As Valentine waited for DS McCormack to retrieve the paperwork she wanted to show him, he stood in the glassed-off office at the end of the incident room and stared out the window. The youths he had spotted earlier were still in the vicinity, still behaving like little more than unruly apes. He watched them, worked up over who knows what, smacking walls and doors. They attacked with fist, foot or forehead any number of inanimate objects in their path. Injury seemed an irrelevance. When a car’s horn sounded in their direction, one took a swing at a moving windscreen. Another let fly at a lamppost. Valentine had seen it all before, seen them swinging bottles like clubs. Had any of them progressed from troglodytes? They ranted, shouted, screamed, poured recriminations in every direction, and why? To draw attention to themselves? To assert their authority within the pack? To test their virility? The answer didn’t matter, he no longer needed to divine a reason: he had reached the conclusion that youths off the estates were feral. The detective had seen footage on television of Indian apes terrorising city dwellers and he had made the connection. He knew what it was like to face off gangs acting out their primal instincts, terrorising people who lived quietly in their homes, he’d even been on the receiving end of blows and blades, and he had little desire to repeat either. He had never felt the need to act in such a way, never felt the want to strike out, to attack the weak in order to assert a sense of superiority. As he watched them, the actions of the youths disturbed Valentine. Their behaviour was bestial, and it both repulsed and unsettled the detective to think that he shared a world with them. He didn’t want to think of himself as being part of the same species as those swaggering apes he had cause to lock away in cells for their own good, week in and week out, since he had joined the force.
‘All kicking off, is it?’ said DS McCormack as she walked in clutching a bundle of blue folders and peering out the window to the street.
Valentine greeted her with a thin smile. ‘No, it’s just Ayrshire rites of passage.’
The DS placed the folders on the desktop and took in the view properly. A thin beanpole of a youth batted his chest and made a Nazi salute. ‘Shouldn’t we tell uniform?’
‘Are you kidding? This is a daily occurrence . . .’
‘But in front of the station?’
The detective tipped back his head and laughed. ‘That’s the reason for it: it’s posturing to the powers that be . . . like an Orange walk. Don’t worry about it, Sylvia, by lunchtime they’ll all be full of Buckfast and basking in the warm glow of their own bullshit.’
She didn’t look convinced. Valentine wondered how it must appear to an outsider, even someone from Glasgow, the infamous ‘No Mean City’ where there was no shortage of louts and yobs. He concluded inwardly that the sea air, or the water, or those inveterate west-coast genes were to blame, but really the cause didn’t bother him: it was the effect that struck a chord. He folded the thought away and stacked it neatly with a host of other wearisome observations.
‘Right, what have you got for me?’ he said, drawing out a chair and positioning himself behind the desk.
DS McCormack stood before him and tapped two fingers on her cheekbone before inhaling sharply and bursting into lyrical speech. ‘Right, you remember I told you that I thought I knew the name Knox . . .’
Valentine cut in. ‘And do you remember I told you I wanted a complete case file on him, not just chasing rainbows?’
‘You have it.’ She rummaged in the pile of notes and presented the DI with a blue folder.
He took the folder and opened it up; he was scanning the contents as McCormack started to talk again. She seemed animated, keen: he liked to see that in his squad, but he knew enthusiasm was no substitute for groundwork, she would need to impress him with her police work over any desire to shine.
‘Knox has spent more time inside than out in the last thirty years, some hard yards as well,’ she said.
‘Took a chiv in the back in Peterhead, I see . . .’
‘Yeah, it was a sharpened chicken bone, I believe. He did the rest of his stretch in isolation, but still managed to get his top row of teeth knocked out.’
‘Popular bloke . . . Can’t say I’m welling up with sympathy, mind you. This record’s horrific; I’d have knocked his teeth out myself.’
McCormack bunched her brows and then her expression gave way to a more understanding look. ‘Never expressed remorse once, never submitted fully to any treatment: I think it’s fair to say Knox was a serial paedophile without contrition for his crimes.’
‘He was bloody well committed to it. He was a beast, nothing more.’
The DS nodded. ‘There are psych reports in there, but they don’t make for pretty reading.’ Her eyes darted. ‘Sir, if you don’t mind, I’d like to make a point about Knox’s time in custody.’
Valentine closed the folder, leaned back and laced his fingers across his stomach. ‘Go on, then.’
‘I listed the times Knox was inside and plotted his known whereabouts when he was at liberty . . . Not always easy, because a few times he managed to slip under the radar, but in the main, save a period of about six months I couldn’t account for when I think he was in the north, he stayed in and around greater Glasgow.’
