As Valentine walked around the mutilated corpse of the murder victim, he had the strangest feeling that he should be elsewhere. He remembered agreeing to meet the chief super, but the pressing urge to take one last look at the crime scene had supplanted that instruction. There was a heat inside his chest that shouldn’t have been there, a pressure that sent his heart rate racing. For a moment he looked around for somewhere to rest, to take the strain off his body weight, but there was nowhere. The flies had gone now. He didn’t know where, or care. It was dark, too. Night-time.
Valentine started to run fingers nervously through his hair. He heard his throat wheezing and then his state of self-absorption exploded. ‘Who the hell let the child into the crime scene?’
The detective felt like steel had been tipped in his spine as he pushed aside the assembled mass of milling bodies. He saw the child, a small girl of maybe five or six years old, in a bright red duffel coat. She was blonde, that pale-to-white colour like Fiona’s and Chloe’s had been, and was dancing around inside the SOCOs’ white tent like it was a kiddies’ playground.
‘Paulo, who let the bloody kid in?’
Valentine felt eyes burning into him; they seemed to think he was the one that had the problem. No one seemed in the least bit bothered about the little girl. It made him wonder if they had been struck blind and dumb; was he alone in sensing the deeply inappropriate nature of the situation? It was hard to imagine a more unsettling scene – and he had seen a dog mauling at the guts of a day-old corpse that was riddled with wounds.
‘Get her out of here! Get her away from that body!’
The child was laughing, smiling. She had been picking daisies and held a bunch of them in her hand. She was a sweet wee thing – a cutie, his wife would say – but she should have been away feeding the ducks or picking out a sweetie for herself; not here, not anywhere near here.
‘Hey, hey . . .’ He was being ignored. His indignation lit, his nostrils flared – he expected the reek of the tip’s mouldering refuse, but instead he smelled flowers, daisies. ‘What are you doing here?’
There were too many people, too many officers and uniform, too many SOCOs. They were all trespassing on his crime scene. He was the officer in charge, but his authority was being ignored. The detective lunged out, reached for the girl that no one else seemed to have even noticed. Valentine was caught by his arms and shoulders; he was held back.
‘Get off me . . .’ He started to lash out. ‘Get your bloody hands off me!’
The girl giggled. She watched the others holding Valentine back as he shouted out. He could still see her; she had bright-blue eyes that burned into him. Was she familiar to him? He didn’t think so, but she seemed to recognise him. It was all a game to her.
‘Get off me . . . Get the girl. She’s playing round the corpse.’
The little girl stood over the murder victim and for a moment Valentine caught her expression change. She looked unhappy now. He knew it was wrong; he didn’t want the girl to see the dead body, the blood. He wanted to pick her up and take her away, back to her parents, but he couldn’t move. His thoughts mashed; ideas of right and wrong collided with a surging, torrential anger as he was held back.
‘Get away!’ He lashed out with his arms. He just wanted to help the little girl. ‘Get away! Get away!’
He was flailing, his heart pounding hard against the inside of his ribcage.
‘Bob.’
Valentine heard his name called and the little girl slipped out of view. He saw her bunch of daisies resting on the corpse’s chest, left there like a memorial to the dead, like the child had completed a bizarre but completely innocent ritual only she understood.
‘Bob . . .’
He recognised the voice now. When he saw Clare’s face, the arms constricting him let go. He pushed forward with the release and then the picture changed.
‘Clare . . .’ He was at home, sitting upright in bed.
‘Jesus, you were screaming.’
‘What?’ He felt lost, even though he knew exactly where he was.
Clare sat up and turned on the bedside lamp. ‘It must have been a dream.’
‘No, it wasn’t a dream . . .’
She touched his back. ‘You’re absolutely soaking wet.’
Valentine turned away, draped his legs over the side of the bed and lowered his head into his hands. His hair was stuck to his brow.
‘I don’t know what the hell that was, but it wasn’t a dream . . .’
‘What was it, then? A nightmare?’
Valentine turned towards Clare. His mind was still full of the images of the little girl. He knew if he held his eyes tight shut he’d see her again, but he was too scared to do so.
‘It wasn’t that either. I was there. I was somewhere else.’
Clare made a sly smile and squinted at her husband. ‘Get back to sleep, Bob.’
‘I’m not kidding you, Clare. There was this girl . . .’
‘Oh, yes . . .’
‘No, a little girl. Like five or something. She had white hair, like the girls had at that age, and she was . . .’
