by Tony Black
Falling was a strange experience: the sudden loss of vision, the blurring of the familiar into the unfamiliar, and the way time seemed to float with your body through the air in a strange slowed motion. Valentine stretched out his arms to break his fall when the realisation dawned that he had been pushed down the hatch and was dropping several feet towards a stone floor. A loud retort like a gunshot signalled the end of his fall and the shooting pain in his wrist confirmed for him that bone did indeed make that loud noise when it broke. The pain arrived at once, in a sharp, agonising burst that repeated itself over and over, extending further along the arm and into his shoulder.
Valentine lay prone on the stone floor. After his arm, his nose and mouth had taken the brunt of the fall, and blood rushed from both. He spat it out: a mouthful at first, and then more drooled before him onto the dusty floor. There was a strange smell in the basement: not damp alone, but something that was definitely dank and something else like burning kerosene. He tried to raise his spinning head, to regain the rest of his blunted senses. The next to return was his hearing, alerted by the sound of footsteps behind him; that sensation was followed by the return of touch, and he was jerked backwards by a hand on his shoulder and spun round to face his assailant’s wild eyes.
‘You’ve broken my arm.’ The remark was instinctual. When he heard it, he thought it might elicit a laugh, such was its absurdity at this point. When his vision drew the dark shape in front of him into focus, he could see laughter was not an option.
Adrian Urquhart was holding a knife in his hand. It looked like a dagger or a bayonet as he leaned forward and placed its tip on Valentine’s shirtfront. His hardened features were separated by the thin slit of his mouth. ‘Why are you here?’ he said, a tremble rising in his voice.
The detective’s eyes flitted between the blade and Adrian’s hardened, immobile features. He saw there was no reasoning with him: he was lost to himself, a maniac had taken him over.
‘Think about what you’re doing, Adrian . . .’ Each of the detective’s words fell between a fresh grimace of pain.
Adrian removed the knife and stepped back. His dark gaze was as distant as another universe. If thought sparked there, beyond those impenetrable eyes, it was a mystery to even him. ‘Get on your feet, Valentine.’
The detective pressed himself against the wall and slowly edged onto his feet. The pain in his arm came in shooting bursts, like he was being lashed with a steel baton, and it prompted waves of nausea from stomach to head. When he managed to stand, he took in the full extent of his surroundings for the first time. Adrian watched him, tapping the dagger off his leg like it was a stick he itched to throw for an impatient dog. He was anxious, but not in any normal way; his anxiety was formed out of despair for a burden he was soon to set down, and it put him on edge. He’d carried this weight with him for so long that it had become part of him; the option to release it had always been there, but so had the consequences, and he couldn’t avoid them now.
‘You want to know what this place is, don’t you?’ he said.
‘What is it?’
He raised up the blade and pointed it at Valentine’s chest once more. His mouth split into a nervous grin as he spoke. ‘It’s your final resting place is what it is.’
Thoughts eddied in the detective’s mind like the confused cries of a drowning man. He thought he saw Adrian Urquhart standing before him with a knife in his chest, proclaiming his guilt of three murders, but he didn’t look like a murderer. His piercing eyes and taut mouth, pressed over his teeth like a wire, painted him as an avenging angel. If he was in the wrong, he didn’t know it. Valentine’s gaze flitted about the room once more. In desperation he sought an escape, but his attention alighted upon a tiny red coat, a child’s coat, hanging on the wall. As he stared at the garment, he knew he had seen it before, but he didn’t want to believe it matched the connection in his mind. He felt himself drawn away from Adrian; the dagger became an irrelevance as his eyes fastened on the wall, on the child’s coat and the pictures. There were photographs stuck on a large frieze and more in boxes on a table. He turned from Adrian, pushed away the knife and walked over to the images. They were children. Their pale bodies exposed to the flashbulbs looked so thin and frail, but it was the pained cries on their faces that reached out from the prints and stung Valentine’s eyes.
He turned back to Adrian, his voice a growl. ‘What the hell is this?’
He didn’t answer. Valentine saw a small pair of sandals on the table: they were tan with buckles, like the kind very young children used to wear to school. He thought he had seen the sandals before. He felt compelled to touch them, and as he did so he felt their inert power pass through his fingertips.
‘Oh, Christ . . .’
A schoolbag, an old-style leather satchel, sat next to the sandals, and its buckles were opened. Valentine reached out for the bag and picked it up with trembling fingers. Inside were jotters, little notebooks from a children’s school. All the pale, age-worn dusty books had the same child’s name on them: Janie Cooper.
A flash of heat engulfed his head as he took in the name and then he dropped the satchel back on the table.
‘Janie . . .’
In the box of pictures beside he saw a little girl wearing the red coat and carrying the bag, but it wasn’t Janie. He picked up the top photograph and held it up.
‘Who’s this?’
‘You know her too,’ said Adrian, his monotonous voice seeming too droll for the occasion.
Valentine turned to face him. ‘Who is she?’
‘It’s Leanne Dunn . . . in Janie’s clothes.’
