Artefacts of the Dead

by Tony Black

  ‘It’s something for my dad . . .’ Valentine opened the package from Amazon and removed the worn copy of McIlvanney’s Strange Loyalties. ‘He’s been reading detective novels, can you believe it?’

  Clare collected the book from the counter and creased her nose. ‘Couldn’t you have got him a new one?’

  ‘It’s been out of print, I had to shop around for this.’

  ‘I’m surprised you had the time.’ It was a calculated remark, and one that Valentine had no reply for.

  He sipped his coffee and watched his wife return to the morning newspaper and her glass of orange juice. ‘Could you drop it off later today, Clare . . . ? He’s just sitting about up there on his own, I think he’d appreciate it.’

  She turned and put widened eyes on him. ‘Well, you’d think he’d appreciate a visit from his son, then.’

  Valentine put down his coffee cup and raised his briefcase; he wasn’t prepared to pick up where he had left off the night before. ‘I’m off to work.’

  Clare had returned to reading the newspaper as he closed the kitchen door and headed towards the car in his shirtsleeves. The air outside was too sharp to be out without a jacket, he realised as he opened the door and flung his grey sports coat on the backseat; it covered the dark patch he still winced to see and still couldn’t quite believe existed. As he pulled out, the sky was an infinite grey smear and the road still glistened from the recent downpour; the contrast struck Valentine as the natural bedfellows of the Ayrshire setting – bleak and bleaker. The Vectra’s engine grunted all the way to the first tailback, which stretched from the junction all the way down Beresford Terrace. When he depressed the clutch the car steadied and he became aware of the fetch and miss of his breath. He gripped the gearstick as the lights changed and drove on to Burns Statue Square, taking a slow glance towards the High Street as he turned left at the Ayrshire and Galloway.

  The town was a huddled hoard of bodies, all bared elbows and blunt shoulders. It was as if either the order ‘eyes down’ had been given or to a one they feared a glance to the grey skies would strike them blind. The traffic soon slowed to a stop once again outside the old market and Valentine found himself staring aimlessly as a torn poster waved to passers-by each time the breeze picked up. There were children on their way to school wailing with siren-like voices as he took off again, glad to be moving forward. The hotel where DS Sylvia McCormack stayed was in front of a roundabout. He knew it as the Caledonian Hotel: it had changed its name several times since then, but to Valentine it would always be the Caly. He pulled up outside and waited for his colleague to appear.

  Valentine realised that he liked DS McCormack because she thought for herself – she utilised some form of judgement, not just in the job but in life too. Most people, most of the time, were just trying to fit in. They were trying to make themselves more like everyone else at the expense of any of their own uniqueness. Being different, even in a small way, made the majority uneasy. Difference was something to be hidden, locked away and secretly challenged: ‘Why am I not like everyone else?’ was the modern preoccupation. It took guts, beyond confidence or any self-assurance, to stand out from the pack and say, ‘No, I’m doing this my way.’ Valentine admired that in DS McCormack: she acquiesced her own self to no one. If it set her aside from the others, so be it.

  He imagined what the DS’s school days must have been like – that cauldron of conformity where every transgression from the norm was an offence worthy of public hostility. Did she spend those days alone? Annexed from the others in the playground, in the dining hall . . . He caught a vision of a young Sylvia McCormack and smiled to himself.

  ‘I’m sure it wouldn’t have bothered her one jot!’ he said.

  Many years ago, someone had called Clare ‘contrary’, he remembered. It had been intended as an insult, a youthful dig, but at the time he thought it was the greatest compliment. To be the opposite, to be blindly accepting, was the true insult. She had been contrary because she’d had a mind of her own and guile enough to use it. He wondered now what had happened to all that: did the world really break us all? He certainly didn’t see too much evidence of it making us stronger.

  The car door opened. ‘Hello, boss . . .’

  Valentine reached for the gearstick and nodded towards DS McCormack. ‘Right . . . Glasgow, here we come.’

  She beamed back at him, and what he thought had been a cruel, unsmiling mouth gave way to an otherwise pretty face.

  ‘It’s dreich enough out.’

