A Taste of Ashes (DI Bob Valentine Book 2)

by Tony Black

  ‘The team-building exercise is not one of my priorities right now, I’m afraid,’ said Valentine.

  She dropped her chin onto her chest. ‘Well you better bloody make it a priority because I have a presentation to make to the divi’ commander a week on Wednesday that should include some pictures of smiling DCs and at least one DI in some form of fancy dress, am I making myself clear?’

  ‘I think I see where you’re coming from.’

  ‘Good, Bob. Don’t let me down or I’ll kick your balls so hard you’ll be shaving pubes off your neck.’

  ‘Was that everything?’

  ‘No, I want you to tell me how you’re getting on with this killing out at Whitletts.’

  He detailed the murder scene for her, summarised the victim’s previous conviction for assaulting a former partner and revealed what limited background reports had been passed on. When he was finished, Valentine expected her to ask for written confirmation, but she rose and walked to the corner of the room where a coffee maker sat on top of a two-drawer filing cabinet.

  ‘What the hell is happening to this town? Ayr used to be a nice place to grow up, to go to work and raise your children. Every day I hear more bloody horror stories, it makes you want to pack up and leave them to it.’ She poured a coffee, turned back to her desk. ‘I’d offer you one but you’re just leaving and I’m all out of biccies.’

  The DI wished she was serious about packing up. ‘Some of us don’t have that many options.’

  She caught him in her gaze as she sat down again; his remark didn’t seem to merit a response. ‘And what about the partner, where’s she?’

  ‘Sandra Millar’s not been seen since last night.’

  ‘The old woman spotted her, the one that passed away.’

  ‘That’s right, Agnes Gilchrist saw her fleeing the murder scene. She also saw an unidentified man. And then there’s the daughter, Jade, and the son, Darren. Both missing. I’m just about to check with the team what the door-to-door turned up last night but experience tells me this isn’t your usual domestic gone wrong.’

  ‘What do you mean by that, Bob?’

  Valentine looked to the floor, his foot was making a stiff angle to his ankle. ‘Something about the scene, that kitchen was untouched and there was no indication of a struggle. This isn’t a classic case of poverty breeding violence, if it was we’d have seen some evidence of that.’

  Martin pressed herself further into her chair, the distracted look was gone. Her focus was on the case, on her DI’s words. ‘Maybe there had been violence previously. Maybe there had been so much violence that there was no need for a trigger incident.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Of course, that would make it premeditated.’

  ‘And entirely outside the norm for this sort of thing. Look, what we do have on our side is that, either way, Tulloch most likely knew his killer. We might even get lucky and find the killer was very close to home.’

  ‘We need to find that murder weapon, as soon as possible.’ The mention of the knife almost prompted him to mention the pathologist’s remark about the precision cutting of the spinal column, but he knew not to overload the chief super. If he gave her too much information she would only use it to hinder him. She liked to see simple solutions to every case but Valentine knew that rarely happened. He held back, it was in the post-mortem report anyway, she could find it for herself.

  Valentine rose from the chair. ‘Murder weapon or partner. Right now I’d settle for one or the other.’

  ‘Go and see what Ally and Phil turned up. And keep me in the loop.’

  ‘Will do.’

  Her voice lifted. ‘And I mean it, Bob. Don’t dismiss the fact that this case might be a violent domestic that got out of hand, try and rule that out before you go chasing rainbows.’

  ‘Well that would make for a quicker clean-up, for sure.’

  ‘That’s not what I’m getting at. I’m on about prioritising.’

  He reached for the door handle. ‘I’ll bear that in mind, boss. That and the team-building exercise.’

  13

  DI Bob Valentine learned early in his working life that there was nothing noble in toadying to people like CS Martin. There was nothing to be gained by those who toadied to him either, and they often found their actions had the opposite of their desired effect. He was not so blunt as to come down on the side of the plain speaker – the blurt whatever you like brigade – he reserved another kind of disdain for them. And by this point, he had seen them all, or as the Scots said ‘met yer type afore’.

