Artefacts of the Dead

by Tony Black

  Urquhart was one of the masters of the universe the media were so fond of pillorying – the banking elite were so lampooned it had become a cliché, but Valentine knew even clichés had once been fresh and full of insight. Their impact lingered for a simple reason: they were apt. It was a fact then, cemented in Valentine’s mind by his own hard-won experience of playing the game, that Urquhart’s thoughts, actions, reactions and every nuance of human behaviour in between would have been formed and informed by his sense of self. He was demonstrably a superior sort of person: he couldn’t deny that to himself or anyone; who, indeed, could deny it? He was fortified by the adulation the world showered on material wealth. It was of no doubt to the DI that Urquhart, and others like him, felt empowered by their status. The question the detective wanted, and needed, to answer now was: how had the innate human need to exert status manifested itself in this instance? In simpler terms: what did Urquhart think he had a right to get away with that lesser mortals had obviously taken grievous exception to? If he could answer that, find the root of the first murder on his books, then the killing of Duncan Knox would, he had no doubt, become clear. He hoped that he was right, that the tightening in his gut meant what he thought it did. There was something missing, something that tied the two cases together, something that made Urquhart and Knox sound less incongruous when mentioned in the same sentence, but he couldn’t see what it was. Valentine knew that once all the pieces of the puzzle came into view it would be obvious, it always was, but right now he saw no way through the forest of question marks.

  Valentine helped the car’s momentum to drop by lowering the gears on the way into Cumnock. When the car ahead’s tail lights glowed red, he applied the brakes and brought the Vectra to a standstill. He lowered his window and the smirr on the air revived him. The town was his father’s home: not his, it had never been his even when as a boy he had lived there. Cumnock was one of those stations where no new recruits wanted to be posted. It was a rough place: in Ayrshire they called it Dodge City – a nod to its Wild West similarity and the fact that so many of its inhabitants were on the dole. In the last few months, as he recuperated from his injuries, Valentine had totted up innumerable grievous crimes on the nightly news, all committed in Cumnock. It was customary, in the district, to see head shakes at the merest mention of the town, perhaps a berating of the Thatcher years that saw the pit closures and the vast majority of those employed in the mines made jobless. But there was more to it than that, thought Valentine; Scotland’s post-industrial population had changed. Where once stood a working class was now an underclass. Things like self-respect, pride, any sense of community or belonging, had long since evaporated. The inhabitants of places like Cumnock, and much of Ayrshire, were increasingly growing to look like members of a separate race: drug-addled zombies wading through life like it was slowly drowning them, guided by full-time carers who were there to tell them how to put their trousers on, how to feed themselves, how to swallow their methadone, to shut up and slump back into stupor so the rest of us could get on without thinking what to do about them.

  The curtains were drawn as Valentine pulled up outside his father’s home on Keir Hardie Hill. He wound up the window and felt the stirring in the depths of his chest that occurred each time he came back. He collected the small carrier bag he’d filled with goods from the Spar store and opened the car door. Valentine stood in the street for a moment, watching the rain clouds looming over the rooftops. A cold wind rattled down the road and whipped at his bare throat; he turned up his collar as he walked towards the house. The gate screeched like an early warning of his approach, but as he raised his head to take in the window once again, the curtains remained still. He returned the hasp and headed towards the doorstep, knocked twice and reached for the handle. The door was open.

  ‘Hello . . .’ Valentine called out as he stood in the hallway. The carpet was faded and worn beneath his feet – he remembered the day when it had been taken up and turned round to allow the less worn end to bear the brunt of the front-door traffic.

  ‘Dad . . . are you in?’ His voice echoed off the walls; the place was cold, damp and musty. He opened a window and made his way through to the living room. As he went through the door he heard some stirring in the next room. The noise of feet on boards and a wracking cough brought him a deep sense of relief. He made his way through to the kitchen, deposited the bag of groceries on the table, and started to fill the kettle; it was beginning to whistle as the thin frame of his father appeared, haunting the doorway like a ghost.

  ‘Hello, auld yin.’

  ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’ His father seemed several shades whiter than the last time he had seen him; Valentine wondered if it could be the case. Had it been that long?

  ‘I brought you some rolls . . . and bacon. Thought I’d do you a bit of tea.’

  His father started to tighten the belt of his dressing gown as he watched the goings-on in the kitchen. He seemed thinner too, more gaunt, and in possession of a stoop that shrunk his frame to boyish dimensions. ‘You’ve been talking to that wife of yours.’

  Valentine placed a mug of coffee in front of his father. ‘Yeah, well, we do exchange words now and again.’

  ‘I don’t need looking after.’ He raised a bony, gnarled finger and wagged it in front of him. ‘Never taken a handout in my life . . . not even in the strike.’

  Valentine’s will to challenge withered and died. He lowered his shoulders and turned towards his father with the frying pan in hand. ‘Don’t start about the bloody strike again . . .’ – he lifted the frying pan – ‘or you’ll get a clout off this!’

  His father pinched his gaunt face and the white bristles on his chin pointed towards his son. ‘Wouldn’t be the first clout I’d got from a polisman.’

