Artefacts of the Dead

by Tony Black

  Adrian squeezed his mother’s hand. ‘I think it must have been sometime yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘I take it Mr Urquhart has never been missing like this before?’

  ‘No. Never.’

  Valentine cast a glance at McAlister, who was walking around the room. ‘You will be aware of the television news bulletin.’

  Mrs Urquhart nodded again, she scrunched up her eyes as she spoke. ‘Yes.’

  Valentine shuffled uneasily on the chair, the woman was in no fit state for questioning, but it was one of those moments where the demands of the job overrode etiquette. He lowered his voice. ‘I have to ask you, are you capable of making an identification?’

  She looked towards her son and buried her head in his chest.

  Adrian spoke. ‘Can I do that?’

  Valentine’s mouth widened, but he didn’t have time to answer.

  ‘No. No. I’ll do it, detective,’ said Mrs Urquhart.

  Valentine rose from the chair and beckoned to McAlister. It was pointless pressing her: very little of any value could be obtained from someone in such a profound state of mourning. There was a prominent thought impressing itself upon Valentine’s mind, though: most murder victims knew their killers. She might indeed be in shock, but her gut reactions would be difficult to fake.

  ‘Mrs Urquhart, if I may ask just one question before we progress . . .’ The DI paused for a moment. ‘Can you think of anyone who would have a cause to harm your husband?’

  Mrs Urquhart looked to her son and then turned on the detectives with steel in her eyes. ‘No, no one.’ Her cut-glass vowels seemed even sharper now. ‘Why . . . why would anyone want to do such a thing?’

  10

  On his return to King Street station, Detective Inspector Bob Valentine collected a stack of notes from the front desk of the incident room and retreated to the glass-partitioned end to be alone with his thoughts. He was haunted by the look on Mrs Urquhart’s face as she had taken in the growing realisation that her husband was not coming home. No matter how many times Valentine saw the look – and it was the familiar look of death visiting – he could not adjust himself to it. He remembered what it had been like to see his mother on her deathbed. She was still, and the almost imperceptible taking of breath signalled a closer proximity to death than he had ever encountered. All previous introductions had been impersonal – random incidents didn’t count, he soon realised – not like this. When he saw his mother, held to life by a pin, the sudden realisation of mortality, of finite time, entered his own life. It wasn’t that Valentine hadn’t always known about death – not at all – he had, and that made his altogether new consciousness the more palpable. Seeing his mother encircled by death made him realise he didn’t know a thing about the end of life. All his assumptions were trite, unthinking, unfelt. He could no more express in words the true gravity of death than he could put the ebbing life back into his mother.

  To see someone he loved dying, to know they were going to leave him for ever, had marked death as permanent in his own existence for the first time. Valentine sensed the cold shift immediately. He never wanted death to be a personal matter again, because it was all too personal as it was. He knew the only way to continue living was to ignore all notion of a personal death: it could happen any minute of any day, be all around you in every form of hurt and misery, but the trick was to ignore it, to sublimate it. For the mass of people this was possible almost without thought, but to Valentine – who was surrounded by death – it took conscious effort. He knew he had to obliterate death, before it obliterated him.

  The detective turned over the cover of the blue folder that he had positioned in the middle of his desk and stared at the first page. The post-mortem report was not a voluminous document; it always surprised him how little information the ending of a life seemed to generate. He ignored the contents section and scanned quickly over the succeeding pages, which detailed the procedures of the pathologist. For a moment he had a vision of the morgue in Glasgow’s Saltmarket area – he saw the murder squad stationed around the corpse of James Urquhart, their looks of dour solemnity and the perplexed impatience with the type of jargon that was used to determine the cause of death.

  Valentine turned the pages and scanned to the section where conclusions, of a sort, were made. He had tried to prejudge the pathologist’s outcome; in his gut he felt that the victim had been killed a certain way – the scene of the crime suggested much of his assumption – but Valentine knew better than to jump to conclusions.

