A Taste of Ashes (DI Bob Valentine Book 2) (7 page)

‘We have ID’d him,’ said Valentine, he turned to McCormack.’

‘Yes. His name’s James Tulloch, he was fifty-four.’

‘We took him in for assaulting a previous partner in the nineties and never saw him again so our details are a bit sketchy. Phil and Ally are profiling his latter years now.’

The pathologist looked at the clock. ‘Right, there’s one or two aspects I’d like to point out if you don’t mind cracking on. I’ve got a bloody appointment at Specsavers in half an hour.’

The DI motioned to the corpse with an open hand. ‘Fire away. We’re all busy people.’

‘Well, just follow on the notes and I’ll go through the main points.’ He pushed between the fingers of his gloves and walked towards the slab.

Valentine flipped pages. ‘He looked much smaller at the scene.’

‘A trick of perspective no doubt. If he was crouched over, shoulders facing forward, that would diminish his bulk. A fit and healthy man, though.’

The DI read through the notes on Tulloch’s cardiovascular system, it had become a habit with him. There were no congenital abnormalities, no evidence of fibrosis or inflammation. The report said all coronary segments and arteries were normally distributed and only a minimal atherosclerosis was noted. But, just how would his own post-mortem look by comparison?

‘The bladder wall was intact and the urine clear. We never found anything to raise suspicions there.’

Valentine tapped the page. ‘The stomach contents were clear too.’

‘Mainly unidentifiable, almost fully digested.’

‘There goes my Sugar Puffs theory.’

Wrighty put his fingertips on the rim of the slab and frowned. ‘I’m not even going to ask. Do you want to hear the interesting bits?’

‘Go on.’

‘The cause of death was undoubtedly the neck trauma, in particular the severing of the spinal column. The wound track, back to front, was administered on a horizontal thrust – that’s interesting, don’t you think?’

‘It is if you say it is, perhaps you can elaborate.’

‘Are you up on your bull fighting, Bob?’

‘Not the last time I looked.’

‘In bull fighting circles this type of wound is known as the
coup de grâce
. It’s how they dispatch the bull, put it out of its misery quickly.’

‘Are you saying I should be looking for a matador?’ the group shared a laugh. ‘Or that this was a professional killing?’ Valentine knew the pathologist couldn’t answer the question, but it was interesting to watch his reaction.

‘Oh, come on, you know that’s above my pay grade.’

‘That puts it well above mine then.’

‘The wound was inflicted by someone who knew how to locate the spinal chord, that’s as far as I can surmise, Bob.’

McCormack looked up from her folder. ‘It says here there was a head injury too.’

‘I was just getting to that. I did find an irregular scalp and skull defect near the midline of the occipital region.’

‘In English, Wrighty.’

‘Someone bumped him on the back of the head, with something heavy. No idea what, before you ask, I couldn’t find any metallic, wood or any other fragments so your guess is as good as mine.’

Valentine folded his report and tucked it inside his jacket. His gaze fell on the deceased but he was addressing the room as he spoke. ‘Someone whacked him on the head, enough to knock him out but not to kill him.’ He looked to the pathologist for confirmation.

‘It’s a significant head wound, I’m sure it would have rendered even a fit man like this unconscious.’

‘So he’s knocked out, but still with us when the
coup de grâce
is administered to finish the job?’

‘That’s about the strength of it.’

‘Well, I find that very interesting.’

‘Very.’ He waved in the technician. ‘Now the difficult work begins.’

‘It does indeed.’

Chief Superintendent Marion Martin stood in front of a filing cabinet with the top drawer open, peering into a blue folder. She scratched at the corner of her mouth with a long fingernail as her eyes moved back and forth over the printed page. With her tight black skirt, and the small white collar of her blouse pointing to the ceiling, it seemed like a pose she had practised, or perhaps stolen from a magazine.

As Valentine entered he asked himself how long the CS might stand with her back to him before acknowledging he was there. He knew the answer was
as long as she liked
so he stationed himself in the seat in front of her desk. He stared out the window that dominated one wall of the large office. The town of Ayr, pelted by rain, looked grey and bleak beyond the blurry splatter marks and failed to hold his attention. As he turned back to the CS he willed her to break concentration, but when that became a bore he tried noisy throat clearing.

