DI Bob Valentine spent the night in fitful dreams with familiar figures, some of whom he knew, while others were mere phantoms that had come to assail his sleep. The small girl with the white-blonde hair was there once again, alongside his own father and late mother. It made the detective feel uneasy to dream of the dead; they somehow came alive once more, became animated in dreams as they no longer did in waking reality. It unsettled him, made his chest constrict and put winding bales of barbed wire in his stomach.
As he made coffee, said goodbye to his family and drove to the station, Valentine tried to downplay the significance of the night before. By the King Street roundabout he had put the entire situation down to the stress of the case: his unconscious mind wrestling by night with the problems he couldn’t find solutions to by day.
Since dispatching Paulo with a suspension, Valentine knew he had unsettled the team: he would need to work twice as hard to get them to bond as a unit now. And with so few leads on the Urquhart killing and nothing to tie it to the murder of Knox, it would be difficult to find something to stoke their enthusiasm with. There was the added uncertainty of the chief super – a loose canon at the best of times – and how she would ultimately react to the team being a DS down. The ever-present threat of the whole investigation being turned over to Glasgow CID was a pressure Valentine could do without but, for the time being, was one he knew he would have to live with.
‘Morning, Jim,’ he said as he entered the front door of the station.
‘Oh, it’s yourself . . .’ The desk sergeant leaned over conspiratorially and beckoned Valentine with a nod. ‘Big Dino’s in already, I see.’
Valentine approached the counter and lowered his briefcase to the floor. ‘Starting early isn’t she?’
‘Aye, and that’s not the all of it . . .’ Jim looked back towards the staircase as if to set the scene for his next announcement. ‘She’s got some new blood up there with her now.’
‘New blood?’
‘Young one, twenties, never seen her before, but she’s polis . . . got it written all over her.’
Valentine felt the barbed wire he carried inside him turning again: it was a call for caffeine, or something stronger. He didn’t know who the young police officer was, but he had his suspicions already. ‘Did you catch an accent?’
Jim frowned, the creases in his brow making his skin look even more like old leather. ‘No, afraid not . . . What you thinking?’
If Valentine had learned one thing in his time at King Street station, it was to keep what you were thinking to yourself. ‘Who knows with Dino . . . Could be my replacement.’ He let the implication hang, then struck again: ‘Or yours, pal.’
On the stairs, Valentine felt Jim’s eyes on his back. He knew he’d set the cogs turning in Jim’s mind and that he’d be paying close attention to their every revolution until something like thought ignited. The detective knew if there was any hope of the new officer’s identity being revealed in a hurry then the desk sergeant would be the first to know; with any luck, Valentine thought, he would be the second.
In the incident room, he hung up his coat and carried his briefcase down towards the glassed-off office. He allowed himself a glance towards the whiteboard to discern any new information, but spotted little save a few additional jottings about the Urquhart post-mortem report in red marker pen. Before he had closed the door, the telephone on his desk was ringing.
‘Hello, Valentine.’
‘Morning, Bob.’ It was Chief Superintendent Marion Martin, her voice high and chipper – too cheery by far. It unsettled him.
‘Yes, Chief, what can I do for you?’
‘Anything to report since yesterday?’
An inverted smile crept onto his features. ‘I need to get an update from the squad before I can brief you; I had them on a number of specifics so I’d be hoping to be edging closer today . . .’
‘Closer to what, Bob . . . the door?’
It was a glib remark and he ignored it.
‘Anyway, I’d like to see you in my office when you have a moment.’
‘Oh, yes . . .’
‘Yes, Bob . . . In fact, right away.’ The line clicked off.
Valentine held his hand in mid-air for a moment, staring at the receiver. He couldn’t quite believe that he had reached his time of life and was still susceptible to the taunts of so-called superiors. The thought that there was anything, in any way, superior about Chief Superintendent Marion Martin brought a moment of levity to his thinking: the woman was deluded, she had ascended the ranks with such alacrity that daily nosebleeds were the norm at her altitude. The detective knew exactly what she was playing at too: she was frightened of being found out, of being found wanting because she was a mere interloper in the force. The consequence for Valentine, however, was that as the investigation’s profile ramped up, the chief super’s need for a speedy resolution intensified. She would spare no one in her quest for results because the results were the thin carapace she hid her true form beneath.
Valentine booted up his computer, waited for the Windows icon to appear and sat in his chair; its back creaked behind him as he twiddled frustratedly with the mouse in his right hand.
‘Right away . . .’ He repeated the words, but couldn’t quite take in that she had said them. She had taunted him like a new recruit who needed to be shown the lie of the land. He reached for the telephone receiver and pressed the speed-dial for the press office – the line was answered on the second ring.
