The road into Ayr was tightly packed with cars. It was that time of the evening, thought Valentine, but then he remembered when the rush hour in town had lasted only ten minutes. He had left the A77 to take the arterial road towards the airport and, after travelling only three car lengths, found his vehicle hemmed in by open fields on one side, all the way to the town of Troon, and by runways on the other, reaching to the outskirts of the village of Mossblown. Ayrshire was a collection of small villages interspersed with fertile farmland, the produce of which was famed the world over. Beef, potatoes, dairy: the region served our tables well. Industry was less prevalent now: a lone paper mill, a shoe factory and some light engineering works were all that remained of a once bustling ‘Silicone Glen’, and mines with a hundred years of coal. You couldn’t look back, Valentine knew that; the district he had grown up in was gone. He tried to imagine how it might feel to be a school-leaver now and have his expectation of life reduced to a supermarket job or a seat amongst the battery hens in a call centre’s serried ranks. It was no life for a man, but then it had not been a man’s world for a long time. Was that such a bad thing? He doubted it, but at the same time felt a drifting, deepening nostalgia for a lost era when he knew his place and felt comfortable there.
The tailback on the road told him he was not getting to King Street station in time to meet with Chief Superintendent Marion Martin. She wouldn’t be pleased, but he held to the knowledge that she would have no choice: experienced staff were a luxury in short supply. The journey from Tulliallan had given the DI time to think, to take in the news that he was an investigating officer once again. It had also allowed him to regain perspective; he had no room for self-doubt in a murder investigation. He was either on his game – one hundred per cent – or he was assuredly off it. The victim deserved as much. Throughout the length of his time on the force, the ability to apply himself fully had never before been an issue; it was what he was there for. Valentine had had cause to question his choices, from time to time, but he had never doubted his duty. His father – a miner who had channelled his considerable vehemence into deterring him from joining the police – had taught him that duty was everything. It was never so much expressed as shown. The Calvinist dirge sang to him still.
The queue of cars nudged ahead a few inches and Valentine released the clutch; the tyres almost completed a full revolution before the brake went on again. The slow, jerky progress persisted all the way to the Heathfield Road traffic lights, which showed red just to affirm their role in the road’s hesitant drama. As he was stopped again, Valentine found himself drawn to a black limousine. It was a long, angular Mercedes driven by a man in a dark coat and tie. The driver possessed the time-worn mournfulness of an undertaker. His hands fed the steering wheel slowly, carefully. His eyes shifted almost imperceptibly as he gauged the camber of the road on the turn. There was something about the way the man negotiated his movements – the practised reverence for the cargo of a single pine box behind him – that made Valentine’s nerves tense. He didn’t know how many people he had known who were now dead; he had lost count of the corpses he had seen – cadavers on mortuary slabs had long since ceased to be anything more than meat to him – but the image before him of a slow-moving hearse jolted a new impulse.
‘Poor bastard.’ He ran the tips of his fingers over his lips. He wanted to take back the words: the dead deserved more reverence. But where had this new set of mores arisen from? They were inside him, he felt them, but he had never before been struck by such an intense shift in his own make-up; the change had sneaked up on him, caught him unawares.
A car’s horn sounded; Valentine shook himself into action and turned onto Heathfield Road. The wheel was slippy in his hands now; he wiped a palm on his trouser-front, then repeated the action for the other hand. He was past the hospital and at the next set of lights before his thought-patterns turned inside the kaleidoscope his mind had become. It was a shape he recognised, like one from the Rorschach ink-blot test that the force psychologist had presented him with not so long ago. The fact that he identified the shape – where his mind had led him – was not a solution, however; it was more like another problem to add to the growing list that now worried him.
Valentine made a reach for his mobile phone and inserted it in the hands-free dock. It was an action designed to halt the runaway train of his thoughts. As the phone rang he made narrow apertures of his eyes in an effort to firm his concentration. He counted the drill of the line as the sun’s waxy sheen painted a yellow reflection on the tarmac of the road; the call was answered on the fourth chime.
