On his return to King Street station, Detective Inspector Bob Valentine collected a stack of notes from the front desk of the incident room and retreated to the glass-partitioned end to be alone with his thoughts. He was haunted by the look on Mrs Urquhart’s face as she had taken in the growing realisation that her husband was not coming home. No matter how many times Valentine saw the look – and it was the familiar look of death visiting – he could not adjust himself to it. He remembered what it had been like to see his mother on her deathbed. She was still, and the almost imperceptible taking of breath signalled a closer proximity to death than he had ever encountered. All previous introductions had been impersonal – random incidents didn’t count, he soon realised – not like this. When he saw his mother, held to life by a pin, the sudden realisation of mortality, of finite time, entered his own life. It wasn’t that Valentine hadn’t always known about death – not at all – he had, and that made his altogether new consciousness the more palpable. Seeing his mother encircled by death made him realise he didn’t know a thing about the end of life. All his assumptions were trite, unthinking, unfelt. He could no more express in words the true gravity of death than he could put the ebbing life back into his mother.
To see someone he loved dying, to know they were going to leave him for ever, had marked death as permanent in his own existence for the first time. Valentine sensed the cold shift immediately. He never wanted death to be a personal matter again, because it was all too personal as it was. He knew the only way to continue living was to ignore all notion of a personal death: it could happen any minute of any day, be all around you in every form of hurt and misery, but the trick was to ignore it, to sublimate it. For the mass of people this was possible almost without thought, but to Valentine – who was surrounded by death – it took conscious effort. He knew he had to obliterate death, before it obliterated him.
The detective turned over the cover of the blue folder that he had positioned in the middle of his desk and stared at the first page. The post-mortem report was not a voluminous document; it always surprised him how little information the ending of a life seemed to generate. He ignored the contents section and scanned quickly over the succeeding pages, which detailed the procedures of the pathologist. For a moment he had a vision of the morgue in Glasgow’s Saltmarket area – he saw the murder squad stationed around the corpse of James Urquhart, their looks of dour solemnity and the perplexed impatience with the type of jargon that was used to determine the cause of death.
Valentine turned the pages and scanned to the section where conclusions, of a sort, were made. He had tried to prejudge the pathologist’s outcome; in his gut he felt that the victim had been killed a certain way – the scene of the crime suggested much of his assumption – but Valentine knew better than to jump to conclusions.
The first term to attract his attention was ‘traumatic brain injury’. There had been a depressed skull fracture, the result of blunt force. More detail was given: acute subdural haematoma, cerebral contusions, dramatically increased intracranial pressure. They were all terms familiar to the DI, terms he classed as necessary evils, but they all mounted up to the same thing in his book: James Urquhart had been hit on the head by someone who wanted him dead.
Valentine was hunched at his desk, poring over the pathology report when the hinges on the door called out and DS Rossi and DS Donnelly walked in.
‘Sir . . .’ Donnelly was the first to acknowledge the officer in charge.
‘Come in, lads.’ He turned over the final page of the report and closed the blue folder. ‘Just going over the post-mortem.’
Rossi nodded. ‘Hammer or a crowbar . . . something like that.’
‘Well, it was pretty clear it wasn’t done out at the tip. There wasn’t enough blood . . . or anyone picking up on a struggle on the boundary street.’
‘He wasn’t alive when he was squeezed through that fence, that’s for sure,’ said Donnelly.
Valentine placed his fingers on the rim of the desk and slowly pushed the wheels of his chair back. He was talking as he rose and walked over to the window. ‘There’s no evidence of a struggle, not so much as a fingernail scraping . . .’
‘Not one, no battle scars at all, sir.’ Rossi kept his eyes on the DI. ‘So he’s been whacked and then moved . . . But why to the tip?’
Donnelly folded his arms, then quickly removed one to illustrate his speech with wild, looping gestures. ‘That’s a message for somebody right there, Rossi. The tip’s where the rubbish goes; he’s been dumped there because someone wants the world to know exactly what they thought of James Urquhart.’
Valentine’s thoughts were building to a fog inside his head. He had been content to sift through the facts in the report, to analyse and to draw his own conclusions. He felt now like he was being sidetracked by the officers – it was as if he had set out for a leisurely stroll and the sudden incursion into his office had resulted in a cross-country run.
