A Taste of Ashes (DI Bob Valentine Book 2) (3 page)

DS Sylvia McCormack emerged from the garden where she had been directing officers in a search, as she approached the detective she waved with a pair of rubber gloves. ‘Hello, sir, sorry to drag you away, hope it wasn’t anything special.’

Valentine didn’t want to be reminded of just how special his plans had been this evening but let it pass. ‘What’s the SP, Sylvia?’

‘Well, we have a white male, late-forties-to-fifties, with a deep wound at the base of the neck. Dead, of course.’

‘He’d bloody want to be for all this fuss.’ The DI walked towards the front door. On the step he paused to point out some medical paraphernalia, needles and phials. ‘Did the paramedics get to him before he carked?’

‘Eh, no, that was for …’ she removed a spiral-bound notebook from her coat pocket, read from the page, ‘Agnes Gilchrist, a neighbour.’

‘Stumbled on the scene, so we have a witness?’

DS McCormack turned another page in her notebook, she was looking for the answer but it wasn’t there. ‘She was unconscious on arrival, sir.’

‘
On our arrival
, Sylvia. But not
her
arrival. I’m assuming somebody called emergency for us to be here in the first place, was it her?’

McCormack lowered her gaze, retrieved a pencil and started to write on the notebook. ‘I’ll get that checked out, right away.’

Valentine let a moment’s silence sit between them. ‘Thanks, Sylvia, it might turn out to be important.’ He made for the front door of the property, beckoning the DS to follow.

Beyond the door frame lines of dark blood were smeared along the white walls. There seemed to be two distinct trails, one slightly higher than the other. They ran thick, initially, heavy in blood, and then thinned into tapered points that looked like digits of a hand. As the detectives stood in the hallway they were joined by DS Phil Donnelly. ‘Good to see you, sir.’

Valentine returned the greeting, but it was always odd to have someone say it was good to see you at a murder scene. ‘What do you make of this, Phil?’

The detective turned towards the wall, rolled on the balls of his feet. ‘Hard to say, looks like two trails.’ Donnelly took his hands from his pockets, traced the space between the trails. ‘Could be made by one marker, I mean, it’s not out of the question.’

‘Do we have prints?’

The DS shook his head. ‘The duster’s on the way, should have them within the hour.’

‘Let me know the minute you have them.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘If we’ve got two sets of prints in there then that’s two facing murder.’

They stared at the smears on the wall once again. There was no way of separating the two lines, no way of judging if one set was a match in size and shape for the other.

‘We need the duster on this right away, Phil.’

‘I’ll chase him now.’ Donnelly tapped his mobile phone, jammed it between ear and shoulder. ‘What are you thinking, boss, robbery gone wrong? That would account for the two bods.’

Valentine scanned the interior. ‘There’s nothing to rob here.’

Donnelly tried to win back some pride. ‘Might have been holding something – drugs, drugs money?’

‘If you know this is a drugs house, I’d listen to you. Do you know that?’

He shook his head, the phone slipped, he made a clumsy reach to catch it in his hands. ‘Shit, that was close.’

Valentine stood waiting for an answer.

‘I don’t know that much about the place, sir.’

‘Then save the conjecture for when we actually know something, son.’

Donnelly wasn’t done. ‘I was just thinking, from a motive point of view, you know, that if there was cash or drugs here then it would be a good reason to off someone and flee.’

‘Yes, of course. And if the crown jewels had been pinched and stashed here, that would be a reason too.’ Valentine didn’t like sarcasm, in himself or others, but a little humbling on a murder investigation kept everyone alert.

DS Donnelly tried the phone at his ear once again. ‘Still ringing.’

Valentine turned towards his detectives. The fey tone was gone; he sounded gruff. ‘Let’s stick to what we know. I don’t want wild conjecture. I don’t want guesswork. I want facts and I want an open mind in the absence of those. This is a murder scene not a pub quiz down the local, do you all understand that?’

‘Yes, boss.’

‘Good.’ Valentine knew he had their attention. It would be a stupid member of the squad that tested his seriousness now.

A bell chimed, it was DS McCormack’s mobile. ‘Emergency just confirmed, sir. The call for police came from the neighbour, Agnes Gilchrist.’