‘King Street . . .’ It was Jim Prentice, the desk sergeant. Valentine recognised the voice at once.
‘Hello, Jim, son . . . How’s tricks?’
‘Oh, it’s yourself . . . To what do we owe the pleasure?’
The DI smirked into the dash. ‘Later, Jim . . . Tell me who Dino’s got down at the tip site.’
A gruff clearing of the throat echoed down the line. ‘The tip, oh Christ, that was some caper. Got the fellow on a plank, I hear, up the bloody arse as well.’
Valentine hoped the station foyer was empty. He grimaced uncomfortably as he replied, ‘Aye, Jim, I’ve heard the details . . . Who’s desking the bag-ups?’
‘Hang on . . . What do you want that for?’
The car ahead started to move again. Valentine engaged the clutch, then the gears. ‘Look, Jim, sorry pal, I thought I was talking to the desk sergeant. If they’ve shunted you up to divvy commander in the time I’ve been away, I’m very sorry.’
‘Aye, very good . . . cheeky bloody swine!’ An audible smile crept into his voice. ‘I was only asking.’
‘It’s my case, Jim. Dino gave me it today, so if you can tell me who’s been chalking up the scores so far, I’d appreciate it.’
Jim sighed, and the sound of a mouse clicking passed down the line. ‘Looks like Big Paulo’s there just now . . . Christ, he’ll not be selling many ice creams on the tip!’
Chris Rossi was an Italian-Scot who had been fortunate, in Valentine’s opinion, to have reached the rank of detective sergeant. He was not the only one on the force with that opinion, but the DS seemed to possess an extra layer of skin that helped him retard the endless jokes that had fallen under the politically correct brigade’s radar; being Italian, it appeared, was fair game.
Valentine knew better than to bite. ‘Is he on his own?’
‘No, no . . . he’s got three million flies with him.’ The desk sergeant found himself hilarious. ‘Jesus, a murder on the tip, eh? You’ve got to wonder about some folk.’
Valentine nodded sagely. ‘What about herself, is she off?’
‘Aye, oh aye . . . she’ll no miss EastEnders, Bob!’
The traffic suddenly opened; a full lane had been freed up in the wake of a bus moving off. Valentine found himself racing through the gears on the way to the crime scene.
‘Right, Jim, I’ll catch you tomorrow morning . . . If Dino asks, I left a message for her an hour ago.’
‘You bloody chancer!’
He hung up.
The entrance to Old Farm Road had been blocked off by two patrol cars, and uniform were already there behind a strip of blue and white tape that had twisted into a thin strand of rope with the wind. There were children patrolling the bournes of the cordon on bicycles and a scattering of women stood, backs on walls, arms folded. They were all blethering, passing comment on the goings-on. Valentine knew that if the murder hadn’t already made the television news, it would be blazoned in headlines across the morning papers. The gravity of the event of murder was never wasted on him, but a bolt twisting in his gut told him this one was going to test him – and everyone – in ways that they had never been tested before.
The DI wound down his window and nodded to the uniform at the roadside. The PC seemed to do a double take when he caught sight of Valentine, like he was the first to greet Lazarus of Bethany. ‘Sir . . .’ He gulped the word, then steadied himself. ‘I wasn’t expecting . . .’
Valentine held up a hand. ‘Just lift the tape, son.’ He had no time for reunions.
As he drove towards the tip entrance he spotted the SOCOs’ white tent, the officers in their spacesuit livery, and the usual hubbub of hangers-on and dicks-in-the-wind.
‘God almighty . . .’ He tried to locate DS Rossi, but the first to hove into view was the fiscal depute, then as he turned the car towards the crime scene he caught sight of the DS talking to DC McAlister and DS Donnelly.
Valentine stilled the engine and removed his sports coat from the front seat beside him. As he exited the vehicle he was approached by the fiscal.
‘Bob . . .’ He put a raised inflection on the word that made him sound like an Antipodean schoolgirl.
