A Taste of Ashes (DI Bob Valentine Book 2) (9 page)

Finnie looked to the rear of the car, shook his head. ‘No, it’s fine with me here.’

As he opened the passenger’s door, stepped inside and positioned the bulky holdall on his knees, the driver watched, patiently. ‘Ready to go?’

Finnie nodded.

‘A B&B it is.’

The drive was quiet, once Finnie had let it be known he wasn’t feeling talkative. He didn’t need the tourist spiel about trips to Goatfell and Brodick Castle, he knew the place well enough already. The cabbie was only after a tip, you could tell. The eager ones got chatty, in case you were the chatty type, but if they sussed you preferred quiet then they soon shut up. They’d concentrate on making you comfortable, heater up or window down, that kind of chat he could handle.

‘Here we go, she keeps a tidy house in there.’ The taxi driver pointed to a substantial sandstone villa with a short pebbled drive, three floors of net curtains and a large
Vacancies
sign hanging in the front window.

‘That’ll do,’ said Finnie. He handed over the cash and waited for his change.

On his way towards the front door Finnie tried not to think about the circumstances which had brought him here. He didn’t want to examine the events of recent days closely. He wanted to forget them completely, but that wasn’t possible.

He pressed the doorbell and waited. It was strange being back in Brodick. The place seemed familiar, the crazy golf on the main drag, the cycling lycra-wearers clogging the roads. Had he ever been away? The answer was yes, the time in between was not something that could be rubbed out, certainly not now. It did seem strange though, coming back to his past when so much of his thought had been stuck there lately.

‘Hello, sir.’ The woman was a pale blonde in her fifties, she had the stout frame some settle for in middle age but it didn’t suit her bearing. As she ushered Finnie inside, made a fuss of registering and form filling, the petty bureaucracy showed her priggishness.

‘Is that us done?’ said Finnie.

‘Yes. That’s the formalities aside,’ she handed over a key, ‘I do hope you’ll enjoy your stay on the island.’

‘Thank you.’ The words sounded automatic, carried no connotation. He hoped she would rate him as just another gruff Glaswegian, or some other Central Belt scruff. He didn’t want to draw attention to himself, so for once the stereotype was welcome.

At the foot of the stairs something beyond the front door caught Finnie’s attention, in the window a white car marked
police
was crawling along the road. For a few seconds he followed its slow path and when it fell from view he went back to the stairs. His returning glance caught the landlady’s, she continued to watch him as he went to his room.

Inside, Finnie flattened his back against the door and started to slump towards the floor. His head was heavy, lolling on his shoulders before his chest took the weight from his neck. He raised the holdall onto his thighs and tucked up his legs, clutching both bag and legs with his tight-gripping arms. It was not a comfortable pose but he held it for several minutes before the cold started to insinuate itself beneath the door, forcing him to rise.

‘What the hell am I doing here?’ he said.

He moved into the room, still clutching the holdall. As he reached the bed, with the white sheets tucked tight at the corners above a rosy valance, he lowered the bag and looked at his hand. The palm was red, deep-lined and moist with sweat. He opened and closed his fingers a few times then dug nails into the itchy palm.

The place was too open, too visible. He went to the window and closed the curtains. Enough daylight escaped the street outside to fill the room but he flicked on the electric light to chase away shadows. The large bed dominated the room, and the bag dominated the bed. He couldn’t bear its presence, lunged for it, shoving the holdall below the bed, kicking the handles as they poked beneath the florid valance.

Finnie was still kicking as a noise began inside his coat pocket. He extracted the mobile phone with two fingers and held it before his eyes. The caller ID showed it was Norrie Leask. He dropped the phone on the bed and waited for the ringing to stop. When the ringtone ended the silence felt unnatural, then two sharp tones sounded to indicate a message had been left on voicemail.

He collected the phone from the bedspread and opened the inbox.

You have 62 unread messages waiting
.

Scrolling through the list showed most were from Norrie Leask but there was also a number from Darren Millar, and one at the top of the list from Darry’s sister, Jade.

The sight of the young girl’s name in his phone set Finnie’s hand trembling. His thumb hovered over the contact number for a few seconds but as his throat constricted and tears fell from his eyes, he could not dial the number.