‘Hello, media relations.’ It was Coreen’s assistant. Valentine struggled to remember her name but then it came back to him.
‘Debbie, I was after your boss . . . Is she about?’
‘Who’s speaking?’ She sounded aloof, and there were officers who would have been offended – served her her arse in parsley for questioning – but Valentine guessed it was Coreen’s training coming to the fore: the girl had obviously made the mistake of handing over stray calls once, but she wouldn’t do it again.
‘It’s Bob Valentine from CID . . . detective inspector.’
A rummaging on the other end of the line was greeted with a sharp intake of breath, then a gap stretched out that had Valentine tapping his fingertips on a pile of blue folders.
‘Bob . . .’ It was Coreen.
‘Good morning.’
‘And what can I do you for?’
Valentine leaned forward and rested his elbows on the desk. ‘Have you heard anything about our man, Sinclair?’
Coreen cleared her throat. ‘I thought that’s what you might be interested in . . . Yes, suspended on full pay, I hear.’
A smile crept up the side of Valentine’s face. ‘Nice one.’
‘I wouldn’t put out the bunting quite yet.’
‘Oh, no?’
‘Definitely not . . . By all accounts he went ballistic.’
‘So what? Paulo’s on the record with the finger pointed squarely at Sinclair.’
Coreen sniggered. It was a fake laugh, more for effect than anything. ‘If I know Cameron Sinclair, he’ll have a bloody great hard-on for all of us now, Bob . . . Don’t expect we’ve heard the last of him.’
‘Just you let me know the second he comes anywhere near you with that hard-on, love . . . You hear me?’
As Valentine lowered the phone, the computer screen lit up and little icons formed themselves into neat rows on his desktop. He clicked on Internet Explorer. When the search engine appeared, Valentine dragged the drop-down menu to select his daughter’s Facebook account and waited for the page to appear. The network was slow, but he conceded that might have something to do with the number of pictures on Chloe’s timeline. His daughter was sixteen and not quite an adult, but seemed to be living a kind of sophisticated social life that he couldn’t comprehend. He justified the intrusion into her life as a necessary evil in today’s world. Valentine no more wanted to snoop on his daughter than anyone else, but it was a means to an end: the conclusion of a nagging feeling that something wasn’t altogether right with her.
He checked her posts, all innocuous enough: pictures of puppies with pop-philosophising captions, links to music videos, adumbrations on the week’s highlights to come. Only one remark struck him as worthy of closer scrutiny: ‘Daddy’s becoming a popular man . . .’ A hyperlink followed. Valentine clicked on it and was brought to the website of the Glasgow-Sun. As he scrolled down he quickly identified Cameron Sinclair’s byline on the article his own name featured in.
‘What the hell is this?’ He couldn’t understand why anyone would post the link on his daughter’s timeline, but conceded much teenage behaviour was inscrutable to him. Then a thought struck him. He returned to his daughter’s stream and checked for the post’s author. Hot needles pressed on his eyeballs as he took in the almost unidentifiable thumbnail picture of a blurred male. As he read the same name he’d seen on the byline only a few seconds ago, his hand constricted tightly round the mouse.
‘You’ve crossed a line, Sinclair.’
The DI closed down the webpage and rose from the chair. He surmised that the Facebook post was some kind of mocking taunt: parents were good value on the embarrassment scale for youngsters, and seeing Dad on television or in the paper was something like incitement; it invited attention from other teenagers. It was a move meant to embarrass his daughter and create some tension at home for him. But Sinclair was sailing close to the wind assuming he wouldn’t check his daughter’s web usage. Either that or he was a more reckless idiot than he had previously given him credit for.
As Valentine opened the door and made his way to the chief super’s office, he hoped he hadn’t misjudged Cameron Sinclair. If he was as rash as his latest action indicated then he would need even closer scrutiny than he had afforded him so far. If it was simply an escalation, an act of desperation, then this was, he conceded, perhaps even more concerning. The thought that his daughter was now seen as a legitimate pawn by Sinclair was something else altogether. If the hack’s intention was to blunt his edge, he was in for a shock: it would have the opposite effect.
He knocked on the door, twice, and took firm hold of the handle as he stepped into the chief super’s office. Dino was standing by the window with a coffee cup in hand; in her other hand was the elbow of a young woman who she seemed to be keen to impress. She threw back her hair and laughed as if the scene merited a kind of cocktail-party bonhomie.
Valentine took two steps and coughed into his fist. ‘Good morning.’
‘Ah, Bob . . . Thought you’d lost your way.’ The thought was there to confirm that he may indeed have lost his way, but not in the manner she meant. He let the rejoinder lie.
‘You wanted to see me?’ He found his gaze shifting towards the young woman, who turned to face him and nodded. It was a polite nod, almost conspiratorial in its suggestion that she had the chief super’s ersatz demeanour in hand.