  ‘Aye, well, that’ll be the summer by with.’ He indicated on his way through the roundabout and onto Barns Street. He could already see the Sandgate clogged with cars. ‘The traffic’s a nightmare . . . When are they expecting us?’

  DS McCormack was shimmying out of her raincoat. ‘Any time after ten.’ Her voice trailed off, fell into a deep well. ‘That’s what Mrs Cooper said . . . when I called.’

  Valentine noticed how tense her face had become. ‘How did she seem . . . Mrs Cooper?’

  The officer sat in silence for a moment and appeared to be considering her response. She said: ‘Empty.’

  Valentine repeated the word. ‘Empty.’

  She turned to face him. ‘It’s the best I can come up with to describe the woman . . . It was like talking to a shadow on the phone when I mentioned Janie.’

  Valentine stored the response away; he didn’t want to give too much importance to the DS’s observation, though he knew it was likely to be accurate. He felt somehow his own perceptions would overrule anyone else’s. ‘What did you tell the Coopers?’

  She started to cough on the back of her hand. ‘Hope that’s not me coming down with the cold . . .’ The coughing fit passed and she got back on track. ‘I told them that we were investigating a murder.’

  ‘Did you mention Knox?’

  ‘No, I didn’t think that would serve any particular purpose at this point.’

  ‘Good. If we bring the Knox angle into play, I’d like to see the reaction.’

  DS McCormack squinted. ‘What are you hoping to gain from this meeting, sir?’

  Valentine was pulling onto the main arterial road to Glasgow; the stretch of single carriageway was busy but allowed him to reach 50 mph. ‘If I knew that, Sylvia, I’d send you and save myself the bother . . . Trust me, if there’s a link to Knox and Urquhart, I’ll find it. Of that I’ve no bloody doubt.’

  ‘You seem very sure of this lead.’

  ‘Knox was questioned at the time Janie Cooper went missing and the bank’s confirmed that Urquhart was living and working in Glasgow at the same time. Call me an optimist, but I’m betting this is our link.’

  The Ayrshire countryside stretched out on either side of the road, green fields washed in buckets of rain. A few cows, Friesians, made mud-splattered tracks towards a copse of trees. A grey half-moon still sat in the morning sky; there was no sign of the sun.

  ‘You think they knew each other, Knox and Urquhart, don’t you?’ said DS McCormack.

  Valentine tipped on the blinkers and made to overtake a Nissan Micra. ‘Think . . . ? I know.’

  ‘But how can you know?’

  At once the detective realised the pomposity of his statement. He had never dealt in what ifs or casuistry; he reasoned and made use of the facts – at best, he interpreted. ‘Do you doubt me?’

  McCormack smiled again. ‘That’s not an answer, that’s a question.’

  ‘OK, then ask me once we’ve seen the Coopers . . . You’ll have your answer then. Knox knew Urquhart and they both ended up dead because of that association. I don’t know how they came to know each other yet, or how they came to know Janie Cooper, but I know someone else on the force took a similar line of reasoning twelve years ago when that wee girl went missing. Knox was in the frame then and I doubt he’s blameless now. Urquhart might have slipped under the radar at the time, but whatever went on has well and truly caught up with them.’

  31

  They were everywhere in Glasgow,
the poseurs. That was the trouble with the big city, thought Valentine, it attracted types prone to reinventing of themselves. It didn’t matter what they had been before – accountant, plooky teen, quantity surveyor – in the city they imagined they could excoriate the skin of the past and start anew. The detective alighted on a man: balding, bad fifties, clearly fighting middle-aged spread. He had squeezed himself into the latest fashions from Top Man: had the term ‘skinny’ jeans not been a warning sign? Valentine fought an urge to shake his head, to frown disapproval, but settled for a disdainful glance towards his own M&S flannels. The bald man was sipping a latte in one of the long glasses that Valentine always sent back, telling the staff that it was a sundae glass and that he wanted a cup of coffee. The man he observed now seemed to relish the effeminacy of the receptacle; it was then that the DI came to the conclusion that the man might be gay. He turned his eyes away quickly, an atavistic fear from his Ayrshire youth firing inside him. When he was growing up in the auld toun, homosexuality was deemed a curse worse than any gypsy’s and attracted the same hysterical, pernicious demonising.