‘Indeed I am.’ Valentine walked past the fiscal, patting him on the shoulder. He muttered, ‘Later, Col . . . when I’ve spoken to my lads.’
The first to approach the officer in charge was DS McAlister. He slit his eyes, then took two firm steps in the direction of DI Valentine.
‘I heard you were joining us, but I didn’t want to believe it.’
‘Look, spare me the welcome party . . . What have we got?’
DS Rossi dismissed the white-suited SOCO and made for the newly formed enclave of officers gathering around Valentine like autograph-hunting boys on the gates of Somerset Park.
McAlister spoke. ‘White male, late fifties and dead as dead gets.’
‘Is that a medical opinion, Ally?’ said Valentine.
‘You could say that . . .’ He tipped his head in the direction of the village. ‘The doc’s been and gone, by the way.’
‘No surprise there, can’t get a happy hour on the tip.’
Valentine took hold of a small cardboard box being held out by one of the SOCOs that contained clear-plastic gloves. He removed a pair and quickly snapped them, one after the other, onto his hands.
‘I won’t ask you to wear the blue slippers,’ said the SOCO, waving a hand. ‘Seems pointless in this mess.’
Valentine nodded, ‘Right, lead the way.’
Rossi was just arriving as they took off again; he called at Valentine’s back, ‘Hello, sir.’
The DI suppressed a smirk at the thought of Jim’s ice cream remark. ‘Move your arse, Paulo!’
As the murder squad headed towards the white tent, the refuse crunched and squelched beneath their feet. An omnipresent hiss of flies followed with them. The group, almost in unison, raised their hands towards their mouths and noses as they walked through air gravid with pestilence.
‘This is rank,’ said Valentine. ‘Almost makes you want one of those wee B&Q masks.’ He pointed to the SOCOs up ahead.
‘They’re in short supply, apparently; we asked,’ said McAlister.
‘You are kidding me.’
‘Wish I was.’
Valentine stopped in his tracks and turned to survey the crest of the rubbish mount that they were standing on like the advance party of some perverse colonial incursion. He pointed to the edge of the site, to a concrete wall. ‘Where did our man come in?’
DS Donnelly spoke. ‘Over there, side of the wall, got blood and fibres from the squeeze.’
‘So what’s that . . . a hundred metres?’
Donnelly flicked the pages of a spiral-bound notepad – the action shooed flies. ‘One-sixty-odd.’
Valentine put himself between DS Donnelly and the view of the concrete wall; he widened his arms. ‘That’s a path – as the crow flies – of about three metres wide, yes?’
The remark was greeted with nods; his use of the Socratic method had triumphed. ‘Right, Paulo, where are you?’
The DS pushed through the bodies, ‘Here, boss.’
‘Aye, I see you . . .’ Valentine pointed to the wall. ‘From there, in a direct line to the tent, I want everything.’
The team looked at each other, then back to the DI. McAlister spoke first. ‘Are you saying you want it bagged, boss?’
‘Do I have to say it twice?’
‘But it’s rubbish . . . piles of crap.’
Valentine shook his head, as the team stared at him he pointed to the ground and stamped his foot on the detritus. A cloud of grey dust erupted from beneath his shoe.
‘Ally, this could be a goldmine of clues we’re standing on, so get the lot of it bagged and stored and not another gripe out of you.’ He pointed at Rossi. ‘Paulo. You’re the senior officer on here, why the hell have you not been bagging this?’
‘Boss, the chief super will do her nut if she hears you’ve bagged that lot; do you know how much it’ll cost? I mean in man-hours, never mind the storage.’
Valentine smiled; two neat chevrons appeared either side of his mouth. ‘I couldn’t care less about the cost.’ He edged forward and fronted up to the assembled group. ‘Do you know the only economics I care about?’ He pointed to the tent. ‘I care why a group of paid civil servants are standing in the middle of the local tip with a white tent pitched over a dead man . . . That is all I care about.’
Valentine stretched out for the tent; as he went, a dirty cloud of tip stour was released by his heavy footfalls. ‘Come on, let’s get a look at our victim.’