There was nothing to indicate that the white tent, its sides fluttering like the sails of a pleasure boat, contained anything untoward. If the familiar ingress and exit of men in white bodysuits had not been relayed on television screens a thousand times before, no one would have had cause to be in the least squeamish at the sight of it. Granted, the fact that it was pitched in the midst of a rubbish tip was a surreal factor to consider, though no less incongruous than the flurry of soberly attired bodies clambering over the mounds of Sainsbury’s carriers and an assortment of burst mattresses, empty paint tins and myriad plastic containers of household products.
The seagulls seemed to be the most interested in the hurried, ant-like formicating that was underway. They circled overhead, swooping occasionally; the bravest of them even set down and spread wings in proprietary fashion. They were arrogant birds, thought DI Bob Valentine, as he made to kick a king-sized one from his path. ‘Flying rats.’
‘They’re bastards, aren’t they?’ said DS McAlister. ‘Should see them down the shore flats where I stay – think they run the place!’
Valentine let the conversational gambit pass, but McAlister wasn’t finished.
‘See the roof of the baths, the Citadel, or whatever they’re calling it these days . . . That’s where they’re nesting. If I was on the council I’d be getting a squad of workies up there and burning them out.’
‘Burning them out?’ said DS Donnelly.
‘Too right I would . . .’
Donnelly tipped back his head and laughed. ‘What with, flame throwers?’ He was still laughing as McAlister began his reply.
‘Listen, mate, you don’t have to live down there – the noise and the car covered in shit every morning – you can bloody well bet I’d be taking a flamethrower to them . . . I’d be bombing the bastards if I could.’
The conversation had taken on a combative tone. Valentine knew there was a danger of the ante being increased; if he didn’t intervene, the seagull topic would become a boxing match between the DS and the DC that threatened to draw attention from the task at hand.
‘Christ above, Ally, you truly regret missing out on ’Nam, don’t you!’
Donnelly laughed and pointed at McAlister. ‘Fancies himself as Chuck Norris.’
‘More like Steven Seagull.’ Valentine’s remark was greeted with an instant burst of cruel laughter. It took him by surprise – he never thought of himself as that amusing, that much of a joker. ‘All right, enough’s enough.’ He asserted his authority. ‘Let’s try and remember why we’re here.’
The squad had reached the entrance to the tent. The front flaps had been secured with a loose knot, which always struck Valentine as wholly insufficient: a light breeze might raise the flaps and expose the contents to those who didn’t want to know what was inside, or worse, reveal something to exactly the prying eyes that shouldn’t see inside.
The DI reached for the knot.
‘It’s not pretty, sir,’ said McAlister.
Valentine peered over his shoulder. ‘When is it ever?’
As they walked into the tent the temperature was the first thing that the DI noticed; it was several degrees higher than he had expected, but at once he realised that the heat was compounded by the foetid air. The stench from the tip waste was intense inside the tent. The SOCOs had put up ultraviolet fly traps but they were ineffective against the plague proportions of insects packed beneath the canvas, which, though white on the outside, had accumulated great black patches of shifting swarms inside.
‘It’s got worse in here,’ said Rossi.
‘A statement of the bleedin’ obvious,’ said McAlister.
It didn’t strike Valentine as at all unusual that not a single member of the squad had made any remark about the reason for them being there: the freshly mutilated corpse of a middle-aged man.
The DI was calm with the murder victim in sight. He couldn’t explain this: for reasons he was utterly unable to fathom, the first sight of a body on his patch always intensified his obligation to the job. It was as if the mortal remains signalled to those nascent, adolescent parts of his nature, those first forays into near-adulthood that had called him to become a police officer. This was why he had joined up: not to spend all those years in uniform lifting drunks or wrestling with football hooligans – those were social problems, political failings – this murder victim symbolised an act of evil, a killing, and those who plied that kind of malevolence needed to be met by someone like Valentine. He was a born hunter: a finder of the sociopaths and psychopaths who had no place in a civilised world. Their capture, the removal of evil, was Valentine’s reason for being – he knew this because his pulse quickened at the thought, every time.
‘I’m thinking he’s a stoat-the-ball,’ said McAlister.
Valentine waited for another reaction from the squad, when none came he put forward his own. ‘You think he’s a paedophile because he’s been impaled . . .’ – he waved a hand towards the wooden shaft – ‘like this.’
‘Aye . . . up the arse.’
The DI straightened his back. ‘Go on.’
McAlister seemed less sure of himself when tested, rocking on the balls of his feet. ‘Well, from a motive point of view, if he was a stoat then a victim would want to, you know . . .’
‘Return the favour in kind,’ said Valentine.
‘Stick it up his hole, boss.’
