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

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.
    Valentine took in the scene, which hinted at surreal domesticity. On the table, beside a spreading pool of blood that threatened to spill over the edge, sat a bottle of HP sauce and a sugar bowl with odd pink splodges inside. There was a packet of Sugar Puffs spread on the floor and some of the contents had been stamped into the linoleum where the blood lay in tacky footprints.
    A chip pan on the cooker. A white plastic jug kettle. Fridge. Washing machine. And men in white suits raking the contents of cupboards, drawers and the kitchen counter for whatever they could find.
    ‘No weapon,’ said Valentine. It was a statement but everyone at once knew it was also a question that required an answer.
    A blue face mask was pulled down. ‘No sign of one, sir.’
    ‘What about the cutlery drawer, any knife sets? Steak knives maybe with one missing?’
    The mask