Artefacts of the Dead

by Tony Black

  Valentine held up a hand. ‘Just lift the tape, son.’ He had no time for reunions.

  As he drove towards the tip entrance he spotted the SOCOs’ white tent, the officers in their spacesuit livery, and the usual hubbub of hangers-on and dicks-in-the-wind.

  ‘God almighty . . .’ He tried to locate DS Rossi, but the first to hove into view was the fiscal depute, then as he turned the car towards the crime scene he caught sight of the DS talking to DC McAlister and DS Donnelly.

  Valentine stilled the engine and removed his sports coat from the front seat beside him. As he exited the vehicle he was approached by the fiscal.

  ‘Bob . . .’ He put a raised inflection on the word that made him sound like an Antipodean schoolgirl.

  ‘Indeed I am.’ Valentine walked past the fiscal, patting him on the shoulder. He muttered, ‘Later, Col . . . when I’ve spoken to my lads.’

  The first to approach the officer in charge was DS McAlister. He slit his eyes, then took two firm steps in the direction of DI Valentine.

  ‘I heard you were joining us, but I didn’t want to believe it.’

  ‘Look, spare me the welcome party . . . What have we got?’

  DS Rossi dismissed the white-suited SOCO and made for the newly formed enclave of officers gathering around Valentine like autograph-hunting boys on the gates of Somerset Park.

  McAlister spoke. ‘White male, late fifties and dead as dead gets.’

  ‘Is that a medical opinion, Ally?’ said Valentine.

  ‘You could say that . . .’ He tipped his head in the direction of the village. ‘The doc’s been and gone, by the way.’

  ‘No surprise there, can’t get a happy hour on the tip.’

  Valentine took hold of a small cardboard box being held out by one of the SOCOs that contained clear-plastic gloves. He removed a pair and quickly snapped them, one after the other, onto his hands.

  ‘I won’t ask you to wear the blue slippers,’ said the SOCO, waving a hand. ‘Seems pointless in this mess.’

  Valentine nodded, ‘Right, lead the way.’

  Rossi was just arriving as they took off again; he called at Valentine’s back, ‘Hello, sir.’

  The DI suppressed a smirk at the thought of Jim’s ice cream remark. ‘Move your arse, Paulo!’

  As the murder squad headed towards the white tent, the refuse crunched and squelched beneath their feet. An omnipresent hiss of flies followed with them. The group, almost in unison, raised their hands towards their mouths and noses as they walked through air gravid with pestilence.

  ‘This is rank,’ said Valentine. ‘Almost makes you want one of those wee B&Q masks.’ He pointed to the SOCOs up ahead.

  ‘They’re in short supply, apparently; we asked,’ said McAlister.

  ‘You are kidding me.’

  ‘Wish I was.’

  Valentine stopped in his tracks and turned to survey the crest of the rubbish mount that they were standing on like the advance party of some perverse colonial incursion. He pointed to the edge of the site, to a concrete wall. ‘Where did our man come in?’

  DS Donnelly spoke. ‘Over there, side of the wall, got blood and fibres from the squeeze.’

  ‘So what’s that . . . a hundred metres?’

  Donnelly flicked the pages of a spiral-bound notepad – the action shooed flies. ‘One-sixty-odd.’

  Valentine put himself between DS Donnelly and the view of the concrete wall; he widened his arms. ‘That’s a path – as the crow flies – of about three metres wide, yes?’

  The remark was greeted with nods; his use of the Socratic method had triumphed. ‘Right, Paulo, where are you?’

  The DS pushed through the bodies, ‘Here, boss.’

  ‘Aye, I see you . . .’ Valentine pointed to the wall. ‘From there, in a direct line to the tent, I want everything.’

  The team looked at each other, then back to the DI. McAlister spoke first. ‘Are you saying you want it bagged, boss?’

  ‘Do I have to say it twice?’

  ‘But it’s rubbish . . . piles of crap.’

  Valentine shook his head, as the team stared at him he pointed to the ground and stamped his foot on the detritus. A cloud of grey dust erupted from beneath his shoe.