  The first term to attract his attention was ‘traumatic brain injury’. There had been a depressed skull fracture, the result of blunt force. More detail was given: acute subdural haematoma, cerebral contusions, dramatically increased intracranial pressure. They were all terms familiar to the DI, terms he classed as necessary evils, but they all mounted up to the same thing in his book: James Urquhart had been hit on the head by someone who wanted him dead.

  Valentine was hunched at his desk, poring over the pathology report when the hinges on the door called out and DS Rossi and DS Donnelly walked in.

  ‘Sir . . .’ Donnelly was the first to acknowledge the officer in charge.

  ‘Come in, lads.’ He turned over the final page of the report and closed the blue folder. ‘Just going over the post-mortem.’

  Rossi nodded. ‘Hammer or a crowbar . . . something like that.’

  ‘Well, it was pretty clear it wasn’t done out at the tip. There wasn’t enough blood . . . or anyone picking up on a struggle on the boundary street.’

  ‘He wasn’t alive when he was squeezed through that fence, that’s for sure,’ said Donnelly.

  Valentine placed his fingers on the rim of the desk and slowly pushed the wheels of his chair back. He was talking as he rose and walked over to the window. ‘There’s no evidence of a struggle, not so much as a fingernail scraping . . .’

  ‘Not one, no battle scars at all, sir.’ Rossi kept his eyes on the DI. ‘So he’s been whacked and then moved . . . But why to the tip?’

  Donnelly folded his arms, then quickly removed one to illustrate his speech with wild, looping gestures. ‘That’s a message for somebody right there, Rossi. The tip’s where the rubbish goes; he’s been dumped there because someone wants the world to know exactly what they thought of James Urquhart.’

  Valentine’s thoughts were building to a fog inside his head. He had been content to sift through the facts in the report, to analyse and to draw his own conclusions. He felt now like he was being sidetracked by the officers – it was as if he had set out for a leisurely stroll and the sudden incursion into his office had resulted in a cross-country run.

  ‘OK, OK . . . Let’s keep the party clean. We don’t know the first thing about this victim yet, we can’t be jumping to the conclusion that the place we found him is a marker to his murderer’s state of mind.’

  Donnelly flared up. ‘But it’s an option, boss.’

  Valentine nodded, allowed a slight indicator of doubt to play on his face, and then delivered a puncture to the DS’s ego. ‘It’s one option, I’ll give you that: our killer might indeed have thought his victim to be trash. But, he might have thought the exact opposite. We don’t know what the hell he was thinking. Keep to what we can confirm, Donnelly. The options are endless at this stage . . . our killer might have thought the worst about Urquhart, or the best, or any one of a million other perceptions you could list. Just because you can put options on a list, it doesn’t validate a single bloody one of them.’

  Donnelly rubbed at the stubble on his chin and clamped his jaw tight. He didn’t seem to have any more to add to the debate at present. He looked deflated, like a boy who had kicked a football further than he had ever done before and had expected to be rewarded for his skill – despite having broken a window in the process.

  Valentine needed to rally his troops. ‘You’re right about one thing though, Phil . . .’ Donnelly’s head lifted as he eyed the DI. ‘We need to keep our options open. At th
is stage, all ideas are worth investigating.’

  The remark seemed to be enough balm to cover Donnelly’s pride. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Right, I think it’s time we put our heads together,’ said Valentine. ‘Paulo . . . Get Ally and the team together round the board. I want to talk to them in ten minutes.’

  DS Rossi pinched his cheeks as if he was about to exhale lavishly. ‘I think Ally’s upstairs at the press office, there was something said about a statement.’ He shrugged his shoulders and levelled a palm at Donnelly.

  ‘Search me,’ said DS Donnelly. ‘That boy’s a law unto himself.’

  Valentine made a circular motion with his index finger at the side of his ear. ‘If he thinks he’s going to be standing in front of a camera this afternoon, he’s dreaming . . . You can tell him from me if he’s any ambitions on that front then he better be preparing to streak down King Street.’

  DS Rossi and DS Donnelly took their cue to laugh up their colleague and exited the DI’s office.