‘I hear you, Bob,’ said CS Martin.

‘If I’ve come at a bad time, I can try again later.’ He eased himself out of the chair; he was too busy to play witness to her display of power.

‘Sit.’

A cheeky response came to him:
Is there a dog in the room?
But he suppressed it, did as he was told and retreated into the seat.

‘Right, Bob. Tell me about this team-building exercise.’ She yanked her chair out and positioned herself precariously on the edge, facing the DI over linked fingers.

Had he heard her properly? Surely she wasn’t going to bring up the paintball or the go-karts again. There was a murder investigation under way. A man had been brutally killed the night before. And a few hours before that there had been a robbery with aggravated assault. No one at the station was short of things to do.

‘I’m sorry, at the risk of sounding daft, could you repeat that please?’

‘I think you heard me.’

The chair was uncomfortable, too hard to sit in. Valentine eased himself onto his elbows and tried to redistribute his weight. ‘Is that why you called me in here, boss?’

‘Well it wasn’t to enquire about your health, Bob.’

There had been a time when she had been very interested in enquiring about his health. After the stabbing, when she had packed him off to look after stripling recruits at the Tulliallan training college, she seemed very keen to know how soon he could return to her murder squad. That was, it seemed, the extent of her interest in her colleagues. She asked after their well-being only when there was a possible threat to her rotas and the station’s clean-up rate.

When he returned to the squad Martin had been horrified at the amount of damage to his heart, at the blood loss and the fifty-plus pints that had been transfused into his body. She said she had seen less horrific post-mortem reports. She did not, however, ask how Clare and the girls were dealing with the situation. The idea that she should ask her own DI how he was didn’t occur to her either.

Valentine didn’t interpret Martin’s comments in a personal manner, but weighed them against the demands of her job. She didn’t care how individuals felt or coped, or how high the case files were stacked. Her interest was in getting the job done in the most efficient manner, making sure the paperwork was completed properly, everything else was an irrelevance.

‘The team-building exercise is not one of my priorities right now, I’m afraid,’ said Valentine.

She dropped her chin onto her chest. ‘Well you better bloody make it a priority because I have a presentation to make to the divi’ commander a week on Wednesday that should include some pictures of smiling DCs and at least one DI in some form of fancy dress, am I making myself clear?’

‘I think I see where you’re coming from.’

‘Good, Bob. Don’t let me down or I’ll kick your balls so hard you’ll be shaving pubes off your neck.’

‘Was that everything?’

‘No, I want you to tell me how you’re getting on with this killing out at Whitletts.’

He detailed the murder scene for her, summarised the victim’s previous conviction for assaulting a former partner and revealed what limited background reports had been passed on. When he was finished, Valentine expected her to ask for written confirmation, but she rose and walked to the corner of the room where a coffee maker sat on top of a two-drawer filing cabinet.

‘What the hell is happening to this town? Ayr used to be a nice place to grow up, to go to work and raise your children. Every day I hear more bloody horror stories, it makes you want to pack up and leave them to it.’ She poured a coffee, turned back to her desk. ‘I’d offer you one but you’re just leaving and I’m all out of biccies.’

The DI wished she was serious about packing up. ‘Some of us don’t have that many options.’

She caught him in her gaze as she sat down again; his remark didn’t seem to merit a response. ‘And what about the partner, where’s she?’

‘Sandra Millar’s not been seen since last night.’

‘The old woman spotted her, the one that passed away.’

‘That’s right, Agnes Gilchrist saw her fleeing the murder scene. She also saw an unidentified man. And then there’s the daughter, Jade, and the son, Darren. Both missing. I’m just about to check with the team what the door-to-door turned up last night but experience tells me this isn’t your usual domestic gone wrong.’

‘What do you mean by that, Bob?’

