A Taste of Ashes (DI Bob Valentine Book 2) Read Online Free

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.’
    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