  People were simple when you got beyond the fronts of respectability, personality and bluster. Confronted, and he was a man who liked to confront, their base motives were the same. People were selfish, composed of egocentric desires and petty envies that often tugged at their ideas of worth. Few were aware enough to understand their own desires or cared to look beyond the task of satisfying their needs.

  Noting the universal cues that people showed was a depressing exercise for Valentine. He made decisions about people quickly and never altered them. Those he regarded as opponents became non-existent to him. He isolated them in company, ignored them in private and treated them with indifference when fate brought them together. It was not arrogance on his part, but a deep weariness that cancelled out his usual humanity for his fellow man. When he examined this trait of compartmentalising people, he understood it as a simplified way of separating the good and evil in people. He didn’t want to look too closely, however, because one might be more prevalent than the other, and his life was about keeping the two apart.

  The DI’s thoughts were interrupted by a familiar voice.

  ‘Hello, Bob,’ said DI Harris.

  ‘Eddy, nearly walked by you there, in a world of my own.’

  DI Eddy Harris fitted the stereotype of the Ayrshire big man perfectly. It was a generic trait, usually passed on by fathers soured by life’s injustices. You could pick out the Flash Harrises on the force by their strut and the seething, sneering looks they reserved for those in uniform or of a lower rank. It was a generational hand-me-down that should have died out by now, but plenty of men like Harris still perpetrated chauvinism as a right.

  ‘I’m on my way to see Dino, presume you’re on your way out?’ said Harris.

  ‘That’s right. And delighted about it.’

  ‘Christ, I knew I should have got her a bag of Bonios.’

  ‘Tranquilliser dart might be more appropriate.’ Valentine didn’t want to be reminded of the chief super, he eased the conversation in another direction. ‘How’s the club raid, Meat Hangers wasn’t it?’

  ‘Little or nothing to go on so far. Waiting for the SOCOs’ report but looking too clean for my liking, not a shred to go on.’

  ‘It’s one of Norrie Leask’s joints isn’t it? That should be your starter for ten.’

  ‘If the report comes back full of holes, Leask’ll get a good rattle, don’t worry about that.’ DI Harris headed for the chief super’s office, waving off his colleague as he went.

  As Valentine opened the door of the incident room he watched the heads turn, but the gazes aimed on him were jerked away. Eyes met computer screens, the surface of desks, the interior of drawers. No one waited to meet his returned stare, except DS McCormack. She stood with a blue folder pressed to her hip and an unreadable expression on her face. For a moment, the DI tried to discern the look, relate it to some stock image he carried in his head but as the seconds passed a creeping self-consciousness diverted him. He pressed forward, headed for the incident board at the far end of the long room.

  ‘Hello, boss,’ said DS McAlister.

  ‘Ally …’

  ‘Any good news to report?’

  ‘That depends. How optimistic are you feeling?’

  As Valentine reached the board he put his hands in his pockets and stood before the team’s input. There were pictures now, from the crime scene and from the police files. The murder victim, crouched over a blood-daube
d kitchen table, held the most prominent position, flanked by a dated-looking mug shot of James Tulloch and smaller, insignificant-looking photographs of a young man in uniform.

  The DI pointed. ‘This the brother?’

  ‘Yes, sir. That’s Darren Millar, aka Darry the lad, aka Corporal Millar of the …’

  ‘He’s still military?’

  ‘Very much so. And get this, they’re as stumped as us as to his whereabouts.’

  ‘You mean he’s AWOL?’

  ‘Too right he is. Posh bloke at the barracks was very cagey, not giving much away, but you could tell they’re spewing about it.’

  ‘They tend to take a dim view of squaddies on the run.’

  ‘Yeah. He wants a word, by the way.’

  ‘Who, Ally?’

  ‘Forgot his name, Major Misunderstanding or something. There’s a Post-it on your desk with his details but I got the impression he’d be calling back before you got to him.’