‘Good. Maybe she saw something.’ The DI cached away the possibilities. ‘Right, now that we’ve got that clear, let’s go and take a look at our victim – middle-aged male, white, do we know anything else?’

The detectives stared at the ground.

‘C’mon, somebody.’

DS Donnelly turned over his palm where he’d marked the skin with ink. ‘The neighbours say the Millars stay here. Sandra Millar’s husband died a few years back, she has a daughter called Jade and an older son who doesn’t live with them anymore.’

‘Ages?’

‘Don’t know yet. Teenage and twenties on the kids. At a guess, I’d say the mother might be the same as our victim.’

‘Do we have a name for him?’

Donnelly scanned his palm again, the pen stood out on his skin under the bright light. ‘James Tulloch.’

Jade Millar removed her flat palms from her stomach and pulled the sleeves of her jacket over her hands. It was a distraction, to change the course of her thinking, and because
her mother
hated it. She had said it was something four-year-olds did but her mother wasn’t there to object. Jade heard her words, though; all day they’d been with her. She didn’t know why it should be that today was the first time in her life that she carried around her mother’s words.

Who listened to their mother? Who listened to her mother? Fathers were different, she knew girls at school who always did what their father told them because they were too scared not to. She’d been envious of them once. When Dad died she wished that there was someone to tell her what to do. She hated seeing girls dropped off by their fathers at school, taken to the shops, or anywhere at all. It was like they did it just to annoy her.

‘Oh, Dad.’ Even the word was difficult to say.

Dad was there with her today, too. But that was different, he was always there. She even dreamed about him at night. Alena from school said she never dreamed about her dad and wasn’t it a bit strange. ‘You should be dreaming about boys, you have Niall for God’s sake.’

Alena didn’t get it. She always said something annoying; most days Jade ignored her when she had to but not today. Just the thought of Alena’s words made her hands form fists.

Jade took out her phone and scrolled down to Alena’s name, she paused with her finger over the delete key in her contacts file. She wanted to do it, to get rid of her. It was simple enough to get rid of people, you just deleted their number from your phone and their profile from your Facebook friends list and they didn’t exist anymore. Why couldn’t the real world be the same?

‘Because that’s not how the real world works, Jade!’ Her mother’s words again.

‘Go away!’ She bashed the side of her head with the phone. ‘Go away. Go away.’

She knew she wouldn’t go away, though.

‘I’ll never leave you,’ that’s what she’d said to her when Dad died. And her mother was tough, her brother had said so, and Darry knew all about being tough. He’d know what to do with this mess.

In the street outside her home a group of people had gathered. Jade watched them from beneath a tree on the other side of the road. There was a police car and an ambulance, another couple of cars with flashing lights that were probably police cars too, and a blue truck that blocked nearly the entire road. Men and women in uniform were taping off the fence, the gate and the bushes. Another group directed the neighbours indoors. It looked like a television show, like the time Brad Pitt had come to Glasgow and it was on the news.

Jade took her hands from the sleeves of her coat, it didn’t seem right to have them there when she knew her mother objected. For a moment she stared at her hands, what should she do with them? God, what was wrong? It was like her mind was missing or all the thoughts had fallen out. She tried her hands in her pockets, felt for her mobile phone and gripped it tightly when she found it.

‘Oh, God …’

Tears came, slow at first, because they were a surprise to her. But when she knew they were there, rolling down her cheeks, they intensified. They weren’t normal tears, they came from another part of her. Tears appeared when you were in pain, she knew all about that, but these were for something else.

She didn’t know what to do. Darry said Mum always knew what to do and wouldn’t listen to advice that didn’t suit her. Jade hadn’t said that, they were her brother’s words. But wasn’t that the problem? She had everything mixed up and Darry wasn’t there either, she wished he was.

She couldn’t read the message in her phone again, the one she’d sent to her brother at the barracks, because all the words just got jumbled up, started to mean something else. She needed someone to sort out the mess, to tell her everything would be all right.

She pulled up her contacts on the phone again and dialled her brother.

He answered quickly. ‘Jade, what’s up now?’