Valentine looked to the floor, his foot was making a stiff angle to his ankle. ‘Something about the scene, that kitchen was untouched and there was no indication of a struggle. This isn’t a classic case of poverty breeding violence, if it was we’d have seen some evidence of that.’

Martin pressed herself further into her chair, the distracted look was gone. Her focus was on the case, on her DI’s words. ‘Maybe there had been violence previously. Maybe there had been so much violence that there was no need for a trigger incident.’

‘Possibly.’

‘Of course, that would make it premeditated.’

‘And entirely outside the norm for this sort of thing. Look, what we do have on our side is that, either way, Tulloch most likely knew his killer. We might even get lucky and find the killer was very close to home.’

‘We need to find that murder weapon, as soon as possible.’ The mention of the knife almost prompted him to mention the pathologist’s remark about the precision cutting of the spinal column, but he knew not to overload the chief super. If he gave her too much information she would only use it to hinder him. She liked to see simple solutions to every case but Valentine knew that rarely happened. He held back, it was in the post-mortem report anyway, she could find it for herself.

Valentine rose from the chair. ‘Murder weapon or partner. Right now I’d settle for one or the other.’

‘Go and see what Ally and Phil turned up. And keep me in the loop.’

‘Will do.’

Her voice lifted. ‘And I mean it, Bob. Don’t dismiss the fact that this case might be a violent domestic that got out of hand, try and rule that out before you go chasing rainbows.’

‘Well that would make for a quicker clean-up, for sure.’

‘That’s not what I’m getting at. I’m on about prioritising.’

He reached for the door handle. ‘I’ll bear that in mind, boss. That and the team-building exercise.’

DI Bob Valentine learned early in his working life that there was nothing noble in toadying to people like CS Martin. There was nothing to be gained by those who toadied to him either, and they often found their actions had the opposite of their desired effect. He was not so blunt as to come down on the side of the plain speaker – the blurt whatever you like brigade – he reserved another kind of disdain for them. And by this point, he had seen them all, or as the Scots said ‘met yer type afore’.

People were simple when you got beyond the fronts of respectability, personality and bluster. Confronted, and he was a man who liked to confront, their base motives were the same. People were selfish, composed of egocentric desires and petty envies that often tugged at their ideas of worth. Few were aware enough to understand their own desires or cared to look beyond the task of satisfying their needs.

Noting the universal cues that people showed was a depressing exercise for Valentine. He made decisions about people quickly and never altered them. Those he regarded as opponents became non-existent to him. He isolated them in company, ignored them in private and treated them with indifference when fate brought them together. It was not arrogance on his part, but a deep weariness that cancelled out his usual humanity for his fellow man. When he examined this trait of compartmentalising people, he understood it as a simplified way of separating the good and evil in people. He didn’t want to look too closely, however, because one might be more prevalent than the other, and his life was about keeping the two apart.

The DI’s thoughts were interrupted by a familiar voice.

‘Hello, Bob,’ said DI Harris.

‘Eddy, nearly walked by you there, in a world of my own.’

DI Eddy Harris fitted the stereotype of the Ayrshire big man perfectly. It was a generic trait, usually passed on by fathers soured by life’s injustices. You could pick out the Flash Harrises on the force by their strut and the seething, sneering looks they reserved for those in uniform or of a lower rank. It was a generational hand-me-down that should have died out by now, but plenty of men like Harris still perpetrated chauvinism as a right.

‘I’m on my way to see Dino, presume you’re on your way out?’ said Harris.

‘That’s right. And delighted about it.’

‘Christ, I knew I should have got her a bag of Bonios.’

‘Tranquilliser dart might be more appropriate.’ Valentine didn’t want to be reminded of the chief super, he eased the conversation in another direction. ‘How’s the club raid, Meat Hangers wasn’t it?’

‘Little or nothing to go on so far. Waiting for the SOCOs’ report but looking too clean for my liking, not a shred to go on.’

‘It’s one of Norrie Leask’s joints isn’t it? That should be your starter for ten.’

‘If the report comes back full of holes, Leask’ll get a good rattle, don’t worry about that.’ DI Harris headed for the chief super’s office, waving off his colleague as he went.