by Tony Black
Valentine stood in front of the whiteboard in the incident room and pressed the flat of his hand on the blank area to the left of the photograph of James Urquhart. He drummed his fingers momentarily and then he removed the red marker pen from the shelf and circled the picture. When he was finished, he drew a thick horizontal line leading from the circled area and ended the task with a question mark. As he stood staring, he contemplated what was likely to cover the question mark and approached the board again, circling the area in heavy red ink. He was placing the cap back on the marker pen when the telephone to his rear started to ring.
‘Yes, Valentine . . .’
It was Jim Prentice on the desk. ‘That’s the call from the track . . . It’s a body. White male, same MO as the tip.’
Valentine felt a chill, like a shadow had crossed him. ‘You sure?’
‘Certain . . .’
The DI was still digesting the information when the doors to the incident room were flung open and the chief super walked in. Valentine lowered the telephone receiver and turned to face Martin.
‘I take it that’s the bongo drums?’ she said.
Valentine blinked; it seemed to prompt him back to life. ‘We have another one, then.’
Martin positioned herself on the rim of the desk and folded her arms across her chest. She bunched her lips and then raked fingers through her hair. For a moment she seemed to be thinking, tapping the leg of the desk with the heel of her shoe; Valentine watched her and tried to detect a germ of optimism in her stance, but found none.
‘The press are going to have a field day,’ she said.
‘Well, that was already on the cards . . . Look, I should get out there now.’
The doors to the incident room opened once more as Valentine spoke; DC McAlister stood in the doorway and stared at the chief super – he seemed to intuit something. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Ally, don’t take your jacket off . . . We’ve got another body out at the track.’
‘What?’
The chief super raised herself from the desk. ‘SOCOs are on their way. I’d suggest you get out there now and start to make yourself useful.’
McAlister nodded. ‘Yes, boss.’
As he turned back towards the door, Valentine called out. ‘Can you give Paulo and Phil a holler?’
‘Aye, sure . . . You want them out there?’
The DI scratched behind his ear and exhaled loudly; it was an expression that indicated thoughts were fighting for prominence inside his head. ‘Erm, no . . . Just Phil. Keep Paulo back here, I want someone looking after the phones.’
As McAlister left the room, Valentine felt the chief super’s stare burning him. ‘Are you OK, Bob?’
‘What do you mean?’ He dropped his hand. ‘No need to worry about me.’
‘We both know I’ve every need . . .’ She tapped her tongue off her two front teeth. ‘Don’t think just because the workload has doubled you can skip out of the therapy sessions. I need you on the ball, Bob, more than ever now.’
Valentine painted a smile on his face. ‘Like I say, you’ve no reason to worry about me.’
The chief super turned away, flagging the detective off with the back of her hand as she went. He knew she was merely pressing the point to assert her authority – to undermine him – and the thought struck like a winding. He watched her leave, listened to the doors’ batting motion and snatched his sports coat from the back of the chair.
On the road out to the racetrack, Valentine felt the morning sun press itself on the window of the car. He was stiff and tense behind the wheel, gripping the gearstick in his left hand like it was a cudgel. Outside, the street was weary, a row of houses that had lost all charm since the giant supermarket had relocated just up the road. The detective rowed the gears back and forth as he passed through the traffic lights. He could see the racetrack on the right, but turned away to check the clock on the dash. He tried to keep his mind open, but assumptions about a double murder on his patch pressed themselves again and again like mosquito bites on his mind.
Valentine parked the Vectra outside the track and made his way towards the collection of uniforms. He was ahead of the SOCOs, but the site had already been cordoned off by the first on the scene. He roved the surrounding area with his eyes and caught sight of DC McAlister walking towards him. Clouds crossed the sky above and dim sunrays fell like ticker tape on the stand before slipping towards the track lanes.
‘It’s the double of the last one, sir,’ said McAlister.
Valentine gave the DC a look, then walked past him and made for the crime scene. When he got behind the cordon, his shoulders tensed beneath his coat. He took a few steps closer and then walked around the victim. The man was heavier than James Urquhart, a bigger individual all round; he had a sports top pushed up around his neck, exposing a prominent stomach. The skin was pale, verging on white, and streaked with dark-red blood. Below his abdomen, a wooden stake poked skywards, streaked in blood that covered the genitals and the ground beneath.
Valentine walked towards the uniforms. ‘What’s the word from the track staff?’
‘No idea who he is, sir . . . Groundsman found him just as you see him now.’ The uniform waved a hand over the scene.
The detective beckoned McAlister towards him and stepped away from the uniforms. As he took a few steps further, he hooked his hands below the tails of his sports coat and gripped the edges of the pockets with his thumbs. ‘What do you think?’
The DC turned towards the victim. ‘He’s bigger than Urquhart, but I think it could still be one man that moved him.’
Valentine nodded. ‘There’s no fence, no wall . . . no obstacles from here to the car park, so it’s possible.’
‘He doesn’t look like a banker.’