She tried to speak but her mouth was numb with all the crying. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

‘What do you mean?’ He was still travelling, she could hear noise from the wheels echoing in the cab of the bus.

‘Darry, it’s Mum. I don’t know what to do.’

‘What’s happened, Jade? Just tell me, slowly.’

‘I went home, like you said. I was waiting for you. I … I had a fight with Mum and, oh God, Darry I don’t know what happened. There’s police everywhere, in the house, in the garden. I can’t see a thing except police and everyone’s out staring at the house.’

‘Calm down, Jade. If you get hysterical, it’s not going to help you.’

‘But I don’t know what to do.’

‘Where’s Mum?’

‘I don’t know. She was with him. Darry, it’s such a mess.’ Her sobbing increased.

‘You can’t go home, Jade. Do you hear me? I don’t want you to go near the police. You can’t talk to anyone.’

‘I’m right across the street, though. And somebody needs to do something.’

Darry exhaled slowly into the phone. ‘Jade, you have to listen to me.’

‘I know.’ The sobbing reached hysteria.

‘I’ll be in town soon and you can tell me everything but don’t talk to anyone before then. I’m staying at Finnie’s place, do you remember where that is?’

‘I think so.’

Darry’s speech quickened. ‘Good. It’s on the way to the harbour, above the pub. Now, the bloke in the pub is a good lad, his name’s Brian and he has the key for Fin’s place, you can ask him for it, say you’re going to tidy up before your brother arrives.’

‘But won’t Fin be there?’

‘He’s out of town for a few days. He won’t mind you being there because he knows why I’m coming home.’

‘You told Fin?’

‘I told him some of it, Jade. I had to. He knows I’m not due leave and wouldn’t desert the place if it wasn’t serious.’

‘But …’

‘Jade, he’s an old friend, he understands. He’s on our side, honestly.’

‘OK.’ A tired note played in her voice.

‘You sound exhausted, just go now. I’ll be home soon.’

‘Darry …’

‘What is it?’

‘Promise me everything will be OK.’

‘I promise.’ His speech stalled, then lit up again. ‘Go, Jade, quickly now, and don’t stop for anyone.’

Jade held the phone to her ear to make sure her brother had gone. When the line tone changed and the call ended she lowered the phone and stared into the street. Another police car was arriving, she watched the uniformed officers jog towards her house, and she raised the mobile phone again.

‘Niall, it’s me.’

‘Where are you now?’

‘I’m at home, I need to see you.’

‘OK. Tell me where.’

As the corpse appeared in front of him DI Bob Valentine’s neck muscles stiffened. It was always the same, like a physical reminder of his calling. He had not joined up to strut about like some of his colleagues, to chase rank. It had been a deeper connection. If he had been looking to attract censure from his father – a striking miner at the time – he could hardly have chosen a worse profession, but that wasn’t what he was about. As fathers went, he had a gem; he wouldn’t want to injure his pride, or any other part of him. The fact that Valentine signed up for the force had little to do with an intention: the police force took him.

From boyhood the idea of good and evil preoccupied Valentine. Even games like cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers had a deeper, darker edge than with other boys. It seemed, to him, the stuff of life. This was what he was about, he was a hunter and a protector. He had grown up and sworn himself to maintaining the pretence that passed for civil society. He had always known it was written for him. Somewhere was a ledger with the words:
Bob Valentine, finder of sociopaths and psychopaths
.

The wound in James Tulloch’s neck drew the detective’s interest. Normally, the cause of death would be the first point he looked at but his own stabbing – still so recent – made him recoil. It wasn’t the excessive amount of blood, or the torn flesh that protruded above the soaking T-shirt, but the way the sight set his mind tripping back to an unhappy time.

He had tried to seal off the part of his memory that stored the entry of a blade into his chest that punctured his heart. The pain was not what bothered him, or the fifty pints of blood they transfused into him at the hospital; the words ‘angiography’, ‘thoracotomy’ and ‘heart-lung bypass’ were just terms the chief super liked to test his mettle with. He was repaired, almost fully; it was the damage his near death had done to his family, to Clare and the girls, that still worried him.