‘Where the bloody hell are you, Jade?’ He hardly recognised the weak voice, shrill with emotion, it sounded like a child’s.

The image of himself that his mind conjured forced a check on his actions. He smeared the tears from his cheeks, tweaked the end of his nose, and returned to the phone. This time, he went into his messages and listened to the last one from Leask.

‘Now come on, Fin, you have to answer these calls sometime. You know who this is, again. I’m not going to pretend I’m a happy man with you, Fin, you’ve let me down badly. You’ve let yourself down, Fin. Now it’s not too late to turn around, wherever you are, and bring back what’s not yours. I’m not going to try and fool you that there won’t be consequences, but nothing you can’t handle, just some face-saving for me …’

Finnie lowered the phone, screamed, ‘You don’t scare me, you bastard.’ His heart accelerated as he gripped the phone and returned to the message.

‘… Don’t make me come looking for you, that’s an expense I don’t want, and one that I will take out of your hide, boy. I won’t lose face for you, Fin. Not on your life. You can be guaranteed of that. Now, I do know I put a lot of temptation in your way and I can see I made a mistake there, you’re obviously not the man I thought you were. But if you let me have it back, we can still stay the course with the plan. What we all agreed. You know that’s best for everyone, well nearly everyone, of course. You know it’s too late for …’

Finnie threw the phone at the bed, it burrowed into the pillows.

His voice came high and firm. ‘Bastard. Who do you think you are, Leask? Playing the hard man with me, you don’t know hard. You don’t know me. You don’t know what I’ve seen and done. You’re nothing. Nothing. A tin-pot gangster. A bloody fantasist. I’ve met the real thing. I’ve done evil, Leask … You’re nothing. You don’t scare me.’

As he paused, Finnie became aware of knocking on the other side of the door. Slow at first, but gaining in persistence.

Chloe faced her father through the open car window and tugged her school bag tight to her shoulder. ‘Why are you here and not Mum?’

‘Why not?’

‘Just asking.’

‘That’s not much of an answer, dear.’

‘Well, it’s just wrong.’

She looked back to the school building, pupils were rushing about in every direction, yelling, screaming.

‘Come on, get in. It’s like Bedlam out there.’ He started the engine. ‘I’m heading that way anyway, your mum was busy.’

The bag got jerked from her shoulder, she looked skyward and stomped for the passenger door of the car. Inside, the door slammed shut, Chloe threw her school bag onto the back seat. For a moment, she stared there, as if the bag had burst or flown out the window, and then she turned. ‘You’d think they’d have given you another car.’

Valentine spluttered a line of laughter. ‘Why would they do that?’

‘Because of the … mess.’

‘The bloodstain you mean, you can say the word y’know, it’s not going to install a depression in me.’

‘It’s just so wrong, I mean, you know that.’

‘Chloe, at the best of times a car is an expensive piece of kit, with all the cutbacks in the country right now do you really expect them to scrap it because there’s a stain on the back seat?’

Chloe reached for her seatbelt, tugged at the inertia reel. ‘It’s wrong. You nearly died, I mean did die. At work on the job, and they still expect you to drive the car where you lost all that blood …
all
your blood!’

The DI always tried to listen to his children. Ever since they were very small, their first mumblings and ramblings, it all seemed important to him. He didn’t ever want to be the type of parent who dismissed their thoughts as just those of children. It was a duty, something a decent parent did. If he let that slip, what was left? Children learned fast and needed to know they were listened to, that they were important, otherwise they simply accepted the opposite. And that would have been his fault. There were too many damaged souls in the world, he’d met many of them, and the thought that he’d increase their tally – however inadvertently – with one of his own children was a deep hurt he couldn’t entertain.

‘What do you think my boss would say if I took your complaint to her?’

‘That depends.’

‘Depends on what?’

‘Depends if she’s a decent human being or not. If she valued you, and your family, she’d get you a new car.’

‘It’s a company car, I don’t think family is that high on her list of considerations.’

‘But it should be.’

‘Does it bother you that much, Chloe?’ He watched his daughter play with the hem of her skirt. Just what was the conversation really about? ‘I’m sorry I missed your big night, love.’

‘It’s OK.’

