Artefacts of the Dead

by Tony Black

  Valentine felt the handle of his briefcase growing damp; he would have to find a way out of the conversation before he became compromised.

  ‘Aye, Brian, the auld town’s not what it used to be . . . If I had a pound for every time I’d heard that recently.’

  ‘But this bloke, the first one, he was in the bank . . . Not the kind you’d expect to see, well, y’know, how he was done.’

  Valentine’s skin was prickling on the back of his arms. He made a half-smile at his neighbour and pointed his briefcase towards his home. ‘It’s getting dark. Going to have to get myself fed, Col . . .’

  ‘Sure, of course, I’m the same . . . My belly thinks my throat’s been cut!’

  Valentine closed his mouth and breathed out slowly through widened nostrils; it struck him as surreal that his neighbour could go from talking about the death of Urquhart to making a joke about his throat being cut: had everyone become desensitised or was it him who was oversensitive? The answer eluded him.

  On the way into the house, the DI lowered his briefcase and leaned onto the banister to check for movement upstairs; if the girls were home they were being uncharacteristically quiet. As he headed towards the kitchen, a shrill voice cut the air like a saw-blade.

  ‘Bob . . . Is that you?’ It was Clare.

  As he opened the door, his wife abandoned her search for an answer to her last question and began to blindly ramble. Her speech was fast but lacked any context or mooring; it was as if she had shaken a ragbag of words and scattered them to the four winds. Valentine removed a chair from beneath the table and watched his wife preparing dinner accompanied by the rapid tremolo of her inane chatter. He picked up odd grains of minutiae that were scattered in the direction of his interest, but mostly the talk was of people he didn’t know, places he never went and all points in between their confluence. She was on a high. As she paced, he noticed she stood beneath a shadeless bulb – a new light-fitting sat on the work surface. She had been spending again, easing her weary place in the world with money. He felt a sickening in his heart that there was nothing he could ever do for Clare that would come close to the presenting of a credit card on a store’s counter.

  ‘Where are the girls?’ His words sliced the room like the crack of a whip.

  Clare halted where she stood and turned towards him, pitching her voice as high as a jazz horn. ‘They’re out.’

  Valentine’s mind skimmed the possibilities, but after a long day and the strange encounter with his neighbour that had brought recent events a little too close to home, he was impatient for a response. ‘I gathered that.’ He snatched his words. ‘Where are they?’

  Clare opened the oven door with gloved hands and reached in to retrieve a Pyrex dish stacked high with lasagne. She raised the dish in her husband’s direction and presented it with a smile. ‘I made your favourite . . . and there’s a Key lime pie too.’ Her smile evaporated into a scowl as she took in her husband. ‘Do you have to wear that old sports coat every day, Bob? I’ll have a look for a new jacket for you, there’s some nice stuff in Slater’s just now . . .’

  Valentine absorbed Clare’s words like a blotter, but they were not the words he wanted to hear; he wanted to know where his daughters were and why his wife’s shaky grip on the last wrung of normalcy seemed to have slipped. He wanted to know what he had missed when he had been away at work, conducting an investigation into two brutal murders in their own home town. His mind filled with possibilities, but none of them addressed the uneasy doubts that were filling his consciousness.

  ‘Clare, stop fussing over the dinner for a moment and come and sit down here.’ He reached to pull out the chair beside him. ‘Come on . . .’

  Clare moved slowly towards him, folding the oven gloves as she went. For a moment she stopped and swayed before him as she placed a hand on the fridge door, and then she reached in to remove a bottle of wine.

  ‘Do you want a glass?’

  ‘I want you to sit down.’

  Her drowsy eyes flickered as she poured the glass of Chablis; her frame seemed suddenly shrunken and tired. When she walked towards the table the chair caught on the table leg and she tugged at it impatiently, a glower growing on her features.

  Valentine rose. ‘Here, I’ll get it.’ As he pulled the chair out, he watched Clare slump on the cushion and raise the wine glass to her mouth. ‘What’s up, Clare?’