  ‘Ally, this could be a goldmine of clues we’re standing on, so get the lot of it bagged and stored and not another gripe out of you.’ He pointed at Rossi. ‘Paulo. You’re the senior officer on here, why the hell have you not been bagging this?’

  ‘Boss, the chief super will do her nut if she hears you’ve bagged that lot; do you know how much it’ll cost? I mean in man-hours, never mind the storage.’

  Valentine smiled; two neat chevrons appeared either side of his mouth. ‘I couldn’t care less about the cost.’ He edged forward and fronted up to the assembled group. ‘Do you know the only economics I care about?’ He pointed to the tent. ‘I care why a group of paid civil servants are standing in the middle of the local tip with a white tent pitched over a dead man . . . That is all I care about.’

  Valentine stretched out for the tent; as he went, a dirty cloud of tip stour was released by his heavy footfalls. ‘Come on, let’s get a look at our victim.’

  4

  There was nothing to indicate that the white tent, its sides fluttering like the sails of a pleasure boat, contained anything untoward. If the familiar ingress and exit of men in white bodysuits had not been relayed on television screens a thousand times before, no one would have had cause to be in the least squeamish at the sight of it. Granted, the fact that it was pitched in the midst of a rubbish tip was a surreal factor to consider, though no less incongruous than the flurry of soberly attired bodies clambering over the mounds of Sainsbury’s carriers and an assortment of burst mattresses, empty paint tins and myriad plastic containers of household products.

  The seagulls seemed to be the most interested in the hurried, ant-like formicating that was underway. They circled overhead, swooping occasionally; the bravest of them even set down and spread wings in proprietary fashion. They were arrogant birds, thought DI Bob Valentine, as he made to kick a king-sized one from his path. ‘Flying rats.’

  ‘They’re bastards, aren’t they?’ said DS McAlister. ‘Should see them down the shore flats where I stay – think they run the place!’

  Valentine let the conversational gambit pass, but McAlister wasn’t finished.

  ‘See the roof of the baths, the Citadel, or whatever they’re calling it these days . . . That’s where they’re nesting. If I was on the council I’d be getting a squad of workies up there and burning them out.’

  ‘Burning them out?’ said DS Donnelly.

  ‘Too right I would . . .’

  Donnelly tipped back his head and laughed. ‘What with, flame throwers?’ He was still laughing as McAlister began his reply.

  ‘Listen, mate, you don’t have to live down there – the noise and the car covered in shit every morning – you can bloody well bet I’d be taking a flamethrower to them . . . I’d be bombing the bastards if I could.’

  The conversation had taken on a combative tone. Valentine knew there was a danger of the ante being increased; if he didn’t intervene, the seagull topic would become a boxing match between the DS and the DC that threatened to draw attention from the task at hand.

  ‘Christ above, Ally, you truly regret missing out on ’Nam, don’t you!’

  Donnelly laughed and pointed at McAlister. ‘Fancies himself as Chuck Norris.’

  ‘More like Steven Seagull.’ Valentine’s remark was greeted with an instant burst of cruel laughter. It took him by surprise – he never thought of himself as that amusing, that much of a joker. ‘All right, enough’s enough.’ He asserted his authority. ‘Let’s try and remember why we’re here.’

  The squad had reached the entrance to the tent. The front flaps had been secured with a loose knot, which always struck Valentine as wholly insufficient: a light breeze might raise the flaps and expose the contents to those who didn’t want to know
what was inside, or worse, reveal something to exactly the prying eyes that shouldn’t see inside.

  The DI reached for the knot.

  ‘It’s not pretty, sir,’ said McAlister.

  Valentine peered over his shoulder. ‘When is it ever?’

  As they walked into the tent the temperature was the first thing that the DI noticed; it was several degrees higher than he had expected, but at once he realised that the heat was compounded by the foetid air. The stench from the tip waste was intense inside the tent. The SOCOs had put up ultraviolet fly traps but they were ineffective against the plague proportions of insects packed beneath the canvas, which, though white on the outside, had accumulated great black patches of shifting swarms inside.

  ‘It’s got worse in here,’ said Rossi.

  ‘A statement of the bleedin’ obvious,’ said McAlister.