  DS Donnelly and DS McCormack joined the others at the incident board. It seemed a good time for Valentine to summon the rest of the room to gather around. The sound of chairs scraping and footsteps followed.

  ‘OK, we know what we’re looking at here, murder is not something we ever approach in the low gears, so I want your full attention and your full commitment. If we get lucky, and we wrap this one up, then I’ll let you know you can start breathing easy again. Until then if you’re not panting like a randy St Bernard on a promise then I’ll want to know why.’

  Valentine eased himself onto the edge of the desk in front of him, indicated DS Donnelly to the front of the crowd. ‘You’re up first, Phil.’

  ‘Thanks, boss,’ said Donnelly. He stood, straight-backed before the gathered audience, then moved towards the board. He seemed to be waiting for his thoughts to align.

  ‘Just the basics, Phil,’ said Valentine. ‘What have you got so far?’

  ‘As you can see from the board, it’s not a great deal, boss. There’s been movement, some fact gathering but nothing very much in the way of progress.’

  ‘Tell us about the prints analysis, what did the dusters come up with on the bloodstained wall?’

  ‘The smeared lines on the wall, yes, that’s been interesting.’

  Valentine turned to face the room. ‘On the night of the incident we were a little perplexed by these marks.’ He retrieved the photographs from the board, passed them around. ‘We couldn’t make out if the marks were the work of one or two people.’

  Donnelly spoke: ‘If it was one, we surmised, one perp. But if it was two …’

  ‘Two sources for the marks means two people fleeing the scene, two possible perpetrators. Of course there’s no guarantees either way, could still have been one perp and a bystander, but that bystander may have been an accomplice or an active participant in murder.’

  DS Donnelly watched as the photographs made their way around the room. ‘Unfortunately, the dusters didn’t come up with much. They’re prints, for sure. But they’re too smudged to be decipherable. There’s a slight chance that some of the boffins in Glasgow might be able to enhance the limited info we have, blow the prints up so to speak, and look for matches but that relies on our perp, or perps, being on record. Sorry, boss, not what you wanted to hear, I’m sure.’

  ‘How far down the queue are we with Glasgow?’

  ‘They know it’s a murder job, they’ve assured us of priority.’

  ‘Well, thankfully there’s precious few Old Firm games at the moment, but I won’t get my hopes up.’

  ‘I’ll keep pressing them, sir.’

  Donnelly collected the photographs, returned them to the board. ‘The other aspect I was looking at was the murder weapon.’

  ‘How did that go?’ said Valentine.

  ‘Well …’

  ‘Oh, Christ. Go on.’

  ‘Nothing retrieved by uniform. They carried out a full eyeball of the grassy patch at the end of the street – and the path to and from – but nothing. It’s a well-trodden path, sir, main ingress and egress to the town centre for the scheme. I’d be surprised if anything showed up because it’s very flattened land, and grass of more than a few inches in height is non-existent.’

  Valentine looked at the DS. ‘The place was heaving with people on the night, kids running about all over the shop, if that’s even a fraction of the foot-traffic then I’d be surprised if a weapon lasted more than five minutes on that path.’

  ‘It’s Whitletts as well, if it’s not tied down it wanders,’ said DS McAlister.

  Valentine agreed. ‘All right, we’re not giving up just yet, before someone mentions magpies liking a nice shiny blade as well.’

  ‘Uniform went all the way into the town, sir. Along the banks of the river, they were pretty thorough. We had the bins too, before the scaffies emptied them out.’

  ‘And has anyone searched the River Ayr?’ said the DI.

  No one answered.

  Donnelly exhaled loudly, pursed his lips like he was about to whistle.

  ‘Is that some kind of reaction to the costs, Phil?’

  ‘We’d need divers for that, boss. A search of the river, I mean.’

  ‘Well I wasn’t expecting to do it with my old Woolies snorkel. Get on it, get the frogmen down there right away. If it glints, or has a pointy bit on the end, grab it.’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  ‘And, Phil. Don’t mention this to Dino, she’s on a need-to-know basis. By that I mean needs to know bugger all unless it’s been run by me first.’

