important part of an investigation?’
The DS glanced in Valentine’s direction. ‘Have I said something wrong?’
‘The first twenty-four hours, son. Forty-eight hours at a push. After that we’re onto extrapolating the known facts and, not a favourite of mine, guesswork.’
‘I think I see what you’re getting at.’
‘You do? Good.’ Valentine pointed to a gap in the road where a row of police cars had parked up, he had the car door open before the vehicle stopped. As the brakes halted the wheels, he pushed himself from the car and motioned with a curled index finger for DS McAlister to follow promptly. On the pavement he was met by a crowd of noisy residents. The noisiest – a woman in sweatpants and a housecoat who was shadowed by two hyperactive youngsters – fronted up to him, blocking the path. ‘You going to tell us what’s going on?’
Valentine sidestepped the woman without an answer and one of the children, a young boy in football colours, started up the path after him. ‘Get those children inside, please. This is a police investigation.’
As Valentine halted his stride, turned, DS McAlister directed the woman back towards the crowd on the side of the road. She wrested her arm from his grip. ‘Get your mitts off me, it’s a free country, you pig.’
‘It won’t be free for you if I arrest you,’ McAlister snapped back.
‘Arrest me for what?’ Her mouth drooped open, a gap-toothed glower that said she might just be stupid enough to test the officer.
‘How about disrupting a police investigation?’ His tone was flat, fully controlled. ‘Or maybe I’ll just do you for civil disobedience. Now get indoors, all of you.’
Valentine provided backup. ‘I’ll have officers round to speak to you all as soon as possible. But in the meantime please go home and let us get on with our work. There’s nothing to be gained from hanging about on the street, and it’s cold! Come on, take the kiddies indoors.’
The woman sunk back from the officers, pushed open the gate at the end of her garden. The crowd started to disperse. DS McAlister approached Valentine as he lengthened his stride towards the property. ‘That was a close one,’ he said.
‘They’re just scared. They know something’s happened, and on their own doorstep, I wouldn’t want that any more than them.’
‘Aren’t you worried about contamination of the crime scene? About kids running all over the evidence.’
The DI fought back an urge to ridicule McAlister for swatting him with the textbook. ‘Ally, you have to treat people like people. That’s your first and foremost. But it’s a fair point, why don’t you get uniform to put up a cordon?’
‘I’ll do that and if anyone crosses it, I’ll make sure they’re thrown in the divvy van, in full view of their pals.’
Valentine stamped towards the murder scene. ‘And when you’re done building community relations, come and join the rest of the squad in there,’ he pointed to the front door of the house, ‘slight matter of a murder investigation to get under way.’
4
The path to the house was clogged with bodies, the SOCOs in their restrictive white suits being the most obvious. The officers in uniform were almost as prevalent but the others in plain clothes were only identifiable as part of the squad by their industry. As Valentine got closer he noticed that an assortment of little yellow A-boards littered the path. They sat next to the familiar shapes made by blood droplets falling on concrete. It fell flat and round, splayed and squashed, it lay as innocuous as red paint but he knew it was not. The blood pools delineated a shambling route that led to the gate and then seemed to have been lost on the black tarmac of the pavement and road.
The detective halted to take in the sweep of the street.Beyond the place he had ran into the welcoming party of neighbours there was a grassy patch, its edges eroded into a muddy thoroughfare, and further on a disconsolate copse of trees. Beyond that was the main road, the town of Ayr, and from there more possibilities than he could count. He turned back, looked the other way up the street: there was a badly scarred bus shelter, the unbreakable Perspex windows melted into holes by determined vandals. The sight held his interest for a second before he returned to the grassy patch: four houses, terraced, between the murder scene and the short cut to the town centre. If he’d been a murderer himself, he would have gone that way. Of course, if he’d been planning it properly, there would have been a car – at that hour of the evening the sound of a car’s engine was not unfamiliar – but this was Whitletts. This was an area where murder wasn’t planned, not in that way; in places like this, murder festered over years and months and then appeared, fully blown, like it was pre-ordained to happen. The consequences were an afterthought at best. They were at worst – and most likely on this occasion – something to run away from as quickly as possible.
DS Sylvia McCormack emerged from the garden where she had been directing officers in a search, as she approached the detective she waved with a pair of rubber gloves. ‘Hello, sir, sorry to drag you away, hope it wasn’t anything special.’