The detective turned back to the picture and stared. He could see some hint of the young girl Leanne was then, but there was very little of the child left in her. She was aged, old before her time, her eyes wide, staring into a world she didn’t understand but knew she was trapped in. The look she wore was of sheer pain and helplessness; it was beyond any of the myriad hurts a childhood could bear or move on from.
‘You see, don’t you?’ said Adrian.
Valentine steadied himself on the table, acid bile rising in his trachea. He tipped out the box of pictures. There were many more images. Piles of them. Pictures of children with men. In focus, out of focus. Colour-bleached or bright, black and white. They covered decades: odd reminders of times past appeared in the backgrounds. A teak-trimmed television, a star clock, bright-red Kickers boots. One thing that never changed was the children’s misery and pain: it was etched on their little faces like a first taste of fear. Valentine brought his uninjured hand to his mouth and gripped tightly; he couldn’t stem the rising vomit, but he couldn’t look away from his hurried search. He tipped over the box and spread out the pictures; it wasn’t long before he alighted on the evidence and held its photographic form before Adrian.
‘This is your father,’ he yelled.
‘It is.’ He didn’t move. A low-pitched sigh started to flow from deep inside him, like he was dredging for a dead emotion. ‘That was my father.’
At once the detective understood; he didn’t need to hear an explanation. The silence said it all. How could it be explained, anyway? There were no words for this. The true revulsion could never be expressed. He knew why the man before him couldn’t face the shame of what inhuman acts had taken place, of the monstrous events his own father had participated in, the man whose blood he had running in his veins.
Valentine’s heart pounded as he took in the sight before him; a million cruel images burned in his mind. He swayed as he wiped back sweat from his heavy brow. ‘What happened to Janie Cooper?’
‘You think I know that? I know she died. I know Knox took care of the remains. They kept her coat and things; I think they dressed Leanne in them to remind them of her. She was special.’ His voice was so flat, so devoid of emotion that he could have been dictating a shopping list or any one of the mundane chores of life – not the brutal abduction, rape and murder of an innocent.
The knowl
edge was not new to him, brought no understanding, and somehow only served to blur his thoughts even more. He looked down to the picture in his hand of the little girl and felt a fierce wave of anger engulf him.
‘But why Leanne . . . Why would you want to kill her?’
Adrian brought the dagger up to the side of his head and scrunched up his eyes into tiny knots of anguish as he spoke. ‘I didn’t want to kill her, I had to.’
‘You had to?’ Valentine’s mind was a pit of confusion and darkening rage. The answers he’d sought came but brought no understanding or resolution. If anything, the reality smacked at him harder, drove deeper wounds in him.
‘She was going to talk to that bloody reporter, wasn’t she?’
‘So Sinclair paid you a visit; you should have lapped that up!’
‘What?’
‘Oh come on, Adrian.’ Valentine put down the picture and moved towards the murderer. ‘That’s what this has all been about, isn’t it? Well, I’ve seen it now, and everyone will know about your father’s secret.’
‘It wasn’t about that: they needed to pay.’
Valentine fronted up to him. ‘Leanne Dunn didn’t need to pay, she’d already paid, her and Janie Cooper and all the fucking rest of those kids!’
‘Leanne was in the way. I didn’t want to kill her but . . . she was going to talk to Sinclair.’
‘And steal your bloody thunder. That’s what you resented, isn’t it, Adrian? Leanne was going to expose your father and you wanted to be the only one to do that.’
‘No. You’re wrong.’ He steadied himself before the detective and brought the knife towards his chest once more, pressing the point of the blade into the fleshy part of the muscle.
‘Did you really think he’d hurt you more than those girls?’
‘Shut up . . . Just stop talking now.’ He pressed the knife harder.
Valentine backed up, innate fear and painful memory rose in him. He tried to lift his injured arm to fend off Adrian, but a greater pain overtook him. ‘You’ve got what you wanted, this is what it’s been about, the whole world will see him for what he was now. Everyone will know about your father, everyone, Adrian . . .’
The sound of police sirens started to wail through the house, diffusing the intimacy of their talk, bringing back the outside world and its implications. Adrian looked up to the rafters for a solution but was greeted by the sound of pounding footfalls above. Yells and roars came on the back of the study door opening, and louder footsteps were heard on the boards of the staircase. Adrian jerked his eyes to the detective, but Valentine severed the gaze between them and looked up to see DS McAlister descending the stairs. He flagged him to a stop.
Adrian gripped the dagger tighter, held it in both his hands. He didn’t seem to be there: like a spectre of himself, he haunted the room with all the other ghosts, all the other victims.
‘Adrian, come on, it’s over. Your work’s done.’
He started to sob, raised his hands towards his face and let the knife fall to the stone floor with a dull clatter. Valentine reached out to him and brought his head onto his shoulder as the young man creased up before him and cried, deep heartfelt sobs tangled in anguish and misery and loss for the father he never had.
‘It’s all over now, Adrian.’
