It was all a game, life. What other way was there of describing it? He had been in so many strange places, met so many different people, that Valentine had stopped the dissolute notion that there was any alternative. We were born to power or pauper and we had no choice but to accept the hand we’d been dealt and play the cards. He’d heard of the Indian philosophy of lila: life as a divine game, life’s energy in all its guises from man and beast to tree and even stone all containing the same life force and susceptible to its whim. It sounded right, seemed to fit the irrational and erratic pattern he knew so well. But there was something else too, a darker element that came into play. He hadn’t always thought like that, however. Valentine could remember a time in his teens when, drunken insensate by a spirit he wasn’t used to, he’d lain down on a bench in Ayr’s magic circle – the town’s less common appellation for Burns Statue Square. As he lay on his back looking at the stars, he saw Rabbie’s head blocking out the constellation of Orion, or was it the Plough? He couldn’t correctly recall, or care, now, but he had a feeling there was something up there for him, in the stars, beyond the grimness of the town. He knew now he had been wrong, embarrassingly so; the detective had pounded those streets, from brig to bar, for decades and knew there was no cobbled pathway or gilded ladder leading skyward – it was all a fallacy. And it was deceit. A lie told to gullible optimists in their tender youth, just to keep their hand in the game. How else did you explain the disparity between James Urquhart’s fortune and yet another poor lifeless girl’s misfortune? There was no rubric within the game’s rulebook to turn to for confirmation, but he knew the rule existed as a fatalistic law of life on Earth. Those who said otherwise were either fools or had an interest to preserve. There may once have been a greasy pole and it may once have even been climbed by someone who found it led all the way to a new galaxy of riches, but it was now long gone. If the pole existed still, it was truncated, cut down somewhere shy of ground level, as likely a declivity as a divot to remember it by. This pale-white murdered girl never knew of its existence, the town of Mossblown never knew of its existence, he was sure of that.
The detective crouched low to the ground and took in the tangled mass of thin white limbs, damp now with the downfall of a little rain. She was no more human than the bed of dirt she lay on. No more a life than any of us would be when the blood sat stagnant in our veins, that great pump stilled in our chests, all thoughts, all clocks, halted. He felt cold inside, cold enough for two people – he felt her cold too – but not because of the exposure of her bare flesh to the harsh elements; he felt the coldness of her loss. She had been someone, once. She hadn’t always been so cold; she’d held the flame of life inside her, but it had been extinguished. Snuffed out, brutally.
‘Look at those bruises,’ said DS McCormack.
‘On the neck or the arms?’ said Valentine. ‘The ones on the arms are older.’
‘She’s a junkie.’
The term turned a spike in the detective; she was a drug user, there was no mistaking it, but she was a member of the same race of beings as they were. She was someone’s daughter. She’d meant something to someone: if not now, then once. We all had, once.
He lowered himself on his haunches and picked a wet leaf from the white flesh. The contusions continued down her arm in consistently spaced points. ‘Fingertips, she’s been battered about.’
‘Repeatedly, I’d say for some time. Look at the stomach distension, sir.’
‘She’s brass, I’ll bet money on that.’ Valentine rose and motioned to one of the uniforms. ‘We got her printed?’
‘Yes, sir. Going through now . . .’
‘Well, that’s something. With any luck we’ll have her on our books and get a name before too long.’
DS McAlister and DS Donnelly approached the crime scene. They were ducking under the blue and white tape as Valentine turned away from them to take a closer look at a silver chain around the girl’s neck.
‘What’s that, boss?’ said McCormack.
‘Don’t know . . . Some kind of pendant.’
As he knelt down again, Valentine removed a yellow pencil from the inside pocket of his sports coat. He pointed the pencil towards the girl’s neck and slotted the tip beneath the silver chain; as he rummaged for the pendant he saw a tangle of mulch around a silver clasp and then the item was sprung onto her chest.
‘A cross . . .’ he said. The detective almost felt like laughing. ‘Where was her God?’
‘It’s just a cheapie,’ said McCormack.
Valentine stood up and rolled his eyes to the heavens. ‘Maybe He might have been pissed at her for that?’ He shook his head. ‘I mean, there’s some things worth splashing out on.’
DS McCormack seemed unsure how to interpret the detective’s words. She held herself still as the wind took stray tendrils of hair in front of her face. Valentine turned away and walked towards the blue tape.
‘A bloody cross.’
He didn’t know why he had got so worked up by the sight of the small silver cross. It just seemed so out of place to him, so ridiculously trite. She was a young girl who hadn’t had a chance from the day she was born, a prostitute who pumped her veins full of poison to numb the pain of being alive: what use did she have for God? What kind of a god could even she imagine had fashioned this hell on Earth for her? How long had she suffered? He knew her story all too well because it was the story of every young girl like her. Pain in childhood, and pain in bigger portions the older she got. There was no escape, no saviour for her. As he reached the edge of the clearing, he felt his throat freezing with an involuntary welling of unwanted emotion.