The DI let McAlister bask in his opinion for a moment, then dispossessed him of any illusion. ‘I think you’re just giving your mind a treat, son.’ Valentine shook his head; his voice came firm and flat. ‘That’s a reach; you have not one iota of a fact to back it up with. Pure conjecture. Now, if you’d told me you’d ID’d him and he had a record for fiddling with kiddies I’d say you could be on to something, but a plank of wood up the crack does not a paedo make.’
The squad fell into a lulled silence; the sound of swarming flies filled the febrile air. Valentine knew the rest of the team would be reluctant to voice their opinions so freely now – if they were of the same calibre as McAlister’s assumptions, then he was glad of that. He lowered himself onto his haunches and returned to the corpse before them. The mouth, its grey lips contorted, drew him; he removed a yellow pencil from his pocket, and with the eraser-end he pushed the lip towards the gumline. He stared for a moment and then extracted the pencil; the lip stayed in its new position with the gumline exposed. Valentine was uneasy with his incursion now; he seemed to have altered the expression of the corpse in a manner that seemed to heighten an already anguished appearance. He shook the pencil like a doctor with a mercury thermometer and then began to fervently rub the eraser-end in the crook of his elbow.
‘We have no ID, I take it?’ he said.
Donnelly spoke. ‘No, boss . . . the SOCOs have printed and swabbed, but they were hanging off on the dental cast . . .’
Valentine cut in. ‘Why?’
‘Erm, they were waiting on the OK to move him.’
The DI shook his head. ‘I want that done now, not tomorrow morning. Now. And I’ve seen him, so you can get on that right away.’
‘Just hang fire there, Bob.’ The fiscal depute was crouching under the tent flaps. ‘You can’t move this corpse until I have a death confirmation; come on now, you know the rules, not being one of the tabula rasa.’ He applied a phoney horseshoe smile to his face as he stared down Valentine.
McAlister and Donnelly turned to eyeball the DI, anticipating a reaction. DS Chris Rossi started to speak. ‘Colin, the . . .’
Valentine flagged him down and took a step towards the fiscal. ‘Keep up, mate . . . Did you miss the episode of Dr Finlay’s Casebook shot at Ayr tip this afternoon?’
‘What?’
‘The doc’s been and gone . . .’ Valentine turned to Rossi. ‘Paulo, get him a death cert’ faxed over, eh.’
‘Yes, boss.’
The fiscal was left standing in the middle of the tent as Valentine headed out, the other officers following behind him in a linear formation, trying to keep pace with the DI’s quick step. As he descended the mound of rubbish, Valentine grinned to himself at the thought of the fiscal – alone in the white tent with the bloodless corpse – then he turned to see him throwing back the tent flaps and hitting a jog.
Valentine allowed himself a discreet laugh as he widened his stride towards the car, content in the knowledge that he had exploded a myth Colin Scott held about himself. The fiscal was from the Castlehill council houses; his father had been a joiner who liked a drink in the Chase most nights and his mother was a nice wee woman who held house and home together cleaning offices. Valentine knew Col’s type – he had been a bright boy in school who had grown up with the power to shock all the adults around him with his bursts of intelligence and occasional displays of knowledge. In adulthood he still felt that the carefully chosen octosyllable should afford him the same adulation, but he was mistaken. To Valentine it marked him as merely a pompous prick: the Scots had a phrase for dismissing those like Colin – ‘I kent yer faither.’
Valentine pointed the key at the lock and the blinkers flickered; he was opening the driver’s door as McAlister caught up.
‘So, what’s your guess, sir?’
‘Haven’t you learned a thing . . . ? I don’t deal in guesses.’
The DI removed his sports coat and placed it on the passenger’s seat; he was putting the keys in the ignition when McAlister spoke up again. ‘OK, bad choice of wording . . . but you must have some ideas.’
‘It’s a single perp, our victim isn’t a big lad or in any way fit, so one mid-build male could have handled him. Two would have made a cleaner job of squeezing the body through the gap in the wall . . .’
McAlister interrupted. ‘So he was killed somewhere else?’
‘I’d say so . . . The pathologist will confirm the time of death, but I don’t think our killer would have wanted to attract any more attention to himself when he already had the stake to hammer into the ground and the corpse to position on top of it.’
Valentine started the engine and engaged first gear. ‘There’s something else to consider: our victim’s a married man, according to the ring on his finger, and he has some expensive-looking dental implants – not to mention those shoes that weren’t picked up at the Barras . . .’
‘So he’s well off.’
‘Well off, and in my experience that always means well connected. People like that don’t end up on a tip with a great spike up their backside unless they’ve made a very big mistake somewhere along the line . . . and somebody else wants the world to know all about it.’