The antiquated-looking exercise bike in the corner of the gymnasium was about all DI Bob Valentine could bring himself to tackle. There was a noisy game of five-a-side going on beyond the wall; the shouts and roars of rowdy recruits would once have proven too tempting an opportunity to go and knock off some arrogance, show them who was boss – after all, he had once been a very useful inside-left – but those days were now over. Reluctantly, he stuck to the bike and the slow revolutions of the pedals that emitted a whirring, hypnotic burr from the gyroscopic wheel.
The DI’s brow was moistening. It had been – what? – ten minutes of low-impact cycling. The doctor had called for more, much more, but it didn’t seem right to push himself. He didn’t like getting out of breath, didn’t like straining the muscle in the centre of his chest that was forced to do all the work. He knew his heart had been through enough. He watched as stiff arms attached to prominently knuckled hands gripped the handlebars. His hold was weaker, less sure than it had once been. He couldn’t imagine hauling himself over the Tulliallan assault course now. His whole body seemed to have attenuated; it was as if some vital force within him had been removed, supplanted with a strange, ethereal mist that he had yet to adjust to, or even comprehend. He knew it was there, could almost see it, certainly he sensed it, but the old mind patterns – they hadn’t altered – refused to acknowledge it.
‘How you doing, Bob?’ The voice seemed to come from nowhere, an eruption amidst the plains of his thought.
‘All right, how’s it going?’ He drew the reply from a store of stock answers. The man’s face still hadn’t registered with him.
‘You’re still with us then?’
Valentine had to search deeper for an answer to that question: did he mean at the training academy or did he mean in the land of the living?
‘Yeah, for now.’
He eased off the pedals and leaned back in the saddle of the bike. For some reason he found himself folding his arms over his chest as he took in the broad man in the red Adidas tracksuit. He looked older than himself, a bald head with short-trimmed grey hairs sat above jug-ears and eyes deep lined with creases as straight as the radial of an Art Deco sunburst. Fulton, his name was Fulton, he remembered now.
‘Don’t know what their plan is for me . . . long term.’
Fulton thinned his eyes; the folds on his face deepened and he became jowly as he dropped his chin – he looked like a pug-dog for a moment. ‘Right . . .’ he nodded, and the image was so complete he might have been sitting on the parcel-shelf of a Ford Mondeo.
What was he doing here, thought Valentine? It was the incident, he knew that. The incident that he had been unable to alter, could do nothing to halt. Except, perhaps to have been a little more lucky. But he had never been that.
‘So, we could be keeping you, then?’ said Fulton.
Valentine shrugged. ‘Who knows?’
A hand was extended, placed on the DI’s shoulder; it made Valentine flinch, he didn’t like the contact. It felt invasive, it felt threatening. He knew in his mind it was nothing of the sort, but he couldn’t alter how he was feeling at any given moment. There was thought, reasoning, for after the event, but in the moment . . . Hadn’t someone said ‘the heart has its reasons that reason knows not of’?
He rose from the exercise bike. ‘Right, well, I better be going . . . hit the showers.’
Fulton smiled, a wide rictus that made him look more of a fool than the PT instructor’s garb. ‘Aye, aye . . . hit the showers.’ He leaned forward to slap the DI on the shoulder, but somehow inferred that it would be an intrusion on Valentine’s space. He retreated a few steps, grinned again, then said, ‘Catch you later, Bob.’
‘Yeah . . . see you later.’ He raised a hand and waved the instructor off. He watched him pace a few steps towards the door and waited to see if his suspicions would be proved right: they were. The man turned and put a stare on Valentine that he took as the last look of the utterly perplexed.
‘See you, Fulton . . .’
The DI had made the same impression on Fulton as he was having on everyone lately: they thought he was losing it. Maybe he was. He shook his head and made for the changing room.
Tulliallan academy was housed in a nineteenth-century castle but it felt more like any other college or learning institution to Valentine. The sweep of the place, its history, was wasted on him. He didn’t like the blonde-wood gymnasium and he didn’t like the in-house Starbucks or the two trendy bars that would look more at home in some overpriced boutique hotel. He felt like a fraud just being there, but then what was the option?
A door opened and a stream of smiling, gallus recruits poured into the corridor, pinning Valentine where he stood. They seemed wholly oblivious to him as he held up his elbows and shrunk into the wall, waiting for the crowd to pass. When the mass of bodies had evaporated before him, Valentine lowered his arms and took deep breath.
‘Christ.’
He felt like he’d just stepped out of the path of a juggernaut, but he was deceiving himself. He was overreacting. As he made a point of placing his hands in his pockets, Valentine gripped fists – weak fists, not the fists of anger he had been known to clench in the past, but more of determination. He didn’t want to carry on like this. He didn’t want to be a shadow of his former self.
In the empty changing room, he rested his head on the locker door and sighed.