Valentine didn’t want to be reminded of just how special his plans had been this evening but let it pass. ‘What’s the SP, Sylvia?’
‘Well, we have a white male, late-forties-to-fifties, with a deep wound at the base of the neck. Dead, of course.’
‘He’d bloody want to be for all this fuss.’ The DI walked towards the front do
or. On the step he paused to point out some medical paraphernalia, needles and phials. ‘Did the paramedics get to him before he carked?’
‘Eh, no, that was for …’ she removed a spiral-bound notebook from her coat pocket, read from the page, ‘Agnes Gilchrist, a neighbour.’
‘Stumbled on the scene, so we have a witness?’
DS McCormack turned another page in her notebook, she was looking for the answer but it wasn’t there. ‘She was unconscious on arrival, sir.’
‘On our arrival, Sylvia. But not her arrival. I’m assuming somebody called emergency for us to be here in the first place, was it her?’
McCormack lowered her gaze, retrieved a pencil and started to write on the notebook. ‘I’ll get that checked out, right away.’
Valentine let a moment’s silence sit between them. ‘Thanks, Sylvia, it might turn out to be important.’ He made for the front door of the property, beckoning the DS to follow.
Beyond the door frame lines of dark blood were smeared along the white walls. There seemed to be two distinct trails, one slightly higher than the other. They ran thick, initially, heavy in blood, and then thinned into tapered points that looked like digits of a hand. As the detectives stood in the hallway they were joined by DS Phil Donnelly. ‘Good to see you, sir.’
Valentine returned the greeting, but it was always odd to have someone say it was good to see you at a murder scene. ‘What do you make of this, Phil?’
The detective turned towards the wall, rolled on the balls of his feet. ‘Hard to say, looks like two trails.’ Donnelly took his hands from his pockets, traced the space between the trails. ‘Could be made by one marker, I mean, it’s not out of the question.’
‘Do we have prints?’
The DS shook his head. ‘The duster’s on the way, should have them within the hour.’
‘Let me know the minute you have them.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘If we’ve got two sets of prints in there then that’s two facing murder.’
They stared at the smears on the wall once again. There was no way of separating the two lines, no way of judging if one set was a match in size and shape for the other.
‘We need the duster on this right away, Phil.’
‘I’ll chase him now.’ Donnelly tapped his mobile phone, jammed it between ear and shoulder. ‘What are you thinking, boss, robbery gone wrong? That would account for the two bods.’
Valentine scanned the interior. ‘There’s nothing to rob here.’
Donnelly tried to win back some pride. ‘Might have been holding something – drugs, drugs money?’
‘If you know this is a drugs house, I’d listen to you. Do you know that?’
He shook his head, the phone slipped, he made a clumsy reach to catch it in his hands. ‘Shit, that was close.’
Valentine stood waiting for an answer.
‘I don’t know that much about the place, sir.’
‘Then save the conjecture for when we actually know something, son.’
Donnelly wasn’t done. ‘I was just thinking, from a motive point of view, you know, that if there was cash or drugs here then it would be a good reason to off someone and flee.’
‘Yes, of course. And if the crown jewels had been pinched and stashed here, that would be a reason too.’ Valentine didn’t like sarcasm, in himself or others, but a little humbling on a murder investigation kept everyone alert.
DS Donnelly tried the phone at his ear once again. ‘Still ringing.’
Valentine turned towards his detectives. The fey tone was gone; he sounded gruff. ‘Let’s stick to what we know. I don’t want wild conjecture. I don’t want guesswork. I want facts and I want an open mind in the absence of those. This is a murder scene not a pub quiz down the local, do you all understand that?’
‘Yes, boss.’
‘Good.’ Valentine knew he had their attention. It would be a stupid member of the squad that tested his seriousness now.
A bell chimed, it was DS McCormack’s mobile. ‘Emergency just confirmed, sir. The call for police came from the neighbour, Agnes Gilchrist.’
‘Good. Maybe she saw something.’ The DI cached away the possibilities. ‘Right, now that we’ve got that clear, let’s go and take a look at our victim – middle-aged male, white, do we know anything else?’
The detectives stared at the ground.
‘C’mon, somebody.’
DS Donnelly turned over his palm where he’d marked the skin with ink. ‘The neighbours say the Millars stay here. Sandra Millar’s husband died a few years back, she has a daughter called Jade and an older son who doesn’t live with them anymore.’
