Artefacts of the Dead

by Tony Black

  ‘Clare, I’m sorry . . . I intended to be home earlier, but I’ve had a very busy day.’

  She brushed her fringe from her eyes. ‘It’s not me you should be apologising to.’

  Valentine sensed an unscripted break in proceedings; he lowered his briefcase and started to unbutton his coat. ‘I’ll go up now.’

  ‘No. He’s sound asleep, they gave him tranquilisers.’

  ‘Is he OK?’ He hung his sports coat on the banister.

  Her fingertips flew from her fringe to the coat on the banister. ‘The scan was clear. It doesn’t look like a stroke, but he’s not a well man.’ She picked up the sports coat in thumb and forefinger like it was the discards of a leper colony. ‘And this is ready for the bucket!’

  Valentine snatched back his coat. ‘Leave it, Clare.’

  Chloe appeared in the hallway wearing her pink polka-dot dressing gown and pyjamas. Her Bart Simpson slippers looked like she had stuck her feet into a pair of cuddly toys. Valentine smiled at the sight of his daughter.

  ‘Hello, Princess . . .’

  She grimaced, turned to the side and made a wave across the glass of milk she held in her hand. ‘Oh, please . . .’

  He had an urge to scoop his daughter in his arms, but her teenage diffidence to the approaching adult world flashed like a warning light from her. ‘How’s school, love?’

  She closed her eyes, let the lids hang in exaggerated fashion for a moment and then put a crick in her jaw. ‘I’m going to bed.’

  His daughter squeezed past them, sullen and disconsolate, and took to the stairs with heavy steps. Valentine saw his wife drawing a bead on him; he knew at once he had said the wrong thing, but his mind was so tired it required a back-up generator to keep body and soul together at this hour.

  ‘I take it my dinner’s in the dog?’ he said.

  Clare waited for Chloe to close the bedroom door. ‘Why did you say that to her? You know she’s not having the best of times at school, and you know why . . .’

  He was re-hanging his coat on the banister as he replied. ‘I wasn’t thinking . . .’

  ‘Well, perhaps you should start, Bob!’ His wife pushed him aside and followed Chloe up the stairs.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To see if our daughter’s all right.’

  Valentine touched the edge of his jaw and felt the emery wheel of his unshaven chin. He opened his mouth just enough to call to Clare again, but something stopped him, an instinct perhaps, the thought that he could more than likely increase his trouble. He collected his briefcase, removed the blue file with the transcripts from the Knox interviews that DS McCormack had delivered, and headed for the kitchen. The down lights beneath the kitchen cabinets were burning, lighting the worktops but little else. He turned to the light switch and pressed it with his shoulder. As the room was illuminated, Valentine lowered his paperwork and started to make coffee. There was a plate sitting out, with what looked like a dinner of mince and potatoes blurred beyond recognition by its cling covering. He wasn’t hungry now anyway. He had passed the point where food was something that would sustain him, it would merely bring dyspepsia at this hour. He took his coffee, retrieved the blue folder and made for the dining-room table.

  As he read the notes, the detective was nostalgic for the time when he would have filled out the same forms. The paper case files had lingered in a few of the smaller stations for longer than they should have. Everything was committed directly to computer now, but the touch of paper felt more personal, reminded him of a time when the world itself seemed to care a little bit more. As he read on, however, Valentine realised his mind was just playing tricks on him: the world was a brutal place and always had been. The investigating officers were not the best communicators, few police were, with most resenting the task of note-taking as no more than a necessary evil at best, a bureaucratic time-suck at worst. He had learnt early on to take his time over the files, because they had a way of coming back to bite you if alternative meanings could be construed from the wording. He smiled as he recalled the incident his late colleague David Patterson had recounted after coming across a cow in the road.

  ‘She’d been hit by a car or a truck.’ He heard David’s voice now, the rich inflection of his tones, the crooning cadence of his Ayrshire accent that had never left him. ‘I swear the beast was half dead . . .’

  ‘You’re sure it wasn’t half alive?’ he’d tested.