‘Together . . . keep it together, man.’
He repeated the paean to himself over and over until he heard the hinges of a door swinging open; he was no longer alone. The armour needed to go on. He drew back his shoulders and retrieved the key from his shorts. The contents of the locker were neatly packed, his grey dogtooth sports coat on the hanger, his trousers beneath. He removed them one by one and then placed them on the bench behind him. Last to come out were his black shoes, Dr Martens – he had got used to them on the beat. He placed them on the floor and then retrieved his mobile phone from the locker. He’d missed a call.
The sound of showers running started as he checked his messages.
‘Martin . . .’ He shook his head. ‘What the bloody hell does she want?’
Chief Superintendent Marion Martin had been the officer responsible for Valentine’s secondment to Tulliallan. She had kept a close eye on him since the incident, but all his requests for a return to the detective’s role had been steadfastly rebuffed. A list of options, reasons why she might be calling, raced through his mind: being put out to grass at Tulliallan on a permanent basis topped the list.
Was this what his career had come to? he wondered. His mind spooled back to the youth he had burned up in pursuits he now questioned. Had the effort, the exertion, been worth it? Certainly, he would not chase the same chimerical dreams again. Ambition had been his flaw. The desire to make something of himself, measure his worth against others on the force had filled his life, once. But life was too short for that, surely. Yet Valentine still measured himself against the likes of Martin. Who was she? A careerist, an underwhelming police officer who had fashioned an overachiever’s job and responsibility for herself. And what did she have that Valentine didn’t, aside from a nice rack and the positive-discrimination policymakers on her side. The answer didn’t matter, because the answer counted for nothing. He knew those like Martin had success for one reason – because it was there for them.
Valentine knew success, the dizzying high-wire type, wasn’t on the way to him. It didn’t come down to ability, achievement, worth – nothing like it. That success was random and disparate; it arrived at the doorstep of some who no more deserved it than desired it. When it fell to people like Martin it engulfed them, changed them completely, took over their personalities and made them anew. She was fighting to sustain an image of superiority – an outward expression of the opposite – and everyone on the force knew it. She was merely acting like the chief superintendent that she imagined herself to be, or thought she should be. The reality was not even a consideration for her. The thought of such a waste of a life struck Valentine as tragic.
The time you had was too precious, he had learned this only recently, but it had struck him instantly and decisively. He couldn’t be jealous of Martin’s success, or anyone else’s, he knew this viscerally, but part of him – the old part, the Valentine before he had learned life’s lessons – still wanted to roll up sleeves and compete. In his youth, the young boy with the lionheart who strutted with his chest out through the lower ranks thought the garlands of success were his right. He was better than everyone else, the competition, so why wouldn’t he be conceded the privilege of lofty regard?
Valentine smirked, inwardly at first, and then gave a replete grin. Had he really once been so stupid? So naive? So utterly dispossessed of any notion of reality, the world and its workings and just how insignificant his role in it mattered? Yes, he conceded. He had been that stupid, once, and it had taken twenty more years of staring at the most blatant of life’s facts to realise it.
He held up the mobile phone, looked at the screen for the count of a few stilled breaths and then dialled Chief Superintendent Martin’s number.
The sound of ringing filled the line.
A brusque voice. ‘Hello.’
‘Boss, it’s Bob . . .’
A pause entered their exchange; he heard movement, the sound of clothes rustling.
‘I called you nearly an hour ago, what the hell have you been doing down there . . . ? Not another bloody happy hour at the Cooper Lounge?’
Valentine held his voice in check; his tone came low and flat. ‘I think that place only opens on a Sunday . . .’
She bit, ‘Never mind that . . . I need you back at the station. How quickly can you get here?’
Valentine’s pulse quickened. ‘The station . . . King Street?’
‘I don’t think they’ve moved it.’
He lowered himself onto the bench. He was sitting on his sports coat, but he didn’t care. ‘Is there something I should know about?’
The chief super’s voice pitched up an octave. ‘I have Bryce, McVeigh and Collins either on annual leave or tied up on other cases, so you are back in business as of today. Unless you’re going to tell me you’re unfit or some such crap.’
Valentine sensed a smirk creeping up the side of his face. It lingered there for a moment – exactly the time it took him to realise that if he was returning to the fray it was not for a good reason.
‘What’s the SP?’
A sigh. The sound of a telephone receiver being shifted between hands. ‘We have a body in the tip . . . good enough for you?’
Valentine’s mouth dried over, the roof first but then his tongue followed as he widened his jaws. ‘The tip?’
‘Battered into next week, and just to put a cherry on top, impaled on a sharp bit of 4x2 . . . up the arse.’
‘That’s horrific.’
‘If you wanted candy floss every day, Bob, you should have joined the bloody circus. Can I see you back here before close of play?’
His reply was on his lips before he realised the chief super had hung up.
‘Yes, of course . . .’