  DS Donnelly was writing on his clipboard, didn’t look up.

  ‘OK, Ally, what’s your story?’ said Valentine.

  14

  As DS McAlister walked towards the incident board Valentine removed the cap from a red marker pen. There was a list of the chores he had handed out at the murder scene with the relevant officer’s initials beside them on the stark whiteboard. Under DS Donnelly’s tasks he drew a fat zero and underlined it, twice.

  ‘No disrespect to you, Phil,’ said Valentine, ‘you had the hard yards to cover for the rest of us.’

  ‘Appreciated, sir,’ said Donnelly.

  ‘But we have to keep a tally so that we know where we are.’ He paused as he returned the pen to the shelf below the board. ‘We’re a team, remember that, we work together not against each other, and our results are just that … our results. The only way we’re going to crack this is by pulling together, sharing information and sticking it on the board as and when we have it.’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  Valentine turned to McAlister. ‘Right, Ally, you’re up.’

  The DS was still looking at the fat zero in red. ‘I’m thinking there’s not much by way of solid information that I can add, but there is some.’

  ‘Many a mickle maks a muckle, as my old mam used to say.’

  ‘Yes, boss.’ He opened out the blue folder in front of him and started to engage the team. ‘Well, as you’d expect, from the door-to-door, uniform picked up a lot of stuff, some of it’s not much better than gossip, but some of it might turn out to be useful.’

  From the folder McAlister removed a postcard-sized photograph of a girl in school uniform and held it up. ‘Jade Millar – from the tie you’ll gather she’s a Belmont Academy pupil.’

  He put the picture on the board.

  ‘What year is she in, Ally?’ said DS McCormack.

  ‘Third year I think. Waiting on the department of education records coming over. But she’s fifteen years old, so third or fourth year seems about right.’

  ‘Why Belmont? Seems a bit of a schlep from Whitletts?’ said Valentine.

  ‘Yeah, well, the school was knocked down and rebuilt a few years ago and has some kind of mega-academy status now. They draw from all over Ayrshire.’

  ‘Sounds like a recipe for disaster if you ask me, wouldn’t want my kids mixing it with with the Ant Hill Mob … Have you spoke to her teachers, yet?’

  ‘No, sir. I thought you’d like to come along f
or that.’

  ‘Being a man of learning you mean?’

  ‘Erm, I was thinking more of you being a man with teenage daughters – you could translate for us.’

  A murmur of laughter spread throughout the room.

  ‘Better revise your Taylor Swift lyrics, sir,’ said McCormack.

  ‘Christ we’re in trouble if it comes to that. Right, Ally, stick Jade up beside her brother and tell us what else you got.’

  ‘Yes, boss.’ McAlister flitted between board and folder for a moment and then continued his speech. ‘Right, what we have on Jade is pretty minimal, not much to report on the door-to-door. But there’s a lot more about her brother, Darry.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Well, Darry’s been around longer, have him at about twenty-four, twenty-five and he’s a kent face. Jade, much less so. Keeps herself to herself, quiet sort of kid, or so they say.’

  ‘Boyfriend?’

  ‘Yes, there’s a young lad. We have a description but no name. We have a best friend for her too, girl called Alena from school. Should have home address by now, they sound pretty inseparable.’

  ‘Set up a visit to Alena at home.’

  ‘Yeah, will do. Oh, and we have a sighting of Jade on the night, about an hour or so before everything kicked off.’

  ‘At the home?’

  ‘No, the locus, though. Neighbour spotted her across the road on her mobile. That was about a half hour before the screaming started, but she’s not been seen since.’

  Valentine reached over for the red marker, grabbed it. ‘Catch!’

  ‘What do you want me to write up, sir?’

  ‘Missing teenager.’ He watched the pen’s tip mark the board. ‘And let’s get on this missing teen now. Preferably I’d like her found before the press cotton on and we have that to worry about too.’