Clare was sitting with her feet up on the couch, flicking channels on the television. A slight curl played on her lip as her husband walked in the room, but there was little else by way of an acknowledgement. She settled on a show he’d never heard of, it seemed to be a re-run from daytime television. A stout woman in pink was lambasting another so-called celebrity about her choice of words; it was all false, the same propagating of political correctness he’d heard a million times before.
Valentine looked at his wife – she was smiling now, laying down the remote control, content with her choice of entertainment. He looked towards the window and stared into the garden at the thick shrubbery and the carefully pruned trees. He wondered what it was all about. Was he only working to maintain an illusion? Playing happy families just to signal virtue to the outside world? An outside world he was growing to hold in contempt. He retreated back through the door and closed it behind him.
In the kitchen he listened out for movement in his father’s room but couldn’t hear anything. Knocking on the door, he opened up and peered round the jamb.
‘Hello, Dad.’ The old man was seated at a green-baize card table, the deck in front of him laid out in a game of patience.
‘Oh, hello.’
‘Mind if I join you? Clare’s watching Loose Women.’
‘That sounds like your kind of thing.’
‘It’s a very deceptive title.’
Valentine walked in and joined his father at the card table.
‘You fancy a game of whist? Or maybe rummy?’
‘Whatever. You choose.’
His father started collecting up the deck. ‘How was your day?’
‘I wouldn’t know where to begin answering that.’
‘No improvement?’
He shook his head: how should he reply? Their last conversation, that morning, had been a comfort to him – they always were – but he didn’t like leaning on the old man. At his time of life he should have been beyond sorting out his son’s troubles. But there was nobody else he could turn to. ‘I caught a member of my team lying to me.’
‘Oh, dear. Did they have a good reason?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Should I ask what the lie was about? Feel free to ignore me if I’m being a nosy old bugger.’
‘It’s fine.’ Valentine picked up the cards his father had dealt him. ‘He’s new to the team, and he’d told me he was a single man, but I found out he actually has a wife and three children that he’s estranged from.’
‘That’s a tricky one. In my time, there was some shame attached to that sort of thing, but I wouldn’t have said that was much of a factor today.’
‘There’s a void where shame used to be in our lives.’
‘It’s a concept that’s been cut from our vocabulary.’ His father’s eyes wandered from the cards in his hand. He appeared to be deep in reverie for a moment, a subtle warmth emanating from him.
‘It made me think. A lot of things have been making me do that lately.’
‘The passage of time does that. Don’t despair; things have a habit of changing, good principles can quickly come around again.’
‘But, I can hardly process how everything I see around me has changed already. In my brief lifetime. Goodness knows how you must feel.’
‘Hey, you cheeky swine!’ He smiled. ‘I’m not that old.’
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean . . .’
‘I’m only teasing you. When I think about the world today, son . . .’ The faraway look returned. ‘I do wonder what my own father, and his generation, would make of the mess we’ve created.’
‘What do you think he’d say?’
‘That we’d grown weak, that we’d confused comfort with civilisation, something like that. He didn’t mince his words; he might have only been a miner but he was still a learned man. He had a good eye for the truth of the matter; I think the war taught him what people were capable of. There’s one thing I can say for sure that he would have said: the war he fought wasn’t for this mess. He always said he thought his generation had been sold a pup, but he’d be bloody horrified watching the news today, even the sanitised version of events we get.’ The card game seemed to have been abandoned. ‘My late father would be sickened by the stories you bring home time and again.’
Valentine doubted that sharing his work had been a good idea. ‘Don’t worry yourself, Dad.’
‘Oh I don’t.’ His response was sharp. ‘I’ll be shuffling off soon enough, and without a care for this bloody place. It’s those girls of yours I worry about. They’re the ones my heart goes out to.’
Clare appeared at the doorway holding the cordless phone. She balanced her free hand on her jutting hip, her elbow poking out to the side as she spoke. ‘You have a call. It’s your lady friend.’
‘What lady friend?’
‘The one you spent the night with on Arran.’ She had the tact to cover the mouthpiece as she spoke.
‘Clare, please.’ He rose from the card table and took the phone but kept a hard stare on his wife. ‘Hello . . .’
‘Oh, hello, boss.’ DI McCormack’s voice was emotionless and he immediately recognised the formal police tone, it was always used to mask seriousness.
‘What is it?’
‘I’m afraid it’s not good news.’
‘Go on.’
‘Phil’s on his way to the hospital. There’s been an incident.’
‘What happened?’
‘He was trailing Malcolm Frizzle, sir. Something appears to have gone wrong, there was an altercation in a car park behind some hotels on the beachfront.’
‘A fight between Phil and Malky?’
‘It’s all a bit confused at the moment, sir. All I can confirm is that we have Phil en route to hospital and, I’m afraid, we also have a deceased person at the scene.’
‘Dead?’
‘It’s Malcolm Frizzle.’ She paused. ‘I can send a car for you, if you like.’
‘No, don’t do that. I’ll make my way there now. Meet me at the scene, I’ll follow my nose.’
As he hung up Valentine felt a surge in his blood. The ground beneath him swayed slightly as he headed for the door, snatching his jacket from the hall-stand.