  It didn’t strike Valentine as at all unusual that not a single member of the squad had made any remark about the reason for them being there: the freshly mutilated corpse of a middle-aged man.

  The DI was calm with the murder victim in sight. He couldn’t explain this: for reasons he was utterly unable to fathom, the first sight of a body on his patch always intensified his obligation to the job. It was as if the mortal remains signalled to those nascent, adolescent parts of his nature, those first forays into near-adulthood that had called him to become a police officer. This was why he had joined up: not to spend all those years in uniform lifting drunks or wrestling with football hooligans – those were social problems, political failings – this murder victim symbolised an act of evil, a killing, and those who plied that kind of malevolence needed to be met by someone like Valentine. He was a born hunter: a finder of the sociopaths and psychopaths who had no place in a civilised world. Their capture, the removal of evil, was Valentine’s reason for being – he knew this because his pulse quickened at the thought, every time.

  ‘I’m thinking he’s a stoat-the-ball,’ said McAlister.

  Valentine waited for another reaction from the squad, when none came he put forward his own. ‘You think he’s a paedophile because he’s been impaled . . .’ – he waved a hand towards the wooden shaft – ‘like this.’

  ‘Aye . . . up the arse.’

  The DI straightened his back. ‘Go on.’

  McAlister seemed less sure of himself when tested, rocking on the balls of his feet. ‘Well, from a motive point of view, if he was a stoat then a victim would want to, you know . . .’

  ‘Return the favour in kind,’ said Valentine.

  ‘Stick it up his hole, boss.’

  The DI let McAlister bask in his opinion for a moment, then dispossessed him of any illusion. ‘I think you’re just giving your mind a treat, son.’ Valentine shook his head; his voice came firm and flat. ‘That’s a reach; you have not one iota of a fact to back it up with. Pure conjecture. Now, if you’d told me you’d ID’d him and he had a record for fiddling with kiddies I’d say you could be on to something, but a plank of wood up the crack does not a paedo make.’

  The squad fell into a lulled silence; the sound of swarming flies filled the febrile air. Valentine knew the rest of the team would be reluctant to voice their opinions so freely now – if they were of the same calibre as McAlister’s assumptions, then he was glad of that. He lowered himself onto his haunches and returned to the corpse before them. The mouth, its grey lips contorted, drew him; he removed a yellow pencil from his pocket, and with the eraser-end he pushed the lip towards the gumline. He stared for a moment and then extracted the pencil; the lip stayed in its new position with the gumline exposed. Valentine was uneasy with his incursion now; he seemed to have altered the expression of the corpse in a manner that seemed to heighten an already anguished appearance. He shook the pencil like a doctor with a mercury thermometer and then began to fervently rub the eraser-end in the crook of his elbow.

  ‘We have no ID, I take it?’ he said.

  Donnelly spoke. ‘No, boss . . . the SOCOs have printed and swabbed, but they were hanging off on the dental cast . . .’

  Valentine cut in. ‘Why?’

  ‘Erm, they were waiting on the OK to move him.’

  The DI shook his head. ‘I want that done now, not tomorrow morning. Now. And I’ve seen him, so you can get on that right away.’

  ‘Just hang fire there, Bob.’ The fiscal depute was crouching under the tent flaps. ‘You can’t move this corpse until I have a death confirmation; come on now, you know the rules, not being one of the tabula rasa.’ He applied a phoney horseshoe smile to his face as he stared down Valentine.

  McAlister and Donnelly turned to eyeball the DI, anticipating a reaction. DS Chris Rossi started to speak. ‘Colin, the . . .’

  Valentine flagged him down and took a step towards the fiscal. ‘Keep up, mate . . . Did you miss the episode of Dr Finlay’s Casebook shot at Ayr tip this afternoon?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The doc’s been and gone . . .’ Valentine turned to Rossi. ‘Paulo, get him a death cert’ faxed over, eh.’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  The fiscal was left standing in the middle of the tent as Valentine headed out, the other officers following behind him in a linear formation, trying to keep pace with the DI’s quick step. As he descended the mound of rubbish, Valentine grinned to himself at the thought of the fiscal – alone in the white tent with the bloodless corpse – then he turned to see him throwing back the tent flaps and hitting a jog.

