A Taste of Ashes (DI Bob Valentine Book 2) (12 page)

‘What a total dick!’ said McCormack.

‘I bet he gets on great with Dino. Do me a favour, just unplug that mobile altogether, and the radio, would you?’

‘Is that wise? You know she’ll go bananas if she can’t get hold of you.’

‘Well, I’ll know it’s serious if I see blue lights flashing in the rear-view, Sylvia.’

DI Bob Valentine was uncomfortable in the Glasgow lab. It didn’t matter how many times he visited the place, it always felt unfamiliar. The faces changed too regularly and the white, clinical feel seemed to repel any attempt to humanise the area. No one looked happy in their starched coats, shuffling around in silence like extensions of the furniture or the equipment. The lab was like a temporary affair, like the set of a movie or a greenhouse that was only useable in the summertime, no one wanted to lay claim to it or make their mark there. In the other areas of the station, the offices, even the morgue, there were hints of humanity: coffee cups, pot plants and pictures of children. There was none of that here.

‘So cold, isn’t it?’ said Valentine.

‘I guess so. Never really thought about it,’ said DS McCormack.

‘I get the feeling that if someone came in here with a pastie from Greggs the alarms would go off.’

‘It’s a clean room, it has to be spotless.’

‘I couldn’t work here.’

‘Because you’re not spotless.’

‘Well, there’s no flies on me, but I’m far from spotless, Sylvia.’

The officers were directed to a seating area – hard blue plastic chairs – Valentine chose to stand.

‘Mike’ll be with you in a minute, he’s just printing off some of the data.’ The unsmiling twenty-something in the long white coat backed out of the door.

‘Where do they get them?’ said Valentine. ‘They seem like an altogether different species.’

‘They’re boffins, sir. It’s all those years of study that could have been spent out honing social skills.’

‘You mean while we were on the death knocks by day and the bevvy by night this lot were staring into test tubes and frothing beakers.’

‘And you called it your misspent youth, when really, it was all your societal assimilation.’

Valentine digested the remark, alighted on a choice memory from Ayr’s Bridge’s Bar but kept it to himself. ‘Makes sense. Schooling of sorts. I don’t know that my days of yore would stand me in good stead for a job in here, though.’

‘Horses for courses. We’re all toiling for the same thing now.’

‘Well, let’s just hope their microscopes have picked up something we’ve missed.’

Valentine consented to remove a blue plastic chair from its resting spot and sat opposite the DS. The little room was a slightly less sterile extension of the lab with, almost a concession to decoration, a health and safety notice behind Perspex on the wall.

The officers were growing restless as the door’s hinges wheezed and Mike Sullivan entered.

‘Bob, Sylvia, good to see you both.’

Valentine leaned out of his seat but was motioned back down. ‘No, stay where you are, you can have a look at this.’ Sullivan placed a blue folder on the table.

‘Don’t tell me you’ve typed a report already, Mike.’

‘Eh, no … that’s my notes from the lab. You’ll get the full report in due course, most likely after I’ve digested lunch and wee Kenny through there’s got to the word processor.’

‘Before we get to this, Mike, I was hoping to get the latest on what your team have made of the crime scene.’

‘Oh, yes. The blood smears and prints, that should be with you later today too. I’ll get Kenny to fire that over with the new notes.’ Sullivan put his hands in his pockets and, just as quickly, removed them. ‘Look, we’ve not found much that’s going to be of use to you, Bob.’

‘Go on anyway,’ Valentine looked at McCormack, ‘anything you say is an addition to what we have.’

‘OK, then. I can confirm the blood in those smears is definitely all from the victim, the samples match.’

‘Well I didn’t expect the perp to leave any claret at the scene, there was no indication of a struggle, didn’t even knock the sugar bowl over.’

‘Apart from the smear lines on the wall it all looked very clinical,’ said Sullivan.

‘And any prints from the smear lines?’

‘We only recovered one full set of prints. Female. And, Bob, I’m sorry but she’s not on record.’

‘Bloody lovely, that. And there was me getting my hopes up.’

‘We got fairly good enlargements from the wall plaster, that should be of some use to you.’