  When he was alone again, Valentine returned to the blue folder and opened up the front cover. There was an ancillary section that detailed a few more findings from the post-mortem examination. The detective always felt like a voyeur reading these medical records of the deceased, but they had the advantage of embaying a level of familiarity he found useful in bringing him closer to understanding – if not bonding with – the deceased.

  James Urquhart had been suffering from cardiomyopathy, according to the report. His arteries were blocked and there was evidence on his heart of previous cardiac arrest. On reading about the victim’s diseased heart, Valentine felt a cold shadow pass through him. He had read so many doctors’ and surgeons’ reports about his own heart that it was almost impossible not to feel a deep, visceral identification with the case notes. Was it sympathy, he wondered, and if it was, then for whom: Urquhart or himself?

  He closed the folder and leaned back from his desk. Since the stabbing, the DI had been forced to alter many aspects of his life. His morning ritual now entailed taking a multitude of prescription medicines – tablets in various shapes, sizes and colours – to keep him alive. That itself wasn’t the issue, he could cope with that, it was the way his life had been restructured that bothered him. Each pill taken was a fresh reminder that he was a different man from the one he had been before the stabbing. He felt different inside and he knew that on the outside it showed too. Clare had said it only the night before and it riled him again now. Even the chief super had remarked – as early as this morning – that there couldn’t have been much left of him after the surgery. Perhaps more than any statement, or observation, that remark had wounded the most. But why? Was it because he knew it was true or because he resented giving Dino credit for having any insight, especially insight into himself?

  Valentine drew back into the moment, removed himself from the claustrophobia of thought, and immediately turned his gaze on the two fingers he was rubbing against the shirt pocket on his chest. Was he checking his heartbeat? Trying to massage sympathy into the damaged muscle? As soon as he became cognizant of his actions the detective jerked his hand away and rose from the desk.

  ‘Christ above,’ he muttered, wiping at the edges of his mouth. He knew he’d come dangerously close to losing focus and that worried him, perhaps more than anything else.

  He looked out towards the incident room: the team were gathering.

  11

  As Valentine closed the door on the partitioned office in the corner of the incident room, he saw the doors at the far end swing open. There was a flourish of long dark hair and a thudding of high heels that came backed with such force they still registered solidly even on carpet tiles. Here was an Ayrshire heifer – all beef to the heels – stampeding into his midst. As the detective stared at Chief Superintendent Marion Martin, he observed a numbness in his throat that he knew was caused by the automatic locking of his jaws. She stomped through the mass of bodies with all the grace of a bulldozer and made straight towards the noticeboard where Donnelly stood with a photograph in hand. As the chief super halted, she dropped her barely perceptible chin onto her fleshy neck and swiped the picture from Donnelly’s outstretched fingers. She started to speak as she waved the photo like a baby’s rattle in the DS’s face, but Valentine couldn’t hear her words – it was not that they weren’t audible, more the fact that he seemed to be blocking her utterances out. He had seen the chief super carry on like this before; she came into investigations and stood in the corner like a headmaster who’d come to oversee a less experienced teacher. It wasn’t on, he thought. There was a part of Valentine that she stoked like a blast furnace; he was tempted to tap her on the shoulder and ask what the hell she thought she was doing, but he had met her type before and knew the drill.

  In Ayrshire, there was a breed of woman that showed themselves up in any crowd by a singular trait: combativeness. They were beyond gruff, verging on bellicose, and there was no getting around them with politesse, put-downs or any of the many options in between. There was no sweet-talking – because that in itself was mere incitement to them – they couldn’t be buttered up; swayed by cajoling; manoeuvred into a more amenable frame of mind; be influenced by facts or reasoning; or by showing the glass as half-full and not half-empty. They were beyond all that, beyond all help, all intervention. Their raison d’être was to spark up – or, to be more exact, to find an excuse to spark up. It didn’t matter what the instigation had been – the object was to be seen as someone who, with the slightest provocation, would lunge into tirades. It was like a self-defence mechanism, a variant strain of the get-your-retaliation-in-first philosophy that had its roots in innate insecurity. It had been this way for decades, centuries likely. It was inter-generational. A blight on the region. A plague no less. In Glasgow, just a few miles inland, it didn’t exist. They had hard-faced women, but they possessed humour. The Ayrshire type, being earthier, closer to the soil, had no redeeming features and Chief Superintendent Marion Martin could have been their standard bearer.