‘Are you going out again?’ yelled Clare.
He didn’t reply. By the time he reached the car, his thoughts had settled into a torrid rhythm, beating on the inside of his skull. The idea that an officer of DI Donnelly’s standing would be stupid enough to confront a scrote like Frizzle was preposterous. But confrontations happened all the time, they were part of the job. And he had a scar as thick as his index finger running the length of his chest to prove it.
He slid behind the wheel and slammed the door. He drove in a daze, getting stuck behind a blue Toyota whose driver seemed lost, alternating between slowing and speeding with no apparent reason. At the beachfront he followed his own instinctual directions, first down a narrow, cobbled street and then a broader road that was lined with Victorian villas, all converted into guesthouses.
In the rear car park Valentine was waved through a taped-off cordon by a uniformed officer holding a flashlight. More uniforms and a smaller number of white-suited SOCOs were already in position, darting beneath the ten-foot-high poles supporting the lighting fixtures, which cast ghoulish shadows on the wet tarmac.
White canvas, draped over a boxy skeleton, flapped in the wind as he approached the scene. ‘Hello, sir,’ said DI Davis. He was emerging from the top of a low embankment where dark shrubbery masked a thick copse of trees.
‘What’s that you have there?’ said Valentine.
Davis held up a clear plastic evidence bag. Inside was a small dark shape that, even in the dim light, couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than a handgun. ‘Automatic, boss. It’s a SIG Sauer.’
‘McCormack didn’t say anything about a firearm.’
‘She wouldn’t have, I only just found it.’
‘Has it been used?’
Davis folded over the evidence bag and put the gun in his jacket pocket. ‘I take it you haven’t heard how Frizzle copped it?’
‘Shot?’
‘Two bullets in the back of the head. Routine execution style, don’t you think?’
‘Christ almighty. Get it checked for prints and run the serial number; it probably won’t give us anything more than a point of manufacture, but you never know.’
‘I don’t know if this is of any consequence, but I’m pretty sure the SIG is a favourite with the intelligence service.’
‘If it is, it’s of no consequence to me. You know I don’t like coincidences; I prefer to deal with hard facts. That gun belonged to somebody, we don’t know who, but it’s now our job to find out.’ Valentine turned back to the parking bays, just as DI McCormack’s car was pulling up. She spotted the officers and started jogging towards the embankment.
‘Phil’s been taken into emergency surgery,’ she said as she pulled a stray clutch of hair from her eyes, turning to the DCI. ‘I didn’t know when I called, sir, but it’s a gunshot wound.’
Valentine looked at Davis. ‘Have you checked the magazine?’
‘It’s a match: three bullets missing.’
‘We have the gun?’ said McCormack.
‘Ian found it, in the bushes.’ Valentine started walking towards the white tent the SOCOs had erected. He motioned the others to follow as he went.
‘Boss, are you saying the murder weapon was disposed of a few yards away from the scene?’
‘Yes, so what’s your point?’
‘Frizzle’s been taken out, mafia-style, and then the gunman flees without the gun. Something’s not right here.’
‘He also shot Phil before fleeing. I don’t know what happened in between then and now, but I do know Phil was supposed to be shadowing Malky. If Phil stumbled across something he wasn’t supposed to see then there could be any number of reasons why we have an officer down, a dead scrote and an assailant on the run. Until we’ve looked more closely at the situation, we can’t make any assumptions.’
Valentine flung back the flap of the tent and ducked down. A SOCO was perched over the corpse, collecting residue on a wooden taper; he looked up and removed his blue face mask as the officers entered. ‘Shoe guards, please, I don’t want my scene contaminated!’
‘It’s my scene, actually,’ said the DCI. ‘So just keep your wig on and tell me if you found anything lying around.’
The SOCO’s tone softened. ‘Some skull fragments, brain matter . . . Nothing I wouldn’t expect, sir.’
Valentine looked at the face of Malcolm Frizzle, wide-mouthed and open-eyed, a dark red-to-black swathe painted down one side. The victim’s expression, on the whole, didn’t look too different to the way it had when Valentine had last seen him: the impassioned fear was still there, as was a nervous assumption of impending doom. Someone had gotten to Malky, but that had happened long before he came to rest in a dark and wet car park on the edge of Ayr.
The crouching SOCO stood up and presented the officers with a small box containing blue shoe covers. ‘If you’re staying, please put these on.’
The DCI waved down the offer and turned back towards the tent’s opening. As he stomped out, Davis and McCormack followed.
‘Sylvia, you wait here for the fiscal,’ he said.
‘I get all the fun jobs.’
‘Well, when the merry-go-round stops, head out to the hospital and stay there until Phil comes around.’
Her head drooped. ‘Yes, boss.’
‘I want to know what happened here tonight and hopefully Phil will come round and shed some light on that.’
‘I’ll let him know we’re praying for him,’ said McCormack.
Valentine nodded, turning to Davis. ‘You can come with me. I think we need to have a very thorough look at Malky’s living conditions, and if he’s left anything lying around that might give us a clue as to why someone would want to blow his brains out so abruptly.’