‘If we find their owner, you mean.’ Valentine leaned forward to pick up the folder and scan the contents; his hopeful gaze raced. ‘A serrated-edge knife.’

‘Well that matches, there were scraping wounds,’ said DS McCormack.

‘I’d sooner it matched a set from the kitchen, the missing one from a complete set, and that it had fingerprints on it.’

Sullivan spoke: ‘We’ve not been that lucky, Bob.’

‘I see that,’ he held up a page, ‘no trace evidence recovered.’

‘Nothing to link to the killer. Certainly not at this stage.’

Valentine shoved in the stray page and threw down the folder. ‘Meaning?’

‘I mean, it’s possible we could recover blood or tissue beneath the handle but we haven’t got that far yet, it’s a lengthy process and there’s still a few options before we get there.’

‘I’d need a killer in custody to make that stick, preferably with a confession unless their DNA’s on there too.’

Sullivan retrieved the folder from the table, patted down the pages and tucked it under his arm. His tone was breathy, carried on the back of a sigh. ‘That would be a long shot, all the samples I’ve seen taken from knives in water have been the result of deep blows into soft tissue, hard and repeated impacts. If we find anything now it’s likely to be the victim’s residue, not the one you’re looking for.’

Valentine looked forlorn. ‘There’s nothing here for me to go on then?’

‘I thought you had CCTV. Can’t it be enhanced to ID the person with the knife?’

‘I doubt it. I’ve more chance of our perp having taken a nick off the blade. Look, what are these options you’ve still to try?’

‘Nothing to get excited about, Bob, just enhancing already perceived markings. There’s some partial printing on the handle but if we can extract it then we’ve still got to match it to the database.’

‘Or the prints from the blood smears.’ DI Valentine rose and thanked Sullivan, they exchanged heavy handshakes. In the car park he was deep into his stride when DS McCormack called him.

‘Hang on, sir.’

‘Sorry, Sylvia, there’s no point hanging around. Let’s get back to the press conference, we might catch the tail end of it if we’re lucky.’

She stopped still. ‘I don’t think you should be so disheartened, we can still get something from the boffins, they’ve got more to do.’

‘Not in my experience.’ He opened the car door. ‘They either front up with plenty to help us right away or paper over their failings with promises of more to come.’

McCormack faced him over the car roof. ‘If we do have a hot-blooded and angry killer, then of course you’re right. They’ll likely be known to their victim, family or friend, and may not have a record with prints on file we can match. But what if it’s not?’

‘What are you getting at?’

‘I mean, what if it’s a cold-blooded and calculated murder and the killer has form?’

They got inside the car. ‘Very well, Sylvia, but you’ve forgotten one thing. The lab boys still need to find something
else
. And I’m not confident they will. The blade’s clean, it’s been in water for long enough to be even cleaner than when it was chucked away, the odds are well and truly against us.’

The A77 back to Ayr was quieter than usual, the occasional white van making itself conspicuous by speeding past the officers in their unmarked vehicle. Valentine knew there were some on the force who would pull over the offending driver – for their own entertainment more than anything – but the thought never appealed to him. Traffic offences were dealt with by an altogether different species from him, hardly police at all, merely civil servants who handed out fines and collected a wage for their bother. It wasn’t that he looked down on this branch of the force, a job was a job and they all had to be done, but his own undertakings couldn’t be compared. How could you weigh the loss of life, in brutal fashion, against a heavy foot on the accelerator pedal.

The DI found his thoughts focusing on the disappointment of the Glasgow lab visit. He was being foolish, placing such high expectations on forensic evidence. His job wasn’t like the super cops on the television who find a speck of dust and everything was pieced together by men in white coats. It took solid police work, hard yards. No one was going to come and solve the murder for him, it was entirely his responsibility.

Thinking of the murder, the violent incursion of a blade into the soft flesh of a living being brought home his own suffering. Not just the pain he felt but his family’s pain. His wife and daughters’ tears, his aged father’s fatigued and worn look he carried for months. The worry they all shared. The ultimate act of violence was murder but it didn’t stop with the corpse, its shockwaves echoed much farther afield.