Epilogue
DI Bob Valentine had enjoyed another full, and uninterrupted, night’s sleep. The weeks since the conclusion of the case had served to build his strength and spirit. The worries he had once carried back and forth on the road to Tulliallan had faded into insignificance and the scar on his chest become a mark of pride he bore like a wound won in a long-ago war. He was not the same man, he knew that, but the preoccupation he had simmered in his mind about who the new Bob Valentine was no longer mattered. There was a word he wanted to use to describe how he felt now, but even that seemed an act of gratuitous self-absorption. ‘Surrendered’ was how he felt. He had surrendered to himself and to the world he lived in, because any other act was futile. There was a time, he knew – when he was still the old Valentine – that he would have considered surrender to be defeat, a weakness, but he would have been wrong. He had been wrong about many things: he conceded that, he surrendered it to himself. If it was his weakness then it was also his greatest strength.
The road to Glasgow was dry and fast, some late sun spreading through the cloud in crimson bursts. The sky above was an infinite wash of blue and white where a light aircraft buzzed like an irascible insect on high. There were still glass-topped puddles twinkling in the sunlight by the side of the road, but they were only there to reflect the day’s glory.
‘Isn’t it lovely,’ said Clare. ‘It’s too lovely for a funeral.’
Valentine glanced towards his wife. ‘It’s not a funeral.’
‘I know, but it feels like one.’
The detective wanted to agree, but he knew he couldn’t. It was the one hurt he harboured from the investigation: that he had been unable to recover Janie Cooper’s body for her parents. That secret had gone with Urquhart and Knox to their graves.
‘You look so smart in that jacket, Bob.’
It was good to see Clare smiling again. He hadn’t given her much to smile about lately – it was his father’s intervention he had to thank for her being there at all. He knew his devotion to the case had nearly cost him his wife and family, but that was going to change now.
He raised his bandaged arm from the wheel and proffered the nap of the cloth. ‘I’m still not sure about pinstripes.’
‘They suit you. They’re distinguished.’
Valentine started a low, growling laugh. ‘I liked the old sports coat, you know, it had seen me through many a tough time.’
Clare widened her eyes and laughed. ‘Let it go, Bob, the old dog-tooth’s where it should be, bloody landfill.’
The mention of the tip staled the detective’s thoughts and brought him back to the grim find on the outskirts of Ayr that had led him to this day. He felt no remorse for the passing of James Urquhart, or even the indignity of his death. His sympathies lay with his wife and the children he had abused in life; wherever he was now, the world was a better place without him.
‘That’s our turn-off,’ he said. His eyeline followed the dotted-white lines at the side of the road as it merged into the slower, more sedate pace of the city limits.
The contours of parklands soon gave way to slower roads and streets of shop fronts and pedestrians. The kirkyard, when it came into view, was dominated by a red-sandstone tower, almost spartan in its simplicity. The centuries had taught Scots not to build lavish monuments to worship in this life when the real rewards were in the next. If we could just believe that, ultimately, we all shared the same end, we would be content in our time in this world. Valentine knew it was a ruse. Anything man could contribute to the lionising of his God was an abomination compared to the misplaced faith his God had spent on him. We were not, and never would be, worthy inheritors of His Earth.
‘There’s Sylvia and Phil,’ said Clare.
As Valentine parked the car, he was greeted by DS McAlister. They hadn’t spoken properly about the night in James Urquhart’s basement or in any great detail about how the DS had trailed Gillon to where Sinclair was holed up. He knew they were both still reeling from the gamble they had taken; it might be years till they fully digested the investigation and shared their thoughts. Today certainly wasn’t the time or place. ‘Hello, Ally.’
‘Boss . . .’
‘Looks like we’re all here.’
‘All except Dino.’
The detective smirked. ‘Don’t tell me she’s developed a sense of herself.’
‘It’s your show, sir, everyone knows that.’
‘No, Ally, it’s that wee lassie’s show.’ He turned to the rear of the car and opened up the boot. Inside was the box containing Janie Cooper’s red duffel coat and sandals, her satchel sat beside them.
DS McAlister looked into the box and quickly removed his gaze.
/> ‘Jesus, I can’t look,’ he said.
‘You have to, son. You have to face it for them.’ Valentine nodded to the Coopers as they waited by the edge of the burial plot.
‘They’re just the tip of the iceberg . . . the ones in plain view.’
‘We can’t bring any of them back, but there’ll be no more now, not from that pair of evil bastards.’
McAlister leant into the boot and eased the box towards him. ‘Here, let me.’
Valentine shook his head. ‘No, it’s my job.’
The pair walked from the car. As he wrestled the box onto his hip and walked towards the others, the DI eyed the Coopers being joined by the minister at the burial plot. The sun, high in the sky above, painted a white glow round their profiles. The mood was of perfect stillness.
‘Boss, why did Urquhart do it . . . ? The son, I mean, why did he kill his own father?’
A deep breath was ingested, then words seemed to float on their back as Valentine spoke. ‘He hated him. Hated what he was and what he stood for and how the world knew nothing of the real man, the father he knew.’
‘But he was his father . . .’
Valentine’s thoughts turned to his own parents for a moment. ‘It’s a good thing you find it difficult to grasp, Ally . . .’ He halted his stride and turned to face the DS. ‘I read a line in a background report once, I think it came from a German philosopher: when one has not had a good father, one must create one.’