The house loomed over the driveway with what seemed like a dolorous reverence for the detective’s approach. Far from welcoming, the face it wore was one that could no longer find shock in the actions of men. He closed the one fastening button of his sports coat to ward off the smirring rain that had started and leaned toward the approaching gable. When he had driven up to the building before he hadn’t taken the time to be awed by its imposing stature, and now he saw it was a much larger property than he had imagined, somehow. The place seemed to belong to another time, another era; surely by this point it should have been subdivided into half a dozen flats or adopted as the headquarters of a government quango. It looked wrong, it was plain wrong that one family occupied its interior, but more than that it looked like it was begging to be put out of its misery. The house was an anachronism, as strange on the eye as catching a procession of Model-T vintage Fords coughing and spluttering amidst the rude health of today’s Toyotas and Audis.
DI Valentine became dimly aware of the sound his shoes made on the driveway scree and found himself almost proceeding on tiptoes. When he thought about the absurdity of his action, he stopped: what did it matter if he encountered the home’s occupant out in the cold or inside under lamplight? If he was too infirm to defend himself or his ailing heart gave out then a few scatter cushions and a deep-pile carpet would make little difference to the outcome. He passed the first window and glared in: everything was as it should be; normalcy reigned. The flickering coloured shadows from the television screen leant a familiarity to the setting that seemed surreal. All was as it should be, prosaic: chintz and voiles carefully arranged, leather-bound books in order of height on parallel shelves. Convention predominated: it could have been the set of a costume drama or a well-to-do comedy of manners. He didn’t know what he had expected to see. Human sacrifice? Pentagons drawn in blood on the walls? He cached away the suggestion, but whatever it was that waited for him inside he knew it contained an answer. That’s what he was there for, that’s what he had risked his career for and was prepared to risk his life for now. A whirring mist rose in his head, carrying the faces of Janie Cooper and the other victims. Even his own children appeared now; the case had touched so many lives.
Valentine’s cold breath came in white clouds as he neared the front door of the mansion house. He could feel the icy fingers of the night on his chest and in his lungs. The rain, that insidious leakage from the sky that made itself into almost invisible droplets, had fooled him again; his shoulders were soaking, his hair stuck hard to his brow. He’d caught the kind of drooking that merited a night on the hills in only a few strides and he resented its sneaky encroachment. He felt fooled, deceived. Valentine wondered if his senses had taken such a battering that he was still recovering. At the foot of the steps he saw the door was open, only a few inches, but enough of an invitation for him to take the steps and ascend. As he touched the door, he expected noise – a loud evacuation from obstreperous hinges perhaps – but nothing came. He felt almost welcome, like he was walking with destiny. He stepped in and the squelch of his wet shoes on the hardwood flooring compensated his eardrums for their earlier disappointment. The sound rang out in the still emptiness. There was no sign of anyone. The staircase leading skyward was fully lit, as was the lobby entrance leading towards the living room. The detective stood still, picked up the minute burr of his breathing, but nothing else. He was certain no one had left through the front door, they would have to pass him on the driveway, so whoever had been remonstrating with Gillon must still be there.
His shoes continued to squelch as he turned on the hard floor, assessing his options on each step. There was a third hallway to the rear that he had seen on previous visits but never explored before, and it seemed to be singing to him. Where did it lead? What was in there? Something he’d missed perhaps. Valentine gave in to his curiosity; the unknown was now his favoured option. His pellucid trail of watery footsteps went with him as he approached the dark corridor. As he reached the wall he touched the plaster, searching for a light switch, but found only the flat of the wall. A few more steps into the darkness and he started to question the wisdom of his actions: was this wise without back-up? He spotted a thin strip of light glowing beneath one of the doors ahead. He was aware of his stomach cramping; the dull ache in his chest had become a concussed anvil his heart battered against. There was a dry, almost metallic taste that appeared in his mouth as he reached out for the door handle and slowly, almost wearily, opened up.
The room sat in stilled silence, almost a tableau of an old-fashioned study. There was an escritoire, a leather-backed chair on castors and a brass reading lamp burning away. It was James Urquhart’s no doubt, and the sight of the large and detailed model railway encompassing three-quarters of the floor space confirmed it. There were no trains in motion, but he saw them there, in the station where tiny people huddled behind newspapers and tinier children rushed about the concourse. The sight of the miniature railway gripped the detective; like a strange message from childhood it seemed to call out to him to take a closer look, to come and play. How many others had felt the same compulsion? He resisted. His attention had already turned towards the open hatch bleeding light from the floor. There was a door from the hatch pressed up against the wall, and as he approached he could see there was a bright light burning in a room below, a white wooden staircase leading the way down. It looked like a cellar, or a basement perhaps, but why was it necessary to keep it out of sight? The rolled-up carpet that came out from the wall had been tugged and torn and now sat in a crumpled mass beside a hessian-backed rug. As he stared, he knew the steps down was the route he should take, but something stopped him. Valentine’s throat tightened as he stood staring into the secret world below; his constricted stomach lurched with his thoughts. As he paused, he sensed a presence; he made to turn, but a heavy blow like a man’s double-fisted punch struck his back.