  His wife touched the pendant round her neck and began to play with it as she spoke. ‘People are talking, and I don’t just mean people on the street . . .’

  ‘About what?’ Valentine’s shoulders tightened as he watched his wife take another sudden gulp of wine.

  ‘What do you think . . . ? About you.’

  He was confused. What did she mean? He had been used to them talking about his time in hospital, everyone knew about that, they had been kind. But he sensed she meant something else. ‘What do you mean, Clare?’

  Her forehead creased and then her voice trailed off into a dull drone. ‘What do you think, Bob . . . ? This bloody case. You’ve been in God alone knows how many newspapers and on the television. People are asking me about it, and do you know what? They’re asking the girls.’

  Clare turned away from her husband and the wine glass started to shudder in her grip. Valentine watched the pale liquid shiver and swirl around the glass and reached out to steady her hand. ‘Clare, where are the girls?’

  She slammed down the glass; some wine spilled over the rim and pooled on the tabletop. ‘Oh, calm down. Where do you think they are? Packed off to the country . . . ? They’re at the pictures, I gave them a treat to take their minds off things.’

  Valentine didn’t get it. He was ashamed not to have noticed the impact the case was having on his family. He wanted to see his daughters, to hold them and try to explain that everything was all right. ‘Who’s been talking to them?’

  ‘Not both of them . . . Well, Chloe told Fiona, but only because she’s been getting some stick at school . . .’

  The DI’s shame turned to simmering contempt, a vague undirected anger at anyone who would upset his daughter. ‘Chloe’s had trouble at school?’

  ‘Yes, Bob, your daughter’s been having the rise taken out of her.’

  The strange remark he’d seen on Chloe’s Facebook page flashed before him. ‘What have they been saying?’

  ‘Just kids’ stuff. You know what they’re like: they’re cruel, you dare not stand out in the crowd or attract derision.’ She touched her forehead and seemed to slump further in the chair. ‘I think it’s worse now than it ever was, worse than in our day. They used to just follow you around the playground then, but kids can’t get away from the bullies now . . . It’s the texts and the websites they post on; there’s nowhere to hide now. It’s such a mob mentality too, one gets on it and they all join in, all bloody little shits together!’

  He understood. His mind flashed over the list of possibilities that might have been thrown Chloe’s way. He didn’t want his daughter to be another victim of the investigation. It was too painful for him to contemplate any hurt being done to his daughter.

  Clare spoke again. ‘Bob, what’s going on? Are you going to catch someone soon? Because people are scared now, and I’m scared what’s going to happen if this goes on any longer or gets worse . . . We’ll have people knocking on our front door demanding you stop it.’

  Valentine rose from the table and walked towards the patio doors. His heart was pounding hard, deep inside his chest, and he knew he needed to calm down. He looked up to the darkening sky: there were black clouds sitting there like precarious boulders waiting to fall. His gaze dipped as a cat leapt onto the back wall and just as quickly disappeared over the other side. He watched the gaps in the gate for the cat’s reappearance in the shaded back wynd beyond, but it never showed.

  ‘I don’t know, Clare . . . I don’t know about anything any more.’

  26

  Few of the old preoccupations meant anything to Valentine now. The idea
of chasing rank, climbing the career ladder, seemed preposterous. Why – for what? Would a bigger office or faster car make him feel better? Would it change how he saw himself, or others for that matter? He had seen what putting on rank had done to some people, and even with the extreme example of Chief Superintendent Marion Martin excepted, it had not been appealing. Of course, the financial rewards would be welcome, were always welcome, but at what cost to his sense of self, his well-being? Valentine knew he couldn’t give any more to the job – he could not take on further responsibility without sacrificing something of himself to the force. He had to concede he was not a careerist, he was a man first and foremost, and he needed to live and act according to his rules. His priority might well be the job, but he had more to consider and the idea that he could shunt those concerns in favour of damming the rising tide of crime was anathema to him. He would start with his contribution to a better world one step at a time and the first step needed to be taken in his own home – with his wife and daughters. If he couldn’t do that, he didn’t know what he had to give elsewhere.