‘Oh yes indeed, Bob, I want to see you.’ CS Martin motioned the young woman to the front of her desk and walked round the other side herself. ‘I’d like to introduce you to Sylvia McCormack if I may . . .’
Valentine put out his hand. The woman reached out and shook it enthusiastically, a wide smile filling her face. ‘Hello, sir.’
Dino stepped between them and made her way towards the coffee pot for a refill. As she poured, she spoke loudly, her words bouncing off the wall. ‘Sylvia is one of Glasgow’s finest young detective sergeants . . .’ She continued on, but by the time Valentine had heard the words ‘Glasgow’ and ‘detective sergeant’ he knew exactly what was afoot.
He cut in. ‘Am I to assume Sylvia has been seconded to Ayr?’
The chief super turned round, held up her coffee cup and dipped her head towards it. ‘You assume correctly, detective.’
Valentine’s pulse jolted; his heart rate increased. His jaws clenched and the familiar taste of a bitter pill being swallowed passed down his throat. Martin had gone behind his back; she hadn’t consulted him but instead had presented the solution to Paulo’s absence as a fait accompli. He knew it was her right to do so, but he also knew better people would have played it straight. He ran a finger down the crease of his shirtsleeve as he tried to find his response. DS Martin walked before him and the light from the window silhouetted her frame on the grey wall.
‘The investigation is at a crucial stage. I’m not quite sure how an officer from another force will improve the dynamic,’ said Valentine.
The young woman stepped forward. ‘I’ve been brought up to speed.’ She snatched a blue folder from the desk and opened it up. ‘I’ve sketched out a profile on the kind of individual that might . . .’
Valentine cut in. ‘That might impale a man through his arse with a piece of 4x2?’ He had tried to ruffle her, but was unsuccessful.
‘I have profiling experience, and I’ve worked a number of similar cases in the Central Belt.’
‘Similar?’ His intonation suggested the idea was ludicrous, that it resembled reality in much the same way as a model aeroplane aspired to manned flight.
‘By that I mean serial mutilation.’ The young woman lowered her head and stepped back. It was a retreat that signalled she thought Valentine’s truculence was insurmountable.
The chief super pitched in with an act of consoling deference to the DI. ‘Bob, I think Sylvia is trying to say that her experience might be useful to the team. A fresh pair of eyes and an outside perspective may pay dividends.’
‘This is not a serial killer we’re dealing with here: there’s no trophy taking, there’s no mutilation, sexual interference or anything else to suggest we’re dealing with an abnormal psychology. This is calculated and precise, yes, but it’s not a pattern killer, and I’ll stake my reputation on that.’
Valentine sensed the air being sucked out of the room. His voice seemed to have risen higher than he’d intended; he was playing to the gallery and when he stopped speaking the audience fell into a stunned silence.
CS Martin fanned the lapel of her jacket in an animated manner. She turned to DS McCormack and made a lullaby of her voice. ‘Perhaps you’d like to go and acquaint yourself with the incident room, Sylvia.’
The young woman’s stone-grey eyes flashed. ‘Yes, of course.’ She was bright, had caught the hint immediately, and gripping the folder she eased herself towards the door with a smile for Valentine on the way out.
The DI felt a pang of guilt: she was an unwilling pawn in Martin’s machinations and he’d been harsh on her, but life was harsh, and life on the force as harsh as it got.
‘What the hell are you playing at, Bob?’ Her sweet tone evaporated as quickly as a morning mist.
‘I’m not sure I know what you mean.’
‘Don’t play wide with me, pal, I’ll give you your head in your hands to play with if you start that patter in here.’ She pointed to the floor as if it indicated a marker of her territory.
Valentine brought his hand up to tap a finger on his cheekbone and affected a look of stupefaction. ‘If you’re referring to the fact that you’ve parachuted a new DS into my team with no prior notice then I’ll put my hand up to not being overly chuffed about it.’
‘I gave you plenty of notice: how many times did I tell you, now let me see?’ She walked over to her desk and opened her diary. She was hiding behind the rulebook, a favourite tactic of all bureaucrats.
Valentine turned where he stood and marched towards the desk. He leaned forward and directed his rant towards CS Martin. ‘I’m referring to specific discussions, not veiled threats to pull the rug out from under me.’
The chief super’s eyes narrowed, her mouth opened and closed like she was exercising her jaws and then her lips formed themselves into a thin pout that precipitated a gale-force blast to come.
Two loud reports on the door shattered the momentary silence.
The officers turned to hear the hinges creaking and saw Jim from the front desk bounding in like a tired marathon runner. ‘I think you should see this . . .’ He held out a copy of the Glasgow-Sun.