The DI edged forward in his seat, placing his fingertips on the rim of the desk. ‘Are you going to tell me you remembered the case?’
McCormack smiled. ‘Better than that, sir.’ A gleam entered her eyes as she reached for another folder. The desk was becoming messy. ‘I found the case by cross-referencing all of Knox’s offences with all of those of a similar nature stretching back through his period of offending.’
‘Thirty-plus years – you trailed that last night?’
‘Not exactly . . . I subtracted the times he was inside and only looked at what was left, which cut it down by a massive amount.’
‘Sylvia, I’m guessing you still had quite a few cases to wade through, but are you going to spill the beans?’
‘Yes, sir . . . I’m getting to it.’
‘No, DS McCormack, spit it out . . . I’m not a dentist, I don’t pull teeth.’
She took her hand away from the blue folder and stepped back from the desk. She was pacing as she spoke, finding the exact words clearly a struggle for her. ‘There was a case in Partick and a case in Shawlands, so two cases with the same MO, and Knox was living in a bedsit on Jamaica Street at the time of them both.’ She paused. ‘Boss, Urquhart was in Glasgow then too . . . This is the only time outside of their recent past in Ayr that I can pinpoint them in the same locality.’
‘And years later, they both turn up on wooden spikes in my patch . . .’
The DS nodded. ‘This could be the link.’
‘Tell me they took him in?’
She sighed, stopped pacing. ‘Not for the Partick one . . .’
‘Glasgow questioned Duncan Knox for Shawlands?’
‘Yes. I checked just five minutes ago, sir, the Partick case was closed anyway, but the one they quizzed Knox on is still open.’
Valentine rose from the desk and put his hands in his pockets; his throat constricted rapidly as he tried to still his mind. He walked towards the window and stared out at the grey wash of sky. It was raining now, and a flooded culvert seemed to swallow all the detective’s instincts whole.
‘Right, Sylvia, give me the details . . .’
The DS reached for one of the folders and removed a single sheaf of paper. ‘A missing Shawlands schoolgirl, Janie Cooper . . .’
The girl’s name made Valentine reel. A knot twisted in his stomach and his breathing stilled. He had never heard the name before and his reaction puzzled him; it was as if he had been told of the death of a relative. A lightness in his head sent his balance askew and he reached out to steady himself on the filing cabinet. He felt like all the air had been sucked out of his lungs, like he existed in a vacuum. It was a strange feeling of weightlessness, of being a soul separate from the physical body.
‘Is everything OK, sir?’
His mouth was dry, a lofty anger exuding through his pores; it was as if the current of his thoughts had accelerated. He nodded and heard the blood pounding in his eardrums. ‘Yes, go on . . .’
‘She was only six, a pretty wee thing by all accounts . . .’
‘Do we have a picture?’ He didn’t know why he had asked. He was magnetically drawn to Janie Cooper’s plight; it felt as though their thoughts had become synchronised the second he became aware of her.
‘No, not a hard copy, I’ll print one up . . . It was twelve years ago now that she disappeared.’
‘He did it . . . Knox.’
‘What?’
Valentine moved away from the filing cabinet and placed the flat of his back on the bare plaster wall. His mind dawdled through a field of immense possibilities; his pulse beat harder when he thought of finding justice for Janie. ‘Don’t ask me how I know, I just know.’
DS McCormack double-blinked and looked away. ‘Erm, Glasgow questioned Knox, but he was released soon after.’
‘He did it.’
McCormack closed the folder over and started to tidy the notes on the desk into their respective piles. She tried not to look at the DI as she spoke. ‘I know at least one of the officers is still on the force, sir. I could arrange a meeting.’
‘What about Janie’s parents?’
‘I don’t know . . . I could find out.’
Valentine nodded. ‘Yes, do that. I want to meet them.’
‘Is that a good idea, sir?’ The DS seemed to be overwhelmed by the reaction the information had generated in the detective. ‘I mean, won’t that be like building their hopes up?’
Valentine pushed himself off the wall. The room felt suddenly small and insufficient for the knowledge he carried inside him. ‘It’s twelve years, Sylvia, did they ever find a body?’
She shook her head. ‘No, sir. The remains of Janie Cooper were never recovered.’
Valentine crossed the distance to the door and opened it. He felt enveloped in a void of helplessness, detached from the reality he knew. He yelled out to the room, ‘Ally, get in here!’
McCormack looked panicked as she picked up the files and headed for the door. ‘I’ll get onto Glasgow, get images.’
‘Right, and get onto the parents: I want to meet them as soon as possible.’ He drew deep breath and exhaled slowly. ‘Maybe want’s too strong a word.’