  His family, his home, was the life preserver he clung to amidst the storm without. Coming home and being able to close the door on the outside world was a fallacy, he knew that, but he liked to fool himself that he and his family were different. They were shielded, cosseted almost, protected certainly from the horrors he had witnessed and knew existed on the other side of the door. If he achieved nothing else, he wanted his home to be an island retreat from the oceans of misery. He didn’t want Chloe or Fiona or Clare to have to think about the evils that lapped at their shores – he would force them back, keep them at bay, because the reality meant conceding that what happened to families like the Urquharts could happen to them. And that was a possibility he could never countenance.

  The detective had called the squad to gather at 9.15 a.m. By 9.20 there was still no sign of DS Sylvia McCormack and the mumble of judgemental voices around the incident room was steadily on the rise. Valentine stood by the board and drew a line down the side of the crime-scene pictures of Duncan Knox’s corpse; beside the line he made a list of bullet points that he copied from the post-mortem report. When he was finished, he picked up the red marker pen and circled the words ‘depressed skull fracture’, drawing a line to the matching words under the image of James Urquhart.

  ‘Right, listen up, everyone . . .’ Valentine returned the top to the marker pen and clasped it in his hand, then pressed the pen with his thumb as he spoke again. ‘As you can see there’s a distinct correlation between the two post-mortem reports.’

  DS McAlister spoke. ‘We’re looking for the same man, obviously.’

  ‘It would seem that way, Ally . . . The MOs are almost identical, though we probably didn’t need the pathologist to tell us that.’ He paced the front of the board and the squad followed him with its collective gaze. ‘Brutal, ritualistic murder on public ground – carried out twice, if not at the locus then with the intention to make us think so – one victim a privileged figure and the other the polar opposite . . . Right, what have we got?’

  As he turned to face the squad, the hinges cried from the door at the other end of the room. DS Sylvia McCormack entered with her jacket on the crook of her arm and proceeded to the coat stand.

  ‘Sorry I’m late . . . Traffic.’

  A few tuts followed her explanation and then everyone returned to the DI.

  ‘OK, Phil, so we’re all on the same page, what have you got for us on James Urquhart’s history?’ Valentine eased himself onto the edge of the desk and gave DS Donnelly the floor.

  ‘Right, thanks, boss . . . Well, I’ve spoken to the bank and the staff he took with him after the buyout, and I have to say there’s no sign of any ill will. This is a man who seems to have made few enemies. Certainly in his professional life, there were a few dissenters . . .’ The DS turned over a page in his notebook. ‘One of the former partners, Carter, thought they should have held off before selling, but he admits he did very well out of the buyout and I don’t think there was any bad blood between them . . . far from it, actually. That’s the picture I got across the board, really.’

  Valentine folded his arms and fixed the DS in his stare. ‘What about clients, employees?’

  ‘Yeah, very little to go on there. The phrase “kept himself to himself” cropped up a lot . . . I got the impression that he held his social life and his family life totally separate from his business affairs, but again, no troubles bubbling up to the surface . . . Sounded like a decent enough boss really.’

  ‘Well, he pissed someone off, Phil. Are you forgetting how he met his end?’ Valentine shook his head and scanned the crowd. ‘Right, Ally, you’re up . . . The buyout, you took that from Paulo, yeah?’

  DS McAlister frowned and shook his head. ‘Eh, no, Phil took that since he was looking at the employers and employees . . .’

  ‘Jesus Christ, is that it? We’ve even less to go on than I thought . . .’ Valentine pushed himself off the desk and stood with his hands empty in the air. ‘Well, what have we got?’

  McAlister spoke. ‘I took the neighbour from Paulo – Ronnie Bell . . .’

  ‘Yes, what did you unearth?’

  The DS opened a blue folder and turned it over. ‘Well, he’s retired, had a string of pound shops but sold them off . . .’

  ‘A pound a go, eh?’ said Valentine.

  A smile. ‘Er, no, bit more than that . . . quite a few million as it happens. He’s certainly not short of a quid and he did invest some money with Urquhart’s brokers before the buyout.’