The schoolgirl and her mother were still missing. Where had they gone? Would there be more victims cropping up soon? The girl was only fifteen; who was looking out for her? Valentine worried less about the brother, or should that be worried about a completely different set of issues. Darry Millar was army, a survivor. He hadn’t deserted his regiment without cause – it was a huge step to take and the consequences were great. Darry was a worry to the DI not because he feared for his safety but because he feared for the safety of others; the thought of more victims piling up increased with each tick of the clock.

‘We’ve almost drawn another blank,’ said Valentine.

‘It’s still at an early stage, sir.’

The officers avoided eye contact.

McCormack continued. ‘What I mean is, the initial findings have been minimal and I know you’d normally look out for your best leads in the first day or two but it’s not like we haven’t made any progress.’

‘It’s going to be uphill from here, Sylvia, we both know that.’

‘We’ve little or no forensic, that’s true, but not every case is solved quickly.’

Rain started to splatter on the windscreen, a grey smear was spreading from the Fenwick Moors. The DI turned on the wipers, they had little effect; he moved them up a notch. It was a grim picture, inside and out.

‘I worry about the Millar girl,’ he said.

‘Me too.’

‘She’s only fifteen, just a bairn really.’

‘She’s not that young, I remember what I was like at her age, lusting after Morten Harket.’

‘Lusting after what?’

‘Not what,
who
. He was in a band called A-ha.’

‘A-ha!’

‘Very funny. What I’m trying to say is, the image you have of girls Jade Millar’s age is probably heavily influenced by your daughters, little girls don’t stay little girls for very long.’

Valentine took in the remark, let the words work on his mind. He didn’t want to relate his fears for his daughters to the case, he’d done that once before and suffered for it. ‘Do you remember what we went through on the Janie Cooper case?’

‘Jade’s not going to be another Janie – it’s a completely different set of factors. She’ll turn up.’

‘Are you basing that on anything or is it just your women’s intuition?’

DS McCormack smacked the dash. ‘Just a wee bit sexist sounding, sir.’

Valentine promptly agreed. ‘I’m teasing you, Sylvia. As you know, I’m not the most intuitive of folk. If I was I would be catching onto some of these hints your psychic pal Crosbie seems to think are flooding my way.’

‘Did the picture he gave you start ringing any bells?’

‘No, nothing. I meant to have another look before I left the house this morning but it passed me by.’

‘Where is the picture now?’

‘On the fridge. I stuck it there when I was grabbing a late tea.’

‘Clare will think you’ve started to get all arty on her.’

Valentine laughed. ‘I doubt that very much. She knows me too well.’

The rest of the journey passed in silence, except for the volume of rain pelting along the bypass. The DI played out possible scenarios for Jade Millar’s whereabouts, stacked up the odds of Darry’s involvement in shielding her from sight. Nothing was sitting right with the current situation, it was as if someone had cried murder and the household fled.

On the way into King Street station Valentine began to speak again. ‘We need to go back to brass tacks, Sylvia.’

‘Meaning?’

‘We have to draw up detailed profiles, call in known associates.’

‘You make them sound like criminals.’

‘Well one of them is.’ He held open the door for the DS.

‘Not necessarily, sir. We could be looking for someone outside the family unit, someone we’ve missed.’

‘True. But they’ll be attached in some way. I want a thorough profile on all the known players: Jade, Darry, Sandra and our victim, Tulloch, too. What do we know about him, apart from the fact that he was in the army?’

‘Not much, yet. The team’s focus has been on collating the available facts from the scene.’

‘We need to spread out our approach now, before things get away from us. Somebody knows something about this family and why Tulloch ended up on a mortuary slab and it’s time for us to start rattling a few cages.’

‘OK. I mean, you’re the boss.’

At the foot of the stairs Valentine heard his name called.

‘Bob, you’re back to face the music, I see!’ It was Jim Prentice, still behind the front desk.

The DI turned around. ‘What are you on about, Jimbo?’

He leaned onto the desk, steadied himself on folded forearms. ‘Something up with your radio? And your phone as well?’

‘Have you been trying to get me?’

‘Oh, you could say that. Tried covering your arse for you as well but when Dino comes down here and stands over my shoulder whilst the dead signal comes back it gets a wee bit difficult.’