‘Ages?’
‘Don’t know yet. Teenage and twenties on the kids. At a guess, I’d say the mother might be the same as our victim.’
‘Do we have a name for him?’
Donnelly scanned his palm again, the pen stood out on his skin under the bright light. ‘James Tulloch.’
5
Jade Millar removed her flat palms from her stomach and pulled the sleeves of her jacket over her hands. It was a distraction, to change the course of her thinking, and because her mother hated it. She had said it was something four-year-olds did but her mother wasn’t there to object. Jade heard her words, though; all day they’d been with her. She didn’t know why it should be that today was the first time in her life that she carried around her mother’s words.
Who listened to their mother? Who listened to her mother? Fathers were different, she knew girls at school who always did what their father told them because they were too scared not to. She’d been envious of them once. When Dad died she wished that there was someone to tell her what to do. She hated seeing girls dropped off by their fathers at school, taken to the shops, or anywhere at all. It was like they did it just to annoy her.
‘Oh, Dad.’ Even the word was difficult to say.
Dad was there with her today, too. But that was different, he was always there. She even dreamed about him at night. Alena from school said she never dreamed about her dad and wasn’t it a bit strange. ‘You should be dreaming about boys, you have Niall for God’s sake.’
Alena didn’t get it. She always said something annoying; most days Jade ignored her when she had to but not today. Just the thought of Alena’s words made her hands form fists.
Jade took out her phone and scrolled down to Alena’s name, she paused with her finger over the delete key in her contacts file. She wanted to do it, to get rid of her. It was simple enough to get rid of people, you just deleted their number from your phone and their profile from your Facebook friends list and they didn’t exist anymore. Why couldn’t the real world be the same?
‘Because that’s not how the real world works, Jade!’ Her mother’s words again.
‘Go away!’ She bashed the side of her head with the phone. ‘Go away. Go away.’
She knew she wouldn’t go away, though.
‘I’ll never leave you,’ that’s what she’d said to her when Dad died. And her mother was tough, her brother had said so, and Darry knew all about being tough. He’d know what to do with this mess.
In the street outside her home a group of people had gathered. Jade watched them from beneath a tree on the other side of the road. There was a police car and an ambulance, another couple of cars with flashing lights that were probably police cars too, and a blue truck that blocked nearly the entire road. Men and women in uniform were taping off the fence, the gate and the bushes. Another group directed the neighbours indoors. It looked like a television show, like the time Brad Pitt had come to Glasgow and it was on the news.
Jade took her hands from the sleeves of her coat, it didn’t seem right to have them there when she knew her mother objected. For a moment she stared at her hands, what should she do with them? God, what was wrong? It was like her mind was missing or all the thoughts had fallen out. She tried her hands in her pockets, felt for her mobile phone and gripped it tightly when she found it.
&nb
sp; ‘Oh, God …’
Tears came, slow at first, because they were a surprise to her. But when she knew they were there, rolling down her cheeks, they intensified. They weren’t normal tears, they came from another part of her. Tears appeared when you were in pain, she knew all about that, but these were for something else.
She didn’t know what to do. Darry said Mum always knew what to do and wouldn’t listen to advice that didn’t suit her. Jade hadn’t said that, they were her brother’s words. But wasn’t that the problem? She had everything mixed up and Darry wasn’t there either, she wished he was.
She couldn’t read the message in her phone again, the one she’d sent to her brother at the barracks, because all the words just got jumbled up, started to mean something else. She needed someone to sort out the mess, to tell her everything would be all right.
She pulled up her contacts on the phone again and dialled her brother.
He answered quickly. ‘Jade, what’s up now?’
She tried to speak but her mouth was numb with all the crying. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
‘What do you mean?’ He was still travelling, she could hear noise from the wheels echoing in the cab of the bus.
‘Darry, it’s Mum. I don’t know what to do.’
‘What’s happened, Jade? Just tell me, slowly.’
‘I went home, like you said. I was waiting for you. I … I had a fight with Mum and, oh God, Darry I don’t know what happened. There’s police everywhere, in the house, in the garden. I can’t see a thing except police and everyone’s out staring at the house.’
‘Calm down, Jade. If you get hysterical, it’s not going to help you.’
‘But I don’t know what to do.’
‘Where’s Mum?’
‘I don’t know. She was with him. Darry, it’s such a mess.’ Her sobbing increased.