‘Two wrongs don’t make a right,’ he yelled.

‘No, Bob, they don’t.’ She stopped at the top of the stairs, turned. ‘And don’t think I’d be so petty, as you’re very fond of saying this is a murder investigation and one I was about to remove from you until it became a double murder investigation. Count yourself lucky you’re still on the job and don’t expect to get any more leeway from me now.’

33

DI Bob Valentine’s arrival in Cumnock was like any other visit to his former hometown: uneasy. There had been a time when coming home was a welcome event, he’d visit his parents and visit his past, but those days were gone. There was nothing for him in Cumnock now. If he was being honest, and dispassionate, he would have said there was nothing in Cumnock at all now. There had been work, once. Mines with a hundred years of coal that Thatcher shut up and flooded lest anyone try to reverse her decision. His father had mined those pits.

There were the streets lined with black spit, the talk of the Friday-night pint that generally ended on a Sunday, and throughout it all, the hard-worn Cumnock women who always kept a clean front step scrubbed twice a day. The town had changed now, and the changeover had been brief. The town had gone from his home to a place not fit for animals in a few short years. The idea that dole moles and junkies might ever care about their front step amused him now.

‘Something funny?’ said the chief super.

‘The old toon …’

‘You grew up here didn’t you, father a miner?’

‘Yes, on both counts.’ They stood on the edge of the field where uniformed officers were busying themselves with blue and white tape, not quite sure whether it was appropriate to tie-up bramble bushes. ‘Place is a mystery to me now, though.’

‘It’s bloody Cumnock, the place is a mystery to everyone. Need your head tested to stay here now.’

‘Or have no choice.’ Valentine turned to face CS Martin, ‘That’s the thing though, we had no choice when I was growing up, but people cared then. People made the most of the place.’

A tut. ‘I can’t see this lot bothering their backside. We’re too far gone now, Bob. Places like this were written off years ago. You’re well and truly out of it … Come on, our stiff awaits.’

Valentine watched and waited as the chief super negotiated a dry-stone dyke. She made noisy objections each time the stones wobbled under her hands and her coat tails rode up in comical fashion as she descended the dyke. She was still cursing when she reached the field, the grass brushing the hem of her coat and forming a wet tide line. It was a bizarre scene for the detective, so out of place, so strange to see his boss wading through a field by the town where he’d once watched his father set off for the pit with a lunch pail under his arm. He felt like he had lived two lives, that they should never have crossed, but here he was watching his present attaching to his past. If there was a message to be discerned, it escaped him; but the eerie feeling that he should be drawing some kind of meaning from the event turned inside him.

‘We should have brought wellies,’ CS Martin roared over the wet grass.

‘Wait till you get further in, you’ll be calling for waders.’

‘That better be a joke.’

‘No joke. You’ll need bloody scuba gear if you fall down one of the shafts.’

The chief super halted her stride, turned to one of the uniformed bodies. ‘How far do we have to go?’

‘Just a little bit further.’ The uniform pointed. ‘Over there, where the tracks end.’

Valentine caught up with them. ‘Tell me they’re our tracks and we’re not parading half the force through our crime scene.’

The uniform shrugged, looked blankly ahead. It seemed too complicated a question for him to understand, never mind answer.

‘Christ, I knew it. We’re up to our knees in it, stamping all over potential evidence.’

‘Relax, Bob. I’m sure if there’s any footprints in this muck we’ve already got them cast.’

The DI peered up to the sky, but didn’t offer a reply; he’d trust his insights into the way uniform worked over the chief super’s any day of the week. As he looked at the churned mess of the ground he knew if there had been anything of use there it was now gone. The fresh path cut through two fringes of flattened long grass that stretched all the way from the drystone dyke. Up ahead the SOCOs in white suits were shuffling about, the unearthly starkness of their appearance always made Valentine aware of the close proximity of death. The dream, or whatever it was, where he had met Bert returned to him. The message had been to look for a soldier but he knew that wasn’t what he was going to find here.

As they reached the main area of activity, Valentine was handed a box of rubber gloves, he took a pair and passed them to CS Martin.

‘No thanks,’ she said. ‘I’m prepared to observe but I draw the line at poking about in fusty remains.’

‘Whatever you say.’ Valentine snapped a glove onto his wrist. ‘You might want the blue slippers, though, keep your shoes clean.’

‘Is that supposed to be a sexist remark?’

‘If it is I’m not aware of it.’

‘Women and shoes, y’know …’

Valentine knew all about women and shoes, his wife had a theory that it was something she fixated on herself because it was the only part of her body that hadn’t grown. The DI eyed Martin but kept the observation to himself and approached the depute fiscal.

‘Hello, Col,’ he said.

‘Ah, detective. Hello to you too.’

The prat knew it was detective inspector and Valentine knew that he knew it but let it slide. Colin Scott fed on irritating people, the worst move was always to show they’d got to you. ‘I take it you’re done here?’

‘All yours, you can … do as thou wilt.’

‘That … shall be the whole of the law.’ Valentine’s retort put the fiscal on guard, police – even detective inspectors – weren’t supposed to be educated enough to finish his obscure quotations.

‘Christ, get a room you pair.’ Martin marched between them, approached the huddle of SOCOs.

It was a patchy piece of ground, bare mostly. The grass halted about four feet away and a muddy expanse, like a dam, had pooled brown water on one side. There was clearly a source for the water somewhere but Valentine couldn’t spot it. As he moved closer to the group of uniforms and SOCOs he surmised that a flooded pit was the cause; and then he caught a glimpse of a grey-white face that was no longer human.

The young man had deep hollows where his eyes should be and a gape of mouth that had been shaped into an unnatural droop. Valentine saw the jaw was broken, it was too wide to be a natural opening. The victim lay on his back, a bony chest exposed to the elements showed bruising, deep-coloured contusions and lighter, yellowing finger marks. He’d been beaten. Blood pooled beneath the nose, around the eyes and to the sides of the black gaping mouth. He was young, that was clear, but not the youngest corpse the detective had seen.

‘Just a boy, isn’t he?’ said Valentine.

‘Just a lad of sixteen summers,’ said Martin.

‘We’ve provisionally ID’d him then?’

‘Yes.’ She pushed past the DI, moved closer to the pale body. ‘I should have said, shouldn’t I? Must be annoying that, being kept in the dark.’

He didn’t respond, it seemed to be a day for holding back.

‘It’s Niall Paton, the details match our description from the parents.’ Martin crouched down. ‘He’ll need a good clean-up before we do a formal ID. He’s been battered black and blue, obviously pissed somebody off.’

He squatted down beside the chief super. ‘Or had something somebody wanted.’

‘He’s sixteen, though, what could he have had that anyone wanted, an Xbox?’

‘Information, maybe. Like the whereabouts of Jade Millar, or her brother, or her brother’s old army buddy.’