‘The tattoos and the fingers . . .’
McAlister thinned his eyes and tilted his head. ‘Fingers?’
‘Yellowed with nicotine: I’d say he was a rollie smoker.’
‘I don’t see the number one crop being a good look in the board room either.’
Valentine unhooked his thumbs and folded his arms. ‘There’s got to be some connection, though, someone has executed the pair of them in an identical fashion.’
‘We might know better when the SOCOs get here . . . Certainly if we get an ID we can explore links.’
Valentine scratched beneath his chin. He started to shake his head as he spoke. ‘Why, though? Why put them up on a spike like this?’
‘It’s obvious . . . to give a message.’
‘But why draw so much attention to yourself? If you want to kill someone, you hide the body, give yourself a chance of getting away with it . . . This is insanity.’
‘You’re not kidding . . . We’re obviously dealing with a psycho.’
‘Or somebody who wants to get caught.’
‘Or somebody who thinks he’s too smart to get caught.’
The DI spotted the first of the SOCOs’ vans to arrive; the fiscal and the pathologist would be next. ‘Ally, I want you to stay put. Anything crops up, get on the phone.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I want the time of death and how long he’s been out in the cold as soon as you get it.’ Valentine removed his car keys from his pocket and started to rattle them in his hand. ‘I want swabs and prints, and if we have him on file, I want to know right away.’
‘Sir.’
17
On the road back to the station, Detective Inspector Bob Valentine sensed his spirit collapsing inside him. He was queasy and couldn’t think clearly – it was as if the whole situation had the unreality of dreams. His mind wandered back to the nightmare he’d had when he saw the little girl with the white-blonde hair laying flowers round the corpse of James Urquhart. He knew the mind worked in unusual ways – that it was likely his unconscious creating an image of a situation that troubled him – but he wondered now what situation could be more worrying than that image? He thought of the girls, Fiona and Chloe: they had been
that size once – was there a connection? Chloe had been most like the girl in the dream – she had been a chatty child, though, and this girl had seemed so withdrawn, taciturn. When Chloe was very young she would stay in her room and hold conversations with imaginary friends, always happy, always benign. But when asked who she was talking to, she would go quiet and cross her lips with fingers as if forbidden to say. It puzzled Valentine then and it made him think about the situation again now: children possessed something special at that age, almost preternatural, which was lost in adulthood.
As Valentine drove towards the station, he was bothered by an irritant. A thought was lodged in his mind like a splinter, and he was avoiding it, trying to take an oblique view in the hope that if he snuck up on the thought then it would lose its power. But there was no getting around it. He was being bothered by this case in a way he hadn’t been before – he felt it more, but the feelings the case triggered were not ones he had ever encountered.
‘Get a grip, Bob,’ he mouthed as he rounded the bend towards King Street and took the entrance to the station car park.
As he pulled up and killed the engine, Valentine sat drumming his fingers on the dash for a moment. The sight of the latest murder victim had lit a fuse in him. He felt it burning away inside his gut. Valentine had allowed his intuition to play a part in the job before, but this was something altogether different: he felt as if he was being led by outside forces rather than by his own knowledge and experience. He rolled up the window and let his breathing still as he tried to focus. There was a wider picture – a broader purview than he had – something was tugging him away from the obvious, but even the most mundane and pedestrian of assumptions seemed to be swept aside by the latest victim.
He slapped a palm off the wheel and opened the car door. On the way into the station he nodded to Jim on the desk and then made straight for the incident room. The first person to catch his attention was Paulo, who had his back to him and was speaking into a telephone.
‘Aye, put that on and give me another two hundred on the nose.’
Valentine moved in front of the DS and stood with his hands in his pockets, making it perfectly clear that he had caught the gist of the conversation.
‘Got to go . . .’ said Paulo. ‘Er, sorry, boss.’
‘That wasn’t what I think it was, because if it was then you’d have my foot in your arse and a new role mopping out the kennels for the dog handlers, Paulo.’
He dropped his gaze and painted a contrite look on his face. ‘Yes, sir.’
Valentine let his indignation burn into the DS for a moment longer and then he called out to the room. ‘Right, can I have all of you round the board, please.’
There was a shuffle of chair legs and some muttering as the squad made their way towards the whiteboard. Valentine picked up a pen and removed the cap; he was writing a description of the latest victim as he began to speak. ‘White male, middle aged, blue-collar worker and spiked through the backside with a sharpened plank of wood.’
‘It’s the same MO, then . . .’ said DS Donnelly.
‘Ah, Phil, you’re here.’
‘I was just on my way out to the scene, sir.’
‘Leave it. Ally can handle that lot; you’ll be more use to me here if they get an ID.’ The DI put the cap back on the marker pen and walked in front of the board. ‘There’re obviously striking similarities to the murder of James Urquhart, so I’d be expecting to uncover links between the two victims . . . What those links will be at this stage we can only guess.’
Paulo asserted himself. ‘They must have known each other.’