  ‘OK, smart-arse, three-quarters dead . . . There was nothing for it but to put the poor beast out of its misery.’

  ‘That’s not something they teach you in the Boy Scouts.’

  David laughed. He had been a man who liked to laugh. He’d had a buttoned-up side too, but he didn’t like to overexpose that part of his nature for fear of being taken too seriously. ‘Well if they had a cow-shooting badge, I didn’t get it.’

  ‘Hang on, you shot it?’

  He nodded rapidly, like an excited child. ‘Two bloody rounds and it was still moaning . . . I swear you have no idea of the paperwork required for the discharge of two rounds of ammunition in the RUC.’

  He was still laughing, shoulders rocking above his broad belly as he pointed his fingers into an imaginary gun and took aim at an invisible cow. Valentine found himself mouthing his old friend’s name, and for the first time in years he felt the warmth of a friendship that could never die.

  ‘Oh, Davie . . . We had some times.’

  His friend was gone, and many more besides, but he didn’t want to become morose thinking about his loss. As quickly as he had chided himself, his mind was wiped clear by the sound of his mobile phone. He reached into his shirt pocket and answered. ‘Hello . . .’

  It was DS McCormack. ‘Are you reading the files?’

  ‘Er, no . . . Just about to.’ He looked at the clock; it was nearly midnight. ‘I presume you’re calling because you’ve found something.’

  Her voice rose in pitch, put on running shoes. ‘Go to page nine, second interaction from DI Fitzsimmons . . . Have you got it?’

  ‘Hang on . . .’ Valentine turned over the file and thumbed his way to page nine. ‘Right, what am I looking for?’

  McCormack’s impatience poured from every word. ‘Skip the top paragraph . . . Read the next one, how it starts . . .’

  The detective ran his gaze down the page to the point she had indicated. ‘OK, here we are . . .’

  ‘He’s addressing Knox, by the way.’

  ‘Yes, got that . . .’ He read the DI’s words: ‘Who are you working with, Duncan? You might as well tell us, because if they’re on our books we’ll be talking to them and they might not extend you the same favour . . .’ Valentine brought his knuckles of his right hand to tap on his chin; he was drinking in the significance of the statement when DS McCormack spoke again.

  ‘Sir, are you there?’

  ‘Yes, yes . . .’

  ‘Then you got that . . . You see what he’s saying?’

  Valentine rubbed his knuckle into his tired eyes and felt a change in the rhythm of his thinking. ‘Fitzsimmons thought he had an accomplice.’

  ‘Yes, but he was looking for someone like Knox, a sex offender.’

  He clamped his teeth, when words came they trawled the room in a soporific drawl that indicated an overburdened mind. ‘They had no chance of finding Urquhart in that case.’

  ‘They were looking in the wrong direction, that’s why.’

  He pushed the folder away. If there were more gems worth unearthing they could wait another day – he had the Cullinan Diamond already. ‘How much of this have you read?’

  ‘I’m well on with it: there’s a few things we need to look at, boss . . .’

  ‘It’s midnight, Sylvia, and I have a wife who thinks I’m a part-timer in this marriage as it is.’

  ‘Oh, of course. I’m sorry to call so late, I just thought . . .’

  He cut her off. ‘You did the right thing, I needed to know. I’m glad you called, but tomorrow’s another day.’


  ‘I’m going to stick with it. I’m not tired and I’m all pumped up for this now.’

  He admired her enthusiasm and envied her youth. ‘Goodnight, Sylvia, I’ll see you at the station tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll keep notes . . . But at least we’ve something else to add to the board!’

  ‘We have that.’

  A faint gleam of optimism entered his weary eyes as he rose from the table and closed the blue folder.

  38

  Danny Gillon over-revved his van on the road outside the doctors’ surgery on Cathcart Street. By the time he had reached the Tourist Information centre there was a cloud of black smoke following him onto the Sandgate. He didn’t care what the woman waving her hand in front of her thought as he passed, because the town of Ayr was nothing to him. Who were they? Old scrubbers and junkies. Streets full of mug punters rolling drunk to the bookie’s or the Bridges Bar. He despised them all; none of them were worth the steam off his piss. He believed that, because, in his world, he was an undisputed potentate. He was a small-town Stalin, or might well have been for all the opposition his girls could muster against his authority.