Falling was a strange experience: the sudden loss of vision, the blurring of the familiar into the unfamiliar, and the way time seemed to float with your body through the air in a strange slowed motion. Valentine stretched out his arms to break his fall when the realisation dawned that he had been pushed down the hatch and was dropping several feet towards a stone floor. A loud retort like a gunshot signalled the end of his fall and the shooting pain in his wrist confirmed for him that bone did indeed make that loud noise when it broke. The pain arrived at once, in a sharp, agonising burst that repeated itself over and over, extending further along the arm and into his shoulder.
Valentine lay prone on the stone floor. After his arm, his nose and mouth had taken the brunt of the fall, and blood rushed from both. He spat it out: a mouthful at first, and then more drooled before him onto the dusty floor. There was a strange smell in the basement: not damp alone, but something that was definitely dank and something else like burning kerosene. He tried to raise his spinning head, to regain the rest of his blunted senses. The next to return was his hearing, alerted by the sound of footsteps behind him; that sensation was followed by the return of touch, and he was jerked backwards by a hand on his shoulder and spun round to face his assailant’s wild eyes.
‘You’ve broken my arm.’ The remark was instinctual. When he heard it, he thought it might elicit a laugh, such was its absurdity at this point. When his vision drew the dark shape in front of him into focus, he could see laughter was not an option.
Adrian Urquhart was holding a knife in his hand. It looked like a dagger or a bayonet as he leaned forward and placed its tip on Valentine’s shirtfront. His hardened features were separated by the thin slit of his mouth. ‘Why are you here?’ he said, a tremble rising in his voice.
The detective’s eyes flitted between the blade and Adrian’s hardened, immobile features. He saw there was no reasoning with him: he was lost to himself, a maniac had taken him over.
‘Think about what you’re doing, Adrian . . .’ Each of the detective’s words fell between a fresh grimace of pain.
Adrian removed the knife and stepped back. His dark gaze was as distant as another universe. If thought sparked there, beyond those impenetrable eyes, it was a mystery to even him. ‘Get on your feet, Valentine.’
The detective pressed himself against the wall and slowly edged onto his feet. The pain in his arm came in shooting bursts, like he was being lashed with a steel baton, and it prompted waves of nausea from stomach to head. When he managed to stand, he took in the full extent of his surroundings for the first time. Adrian watched him, tapping the dagger off his leg like it was a stick he itched to throw for an impatient dog. He was anxious, but not in any normal way; his anxiety was formed out of despair for a burden he was soon to set down, and it put him on edge. He’d carried this weight with him for so long that it had become part of him; the option to release it had always been there, but so had the consequences, and he couldn’t avoid them now.
‘You want to know what this place is, don’t you?’ he said.
‘What is it?’
He raised up the blade and pointed it at Valentine’s chest once more. His mouth split into a nervous grin as he spoke. ‘It’s your final resting place is what it is.’
Thoughts eddied in the detective’s mind like the confused cries of a drowning man. He thought he saw Adrian Urquhart standing before him with a knife in his chest, proclaiming his guilt of three murders, but he didn’t look like a murderer. His piercing eyes and taut mouth, pressed over his teeth like a wire, painted him as an avenging angel. If he was in the wrong, he didn’t know it. Valentine’s gaze flitted about the room once more. In desperation he sought an escape, but his attention alighted upon a tiny red coat, a child’s coat, hanging on the wall. As he stared at the garment, he knew he had seen it before, but he didn’t want to believe it matched the connection in his mind. He felt himself drawn away from Adrian; the dagger became an irrelevance as his eyes fastened on the wall, on the child’s coat and the pictures. There were photographs stuck on a large frieze and more in boxes on a table. He turned from Adrian, pushed away the knife and walked over to the images. They were children. Their pale bodies exposed to the flashbulbs looked so thin and frail, but it was the pained cries on their faces that reached out from the prints and stung Valentine’s eyes.
He turned back to Adrian, his voice a growl. ‘What the hell is this?’
He didn’t answer. Valentine saw a small pair of sandals on the table: they were tan with buckles, like the kind very young children used to wear to school. He thought he had seen the sandals before. He felt compelled to touch them, and as he did so he felt their inert power pass through his fingertips.
‘Oh, Christ . . .’
A schoolbag, an old-style leather satchel, sat next to the sandals, and its buckles were opened. Valentine reached out for the bag and picked it up with trembling fingers. Inside were jotters, little notebooks from a children’s school. All the pale, age-worn dusty books had the same child’s name on them: Janie Cooper.
A flash of heat engulfed his head as he took in the name and then he dropped the satchel back on the table.
‘Janie . . .’
In the box of pictures beside he saw a little girl wearing the red coat and carrying the bag, but it wasn’t Janie. He picked up the top photograph and held it up.
‘Who’s this?’
‘You know her too,’ said Adrian, his monotonous voice seeming too droll for the occasion.
Valentine turned to face him. ‘Who is she?’
