They were everywhere in Glasgow, the poseurs. That was the trouble with the big city, thought Valentine, it attracted types prone to reinventing of themselves. It didn’t matter what they had been before – accountant, plooky teen, quantity surveyor – in the city they imagined they could excoriate the skin of the past and start anew. The detective alighted on a man: balding, bad fifties, clearly fighting middle-aged spread. He had squeezed himself into the latest fashions from Top Man: had the term ‘skinny’ jeans not been a warning sign? Valentine fought an urge to shake his head, to frown disapproval, but settled for a disdainful glance towards his own M&S flannels. The bald man was sipping a latte in one of the long glasses that Valentine always sent back, telling the staff that it was a sundae glass and that he wanted a cup of coffee. The man he observed now seemed to relish the effeminacy of the receptacle; it was then that the DI came to the conclusion that the man might be gay. He turned his eyes away quickly, an atavistic fear from his Ayrshire youth firing inside him. When he was growing up in the auld toun, homosexuality was deemed a curse worse than any gypsy’s and attracted the same hysterical, pernicious demonising.
A thought soon lit in Valentine: he couldn’t grudge the stranger his new life. A vague, nauseating wave of guilt hit him for having judged someone who had likely faced harsh judgement his entire life. If he had just moved to the city, reinvented himself as a fifty-something Top Man, then so what? He had every right to his trip, as much as – maybe more so than – the middle-class teen who fancied himself an artist or a musician or a boulevardier hanging louchely on a Gitane somewhere in the Merchant City. People were strange and did even stranger things to escape the fact. Valentine realised that part of his aversion to the big city was the idea that he was confronted with such strangeness wherever he looked. He was overstimulated by the fact, like some hyperactive terrier let loose in a barn full of rats. He longed to be home, back in Ayr, where being normal and bland was a given because straying from the narrow path of conformity led only to the steep cliffs of derision.
DS Sylvia McCormack appeared clutching two paper cups filled with coffee. She smiled towards her boss as she placed the cups down on the Formica tabletop. The liquid let off a slow flare into the brisk air that signalled its unsuitability for bodily contact.
‘Watch, it’s hot,’ said McCormack.
‘I see that.’
‘Aye, well, I felt it when I was stupid enough to take a sip.’
‘It’ll not be long cooling down. I swear Glasgow is the coldest place on the planet . . . Vladivostok doesn’t get a look in.’
He watched the DS huddle her hands around the paper cup like it was a mini-brazier she had acquired for the purpose. There was a lot of people around, people just milling about – old men and youths alike. Valentine wondered where they came from and why they seemed to lack all sense of purpose in where they were going.
‘Like the land of the living dead around here,’ he said, glancing over McCormack’s shoulder.
She took her cue from the DI and revolved her eyes over the scene. ‘The jakey brigade . . . You get used to it.’
He knew she was right. He could remember a time when there was one tramp – they called them tramps then – in Ayr and one in Kilmarnock. They were well-kent faces; the towns had complete genealogical records on them, knew their previous lives and ultimate falls from grace as the stuff of legend. Not now, though. Valentine couldn’t keep pace with the number of the fallen in Ayrshire; their toll increased almost daily, it seemed, certainly they were not faces with names – they were not unusual enough any more to be afforded any special status.
The DI ventured a sip of coffee. It wasn’t as warm as it looked or as inviting as the idea suggested – the greasy rainbow swirling on top made his nostrils flare.
‘Pretty dire, isn’t it?’ said McCormack.
Valentine stuck out his tongue. ‘Did you buy it from a mechanic?’
She smiled. ‘No, I did not . . . You saw me going over to the counter.’
‘Maybe they do oil changes as well . . . Think we got the Castrol instead of the Nescafé.’ He stood up and fastened the button of his grey dog-tooth sports coat.
‘Are we off, boss?’
He nodded. ‘Come on, you can bring your coffee with you . . . Might run into an AA man you can give it to.’
The officers left the car in a side road between a kirkyard and playing fields and made their way to Pollokshaws Road. Janie Cooper’s school was a short walk from the car. An imposing stone building, it reminded Valentine of the way schools used to be made. It looked like Ayr Academy, not some prefabricated box that had been flung up in five minutes flat. The windows were tall and thin, newly replaced but sustaining some grandeur of times past. He knew that the reality of the place would be somewhat different from his perception of solidity and that great Scots record on education, but he couldn’t help feeling comfortable standing in front of the impressive façade. On the other side of the road sat a tacky, flat-roofed oblong of flats that looked to have been built in the seventies – the decade that style forgot – and now housed a children’s play centre below and brutally exposed balconies replete with peeling paint and plastic furniture above.
‘So, this is where she . . .’ Valentine couldn’t bring himself to say the words, to complete the sentence. They both knew where they were and what had happened to Janie Cooper that day twelve years ago when she never made it home from school.
‘The Coopers still stay in Bertram Street.’ DS McCormack indicated the direction of the route the young girl must have walked.
‘Hardly any distance at all,’ said Valentine. ‘Come on . . .’ He paced himself as he walked towards Bertram Street, taking in the scene of utter simplicity – an anywhere road in any town in Scotland. He knew why the Coopers had never moved: where could they go that would not remind them of the utter normality of the place?
As they reached the corner of Bertram Street, the detective stopped in his tracks. They stood beside a low verge and boxy hedgerows that edged the communal gardens of tenement flats. He was overwhelmed by the singular feeling that he had been there before.
‘How many streets are there just like this?’ he said.
McCormack pulled a stray strand of hair from her mouth; the wind was picking up. ‘At least a million, we could be anywhere . . . Edinburgh, Inverness, the Borders . . .’
‘We could even be in Ayr.’