  A Stagecoach bus heading for Kincaidston pulled out in front of the van and Gillon cursed the driver and every one of his passengers. ‘Bloody bunch of scruffs!’ He raised a single-digit salute. ‘Get out to your council rabbit hutches . . . Don’t know why you’re in such a rush, bloody sure I wouldn’t be.’

  By the roundabout at the top of the Sandgate his blood had cooled a little, and he smiled at a pair of young girls standing outside the bus station. One of them had spotted him, but pretended to be wall-eyed. He rolled down the window as the traffic stalled.

  ‘Hello, darlings, and what are you lovely little ladies up to today?’

  The girls were no more than fourteen or fifteen, and the sheen of their overtly straightened hair and heavily mascarad eyes belied their attempts to convince anyone of the contrary. They giggled as Gillon leaned a hand on the edge of the window and winked. They were bait – jailbait, of that he had no doubts – but fresh meat in the town always attracted big game.

  ‘And what brings you to sunny Ayr, eh?’ He scrabbled on the dash for a packet of Embassy Regal and offered the girls cigarettes.

  ‘Thanks.’ One was gamer than the other. She’d be full of lip, thought Gillon.

  ‘You sound like a wee handful.’ He smiled at them and the girls turned to each other and giggled.

  A car’s horn sounded behind him, which seemed to startle the girls. They turned and headed back to the bus station at pace.

  ‘Aye, all right! All right!’ He smacked his hand off the steering wheel and pulled out from the roundabout. ‘Bloody scared the horses now anyway . . .’

  As Gillon turned for Wellington Square he cast a backwards glance in the mirror, but there was no sign of the young girls. He shook his head and cursed but opted only to depress the cigarette lighter and clamp a king-size in his mouth; after all, girls were ten a penny in this town. The coast attracted them, the sea air and the holiday atmosphere, the hotels and pubs calling for fodder to pour drinks and wash toilet bowls. It was a move that soon turned sour: he knew that, and relied upon it. The service industry’s loss was his gain, because there was always work for young girls with Gillon. The trick was to paint it as something else at the start, fire them up, make them think life was one big party with him, and then once they were hooked, get them hooking. He smiled to himself because life was that simple: it was only square pegs and stupid lassies that made it complicated.

  When he returned to the block of flats in Lochside where he had set up his working girls, he parked and stilled the engine. The exhaust rattled a little after he had stopped and he knew that it would soon be costing him money. He gnawed the tip of his cigarette and stepped out, looking towards the rear of the vehicle: a sooty black cloud was hanging in the air. The exhaust pipe was still in place but looked precipitously close to coming off. A bad speed bump or a clipped kerb and he’d be forking out for a new one. He scrunched his eyes and tried not to think about it. There was the payday from the hack coming; all he had to do was get Leanne prepared for the next stage in Sinclair’s wee plan.

  As he walked through the empty car park, Gillon kicked out at a stray can of Export and sent it into the air. The can spun all the way to the pinnacle of its grand arc and then plummeted like a stone onto the tarmac. The shaken remnants of the can spilled onto the street in a bubbling foam that looked at home in the litter-strewn surrounds. When he reached the door of the flats, the pimp pressed the buzzer for Leanne’s apartment, but there was no answer.

  ‘Come on, Leanne . . .’

  He pressed the buzzer again, but there was still no answer.

  ‘Come on! Come on!’

  He stepped back and fastened his eyes on the kitchen window that faced out into the narrow courtyard: there was no sign of movement.

  ‘Where the bloody hell are you?’

  He had another girl set up in the same block. He returned to the buzzer and pressed for Angela.

  She answered quickly. ‘Hello.’

  ‘It’s me, Danny, buzz me in, eh.’

  ‘Danny?’

