Valentine wondered what it was that had kept him in the job all these years. It wasn’t his progression through the ranks or the feeling of moving onward with life in other ways. The job afforded you so little status that it was hardly worth counting; to most, their rating of a police officer was somewhere shy of used-car salesman. The job certainly didn’t open any doors to rarefied echelons, or if it did, it was for all the wrong reasons.
There had been a moment at the outset of his career when he thought that he was doing some good. Rounding up rowdies at Somerset Park after the Killie games, or scooping up the Saturday night dafties before they went scripto, felt like a job worth doing. It was physical too, and he remembered a time when he was fit enough and fond enough of his own chances to get a buzz from it. He smiled inwardly – a lot of the boys had joined up because they knew, as he did then, that it was very hard to lose a fight in uniform. But somewhere along the line he’d realised that the task was a thankless one: he was merely working to keep the prison service supplied. He didn’t want to be a social worker, picking up the detritus left by political failings: ‘an instrument of the state’ was the term his father had used to galling effect. It always felt like doing someone else’s dirty work: someone better paid, higher up the corridors of power, someone who didn’t want to get their own hands dirty.
Valentine knew he remained a police officer for two reasons: because it kept his attention after all these years, and because he had passed the point where there was any other option on offer. He was too old and too set in his ways to switch lanes now – and where would they lead? A private security firm? Nightwatchman? At his age the choices were thin, so he resigned himself to the fact that he still took an interest in the job and its challenges, but more so in the complexities of human foibles. He conceded that, along with the criminal flotsam and jetsam, some complex situations washed up. At their margins of endurance, when pushed, people acted to their true type, and this fascinated Valentine. It confirmed the blackest thoughts he harboured about the human race: we were all, each and every one of us, capable of heinous criminal acts. All that we needed was circumstance. Unravelling the motives, the causes and the triggers that led to crime showed the DI the real people he shared the planet with, and he could think of no other job that would afford him that insight.
Valentine stood in front of the whiteboard in the incident room and pressed the flat of his hand on the blank area to the left of the photograph of James Urquhart. He drummed his fingers momentarily and then he removed the red marker pen from the shelf and circled the picture. When he was finished, he drew a thick horizontal line leading from the circled area and ended the task with a question mark. As he stood staring, he contemplated what was likely to cover the question mark and approached the board again, circling the area in heavy red ink. He was placing the cap back on the marker pen when the telephone to his rear started to ring.
‘Yes, Valentine . . .’
It was Jim Prentice on the desk. ‘That’s the call from the track . . . It’s a body. White male, same MO as the tip.’
Valentine felt a chill, like a shadow had crossed him. ‘You sure?’
‘Certain . . .’
The DI was still digesting the information when the doors to the incident room were flung open and the chief super walked in. Valentine lowered the telephone receiver and turned to face Martin.
‘I take it that’s the bongo drums?’ she said.
Valentine blinked; it seemed to prompt him back to life. ‘We have another one, then.’
Martin positioned herself on the rim of the desk and folded her arms across her chest. She bunched her lips and then raked fingers through her hair. For a moment she seemed to be thinking, tapping the leg of the desk with the heel of her shoe; Valentine watched her and tried to detect a germ of optimism in her stance, but found none.
‘The press are going to have a field day,’ she said.
‘Well, that was already on the cards . . . Look, I should get out there now.’
The doors to the incident room opened once more as Valentine spoke; DC McAlister stood in the doorway and stared at the chief super – he seemed to intuit something. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Ally, don’t take your jacket off . . . We’ve got another body out at the track.’
‘What?’
The chief super raised herself from the desk. ‘SOCOs are on their way. I’d suggest you get out there now and start to make yourself useful.’
McAlister nodded. ‘Yes, boss.’
As he turned back towards the door, Valentine called out. ‘Can you give Paulo and Phil a holler?’
‘Aye, sure . . . You want them out there?’
The DI scratched behind his ear and exhaled loudly; it was an expression that indicated thoughts were fighting for prominence inside his head. ‘Erm, no . . . Just Phil. Keep Paulo back here, I want someone looking after the phones.’
