Alena didn’t get it. She always said something annoying; most days Jade ignored her when she had to but not today. Just the thought of Alena’s words made her hands form fists.

Jade took out her phone and scrolled down to Alena’s name, she paused with her finger over the delete key in her contacts file. She wanted to do it, to get rid of her. It was simple enough to get rid of people, you just deleted their number from your phone and their profile from your Facebook friends list and they didn’t exist anymore. Why couldn’t the real world be the same?

‘Because that’s not how the real world works, Jade!’ Her mother’s words again.

‘Go away!’ She bashed the side of her head with the phone. ‘Go away. Go away.’

She knew she wouldn’t go away, though.

‘I’ll never leave you,’ that’s what she’d said to her when Dad died. And her mother was tough, her brother had said so, and Darry knew all about being tough. He’d know what to do with this mess.

In the street outside her home a group of people had gathered. Jade watched them from beneath a tree on the other side of the road. There was a police car and an ambulance, another couple of cars with flashing lights that were probably police cars too, and a blue truck that blocked nearly the entire road. Men and women in uniform were taping off the fence, the gate and the bushes. Another group directed the neighbours indoors. It looked like a television show, like the time Brad Pitt had come to Glasgow and it was on the news.

Jade took her hands from the sleeves of her coat, it didn’t seem right to have them there when she knew her mother objected. For a moment she stared at her hands, what should she do with them? God, what was wrong? It was like her mind was missing or all the thoughts had fallen out. She tried her hands in her pockets, felt for her mobile phone and gripped it tightly when she found it.

‘Oh, God …’

Tears came, slow at first, because they were a surprise to her. But when she knew they were there, rolling down her cheeks, they intensified. They weren’t normal tears, they came from another part of her. Tears appeared when you were in pain, she knew all about that, but these were for something else.

She didn’t know what to do. Darry said Mum always knew what to do and wouldn’t listen to advice that didn’t suit her. Jade hadn’t said that, they were her brother’s words. But wasn’t that the problem? She had everything mixed up and Darry wasn’t there either, she wished he was.

She couldn’t read the message in her phone again, the one she’d sent to her brother at the barracks, because all the words just got jumbled up, started to mean something else. She needed someone to sort out the mess, to tell her everything would be all right.

She pulled up her contacts on the phone again and dialled her brother.

He answered quickly. ‘Jade, what’s up now?’

She tried to speak but her mouth was numb with all the crying. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

‘What do you mean?’ He was still travelling, she could hear noise from the wheels echoing in the cab of the bus.

‘Darry, it’s Mum. I don’t know what to do.’

‘What’s happened, Jade? Just tell me, slowly.’

‘I went home, like you said. I was waiting for you. I … I had a fight with Mum and, oh God, Darry I don’t know what happened. There’s police everywhere, in the house, in the garden. I can’t see a thing except police and everyone’s out staring at the house.’

‘Calm down, Jade. If you get hysterical, it’s not going to help you.’

‘But I don’t know what to do.’

‘Where’s Mum?’

‘I don’t know. She was with him. Darry, it’s such a mess.’ Her sobbing increased.

‘You can’t go home, Jade. Do you hear me? I don’t want you to go near the police. You can’t talk to anyone.’

‘I’m right across the street, though. And somebody needs to do something.’

Darry exhaled slowly into the phone. ‘Jade, you have to listen to me.’

‘I know.’ The sobbing reached hysteria.

‘I’ll be in town soon and you can tell me everything but don’t talk to anyone before then. I’m staying at Finnie’s place, do you remember where that is?’

‘I think so.’

Darry’s speech quickened. ‘Good. It’s on the way to the harbour, above the pub. Now, the bloke in the pub is a good lad, his name’s Brian and he has the key for Fin’s place, you can ask him for it, say you’re going to tidy up before your brother arrives.’

‘But won’t Fin be there?’

‘He’s out of town for a few days. He won’t mind you being there because he knows why I’m coming home.’

‘You told Fin?’

‘I told him some of it, Jade. I had to. He knows I’m not due leave and wouldn’t desert the place if it wasn’t serious.’

‘But …’

‘Jade, he’s an old friend, he understands. He’s on our side, honestly.’

‘OK.’ A tired note played in her voice.

‘You sound exhausted, just go now. I’ll be home soon.’

‘Darry …’

‘What is it?’

‘Promise me everything will be OK.’

‘I promise.’ His speech stalled, then lit up again. ‘Go, Jade, quickly now, and don’t stop for anyone.’

Jade held the phone to her ear to make sure her brother had gone. When the line tone changed and the call ended she lowered the phone and stared into the street. Another police car was arriving, she watched the uniformed officers jog towards her house, and she raised the mobile phone again.

‘Niall, it’s me.’

‘Where are you now?’

‘I’m at home, I need to see you.’

‘OK. Tell me where.’

6

As the corpse appeared in front of him DI Bob Valentine’s neck muscles stiffened. It was always the same, like a physical reminder of his calling. He had not joined up to strut about like some of his colleagues, to chase rank. It had been a deeper connection. If he had been looking to attract censure from his father – a striking miner at the time – he could hardly have chosen a worse profession, but that wasn’t what he was about. As fathers went, he had a gem; he wouldn’t want to injure his pride, or any other part of him. The fact that Valentine signed up for the force had little to do with an intention: the police force took him.

From boyhood the idea of good and evil preoccupied Valentine. Even games like cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers had a deeper, darker edge than with other boys. It seemed, to him, the stuff of life. This was what he was about, he was a hunter and a protector. He had grown up and sworn himself to maintaining the pretence that passed for civil society. He had always known it was written for him. Somewhere was a ledger with the words: Bob Valentine, finder of sociopaths and psychopaths.

The wound in James Tulloch’s neck drew the detective’s interest. Normally, the cause of death would be the first point he looked at but his own stabbing – still so recent – made him recoil. It wasn’t the excessive amount of blood, or the torn flesh that protruded above the soaking T-shirt, but the way the sight set his mind tripping back to an unhappy time.

He had tried to seal off the part of his memory that stored the entry of a blade into his chest that punctured his heart. The pain was not what bothered him, or the fifty pints of blood they transfused into him at the hospital; the words ‘angiography’, ‘thoracotomy’ and ‘heart-lung bypass’ were just terms the chief super liked to test his mettle with. He was repaired, almost fully; it was the damage his near death had done to his family, to Clare and the girls, that still worried him.

The kitchen table was nothing special, an old MFI number with a couple of drawers and rickety legs. His late mother would have said it had ‘seen better days’ but then she would never have had chipboard under her roof in the first place. The sag in the middle, where the weight of a man’s torso lay, suggested his mother would be right to assume the product was useless.