Valentine tapped the board at the description of the latest victim. ‘Do they look like the kind of people to be friends . . . ? See James Urquhart going for a game of darts with our latest victim?’
‘Maybe casual acquaintances: he could have been a gardener or tradesman, odd-job man?’ said Donnelly.
‘Better . . . Get on that, Phil.’ He laid the flat of his shoe against the wall and reclined in the chair. ‘Anyone get anything on James Urquhart’s movements yet?’
DS Donnelly spoke again, reeling off a list of regular activities. ‘He was a member of the Rotary Club but not a regular by any means, and there was a model-railway club that according to their website meets on a Wednesday night in the town.’
‘Check it out with the club, and with his wife. See if they tie up.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Anyone got anything else to report at this stage?’
DS Rossi raised a hand. ‘I looked into the neighbour . . . Ronnie Bell.’
‘Oh, aye.’
‘Well, on paper anyway, he’s clean.’
‘Most folk are, Paulo . . . I’m not interested in his parking tickets or if he takes too many plastic bags at Asda. Pay him a visit, get under his skin. How friendly was he with Urquhart? And how friendly is he with his wife?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Valentine clapped his hands together. ‘Right, that’s it for now. Get back to work and let me know the second anything comes up.’
The DI returned to the board and stood with his hands on his hips, taking in the details that had been put up. They had little to go on. He looked at the photographs that showed James Urquhart’s brutal injuries, and he thought of the latest victim and the pictures of his injuries that would soon be added to the board. He caught himself tapping a thumbnail off his front row of teeth – the clacking noise seemed to indicate nervousness to him, and he halted it at once. As his thoughts zigzagged, he wondered how long it was going to be before the chief super started to goad him with the possibility of turning the case over to the Glasgow Murder Squad. He knew that he would need to get a lead, to stake a claim on the case to ward off that eventuality, but there was nothing presenting itself. He closed his eyes in an effort to summon inspiration, but the process was immediately droned out by the ringing of a telephone.
‘Hello, Valentine . . .’
It was DC McAlister. ‘Sir, you’re not going to like this, but the SOCOs have ID’d our stiff.’
‘They have?’ He paused. ‘And why wouldn’t I like it, Ally?’
‘Well, for starters he’s known to us . . .’
‘Go on.’
‘Sir, he’s a stoat-the-ball.’
‘Convicted?’
‘Yes, he’s a convicted paedophile, sir . . . Name’s Duncan Knox.’
The name didn’t register in Valentine’s memory banks. ‘I take it you’ve run him through the system.’
‘Yeah, and it’s a list of convictions as long as your arm . . . If you were looking at a revenge killing, you could be pulling potentials from all over the country. I’d say he’s spent more time inside than out.’
Valentine eased himself down into a chair. Pressure was building in his chest and he started to rub the palm of his hand down the front of his shirt. As he looked up, he noticed the chief super walking into the room, eyeing him cautiously.
‘OK, Ally, get yourself back to the station when you’re ready. Good work, son.’
18
Leanne Dunn pressed her head against the wall and started to moan, indistinctly at first, and then her slow trail of wails became a lament. She hadn’t done anything to bring this upon herself and the feeling of self-pity made the burning sensation in her head sting all the more. She turned over on the floor and laid the palms of her hands out in front of her, and as she kneeled there her head drooped. She was slipping, falling into a stupor that threatened to engulf her when her head was violently jerked backwards.
‘I told you I didn’t want that stoat round here!’ Danny Gillon roared directly into Leanne’s ear. He had hold of her hair in a clump, which he tightened like a knot.
‘I–I never . . .’ Leanne’s words came on the back of sobs.
Gillon pushed her towards the wall, pressed her face into the plaster and roared again, ‘How many times . . . ? Eh? How many times have you got to be told?’
‘But, he wasn’t . . .’ Lean
ne felt the dim glow of energy within her being extinguished. Gillon was too strong for her. She wanted to collapse in a heap on the floor and let him tire himself out with roars like he usually did, but this wasn’t the usual situation, she knew that much.
‘You let that stoat in here again, though . . . Was he paying?’
‘No . . . No, he wasn’t here . . .’
‘Was he after a freebie . . . just like the old days?’
‘No.’ Leanne felt her hair freed from Gillon’s grasp, and she sat upright and pushed herself away from him with the balls of her feet. ‘I didn’t . . .’
Gillon stepped forward and levelled the back of his hand towards her face. ‘Don’t you lie to me, Leanne . . . Don’t even think about that, because I’ll burst your face wide open if you’re lying to me.’
Her hands shot up to protect her face. ‘Don’t.’
The pimp took two steps back and stood watching Leanne where she sat on the floor. She was cowering, her knees locked together and her shoulders trembling. He watched her for a moment or two, and then he withdrew a packet of cigarettes from his pocket. As he lit up, he called out to her, ‘Right, c’mon . . . on your feet.’
‘Why? Where are we going?’
He flicked his lank fringe. ‘C’mon, into the kitchen . . . Have a wee seat.’