‘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.’

13

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.