‘Sir, have you seen the tracks?’ One of the uniforms pointed to the broad-rimmed tyre marks in the wet ground. He was tall, his shoulders looked too square for his narrow hips, but he didn’t seem the type to be concerned with his appearance.
‘You better get those cast,’ said Valentine. He watched the uniform dip his head and lower his gaze to the tracks. It was like watching a giraffe take a drink.
‘Looks like a big vehicle, sir. A large saloon or maybe even a truck.’
The detective looked at the tyre prints; they were clear and fresh, and the vehicle seemed to have spun a little in the wet mud. ‘Looks like they were in a hurry to get away.’
‘Might have been the running party . . . Maybe saw them coming.’
Valentine turned back towards the crime scene. The SOCOs had started to unfurl a white tent, and a noise like wind in a sail sent a wood pigeon scrabbling from the branches of a nearby tree.
The detective pointed to what looked like a steep gash in the ground. ‘What’s that, there?’
The uniform straightened his back and tipped up his head. ‘That’s like some kind of hole, sir . . . We think it’s fresh too.’
Another interpretation made more sense. ‘A grave, you mean.’
‘Could be, sir.’
The DI was tired of the lopsided conversation; he had seen enough to know he didn’t need to see any more. He turned for the car with his face set in a granite sneer. ‘Tell the others I’m going back to the station.’
‘Don’t you want to wait for the fiscal, sir?’
He didn’t think the question deserved an answer. Was the fiscal going to deliver some insight? Was the fiscal going to tell him how to do his job, how to solve another murder? As he reached the road, Valentine unlocked the car and kept his head low, facing off a fierce wind, until he had reached the vehicle. He got inside just as the rain was starting up again and sat with his hands in his lap, his knees locked at right angles to the floor. As he stared out of the car’s window to the row of grim council houses he saw the stacks of chimneys stalking the grey horizon like weary sentries who wished to be anywhere but here. An old man stood in front of his home, leaning on a dilapidated garden gate with folded arms and furrowed brows. Valentine stared at the man for a moment, made an unfathomable connection with his dark eyes and felt them share a mute understanding of a world that had long ago ceased to make any sense to them both. The detective put the key in the ignition and set off.
The road back to Ayr was lined with fields, green and bright in the divisions that were spared the cut of tractor tracks. The march of yuppie commuter homes had started to spill into the fields skirting the bypass, and the heavy machinery of clearing vehicles and dump trucks chuntered behind drystone dykes. Valentine knew he was observing a rapidly changing landscape: the fertile fields of Burns Country were giving way to bricks and mortar, to tiled roofs and tarred roads. In another decade the small town would be swallowed up, along with a few others. Ayr would be a small city then – if it wasn’t already in all but name.
At the station, Valentine approached the front desk and called out to Jim Prentice. The desk sergeant turned and nodded; he was holding the receiver of a telephone, but the conversation seemed to be coming to an end. His facial expression suggested there was a fence that needed mending sitting between the two men.
‘Sorry to be barking at you this morning, Jim,’ said Valentine.
‘It’s all right, I know how it is.’ He clamped his mouth tight shut and removed the chair from beneath the counter. It slid out on its small castors. ‘I take it that’s another one to add to the tally?’
The detective nodded. ‘Young girl. She’s brass, but lucky if she’s seen twenty summers.’
‘Well, she’ll not see another one.’ He shook his head. ‘What’s this bloody place coming too? What happened to the days of lost bikes and kids raiding orchards?’
Valentine smirked. ‘Long gone, Jim . . . Long gone.’
As he made his way onto the stairs, he caught sight of the chief super’s chubby ankles on the floor above him heading for the incident room. The heavy thump of her footsteps suggested that she had some important news to deliver. Valentine upped his pace and made leaps of two steps at a time. As he jogged in behind CS Martin’s thundering footfalls, he was breathing heavily.
‘Oh, you’re back?’ she said.
‘Just . . .’
‘Couldn’t have been there long.’ She ran her fingers through her hair as if it was an annoyance to her, perhaps even interfering with her thought processes.
‘Long enough . . . She’s a prostitute, a well-worked one by the looks of it, so she shouldn’t be too hard to ID.’
The chief super raised her right hand and pinned a pile of papers to Valentine’s chest. ‘Get your laughing gear round that . . . We have an I.D.’
‘The prints?’
‘Yes indeed. We’ve pulled her up more times than a shithouse seat.’
Valentine removed his gaze from Dino, peeled the paperwork from his chest and scanned the contents. The printout wasn’t the best quality: a grainy black and white photograph of the girl that looked to have been taken during a booking. There was no doubting her resemblance to the girl he’d just left lying in a cold field, though.
‘That’s her,’ he said.
‘You sure?’
‘Certain.’ Valentine held up the papers and slapped his other hand off them. ‘The girl in Mossblown is Leanne Dunn.’