  Valentine turned back to the stove and sparked up the gas. He ignored his father’s goading; time-worn experience had taught him that indulgence and ignoring him were the fastest route from the conflict.

  His father sipped the coffee and continued. ‘Summer of ’84, after Thatcher had stockpiled enough coal, that’s when I first faced down a polisman on a horse . . . Shields and sticks they had. They were all pally with us before that, joking and laughing away, but it got nasty quick enough . . . Did I ever tell you they used to come down and wave five-pound notes at us, those polis . . .’

  ‘Once or twice, Dad.’

  ‘Aye well.’ He eased back in the chair and looked out of the window. ‘Bloody coal board took full-page adverts in the paper, said we were blocking essential supplies of coal to the hospitals and the schools and the old folks’ home.’ He made a spitting sound, and sighed. ‘Utter rubbish. I went up on the hills howking coal for the wee wifey who lived next door . . . Never saw anyone go short.’

  Valentine turned round and presented his father with the bacon roll he had prepared. The plate clattered off the tabletop as he put it down. ‘You want any sauce on that?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’m all out.’

  ‘I could nip down the shops . . .’

  ‘No. Be cold by time you got back . . .’

  The pair sat in silence as the old man ate his bacon roll. Valentine watched his father raising his thin arms and thinner fingers towards his mouth as he ate and wondered what had ever became of him. This was the man who had stood in the Cumnock Town Hall to hear Mick McGahey proclaim the strike was theirs to win. Six hundred souls believed him and thousands paid the price of the fight that had no winners. The police suffered too. Valentine had listened to those stories when he had joined the force, but his father didn’t want to hear about female officers getting booted in the face or local boys having their cars torched. It all seemed such a long time ago now that Valentine found it hard to understand what kept the flame alive in his father. Was it his war? He remembered his grandfather talking about his days in North Africa chasing Rommel and seeing the lights go on in his eyes; he was still there, even as an old man, back in his youth, in his prime. Was this what old age
did to you? Was this what it was for: to regale yourself with the flashpoints, the highs and the lows of your life?

  Valentine took in his father: the slow masticating of his thin jaws and brittle teeth looked a trial to him. He grimaced on each minute swallow of food. Did it have to be so hard, this life of men?

  ‘How have you been keeping?’

  His father moved his head from side to side in lieu of a shrug. ‘So, so.’

  ‘Clare worries about you. The girls are asking for you.’

  The mention of his granddaughters brought a smile to the old man’s face; his eyes lit up. ‘There’s no need to worry about me . . . I’ve never died a winter yet.’

  It struck Valentine that the optimum word was ‘yet’. ‘Well, is there anything you need?’

  ‘Not fussing, anyway!’

  ‘Dad . . . please.’

  ‘I’ll be fine with some peace and quiet; get back to that wife and those daughters of yours and fuss over them.’

  Valentine felt his father’s inscrutable gaze burrowing into him and for a moment he was a small child once again. He had never managed to understand his father’s complete rejection of all affection shown to him, but he knew it sprang from the same source as his own overweening pride. He couldn’t criticise him for it, but he wondered if he could target some censure at himself for perpetuating the fault. He took a deep breath and turned away from him, catching sight of a pile of library books in the corner of the room as he did. ‘Do they need to go back?’

  ‘Aye, they do.’

  Valentine picked up the books: two detective novels by William McIlvanney sat on the top. ‘What’s this . . . Are you reading up on the police now?’

  ‘He’s a Kilmarnock laddie, the writer.’

  ‘I know, I read the books years ago . . . Set in Glasgow, mind you.’

  His father slouched forward in his chair and spoke with his finger tapping out his main points on the table. ‘But it would take an Ayrshire man to make sense of that place, you realise.’

  Valentine smiled. ‘The son of a miner, no doubt.’

  ‘Are you making assumptions?’

  ‘Me, Dad? No . . . never.’ He picked up the other books and turned for the door. ‘I’ll get these back. Do you want me to pick up some others?’

  The old man nodded. ‘Aye, you can get me the third one in the series . . . Strange Loyalties, I think it’s called.’

  ‘The police again?’

  ‘They make good reading.’

  It was the closest Valentine had ever heard his father come to a compliment.

  22

  DI Bob Valentine spent the night in fitful dreams with familiar figures, some of whom he knew, while others were mere phantoms that had come to assail his sleep. The small girl with the white-blonde hair was there once again, alongside his own father and late mother. It made the detective feel uneasy to dream of the dead; they somehow came alive once more, became animated in dreams as they no longer did in waking reality. It unsettled him, made his chest constrict and put winding bales of barbed wire in his stomach.

  As he made coffee, said goodbye to his family and drove to the station, Valentine tried to downplay the significance of the night before. By the King Street roundabout he had put the entire situation down to the stress of the case: his unconscious mind wrestling by night with the problems he couldn’t find solutions to by day.