As McAlister left the room, Valentine felt the chief super’s stare burning him. ‘Are you OK, Bob?’
‘What do you mean?’ He dropped his hand. ‘No need to worry about me.’
‘We both know I’ve every need . . .’ She tapped her tongue off her two front teeth. ‘Don’t think just because the workload has doubled you can skip out of the therapy sessions. I need you on the ball, Bob, more than ever now.’
Valentine painted a smile on his face. ‘Like I say, you’ve no reason to worry about me.’
The chief super turned away, flagging the detective off with the back of her hand as she went. He knew she was merely pressing the point to assert her authority – to undermine him – and the thought struck like a winding. He watched her leave, listened to the doors’ batting motion and snatched his sports coat from the back of the chair.
On the road out to the racetrack, Valentine felt the morning sun press itself on the window of the car. He was stiff and tense behind the wheel, gripping the gearstick in his left hand like it was a cudgel. Outside, the street was weary, a row of houses that had lost all charm since the giant supermarket had relocated just up the road. The detective rowed the gears back and forth as he passed through the traffic lights. He could see the racetrack on the right, but turned away to check the clock on the dash. He tried to keep his mind open, but assumptions about a double murder on his patch pressed themselves again and again like mosquito bites on his mind.
Valentine parked the Vectra outside the track and made his way towards the collection of uniforms. He was ahead of the SOCOs, but the site had already been cordoned off by the first on the scene. He roved the surrounding area with his eyes and caught sight of DC McAlister walking towards him. Clouds crossed the sky above and dim sunrays fell like ticker tape on the stand before slipping towards the track lanes.
‘It’s the double of the last one, sir,’ said McAlister.
Valentine gave the DC a look, then walked past him and made for the crime scene. When he got behind the cordon, his shoulders tensed beneath his coat. He took a few steps closer and then walked around the victim. The man was heavier than James Urquhart, a bigger individual all round; he had a sports top pushed up around his neck, exposing a prominent stomach. The skin was pale, verging on white, and streaked with dark-red blood. Below his abdomen, a wooden stake poked skywards, streaked in blood that covered the genitals and the ground beneath.
Valentine walked towards the uniforms. ‘What’s the word from the track staff?’
‘No idea who he is, sir . . . Groundsman found him just as you see him now.’ The uniform waved a hand over the scene.
The detective beckoned McAlister towards him and stepped away from the uniforms. As he took a few steps further, he hooked his hands below the tails of his sports coat and gripped the edges of the pockets with his thumbs. ‘What do you think?’
The DC turned towards the victim. ‘He’s bigger than Urquhart, but I think it could still be one man that moved him.’
Valentine nodded. ‘There’s no fence, no wall . . . no obstacles from here to the car park, so it’s possible.’
‘He doesn’t look like a banker.’
‘The tattoos and the fingers . . .’
McAlister thinned his eyes and tilted his head. ‘Fingers?’
‘Yellowed with nicotine: I’d say he was a rollie smoker.’
‘I don’t see the number one crop being a good look in the board room either.’
Valentine unhooked his thumbs and folded his arms. ‘There’s got to be some connection, though, someone has executed the pair of them in an identical fashion.’
‘We might know better when the SOCOs get here . . . Certainly if we get an ID we can explore links.’
Valentine scratched beneath his chin. He started to shake his head as he spoke. ‘Why, though? Why put them up on a spike like this?’
‘It’s obvious . . . to give a message.’
‘But why draw so much attention to yourself? If you want to kill someone, you hide the body, give yourself a chance of getting away with it . . . This is insanity.’
‘You’re not kidding . . . We’re obviously dealing with a psycho.’
‘Or somebody who wants to get caught.’
‘Or somebody who thinks he’s too smart to get caught.’
The DI spotted the first of the SOCOs’ vans to arrive; the fiscal and the pathologist would be next. ‘Ally, I want you to stay put. Anything crops up, get on the phone.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I want the time of death and how long he’s been out in the cold as soon as you get it.’ Valentine removed his car keys from his pocket and started to rattle them in his hand. ‘I want swabs and prints, and if we have him on file, I want to know right away.’
‘Sir.’