  ‘Tell me he lost his hat.’

  ‘No, seems to be quite the opposite actually.’

  ‘Money goes to money.’ Valentine had a knot of tension building in his chest. He dropped his chin to his shoulder and looked out of the window towards the street. A slow, somnambulant trail of hunched youths was working its way to the riverbanks, where they would spend the day in the kind of inebriated mischief the town knew well. For a moment their plans looked under threat as a loud siren emitted from the station and a police car cut a swathe through the hum of traffic. As the car sped off towards Tam’s Brig, the youths gestured behind it, then regained their swagger like they had just put on armour.

  Valentine turned back to the squad. ‘So that’s a blank on the work colleagues and the neighbour . . . Any more good news?’

  DS McAlister hoisted up his belt and spoke. His voice was quieter than it had been before, the timbre more drawn out, almost a drawl. ‘Well, it might be nothing, but I checked out the Rotary Club and one or two other things.’

  Valentine’s eyes widened. ‘Go on . . .’

  ‘Urquhart was not a regular at the Rotary: he’d show for a Burns’ Supper and a couple of other highpoints in the year, but that was it.’ McAlister found his stride and started to punctuate his words with hand gestures. ‘He did attend a regular bridge night and Mrs Urquhart mentioned a weekly model enthusiasts’ club that he went to, he was into trains and the like . . .’

  The DI raised his arm. ‘Ally, is this going somewhere? I just don’t know that I can take much more excitement.’

  As the squad laughed, McAlister fixed his stare; his face looked solemn, as if he might begin to chant. ‘No, this is my point, sir . . . The model-railway club was a weekly thing, met on a Wednesday night . . .’

  ‘Don’t tell me, like clockwork!’ said DS Donnelly.

  McAlister started to look nervy, his skin as pale as cheese, as the room erupted into more laughter. ‘No, listen, what I’m getting at is . . . Mrs Urquhart said her husband went to the model club every week without fail, but when I spoke to the bloke in charge . . .’ He started to turn pages rapidly in his spiral-bound notebook. ‘Yeah, Mr Forgan, he told me he’d only seen Urquhart a handful of times in the last three years.’

  Valentine’s thoughts started to swirl in his mind. The roof of his mouth suddenly dried over; his lips were parched. As he looked at DS McAlister fingering the edges of his notebook, he
noted he had the pleased look of a dog that had just retrieved a stick for his master.

  ‘Ally, are you saying Urquhart was AWOL every Wednesday night?’ said the DI.

  He nodded. ‘More or less.’

  Valentine folded an arm across his stomach and rested his chin on the knuckles of his fist. As he fastened his eyes on the squad, tight radial lines appeared at their edges. He made a half-smile, not because he was happy, but because he couldn’t help it. ‘Right, listen up, all of you: I want to know where our murder victim was on all those Wednesday nights. I want bank cards, visas, petrol receipts checked and mapped . . . If we can pinpoint his whereabouts, I want uniform door to door with photographs and dates. I want CCTV footage taken from shops, garage forecourts and bloody eye-in-the-sky traffic reports if necessary. I want his car circulated, and registration, and I want all of this yesterday. If there’s something unusual, anything – be it a trip to a toy store or a hotel that charges by the hour – I want it on that board!’

  The team moved away from the whiteboard and the room filled once again with the familiar sounds of chair legs scraping the floor, telephones being raised and filing cabinets opening and closing.

  Valentine looked out the window towards the cloud-crossed sky and saw weak sunrays patting the rooftops with bouncing light. For a moment he felt uneasy, like his grip on reality had been loosened; as he stared out, the world was a confusion to him. He felt hollowed out, a husk, as he thought of the case and how far they were from a resolution. He knew he needed something solid, something that would link Urquhart to Knox and unlock the investigation, but he felt a long way off. When he turned back to the desk to retrieve his notes, DS McCormack was standing there.

  ‘Sylvia, glad you could join us . . .’ It was sarcasm, and he almost regretted it.