  Valentine pressed his tongue on the roof of his mouth and tried to release his locked jaws. He could sense the familiar copper taste that precipitated anger; it was enough to alert him to the off switch. As he walked, he put his hands in his pockets and tried to remind himself that he had a bigger aim than playing office politics with Dino. If she wanted to sit in on his briefing then she was entitled, if somewhat less than welcome; he just wouldn’t be affording her a front row seat.

  ‘Right, everybody.’ He made sure his voice was heard. ‘Can I have your undivided attention?’

  There was a rustle of paper; a filing cabinet drawer was closed loudly and a ringing telephone cut off by dumping the receiver on a desktop.

  ‘Well, I’m not shouting to the four corners of the station, so you can gather round here.’

  As the squad started to assemble, the detective leaned towards DC McAlister and laid a hand on his shoulder. He kept his voice low as he leaned towards him. ‘Ally, what did uniform turn up on the delivery van?’

  McAlister shook his head from side to side. ‘Not good, boss. No deliveries in the locus and no tradesmen uncovered on the door-to-door.’

  Valentine huffed. ‘So we can rule our white-van man out as a potential to move the case forward.’

  ‘Unless we turn up another lead, I can’t see how the van’s useful to us.’ McAlister turned his gaze towards the board. ‘Might have been nothing, sir.’

  Valentine patted the DC on the back and moved with the rest of the room’s occupants as they gravitated towards its centre. The chief super was left out on the periphery of the group, by the noticeboard, holding the photograph she had snatched from DS Donnelly. Valentine was keenly aware of her displeasure at being dispossessed of cynosure status; from the corner of his eye he watched her suck in her cheeks and drop the picture on the desktop. She folded her arms as the others booked their front-row seats.

  ‘OK, you’ll all have seen the pictures and the SOCOs’ reports �
�� for what they’re worth – by now. The post-mortem report is on my desk through there and you can have a shufti at that if you haven’t already. I’m not going to try to prejudge anyone’s opinion at this stage; what I want is to make sure we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet and make sure we’re all aware of our role . . . understood?’

  Together: ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Good,’ said Valentine, edging himself onto the side of a desk, taking the collected gaze of the squad with him. ‘So what are we looking at? A brutal, almost ritualistic murder on public ground – if not carried out there, certainly the intention was to make people think so – and of a figure who might be described as privileged, perhaps . . . extremely wealthy, certainly.’ He halted, drew breath. ‘A point in fact: our victim’s social status will be a bone of contention with the media – bear that in mind.’

  A hand went up in the middle of the crowd. ‘Are you approaching this from a financial perspective, sir?’

  The DI shrugged. ‘We don’t have a motive at this stage, but am I willing to explore blackmail or a monetary grudge . . . maybe even resentment or jealousy? Yes, of course . . . I want everyone to keep their minds open. This is not the time to be jumping to conclusions, but it’s also not the time to be ruling anything out.’

  DC McAlister leaned forward in his seat and held up a pencil. ‘If it’s related to cash, then why the impaling, boss? Seems a bit . . . unusual.’

  Valentine smiled at McAlister. ‘Good point. It’s unusual all right, unless it’s a distraction . . . Make it look like a psycho-killing because you want to draw attention from the fact that the motive is money.’

  ‘They could be linked, though,’ said DS Donnelly. ‘I mean, say the motive is money but also a grudge.’

  ‘You mean murder’s not enough to settle a grudge?’ said the DI.

  ‘What I mean is, say our killer wanted to do more than settle a score, say they wanted to pour shame on the victim.’