Clare started to rub at her bare shoulders. ‘She was what?’
‘I – I don’t know . . . Just, she had flowers and was putting them on my murder victim.’
The mention of the case signalled a shift in Clare’s attentiveness. She turned away from Valentine and reached for the lamp. ‘Get some sleep, Bob.’
As the light went out, Valentine rose from the side of the bed and made his way towards the bathroom. The brightness of the main light hurt his eyes, but in a moment he steadied himself against the cool tiles of the wall and drew deep breaths. His heart was returning to a normal rhythm now. As he opened his eyes he saw himself in the bathroom mirror. His irises were lined in red; dark shadows sat in pockets beneath them. As he removed his sweat-soaked T-shirt, his eyes were drawn towards the thick ridge of scar tissue that sat in the centre of his chest. He never liked to touch the mark – it didn’t feel like a part of him – but he allowed his fingertips to dab at the edges of the fatty tissue that surrounded the scar.
‘Oh, Jesus . . .’
Valentine wondered what was happening to him. He felt like he had been given another chance at life, but he doubted whether he deserved it. Why would he be given another chance at life? What had he done to receive that great gift? He thought about Clare and how she had begged him to leave the force, to take a desk job – administration, pencil-pushing, it didn’t matter. She knew he was lucky to be alive and she didn’t want to take the chance on losing him again.
Valentine started to run the cold tap and, slowly, to douse the back of his neck with water. The first splash made him shiver, and a few beads escaped down the side of his chest and flanked the scar that kept grabbing his gaze. He didn’t want to look in the mirror, but this alien object that signified a new right to life demanded his attention.
He picked up the hand towel and dried himself down. As his breathing eased into a slow, steady rhythm, he reached for the light switch and clicked it to off, then he began to move back towards the bedroom and his wife. He knew he needed to attempt some type of explanation, to give Clare some reason as to why he had changed his mind, why he had gone back on everything he had told her he would do.
The bedroom was in blackness; only the orange fizz of the street lamps burned beyond the strips of blinds. He lowered himself down on the edge of the bed and placed a hand on Clare’s bare back. She murmured for a moment and then patted his side of the bed.
‘Clare, I need to talk to you . . .’
‘Tomorrow. I need to sleep.’
‘It’s important.’
‘Can’t it wait?’
Valentine got into the bed and drew up the duvet. ‘I’m not doing this for me.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Taking on this case . . . I can’t explain it.’
‘Well, good. We can talk tomorrow.’
Valentine reached over to turn on the bedside light; Clare grumbled and sat up.
‘Right you have my attention, can we get this over with?’
‘About earlier, when you saw the case files, I knew you wouldn’t be pleased.’
She tutted. ‘And you knew why.’
‘Clare, please, I’m trying to explain . . . I feel like I’ve changed, been through some kind of life crisis after . . .’
‘It was a crisis all right, you nearly died, Bob! Jesus Christ, you nearly left me a widow and . . .’ She looked away.
Valentine’s emotional-response signal flared. ‘And who’d have cleared your Visa bills then . . . Was that what you were going to say?’
He watched his wife raise a hand to her thinned lips. ‘That’s not what I was going to say at all.’
‘I’m sorry. That was a low blow.’
Clare looked towards the ceiling and shook her head. ‘I couldn’t tell you when I last bought a thing.’
Valentine sighed. ‘I don’t want to bring that up again . . .’ He ran his fingers through his wet hair and turned away from Clare. ‘I’m just not myself at the moment.’
‘You’re bloody right you’re not. I don’t understand you any more, I used to think I did. I look at you now and I . . .’
He interrupted. ‘You just don’t see where I’m coming from. I feel I have this new chance and that I should make a difference. I can’t properly explain it, Clare, I feel like a different man.’
Clare put her head in her hands. She held herself on the edge of the bed for a moment and then she turned to face her husband. ‘Well, you’re certainly that. You just look through me and the girls now. There was a time when you wouldn’t have put us second best to some vague notion or late-flush of ambition . . .’ She met his gaze for a second but couldn’t hold it. ‘Oh, just forget it. Forget everything.’ Clare reclined in the bed, turned over and switched off the light.
As the darkness of the room enveloped Valentine, his spirit shrivelled inside him. He thought about reaching out and touching his wife’s bare shoulder, saying sorry again and trying to talk. But he didn’t want to be rebuffed. He lay down on the bed and closed his eyes, but knew sleep was going to be hard to find in his current state of mind.