Valentine had observed Clare for long enough to know what was at the root of her personal problems. Her unhappiness – and it was an all-consuming soul weariness – was caused by her own shallow vapidity. She had surrendered early to the ideals of consumerism and progressed to the point where she measured her daily victories in goods purchased. A takeaway coffee might yield a five-minute high, but a dress or a new pair of shoes could deliver a week’s worth of inner gratification. However, no matter what she bought or how the thrill was pipetted out over a lengthier period of time, the impact on her long-term self-esteem was always negligible, if not outright injurious.
Valentine had watched over the years as his wife regaled herself with glossy magazines that portrayed a lifestyle truly alien to her – an alternative reality where the beautiful people frolicked under holiday-brochure blue skies. The inference to be taken was always that an Amex with unlimited credit would deliver you from the woes of reality. It was a myth. The world Clare aspired to didn’t exist outside of an ad man’s imagination – it was a creation aimed at those who were wracked by the keenly felt emptiness of their own lives. The real genius was to slot products around the images of supposed happiness: conferring an inanimate object with transformative powers was, on the face of it, absurd, but people like Clare jumped for the brass ring every time.
Valentine knew his wife had always obsessed about the family home. At first it was interior furnishings and then, when the inside could not be altered any more, the exterior. The need to extend the family home had become a recurring theme for Clare – and one that had come to exhaust Valentine. If they could not afford to extend the home further, it didn’t seem to matter to her. That they had enough space for their needs was of little relevance to Clare either. It seemed the mere act of planning to extend the home was in some way a stepping stone towards the conclusion of the aspiration. Valentine knew if the dream itself was ever realised, it wouldn’t be enough – it was a flame that couldn’t be extinguished. A bigger project or a newer home would soon become his wife’s preoccupation.
It disturbed Valentine that his wife’s inner life had become so unhealthy, so prosaic. There was no spiritual side to Clare, no intellectual depth. She possessed no desire, it seemed, to expand her life’s reach beyond accumulating material possessions. She was like a woman who had been shelled out and her innards supplanted with a robotic desire to consume. It was a desire that was incapable of ever being quenched, because there was always a new range of clothes to buy or a newer catalogue to leaf through. No matter how many armfuls of purchases she returned with, they didn’t fill the emptiness, meet the need, which it seemed to Valentine grew deeper and deeper by the day. When she became stressed, like she was now, the obsession intensified. It was as if problems with the girls, or his job, became submerged under mounds of packing foam, crumpled paper, carrier bags, clipped labels and the mountainous remnants of Clare’s shopping sprees.
As Valentine sat down to dinner, he watched Clare fussing about the kitchen. The dress she wore was new, but the time when he would pass comment on a new item of clothing worn by his wife had passed; now any remark would be met by defensiveness or recriminations. He stored the fact of the dress away, though; if Clare was seeking solace in shopping then it was good to be forearmed with the knowledge.
She placed his food down in front of him and pulled out her chair.
‘What’s this?’ said Valentine.
‘It’s dinner,’ said Clare. She sat down beside him and began to pick at the food on her plate.
‘Salad, I recognise . . . This looks like chicken or pork, but it’s neither.’
Clare’s jaws went to work on a mouthful, and when she was finished she spoke. ‘It’s tofu.’
‘And what the hell’s that when it’s at home?’
‘It’s good for you is what it is . . . Eat it.’
Valentine stared at the contents of his plate and turned over a few pieces of tofu. He raised some on his fork and began to chew. He didn’t like the taste. ‘This is pretending to be something . . . but it’s not.’
Clare shifted her gaze towards the wall and then turned on her husband. ‘No, it’s not. Now eat it.’
Valentine took a few more desultory mouthfuls and then began to roll the fork around his plate. ‘I saw a pig’s head in the butcher’s once.’
‘Really?’
‘It was plastic.’
Clare sighed. ‘That’s nice.’
‘Is that what we’ve got here?’
His wife dropped her cutlery on the plate; the clatter was ear-splitting. She lowered her head onto her chest and then pushed out her chair and left the room.
‘Clare . . . Clare . . .’ Valentine called to her. ‘I’m only having a joke with you. I’ll eat it . . .’
She turned on her heels in the kitchen and stomped back into the dining room. ‘I bought it because it is good for you, lower fat, healthier . . . better for your heart. Perhaps I shouldn’t have bloody well bothered.’ She left the room again and closed the door behind her.
Valentine dropped his own knife and fork and stared out into the garden. He could see his neighbour’s sprinkler spraying a wide arc of lawn. The sun was low and flat in the sky. For a moment the scene felt calm and familiar, and then the realisation of recent events hit him. Valentine was suffused with a strange kind of sadness. It was the type of feeling he’d had when watching the girls grow up: a pride tinged with loss, the realisation that each day they were getting further away from him. There would be no more first birthdays, no more first steps; so many good times had passed and the future was so filled with uncertainty that it was hard to focus on the good times that were still to come. He knew Clare was not dealing well with his return to active policing; she was handling the situation in her usual way, and he knew what that might mean. Valentine had a well of guilt swelling in him because he felt sure he couldn’t give Clare his full attention and still devote himself to the case. But what option did he have? A man had been killed, in brutal fashion, and now the press were circling – he would need to find answers.