The DS nodded. ‘That we could, sir.’
They progressed down the street and made their way to the front door of the Coopers’ tenement. As they stared at the rows of buttons on the outside wall, the plastic coverings on a host of nametags – all familiar to anyone accustomed to perusing a Scottish telephone directory – Valentine paused.
‘I’ve a very strange feeling about this . . .’ The words were out before he realised what he had said, and the DI made a sudden and sharp intake of breath. He wished he could have swallowed his last utterance.
‘Sir . . . What do you mean?’ McCormack’s eyes thinned as she stood granite-firm on the path beside her boss and stared into him.
Valentine shook off the enquiry and reached forward to depress the buzzer in front of them. ‘Nothing, just thinking aloud . . .’
‘Is there something you want to tell me?’
He shrugged and turned back towards the door. ‘Like what?’
‘I’m not sure, anything . . . If you don’t mind me saying, you seem a bit . . . jumpy.’
Valentine grinned, a wide headlamp smile that he knew he always reserved for such situations. He was cornered and had nothing to say that would get him out of the trap he’d sprung for himself.
The buzzer sounded and the detective lunged for the handle and stepped inside.
‘Saved by the bell, eh,’ said McCormack.
The stairwell was dark and dank. A mountain bike sat tethered to the railings of the banister; two stanchions had already been cut, and Valentine wondered how long the bike would last under such flimsy security. There was a door that led out to a back green flapping open, banging soundly on the jamb every time the wind picked up. The plaster was crumbling from the damp walls and sat in dusty flakes on the stone steps. Some had made its way to the corner of the first floor – likely on a dustpan – and sat in a white cairn that poked at Valentine like a reminder of his visit. He ran a finger along the wall and inspected the blackness, simply as a distraction for himself, before rubbing it on his thumb and then the fronts of his trousers.
‘Here it is, this is us,’ said McCormack. She turned to face her boss, then spoke again with her hand poised over the door, ready to knock. ‘Will I do the honours, sir?’
Valentine nodded and took a step back, making sure his mobile phone was switched off. They faced a faded net curtain in the door’s window; its movement was almost imperceptible as the DS made two delicate taps on the doorframe and retreated to stand beside her boss. As a light went on behind the curtain, the net went from a dull grey to a luminous yellow and then the silhouette of a man appeared in the frame. Valentine’s stomach clenched and then released, and he brought the flat of his hand up to his chest in an almost Pavlovian response to the unknown. The musty smell that percolated the stairwell seemed to vanish as the door opened and Billy Cooper waved them in.
Billy’s face was stolid as he closed the door behind the officers and began to run the palms of his hands over the sleeves of his T-shirt. He was nervous, clearly, but this was someone who had learned to deal with simple emotions and some that were obviously far more complex – that much was displayed in the way he took control of the situation, extending a hand to the officers and flashing blue-grey eyes tinged with both a welcome and forlorn sadness. He was broad-shouldered and angular, but his frame looked burdened with the approaching bulk of middle age and the strains of a life given to manual labour; it was, again, a cross he bore lightly, almost blithely. The city could fall, nations and empires crumble, but Billy Cooper would be unmoved by anything else this life of man had to offer, not now, not ever again. He had survived a hurt that few would dare to imagine and there was nothing left for the fates to throw at him while he endured the remainder of his time in this existence.
The officers stood facing Billy for a moment, Valentine was unsure how to effect introductions: were they even there on official business? He doubted it and knew CS Martin would doubt it too. He was following a hunch that was more visceral than anything else, yet he believed he was in the right place to advance the case.
The DI dipped his head. ‘Can I introduce myself – Detective Inspector Bob Valentine.’ He turned to face his colleague. ‘And this is Detective Sergeant Sylvia McCormack.’
Billy Cooper took the hands as they were offered, but his face told them that no connection had been made beyond the surface of the skin. He was a man who had cut all ties to the outside world, even the most ephemeral.
‘My wife’s through in the front room,’ he said.
‘We’d like to meet her, Billy,’ said Valentine.
As they walked towards the living room at the top of the flat, the detective became vaguely aware that he was not in a home. It was a shrine to the memory of a home. There were pictures on the walls that would have been out of fashion a decade ago: rural scenes of hunting, shooting and fishing set in gaudy brass frames – they were the type of pictures you saw in charity shop windows, or cheap student bedsits, certainly not anywhere where people would want, or choose, to live. The carpets were threadbare and coated with such a heavy layer of dust that they would have greeted a vacuum cleaner as a long-lost stranger. As they rounded the hallway into the living room, a shelving unit made of chrome and smoked glass spied on them from the facing wall. Valentine at once gazed directly at the row of pictures that had been lined up like unholy babushka dolls in ascending height. To a one they contained photographs of Janie Cooper. She had a broad, say-cheese grin that shouted her personality to the world at large. Her round eyes were a violet-blue and shone beneath the shock of white-blonde hair that hung in a heavy fringe and was long enough to be tied in a neat ponytail. In every image the girl proclaimed her love of life, she brimmed full of it, looked in awe of an awesome world where she was happy to exist in the company of her beloved family. The sight of Janie jolted Valentine’s senses and a deep, yet somehow hollow, pain erupted in the depths of his chest, telling him he was in a new place now, somewhere he had never been before. The detective felt like he stood at the threshold of the kind of life discovery that changed a man, made him anew, and not always for the better. He knew this, and yet despite all his reservations, all the consequences he foresaw, he was compelled to cross the line. As Valentine turned to Diane Cooper where she sat huddled on a corner seat, she seemed held together by only a thin thread of life, which, under tremendous stresses already, threatened to snap.
‘Hello, Diane,’ he said. ‘The pictures of your daughter are just beautiful.’