  Since dispatching Paulo with a suspension, Valentine knew he had unsettled the team: he would need to work twice as hard to get them to bond as a unit now. And with so few leads on the Urquhart killing and nothing to tie it to the murder of Knox, it would be difficult to find something to stoke their enthusiasm with. There was the added uncertainty of the chief super – a loose canon at the best of times – and how she would ultimately react to the team being a DS down. The ever-present threat of the whole investigation being turned over to Glasgow CID was a pressure Valentine could do without but, for the time being, was one he knew he would have to live with.

  ‘Morning, Jim,’ he said as he entered the front door of the station.

  ‘Oh, it’s yourself . . .’ The desk sergeant leaned over conspiratorially and beckoned Valentine with a nod. ‘Big Dino’s in already, I see.’

  Valentine approached the counter and lowered his briefcase to the floor. ‘Starting early isn’t she?’

  ‘Aye, and that’s not the all of it . . .’ Jim looked back towards the staircase as if to set the scene for his next announcement. ‘She’s got some new blood up there with her now.’

  ‘New blood?’

  ‘Young one, twenties, never seen her before, but she’s polis . . . got it written all over her.’

  Valentine felt the barbed wire he carried inside him turning again: it was a call for caffeine, or something stronger. He didn’t know who the young police officer was, but he had his suspicions already. ‘Did you catch an accent?’

  Jim frowned, the creases in his brow making his skin look even more like old leather. ‘No, afraid not . . . What you thinking?’

  If Valentine had learned one thing in his time at King Street station, it was to keep what you were thinking to yourself. ‘Who knows with Dino . . . Could be my replacement.’ He let the implication hang, then struck again: ‘Or yours, pal.’

  On the stairs, Valentine felt Jim’s eyes on his back. He knew he’d set the cogs turning in Jim’s mind and that he’d be paying close attention to their every revolution until something like thought ignited. The detective knew if there was any hope of the new officer’s identity being revealed in a hurry then the desk sergeant would be the first to know; with any luck, Valentine thought, he would be the second.

  In the incident room, he hung up his coat and carried his briefcase down towards the glassed-off office. He allowed himself a glance towards the whiteboard to discern any new information, but spotted little save a few additional jottings about the Urquhart post-mortem report in red marker pen. Before he had closed the door, the telephone on his desk was ringing.

  ‘Hello, Valentine.’

  ‘Morning, Bob.’ It was Chief Superintendent Marion Martin, her voice high and chipper – too cheery by far. It unsettled him.

  ‘Yes, Chief, what can I do for you?’

  ‘Anything to report since yesterday?’

  An inverted smile crept onto his features. ‘I need to get an update from the squad before I can brief you; I had them on a number of specifics so I’d be hoping to be edging closer today . . .’

  ‘Closer to what, Bob . . . the door?’

  It was a glib remark and he ignored it.

  ‘Anyway, I’d like to see you in my office when you have a moment.’

  ‘Oh, yes . . .’

  ‘Yes, Bob . . . In fact, right away.’ The line clicked off.

  Valentine held his hand in mid-air for a moment, staring at the receiver. He couldn’t quite believe that he had reached his time of life and was still susceptible to the taunts of so-called superiors. The thought that there was anything, in any way, superior about Chief Superintendent Marion Martin brought a moment of levity to his thinking: the woman was deluded, she had ascended the ranks with such alacrity that daily nosebleeds were the norm at her altitude. The detective knew exactly what she was playing at too: she was frightened of being found out, of being found wanting because she was a mere interloper in the force. The consequence for Valentine, however, was that as the investigation’s profile ramped up, the chief super’s need for a speedy resolution intensified. She would spare no one in her quest for results because the results were the thin carapace she hid her true form beneath.

  Valentine booted up his computer, waited for the Windows icon to appear and sat in his chair; its back creaked behind him as he twiddled frustratedly with the mouse in his right hand.

  ‘Right away . . .’ He repeated the words, but couldn’t quite take in that she had said them. She had taunted him like a new recruit who needed to be shown the lie of the land. He reached for the telephone receiver and pressed
the speed-dial for the press office – the line was answered on the second ring.

  ‘Hello, media relations.’ It was Coreen’s assistant. Valentine struggled to remember her name but then it came back to him.

  ‘Debbie, I was after your boss . . . Is she about?’

  ‘Who’s speaking?’ She sounded aloof, and there were officers who would have been offended – served her her arse in parsley for questioning – but Valentine guessed it was Coreen’s training coming to the fore: the girl had obviously made the mistake of handing over stray calls once, but she wouldn’t do it again.

  ‘It’s Bob Valentine from CID . . . detective inspector.’

  A rummaging on the other end of the line was greeted with a sharp intake of breath, then a gap stretched out that had Valentine tapping his fingertips on a pile of blue folders.

  ‘Bob . . .’ It was Coreen.

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘And what can I do you for?’

  Valentine leaned forward and rested his elbows on the desk. ‘Have you heard anything about our man, Sinclair?’

  Coreen cleared her throat. ‘I thought that’s what you might be interested in . . . Yes, suspended on full pay, I hear.’

  A smile crept up the side of Valentine’s face. ‘Nice one.’

  ‘I wouldn’t put out the bunting quite yet.’