The detective removed his mobile phone from his trouser pocket and scrolled the contacts for DS Rossi’s number. The phone was answered after only a few seconds.
‘Hello, sir.’
‘Paulo, I’ve been waiting for the update on what happened with Mrs Urquhart.’
‘Oh, yes, sorry boss . . .’
Valentine cut in. ‘Well?’
‘I was having my tea . . .’
‘Well, you can get back to your bloody spaghetti in a minute, Paulo. Tell me the details, eh.’
The sound of shuffling and the creaking of a door came down the line. ‘It’s a positive ID, sir. The wife, er, Mrs Urquhart, picked him out at the morgue no trouble.’
‘She did . . . and what was the response like?’
Rossi cleared his throat before speaking. ‘She seemed a bit, erm, stony-faced, I suppose you would say.’
‘Not emotional?’
‘Well, yes and no: there was some dabbing at the eyes with a hankie, if that’s what you mean, but there was no big outburst or the like.’
Valentine tried to spool the image in his mind: it seemed to fit with what he had come to expect of Mrs Urquhart. She was too high up the social ladder to put on any outward display of emotion in public. They were a reserved lot, the upper classes. The act of keening over the dead was something reserved for the lower caste.
‘I wasn’t expecting suttee, Paulo.’
‘What?’
‘Never mind . . . And the son, Adrian, how did he appear?’
Rossi’s regular tone returned. ‘He wasn’t there, sir . . . It was the neighbour . . .’ The pause in his speech was filled with the sound of pages turning in a notebook. ‘Ronnie Bell’s his name.’
‘I know who he is, Paulo, we’ve had the pleasure . . . What I want to know is what he was doing running Mrs Urquhart up to the morgue when her own son was on hand and there’s no shortage of luxury motors sitting in the driveway.’
‘Erm, well . . .’
‘It didn’t strike you as just a wee bit odd?’
‘Now you mention it, sir, I suppose the boy would have been the likely one to go and hold his mother’s hand, but maybe he was too upset or something.’
‘Aye, maybe . . . or maybe not. We don’t know, Paulo, and that’s the problem here. This is a murder investigation and we don’t know anything.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Rossi’s voice registered the fact that he had absorbed some of the DI’s disapproval.
‘Right, I want you to start a file on this Ronnie Bell character, and in that file I want to see everything, including his preference for Ys or budgie-smugglers, and it better all be there the first time I pick the file up, Paulo. Am I making myself clear?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good. And in future, Paulo, the second anything comes in you pick up the phone, do you hear me? I don’t care if you’ve got a mouthful of spag bol made by the wee granny off the Dolmio ads herself, you let me know what you know right away.’
‘Yes, sir . . . I’m sorry about that.’
Valentine hung up. He could feel the throbbing of his vocal chords from when his rant had reached a rasp.
He scrolled down his contacts of his phone again and found DC McAlister. The DI’s mind was still sparking as McAlister answered.
‘Yes, boss. . .’
‘Ally, we have our ID.’
‘She picked him, then?’
‘Aye, it’s officially James Urquhart. I don’t see any point in keeping it from the press when this Sinclair hack has so much information.’
‘What was his explanation?’
‘He said he got an anonymous tip-off from someone claiming to be an ex-employee of Urquhart . . . Plausible, I suppose.’
McAlister made a dismissive huff. ‘I don’t know . . . anonymous. Sounds like one from the hack’s rulebook to me.’
Valentine felt the skin tightening on the back of his neck. ‘We’ll see. I don’t think there’s any point going in too hard on Sinclair at this stage. It might just be one lucky bit of information that fell into his lap. If he starts sprouting them on a regular basis we might need to look a bit more closely at him . . . and those around him.’
‘Understood, sir.’ McAlister paused, seemed to hold his breath for a moment or two, and then spoke. ‘You don’t suspect anyone on the squad, do you, sir?’
Valentine’s response to the same question by the chief super had been swift and decisive, but after talking to Sinclair and seeing the whites of his eyes he wasn’t so sure of himself.
‘I suspect everyone, Ally. Always do. One thing’s for sure and certain, though: if we have a mole on the team feeding biccies to Sinclair, then I’ll be feeding them into a mincer.’
McAlister’s voice rose. ‘For what it’s worth, sir, I’d be stunned if anyone was that stupid.’
‘Ally there’s no shortage of idiots in this world.’ He cut the conversation off at the knees. The point had been made and he could rely on Ally to circulate the salient facts. ‘Anyway, get in touch with Coreen in the morning and tell her to give the victim’s name to the press pack at close of play tomorrow – not before. I want a clear day for us to get our ducks in a row before we have to start answering press queries again. But at the very least we’ll be raining on Sinclair’s parade.’
McAlister bit. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I asked him not to release the name in tomorrow’s paper for fear of prejudicing the investigation.’
‘And he agreed?’
‘Ally, if he’s smart he’ll play fair by us.’
‘I don’t know, boss: like you say, there’s a lot of idiots in the world.’