  ‘Aye, Danny . . . You wanting a picture sent up first?’

  The buzzer sounded, the lock was released, and he walked through the door. The stairwell stank of urine and stale cigarette smoke. The combination was enough to put him off his Embassy Regal and he flicked it onto the ground. He grabbed the banister and loped up to the first floor of the flats.

  Angela was waiting outside her door. ‘Something up, Danny?’

  He grabbed her thin white face in his hand and pushed her back towards the door. ‘Who said you could come out?’

  ‘I was just . . .’

  He pointed at her as he walked to the foot of the next set of steps. ‘You were just getting into that flat and getting on your back . . . I’ll be round after for my money.’

  The girl turned her black hair behind her ear and retreated into the dim hallway of the flat. She peered out from behind the narrow gap between door and jamb for a second, but as Gillon hit his stride on the steps she disappeared.

  ‘Leanne . . .’ He battered on the door but there was no answer.

  ‘Leanne . . . come on, open up.’ For a moment he had the notion that she might have collapsed. He leant down to look through the letter box but saw nothing unusual. The door to the kitchen was open, as it always was; the bedroom door was closed, but she never spent time in there unless she was on her back and there was no sign that she was with a punter. The place looked empty.

  He banged on the door again. ‘Leanne . . .’

  It was a futile gesture, and he knew that. But at least she hadn’t shot herself up and carked it on him. That would be messy: he’d have to take her to casualty and drop her at the door, or pay a cabbie, and that was never cheap these days.

  Gillon punched out at the door again. The resounding sound of bone on wood rung through the empty hallway and brought a thin eye-slot to the neighbouring door.

  ‘Hey, hey . . .’ Gillon ran towards the chink of light that had appeared in the doorframe. He could see the outline of an old woman. He pushed himself towards the door and she shrieked.

  ‘Do you know where Leanne went?’ He kept his hand pressed firmly on the front of the door.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, when did she go out?’

  The woman smelled like an old chip pan, all burnt charcoal and dripping fat. ‘We don’t speak.’

  ‘I didn’t ask if you were best mates, I asked you where she went . . . When did you last see her?’

  She raised a thin hand, and the spotted flesh hung over the bulbous fingers as she gripped the buttons of her cardigan. ‘She went out last night, I think . . . I never saw her after that and I haven’t heard her today.’

  ‘What . . . Last night?’

  The old woman nodded. She cast a glance into the stairwell as if looking for help. ‘Yes,
that’s right . . . I haven’t seen her since.’

  Gillon started to drum his fingers on the door, a rough percussion that signalled his growing impatience and dissatisfaction with what was being relayed to him. ‘And was she alone, or with someone?’

  ‘A man . . . A young man.’

  Gillon stared at the woman. Her eyes were moistening and she looked ready to keel over. He slapped the door and stepped back. She had the wood in the frame and the mortise turned in the lock by the time he could blink.

  None of it made any sense. The pimp felt a mix of emotions and thoughts flushing through him. As he descended the stairs, he tried to put the facts together. She was with a punter, surely. But where had she gone? If the punter had turned up on her doorstep then why hadn’t they just done the business in the flat? It didn’t make sense, unless he had a kink for the outdoors, but then she’d be back by now, would have been back last night, surely. He didn’t see anyone paying for an all-nighter with a skank like Leanne: she was strictly disposable.

  Gillon rattled the knocker on Angela’s door once again. When she appeared, gripping a brown dressing gown around her thin shoulders, he felt the need to draw a fist. ‘Get inside . . .’

  Angela gasped for breath as he pushed her inside. Her face indicated she would have preferred to scream, but she knew that wasn’t an option worth pursuing.

  ‘Right, speak . . . Where’s Leanne?’

  ‘What?’ She was trembling.

  ‘That tart upstairs . . . She went out with some guy last night.’

  ‘I–I don’t . . . I haven’t seen her for a couple of days.’

  Gillon flashed his bottom row of teeth the second before he fired his fist into Angela’s belly. She folded like a hinge and then collapsed onto the floor.