The detective halted to take in the sweep of the street.Beyond the place he had ran into the welcoming party of neighbours there was a grassy patch, its edges eroded into a muddy thoroughfare, and further on a disconsolate copse of trees. Beyond that was the main road, the town of Ayr, and from there more possibilities than he could count. He turned back, looked the other way up the street: there was a badly scarred bus shelter, the unbreakable Perspex windows melted into holes by determined vandals. The sight held his interest for a second before he returned to the grassy patch: four houses, terraced, between the murder scene and the short cut to the town centre. If he’d been a murderer himself, he would have gone that way. Of course, if he’d been planning it properly, there would have been a car – at that hour of the evening the sound of a car’s engine was not unfamiliar – but this was Whitletts. This was an area where murder wasn’t planned, not in that way; in places like this, murder festered over years and months and then appeared, fully blown, like it was pre-ordained to happen. The consequences were an afterthought at best. They were at worst – and most likely on this occasion – something to run away from as quickly as possible.

DS Sylvia McCormack emerged from the garden where she had been directing officers in a search, as she approached the detective she waved with a pair of rubber gloves. ‘Hello, sir, sorry to drag you away, hope it wasn’t anything special.’

Valentine didn’t want to be reminded of just how special his plans had been this evening but let it pass. ‘What’s the SP, Sylvia?’

‘Well, we have a white male, late-forties-to-fifties, with a deep wound at the base of the neck. Dead, of course.’

‘He’d bloody want to be for all this fuss.’ The DI walked towards the front door. On the step he paused to point out some medical paraphernalia, needles and phials. ‘Did the paramedics get to him before he carked?’

‘Eh, no, that was for …’ she removed a spiral-bound notebook from her coat pocket, read from the page, ‘Agnes Gilchrist, a neighbour.’

‘Stumbled on the scene, so we have a witness?’

DS McCormack turned another page in her notebook, she was looking for the answer but it wasn’t there. ‘She was unconscious on arrival, sir.’

‘On our arrival, Sylvia. But not her arrival. I’m assuming somebody called emergency for us to be here in the first place, was it her?’

McCormack lowered her gaze, retrieved a pencil and started to write on the notebook. ‘I’ll get that checked out, right away.’

Valentine let a moment’s silence sit between them. ‘Thanks, Sylvia, it might turn out to be important.’ He made for the front door of the property, beckoning the DS to follow.

Beyond the door frame lines of dark blood were smeared along the white walls. There seemed to be two distinct trails, one slightly higher than the other. They ran thick, initially, heavy in blood, and then thinned into tapered points that looked like digits of a hand. As the detectives stood in the hallway they were joined by DS Phil Donnelly. ‘Good to see you, sir.’

Valentine returned the greeting, but it was always odd to have someone say it was good to see you at a murder scene. ‘What do you make of this, Phil?’

The detective turned towards the wall, rolled on the balls of his feet. ‘Hard to say, looks like two trails.’ Donnelly took his hands from his pockets, traced the space between the trails. ‘Could be made by one marker, I mean, it’s not out of the question.’

‘Do we have prints?’

The DS shook his head. ‘The duster’s on the way, should have them within the hour.’

‘Let me know the minute you have them.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘If we’ve got two sets of prints in there then that’s two facing murder.’

They stared at the smears on the wall once again. There was no way of separating the two lines, no way of judging if one set was a match in size and shape for the other.

‘We need the duster on this right away, Phil.’

‘I’ll chase him now.’ Donnelly tapped his mobile phone, jammed it between ear and shoulder. ‘What are you thinking, boss, robbery gone wrong? That would account for the two bods.’

Valentine scanned the interior. ‘There’s nothing to rob here.’

Donnelly tried to win back some pride. ‘Might have been holding something – drugs, drugs money?’

‘If you know this is a drugs house, I’d listen to you. Do you know that?’

He shook his head, the phone slipped, he made a clumsy reach to catch it in his hands. ‘Shit, that was close.’

Valentine stood waiting for an answer.

‘I don’t know that much about the place, sir.’

‘Then save the conjecture for when we actually know something, son.’

Donnelly wasn’t done. ‘I was just thinking, from a motive point of view, you know, that if there was cash or drugs here then it would be a good reason to off someone and flee.’

‘Yes, of course. And if the crown jewels had been pinched and stashed here, that would be a reason too.’ Valentine didn’t like sarcasm, in himself or others, but a little humbling on a murder investigation kept everyone alert.

DS Donnelly tried the phone at his ear once again. ‘Still ringing.’

Valentine turned towards his detectives. The fey tone was gone; he sounded gruff. ‘Let’s stick to what we know. I don’t want wild conjecture. I don’t want guesswork. I want facts and I want an open mind in the absence of those. This is a murder scene not a pub quiz down the local, do you all understand that?’

‘Yes, boss.’

‘Good.’ Valentine knew he had their attention. It would be a stupid member of the squad that tested his seriousness now.

A bell chimed, it was DS McCormack’s mobile. ‘Emergency just confirmed, sir. The call for police came from the neighbour, Agnes Gilchrist.’

‘Good. Maybe she saw something.’ The DI cached away the possibilities. ‘Right, now that we’ve got that clear, let’s go and take a look at our victim – middle-aged male, white, do we know anything else?’

The detectives stared at the ground.

‘C’mon, somebody.’

DS Donnelly turned over his palm where he’d marked the skin with ink. ‘The neighbours say the Millars stay here. Sandra Millar’s husband died a few years back, she has a daughter called Jade and an older son who doesn’t live with them anymore.’

‘Ages?’

‘Don’t know yet. Teenage and twenties on the kids. At a guess, I’d say the mother might be the same as our victim.’

‘Do we have a name for him?’

Donnelly scanned his palm again, the pen stood out on his skin under the bright light. ‘James Tulloch.’

5

Jade Millar removed her flat palms from her stomach and pulled the sleeves of her jacket over her hands. It was a distraction, to change the course of her thinking, and because her mother hated it. She had said it was something four-year-olds did but her mother wasn’t there to object. Jade heard her words, though; all day they’d been with her. She didn’t know why it should be that today was the first time in her life that she carried around her mother’s words.

Who listened to their mother? Who listened to her mother? Fathers were different, she knew girls at school who always did what their father told them because they were too scared not to. She’d been envious of them once. When Dad died she wished that there was someone to tell her what to do. She hated seeing girls dropped off by their fathers at school, taken to the shops, or anywhere at all. It was like they did it just to annoy her.

‘Oh, Dad.’ Even the word was difficult to say.

Dad was there with her today, too. But that was different, he was always there. She even dreamed about him at night. Alena from school said she never dreamed about her dad and wasn’t it a bit strange. ‘You should be dreaming about boys, you have Niall for God’s sake.’