‘It’s Leanne Dunn . . . in Janie’s clothes.’
The detective turned back to the picture and stared. He could see some hint of the young girl Leanne was then, but there was very little of the child left in her. She was aged, old before her time, her eyes wide, staring into a world she didn’t understand but knew she was trapped in. The look she wore was of sheer pain and helplessness; it was beyond any of the myriad hurts a childhood could bear or move on from.
‘You see, don’t you?’ said Adrian.
Valentine steadied himself on the table, acid bile rising in his trachea. He tipped out the box of pictures. There were many more images. Piles of them. Pictures of children with men. In focus, out of focus. Colour-bleached or bright, black and white. They covered decades: odd reminders of times past appeared in the backgrounds. A teak-trimmed television, a star clock, bright-red Kickers boots. One thing that never changed was the children’s misery and pain: it was etched on their little faces like a first taste of fear. Valentine brought his uninjured hand to his mouth and gripped tightly; he couldn’t stem the rising vomit, but he couldn’t look away from his hurried search. He tipped over the box and spread out the pictures; it wasn’t long before he alighted on the evidence and held its photographic form before Adrian.
‘This is your father,’ he yelled.
‘It is.’ He didn’t move. A low-pitched sigh started to flow from deep inside him, like he was dredging for a dead emotion. ‘That was my father.’
At once the detective understood; he didn’t need to hear an explanation. The silence said it all. How could it be explained, anyway? There were no words for this. The true revulsion could never be expressed. He knew why the man before him couldn’t face the shame of what inhuman acts had taken place, of the monstrous events his own father had participated in, the man whose blood he had running in his veins.
Valentine’s heart pounded as he took in the sight before him; a million cruel images burned in his mind. He swayed as he wiped back sweat from his heavy brow. ‘What happened to Janie Cooper?’
‘You think I know that? I know she died. I know Knox took care of the remains. They kept her coat and things; I think they dressed Leanne in them to remind them of her. She was special.’ His voice was so flat, so devoid of emotion that he could have been dictating a shopping list or any one of the mundane chores of life – not the brutal abduction, rape and murder of an innocent.
The knowledge was not new to him, brought no understanding, and somehow only served to blur his thoughts even more. He looked down to the picture in his hand of the little girl and felt a fierce wave of anger engulf him.
‘But why Leanne . . . Why would you want to kill her?’
Adrian brought the dagger up to the side of his head and scrunched up his eyes into tiny knots of anguish as he spoke. ‘I didn’t want to kill her, I had to.’
‘You had to?’ Valentine’s mind was a pit of confusion and darkening rage. The answers he’d sought came but brought no understanding or resolution. If anything, the reality smacked at him harder, drove deeper wounds in him.
‘She was going to talk to that bloody reporter, wasn’t she?’
‘So Sinclair paid you a visit; you should have lapped that up!’
‘What?’
‘Oh come on, Adrian.’ Valentine put down the picture and moved towards the murderer. ‘That’s what this has all been about, isn’t it? Well, I’ve seen it now, and everyone will know about your father’s secret.’
‘It wasn’t about that: they needed to pay.’
Valentine fronted up to him. ‘Leanne Dunn didn’t need to pay, she’d already paid, her and Janie Cooper and all the fucking rest of those kids!’
‘Leanne was in the way. I didn’t want to kill her but . . . she was going to talk to Sinclair.’
‘And steal your bloody thunder. That’s what you resented, isn’t it, Adrian? Leanne was going to expose your father and you wanted to be the only one to do that.’
‘No. You’re wrong.’ He steadied himself before the detective and brought the knife towards his chest once more, pressing the point of the blade into the fleshy part of the muscle.
‘Did you really think he’d hurt you more than those girls?’
‘Shut up . . . Just stop talking now.’ He pressed the knife harder.
Valentine backed up, innate fear and painful memory rose in him. He tried to lift his injured arm to fend off Adrian, but a greater pain overtook him. ‘You’ve got what you wanted, this is what it’s been about, the whole world will see him for what he was now. Everyone will know about your father, everyone, Adrian . . .’
The sound of police sirens started to wail through the house, diffusing the intimacy of their talk, bringing back the outside world and its implications. Adrian looked up to the rafters for a solution but was greeted by the sound of pounding footfalls above. Yells and roars came on the back of the study door opening, and louder footsteps were heard on the boards of the staircase. Adrian jerked his eyes to the detective, but Valentine severed the gaze between them and looked up to see DS McAlister descending the stairs. He flagged him to a stop.
Adrian gripped the dagger tighter, held it in both his hands. He didn’t seem to be there: like a spectre of himself, he haunted the room with all the other ghosts, all the other victims.
‘Adrian, come on, it’s over. Your work’s done.’
He started to sob, raised his hands towards his face and let the knife fall to the stone floor with a dull clatter. Valentine reached out to him and brought his head onto his shoulder as the young man creased up before him and cried, deep heartfelt sobs tangled in anguish and misery and loss for the father he never had.
‘It’s all over now, Adrian.’