‘No doubt about that. I wouldn’t mind a look at Norrie Leask’s knuckles right now.’

‘I wouldn’t think he’d get his own hands dirty with that sort of thing, sir.’

‘No, you’re right. He gets others to do the legwork. Get onto those staff records from the Meat Hangers, if you find anything give me a holler. I’ve got a debriefing with the Chuckle Brothers.’

‘Are Ally and Phil back then?’

‘Looks like it.’ He pointed to the officers who had stationed themselves in the glassed-off office at the other end of the incident room.

‘Jeez, they look pensive.’

‘Yeah, and not in a good way.’

McCormack headed to her workstation and Valentine made for the office, grabbing a coffee from the nearby tray as he went. A few heads rose from desks as he passed but they slunk back rapidly; no one had anything to say, nothing to add to the ongoing investigation. Valentine’s stomach tensed with the prospect of what his team were facing.

It had been a tough time, visiting the Patons and telling them he thought the son they had reported missing was lying in the morgue. Asking them to identify the boy, as he lay there bruised and battered, had been even more painful. There was never a nice time to tell anyone that a loved one had been taken from them, but a child murder was a brutal undertaking. For Valentine, this was the second killing on his patch lately, and he didn’t want to see another one.

As he opened the door to the office Donnelly and McAlister acknowledged the DI with downtrodden nods.

‘Christ, I hope the hangdog looks aren’t an indicator that your jolly to the east was a complete waste,’ said Valentine.

McAlister looked to Donnelly, his heavy eyes pleaded for a reply. They were worn out, tired. ‘It depends what you want to hear, boss,’ said Donnelly.

‘I’ll settle for our perp in the cells and Dino slobbering over a bone with a big bow on it. Of course, the way things are going, I have a feeling you’re going to tell me the case is being taken over by the boys with MP on their arms.’

‘I’m not entirely sure what we’ve got,’ said McAlister, scratching a stubbled chin.

Valentine moved behind his desk, pulled the chair under him. ‘You’ll have heard about the Paton boy.’

‘Yes. No age at all was he.’

‘He was sixteen, Phil. And no, that’s no bloody age at all.’ Valentine told the detectives about the recent links that had been discovered to the Meat Hangers robbery before skirting over the run-in he’d had with the chief super.

‘She’s a paranoiac, thinks we’re all talking about her,’ said McAlister.

‘We are,’ said Donnelly, a rare smile creeping in.

‘But, what I’m saying is, we should never have kept the pathology report from her, was just asking for trouble.’

‘Well, that was my call,’ said Valentine. ‘So, I’ll take the fall for that one. But I had my reasons … Now from here on, we keep Dino in the loop, we won’t get away with it again.’

‘Not a chance.’

‘None. And unless you fancy answering to Flash Harris you’ll take heed … Now, tell me about your visit to the barracks.’

The pair exchanged glances once more and McAlister conceded to Donnelly’s claim on the initial briefing.

‘It was a tough gig, as you might imagine,’ said Donnelly.

‘I didn’t expect them to lay out the red carpet.’

‘No. They didn’t, nothing like it in fact. But we persisted. The first day was gathering names, people who knew Tulloch and Millar.’

Valentine cut in. ‘What about Grant Finnie?’

‘We just heard about him, funnily enough, about the same time you did by the looks of things.’

‘Go on …’

‘Well, you know that Tulloch was about as popular as a turd in a jacuzzi, but he was a higher rank too, a sergeant to be precise and he had a bit of a rep as a ball-buster. Millar and Finnie were both under his command but when we put that to some of the squaddies they clammed up, it was very strange, almost rehearsed.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Like they were all reading from the same script, like they’d been told to keep schtum.’

‘By who?’

‘No idea, boss,’ said Donnelly. ‘Higher up the ladder I’d expect but that could be anyone. Of course, it could be the institutionalised mind-set – no one in the army wants to be seen as a grass.’

Valentine touched his brow. ‘Hang on, you’ve just told me no one was saying anything.’

McAlister spoke: ‘Officially, that’s true. Unofficially, and I mean off the record, we got a hint that something had went on between Tulloch and Finnie.’

‘Like what?’

‘It was in Helmand, on a tour of duty in late 2013.’

Valentine found himself dipping his head towards the desk, there was a sound, a voice he recognised that shouldn’t be in the room. He heard Bert’s words again and began to feel queasily unwell.

McAlister got up and prodded Valentine’s shoulder. ‘You OK there, boss?’

The room’s mood returned to normal, the DI snapped, ‘I’m fine. What happened in Helmand?’

Donnelly joined McAlister standing in front of Valentine’s desk. ‘We don’t know. But we can guess that it wasn’t pleasant.’

‘Try highly irregular,’ said McAlister. ‘We spoke to one of the boys from the regiment off the base, that’s why we needed to stay a bit longer. He told us that there was an incident, a crime of some sort and he thought it involved one of the women on the ground, a native …’

‘What happened?’

‘We don’t know for sure.’

‘Well, are we talking rape or torture?’

‘Boss, we’re talking murder.’

‘She was killed?’

‘Shot,’ said Donnelly, his voice a low drawl.

‘That’s a bloody war crime, no wonder they hushed it up, can you imagine the fallout in the media?’ Valentine got to his feet. ‘How much of this have you confirmed?’

‘On the record?’

‘Don’t piss about, Ally, on the record, off the record, we’re not in the business of protecting murderers.’

Donnelly held up his palms. ‘Look, our informant stuck his neck out.’

‘What about that bloody woman, Phil? What about Tulloch and Niall Paton? They stuck their necks out too. I need more to go on than a rumour.’

‘We checked the books, I mean the official paperwork. It all ties up, the times. Tulloch and Finnie were in Helmand together at the same time, returned together at the same time, but their departure wasn’t at the same time as the regiment shipped out.’

‘That’s hardly conclusive.’

‘No, but their discharge papers might be. They were booted out the Royal Highland Fusiliers on the same day, and they both hit civvie street without so much as a kind word from the army about their spud-peeling skills.’

37

The incident room was a blur of unfamiliar faces, bodies that were no more than obstacles and a low-level hum that might have been chatter but might also have been the inside of Valentine’s head cracking. He wasn’t in an unfamiliar place, the opposite was true, but it was certainly an uncomfortable place. His booming senses and eddying emotions told him that the return had been instant, round about the time Phil had detailed the results of the east-coast investigation.

‘Sir, can I have a word?’ It was DS McCormack.

‘Not now, Sylvia.’

‘It’s important.’

‘I’m sure it is, but it’ll have to wait.’ Valentine headed for the door and crossed the corridor in loping strides. He tried to increase his pace but the effort didn’t bring the desired results, only made him feel more off balance. He reached out for the wall to steady himself and almost fell against it. He stopped, gathered breath and made the final steps to the door of the gents in an almost drunken stupor.

Inside, the door closed, the atmosphere changed. The sounds changed, the clatter of the incident room was replaced by a still almost hypnotic birr from the strip lights. He heard a voice and at once knew it didn’t belong to anyone that existed on the same plain as him. There might have been actual words, and meaning attached to those, but the DI was too unsettled to allow himself to strain for their meaning. He rushed to the sink and started to splash cold water on his face and neck.