‘No. It’s not OK at all. Not for me it’s not. I wanted to be there, to see my little girl make her big stage debut.’

Chloe pressed herself further into the seat. ‘It’s the job again, isn’t it? It’s always the job.’

‘Now you sound like your mother.’

‘Oh, please.’

‘Shall we get going? Can’t miss your drama class if you’re to be a movie star.’

On the road to Troon, Valentine let his daughter select a radio station that met with her approval. An insipid boyband’s tune filled the car, a manufactured kind of music that made the DI ask what had gone wrong with the world? He kept his opinion to himself, though. There were times when he could get away with teasing his daughter about her musical tastes but this wasn’t one of them. He wasn’t under any pressure from her for missing the opening night at the theatre, she wasn’t the type to make a point for the sake of it, all the pressure came from him. The core feeling inside that said he’d let her down, let Clare down and now he needed to make amends. It could be shoved away, forgotten about for now, but where it would go and what it would do when it got there was a worry to him.

‘I don’t know what Mum’s got to be so busy with, it’s not like there’s a sale at TK Maxx or anything.’

‘Come on, Chloe.’

‘I mean it, she doesn’t work. All she has to do is shop and run about with her friends now and again … Oh, and drive me and Fi to the odd thing.’

‘She has your Granda to look after too, now.’

‘Granda looks after himself, he’d clobber you for saying something like that.’

‘Am I picking up a bit of a vibe here, Chloe?’

‘Is that you trying to sound street?’

Valentine stared at his daughter. ‘I am street.’

They laughed together. The enormous pressure eased away.

‘Yeah, I’m pathetic, I know. But all dads are a wee bit.’

‘Is it funny for you having Granda around again?’

‘No. Not really. We never see each other, sometimes in the passing, like ships in the night.’

‘That’s what Mum says, you’re like ships in the night.’

‘Oh, right.’

‘Is Mum OK, Dad?’

‘What do you mean by that?’ His answer was a delaying tactic, he knew Chloe was growing up fast, forming her own impressions now. Clare was hard work sometimes but he didn’t want his daughter to know that, or if she was coming to the conclusion, he didn’t want her to think it. Not just yet, anyway. Not whilst she was still a child and prone to rash judgements.

‘Just, y’know. She gets worked up and that, like this theatre thing. It doesn’t bother me really but Mum got upset.’

‘Your mother’s a sensitive one, Chloe. She cares deeply about things, about you and Fiona and the whole family. She wants things to be right, all the time.’

‘But it can’t be can it? I mean, that’s just magazines and that.’

‘It doesn’t stop her trying.’

‘But it’s pointless. Futile.’

‘To you maybe, love, but to her it’s the stuff of life. Everyone needs something to cling to, to make it all make sense. It doesn’t matter what it is, for you it might become acting, and that’s great but it doesn’t have to be any greater than anybody else’s stuff. We’re all different.’

‘But what about when she goes on about your job and makes you both upset, that’s not right either. And that’s her thing too, y’know.’

Valentine didn’t like the way the conversation was going, the plan had been to spend a little time with his daughter and appease his wife but all he’d done was confirm for himself that every family’s unhappiness was unique. That always trying to be the better parent was impossible when kids drew their own conclusions regardless. ‘This is getting very deep for the road to drama class, is it not?’

Chloe put her heels on the rim of the seat, pulled her knees up to her chin. ‘I can’t talk to Mum about things like this. There’s only you and Granda.’

‘Now your Granda could talk the leg off an iron pot, on any subject.’

She seemed to sense his need to change the topic now. ‘It’s all right, Dad. That’s all I wanted to say.’

‘It is?’

‘Yeah. It is.’

At the turn-off for Troon, on the road skirting the golf course, the boyband was replaced by Eminem and Valentine felt his faith in the future returning. At the drama class Chloe waved, dodged some puddles in the car park, and went inside the old red sandstone building. What went on inside, what constituted an acting lesson? He found he had no reference for it at all. It was impossible to answer, another of life’s mysteries and one that he had no pressing urge to solve. As the Vectra rolled back to the road he tried to clear some headspace for the real purpose of his visit to Troon. It wasn’t something he was looking forward to, or even cared for, but it did seem necessary. And, he wanted to appease DS McCormack.