‘OK, OK . . . Let’s keep the party clean. We don’t know the first thing about this victim yet, we can’t be jumping to the conclusion that the place we found him is a marker to his murderer’s state of mind.’
Donnelly flared up. ‘But it’s an option, boss.’
Valentine nodded, allowed a slight indicator of doubt to play on his face, and then delivered a puncture to the DS’s ego. ‘It’s one option, I’ll give you that: our killer might indeed have thought his victim to be trash. But, he might have thought the exact opposite. We don’t know what the hell he was thinking. Keep to what we can confirm, Donnelly. The options are endless at this stage . . . our killer might have thought the worst about Urquhart, or the best, or any one of a million other perceptions you could list. Just because you can put options on a list, it doesn’t validate a single bloody one of them.’
Donnelly rubbed at the stubble on his chin and clamped his jaw tight. He didn’t seem to have any more to add to the debate at present. He looked deflated, like a boy who had kicked a football further than he had ever done before and had expected to be rewarded for his skill – despite having broken a window in the process.
Valentine needed to rally his troops. ‘You’re right about one thing though, Phil . . .’ Donnelly’s head lifted as he eyed the DI. ‘We need to keep our options open. At this stage, all ideas are worth investigating.’
The remark seemed to be enough balm to cover Donnelly’s pride. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Right, I think it’s time we put our heads together,’ said Valentine. ‘Paulo . . . Get Ally and the team together round the board. I want to talk to them in ten minutes.’
DS Rossi pinched his cheeks as if he was about to exhale lavishly. ‘I think Ally’s upstairs at the press office, there was something said about a statement.’ He shrugged his shoulders and levelled a palm at Donnelly.
‘Search me,’ said DS Donnelly. ‘That boy’s a law unto himself.’
Valentine made a circular motion with his index finger at the side of his ear. ‘If he thinks he’s going to be standing in front of a camera this afternoon, he’s dreaming . . . You can tell him from me if he’s any ambitions on that front then he better be preparing to streak down King Street.’
DS Rossi and DS Donnelly took their cue to laugh up their colleague and exited the DI’s office.
When he was alone again, Valentine returned to the blue folder and opened up the front cover. There was an ancillary section that detailed a few more findings from the post-mortem examination. The detective always felt like a voyeur reading these medical records of the deceased, but they had the advantage of embaying a level of familiarity he found useful in bringing him closer to understanding – if not bonding with – the deceased.
James Urquhart had been suffering from cardiomyopathy, according to the report. His arteries were blocked and there was evidence on his heart of previous cardiac arrest. On reading about the victim’s diseased heart, Valentine felt a cold shadow pass through him. He had read so many doctors’ and surgeons’ reports about his own heart that it was almost impossible not to feel a deep, visceral identification with the case notes. Was it sympathy, he wondered, and if it was, then for whom: Urquhart or himself?
He closed the folder and leaned back from his desk. Since the stabbing, the DI had been forced to alter many aspects of his life. His morning ritual now entailed taking a multitude of prescription medicines – tablets in various shapes, sizes and colours – to keep him alive. That itself wasn’t the issue, he could cope with that, it was the way his life had been restructured that bothered him. Each pill taken was a fresh reminder that he was a different man from the one he had been before the stabbing. He felt different inside and he knew that on the outside it showed too. Clare had said it only the night before and it riled him again now. Even the chief super had remarked – as early as this morning – that there couldn’t have been much left of him after the surgery. Perhaps more than any statement, or observation, that remark had wounded the most. But why? Was it because he knew it was true or because he resented giving Dino credit for having any insight, especially insight into himself?
Valentine drew back into the moment, removed himself from the claustrophobia of thought, and immediately turned his gaze on the two fingers he was rubbing against the shirt pocket on his chest. Was he checking his heartbeat? Trying to massage sympathy into the damaged muscle? As soon as he became cognizant of his actions the detective jerked his hand away and rose from the desk.
‘Christ above,’ he muttered, wiping at the edges of his mouth. He knew he’d come dangerously close to losing focus and that worried him, perhaps more than anything else.
He looked out towards the incident room: the team were gathering.