  Valentine allowed himself a discreet laugh as he widened his stride towards the car, content in the knowledge that he had exploded a myth Colin Scott held about himself. The fiscal was from the Castlehill council houses; his father had been a joiner who liked a drink in the Chase most nights and his mother was a nice wee woman who held house and home together cleaning offices. Valentine knew Col’s type – he had been a bright boy in school who had grown up with the power to shock all the adults around him with his bursts of intelligence and occasional displays of knowledge. In adulthood he still felt that the carefully chosen octosyllable should afford him the same adulation, but he was mistaken. To Valentine it marked him as merely a pompous prick: the Scots had a phrase for dismissing those like Colin – ‘I kent yer faither.’

  Valentine pointed the key at the lock and the blinkers flickered; he was opening the driver’s door as McAlister caught up.

  ‘So, what’s your guess, sir?’

  ‘Haven’t you learned a thing . . . ? I don’t deal in guesses.’

  The DI removed his sports coat and placed it on the passenger’s seat; he was putting the keys in the ignition when McAlister spoke up again. ‘OK, bad choice of wording . . . but you must have some ideas.’

  ‘It’s a single perp, our victim isn’t a big lad or in any way fit, so one mid-build male could have handled him. Two would have made a cleaner job of squeezing the body through the gap in the wall . . .’

  McAlister interrupted. ‘So he was killed somewhere else?’

  ‘I’d say so . . . The pathologist will confirm the time of death, but I don’t think our killer would have wanted to attract any more attention to himself when he already had the stake to hammer into the ground and the corpse to position on top of it.’

  Valentine started the engine and engaged first gear. ‘There’s something else to consider: our victim’s a married man, according to the ring on his finger, and he has some expensive-looking dental implants – not to mention those shoes that weren’t picked up at the Barras . . .’

  ‘So he’s well off.’

  ‘Well off, and in my experience that always means well connected. People like that don’t end up on a tip with a great spike up their backside unless they’ve made a very big mistake somewhere along the line . . . and somebody else wants the world to know all about it.’

  5

  DI Bob Valentine knew that something wasn’t sitting right with what he had just observed. It was a crime scene, a brutal murder, and nothing was supposed to sit right, but the information
– the sights and sounds, even – were working on an altogether different part of him than usual. As he drove, a shrill chime started to emanate from the dashboard and he noticed the petrol gauge flashing. He had an instinct to curse, to slap the rim of the wheel, but he halted, held himself in check; the days of anger – either inwardly directed or outwardly expressed – were over. He couldn’t risk elevating his blood pressure or pitching a spike in his stress levels: not now, certainly not now that CS Martin would be watching him so closely. And she would be watching very closely. There was a line from Burns – the Ayrshire bard – about what a gift it would be to see ourselves as others see us; it came to mind as Valentine drove. He had no desire to see, or even glimpse, how the chief super saw him. He knew what he made of her assessments, her opinions, and they mattered little to him. But in one very important regard her views did indeed matter: she had the ability to pass judgement on his future on the force.

  Valentine had been questioning just that recently – his place on the force – and had found himself wanting. The desire was still there, but he had his inner detractors: the little devils on his shoulders that poked fun at him, told him he’d lost it, that he’d lost his bottle. After the incident he wondered if he had, but more worryingly than that, he knew others – like Martin – worried also.

  The car slowed as Valentine applied the brakes at the roundabout next to the old cattle market – it was a supermarket now, but he still referred to this end of the town as the old market. Most people did: it was still Auld Ayr to those who had connections with the place and it would take more than concrete to flatten the place it held in their imaginations. Valentine pulled up – there were three rows of cars now, nudging imperceptibly towards the nozzles on the forecourt. He remembered walking past the high walls of the market as a boy on his way into the town centre. Old images flashed by like he was unpacking long-lost photographs for the first time in decades. They were fond memories, they made him smile, but the act of memory was brief, short-lived. Valentine soon found himself replacing kindly thoughts with the harsher light of reality. His neatly stacked store of memories – the photographs he had piled high in his mind – was suddenly introduced to a gale-force wind and scattered.