  A thought soon lit in Valentine: he couldn’t grudge the stranger his new life. A vague, nauseating wave of guilt hit him for having judged someone who had likely faced harsh judgement his entire life. If he had just moved to the city, reinvented himself as a fifty-something Top Man, then so what? He had every right to his trip, as much as – maybe more so than – the middle-class teen who fancied himself an artist or a musician or a boulevardier hanging louchely on a Gitane somewhere in the Merchant City. People were strange and did even stranger things to escape the fact. Valentine realised that part of his aversion to the big city was the idea that he was confronted with such strangeness wherever he looked. He was overstimulated by the fact, like some hyperactive terrier let loose in a barn full of rats. He longed to be home, back in Ayr, where being normal and bland was a given because straying from the narrow path of conformity led only to the steep cliffs of derision.

  DS Sylvia McCormack appeared clutching two paper cups filled with coffee. She smiled towards her boss as she placed the cups down on the Formica tabletop. The liquid let off a slow flare into the brisk air that signalled its unsuitability for bodily contact.

  ‘Watch, it’s hot,’ said McCormack.

  ‘I see that.’

  ‘Aye, well, I felt it when I was stupid enough to take a sip.’

  ‘It’ll not be long cooling down. I swear Glasgow is the coldest place on the planet . . . Vladivostok doesn’t get a look in.’

  He watched the DS huddle her hands around the paper cup like it was a mini-brazier she had acquired for the purpose. There was a lot of people around, people just milling about – old men and youths alike. Valentine wondered where they came from and why they seemed to lack all sense of purpose in where they were going.

  ‘Like the land of the living dead around here,’ he said, glancing over McCormack’s shoulder.

  She took her cue from the DI and revolved her eyes over the scene. ‘The jakey brigade . . . You get used to it.’

  He knew she was right. He could remember a time when there was one tramp – they called them tramps then – in Ayr and one in Kilmarnock. They were well-kent faces; the towns had complete genealogical records on them, knew their previous lives and ultimate falls from grace as the stuff of legend. Not now, though. Valentine couldn’t keep pace with the number of the fallen in Ayrshire; their toll increased almost daily, it seemed, certainly they were not faces with names – they were not unusual enough any more to be afforded any special status.

  The DI ventured a sip of coffee. It wasn’t as warm as it looked or as inviting as the idea suggested – the greasy rainbow swirling on top made his nostrils flare.

  ‘Pretty dire, isn’t it?’ said McCormack.

  Valentine stuck out his tongue. ‘Did you buy it from a mechanic?’

  She smiled. ‘No, I did not . . . You saw me going over to the counter.’

  ‘Maybe they do oil changes as well . . . Think we got the Castrol instead of the Nescafé.’ He stood up and fastened the button of his grey dog-tooth sports coat.

  ‘Are we off, boss?’

  He nodded. ‘Come on, you can bring your coffee with you . . . Might run into an AA man you can give it to.’

  The officers left the car in a side road between a kirkyard and playing fields and made their way to Pollokshaws Road. Janie Cooper’s school was a short walk from the car. An imposing stone building, it reminded Valentine of the way schools used to be made. It looked like Ayr Academy, not some prefabricated box that had been flung up in five minutes flat. The windows were tall and thin, newly replaced but sustaining some grandeur of times past. He knew that the reality of the place would be somewhat different from his perception of solidity and that great Scots record on education, but he couldn’t help feeling comfortable standing in front of the impressive façade. On the other side of the road sat a tacky, flat-roofed oblong of flats that looked to have been built in the seventies – the decade that style forgot – and now housed a children’s play centre below and brutally exposed balconies replete with peeling paint and plastic furniture above.

  ‘So, this is where she . . .’ Valentine couldn’t bring himself to say the words, to complete the sentence. They both knew where they were and what had happened to Janie Cooper that day twelve years ago when she never made it home from school.

  ‘The Coopers still stay in Bertram Street.’ DS McCormack indicated the direction of the route the young girl must have walked.

  ‘Hardly any distance at all,’ said Valentine. ‘Come on . . .’ He paced himself as he walked towards Bertram Street, taking in the scene of utter simplicity – an anywhere road in any town in Scotland. He knew why the Coopers had never moved: where could they go that would not remind them of the utter normality of the place?

  As they reached the corner of Bertram Street, the detective stopped in his tracks. They stood beside a low verge and boxy hedgerows that edged the communal gardens of tenement flats. He was overwhelmed by the singular feeling that he had been there before.

  ‘How many streets are there just like this?’ he said.

  McCormack pulled a stray strand of hair from her mouth; the wind was picking up. ‘At least a million, we could be anywhere . . . Edinburgh, Inverness, the Borders . . .’

  ‘We could even be in Ayr.’

  The DS nodded. ‘That we could, sir.’

  They progressed down the street and made their way to the front door of the Coopers’ tenement. As they stared at the rows of buttons on the outside wall, the plastic coverings on a host of nametags – all familiar to anyone accustomed to perusing a Scottish telephone directory – Valentine paused.

  ‘I’ve a very strange feeling about this . . .’ The words were out before he realised what he had said, and the DI made a sudden and sharp intake of breath. He wished he could have swallowed his last utterance.

  ‘Sir . . . What do you mean?’ McCormack’s eyes thinned as she stood granite-firm on the path beside her boss and stared into him.

  Valentine shook off the enquiry and reached forward to depress the buzzer in front of them. ‘Nothing, just thinking aloud . . .’

  ‘Is there something you want to tell me?’

  He shrugged and turned back towards the door. ‘Like what?’

  ‘I’m not sure, anything . . . If you don’t mind me saying, you seem a bit . . . jumpy.’

  Valentine grinned, a wide headlamp smile that he knew he always reserved for such situations. He was cornered and had nothing to say that would get him out of the trap he’d sprung for himself.

  The buzzer sounded and the detective lunged for the handle and stepped inside.

  ‘Saved by the bell, eh,’ said McCormack.

  The stairwell was dark and dank. A mountain bike sat tethered to the railings of the banister; two stanchions had already been cut, and Valentine wondered how long the bike would last under such flimsy security. There was a door that led out to a
back green flapping open, banging soundly on the jamb every time the wind picked up. The plaster was crumbling from the damp walls and sat in dusty flakes on the stone steps. Some had made its way to the corner of the first floor – likely on a dustpan – and sat in a white cairn that poked at Valentine like a reminder of his visit. He ran a finger along the wall and inspected the blackness, simply as a distraction for himself, before rubbing it on his thumb and then the fronts of his trousers.

  ‘Here it is, this is us,’ said McCormack. She turned to face her boss, then spoke again with her hand poised over the door, ready to knock. ‘Will I do the honours, sir?’

  Valentine nodded and took a step back, making sure his mobile phone was switched off. They faced a faded net curtain in the door’s window; its movement was almost imperceptible as the DS made two delicate taps on the doorframe and retreated to stand beside her boss. As a light went on behind the curtain, the net went from a dull grey to a luminous yellow and then the silhouette of a man appeared in the frame. Valentine’s stomach clenched and then released, and he brought the flat of his hand up to his chest in an almost Pavlovian response to the unknown. The musty smell that percolated the stairwell seemed to vanish as the door opened and Billy Cooper waved them in.

  Billy’s face was stolid as he closed the door behind the officers and began to run the palms of his hands over the sleeves of his T-shirt. He was nervous, clearly, but this was someone who had learned to deal with simple emotions and some that were obviously far more complex – that much was displayed in the way he took control of the situation, extending a hand to the officers and flashing blue-grey eyes tinged with both a welcome and forlorn sadness. He was broad-shouldered and angular, but his frame looked burdened with the approaching bulk of middle age and the strains of a life given to manual labour; it was, again, a cross he bore lightly, almost blithely. The city could fall, nations and empires crumble, but Billy Cooper would be unmoved by anything else this life of man had to offer, not now, not ever again. He had survived a hurt that few would dare to imagine and there was nothing left for the fates to throw at him while he endured the remainder of his time in this existence.