Summoning the Dead (DI Bob Valentine #3)(3)

‘Is that a medical opinion? If it is, I’d like to ask when you last had a live patient?’

DS McCormack had been scrutinising the organs the pathologist removed from the body when she interrupted the banter. ‘Can I ask why they’re so shrivelled?’

Wrighty looked up. He had his hands under the swollen, reddish ball of the stomach. ‘Probably the chemotherapy.’

‘He’d been treated for cancer?’ said the DS.

‘Yes. Though not recently. These organs are riddled with it. By the look of it, I’d say the tumour was in the stomach and the cancer spread.’ He called for an aluminium dish to place the latest removal in; the assistant took the dish away and laid it with the other organs.

‘Anything you can tell us is a help,’ said Valentine. ‘We’ve no dental, and he’s not on any DNA databases.’

‘I saw that on the telly the other night. They said he’d removed all the labels from his clothes too.’

‘Cut them out.’

‘What was all that about?’

‘It’s common enough for suicides, when they don’t want to be found. There was a French lad who went up the hills that had done the same a few years back. Took Northern an age to track him down.’

Wrighty paused and looked at the officers. ‘It’s a sad business. I take it that’s what all the CCTV footage was about as well?’

‘Every time he left the hotel the cameras in the foyer caught him with a carrier bag. The street cameras caught him putting it in the bin a few times. He was disposing of all his effects because he clearly didn’t want to be identified after death. He probably never dreamed the tide would carry him back in either, and now here we are poking about in his last days and hours in the hope of undoing all his hard work.’

The pathologist summoned his assistant and started to remove his gloves. ‘Well, I’m afraid I can be of little help to you. There’s nothing to suggest foul play here. I’d say entirely natural causes, likely a massive cardiac arrest as a result of the pressure the swim had put on his heart. He was a very sick man; his organs are riddled with cancer. He wouldn’t have lasted much longer even if he hadn’t gone for a dip on Ayr beach.’

Valentine allowed himself a half smile. ‘Well, that’s that then. Nothing to see here, Sylvia, write it up as natural causes.’

‘And what about his family, boss?’ she said.

‘What family? We don’t know he has any. We don’t even know his name.’

‘It just seems so, I don’t know, sad and mysterious.’

‘And that’s what it will remain, I’m afraid. We can’t solve them all; we wouldn’t have a station full of cold cases if we could.’

‘It seems so final.’

‘It is. Unless we get a call out of the blue, we don’t have the resources to scour the globe for potential relatives. Don’t be downhearted, Sylvia, it’s just the way it goes.’

‘We can’t win them all.’

‘Sometimes it’s a miracle that we win any of them at all, you know that.’

‘Yes, boss.’

The officers thanked the pathologist, shook hands and headed back to the car. Outside the morgue door Valentine removed his blue shoe-coverings without effort. ‘Would you believe it? I think my dyspepsia has gone. No, it definitely has. Completely vanished.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. Maybe your bad mood will have went with it. You’ve been like a bear with a sore head – I mean stomach – all week.’

The DI pointed the key at the car and opened the door as the blinkers flashed. Inside he turned to McCormack and said, ‘Don’t you think that’s odd?’

‘What?’

‘That I’ve lugged around bad guts, just as we’re investigating the Thin Man.’

‘Who we discover today had stomach cancer. It’s a coincidence of sorts. You’ll be telling me you’re getting the dreams again.’

Valentine turned to face McCormack. ‘Who said they’d stopped?’

‘But I asked you just the other day and you said . . .’

‘No, Sylvia, you asked if I had had any dreams about the case.’

‘And you said you hadn’t. Are you telling me that’s not the whole story now?’

The DI tapped the car keys on the rim of the steering wheel and looked away from McCormack. ‘I did see the Thin Man in one of those intense dreams.’

‘And what?’

‘Nothing. Well, nothing about the case.’

‘He clearly told you something.’

Valentine shifted to face the DS once again. ‘He was there, on Ayr beach, and he said he had a message for me.’

‘Go on.’

‘He said I had no need to worry because, when it was my time, my mother would be there to take my hand.’

‘That could have been just a dream, you know.’

‘I told you, they’re not like dreams at all.’

‘Maybe we should have another meeting with Hugh Crosbie.’

‘Who?’

‘The psychic, spiritualist bloke that Colin Baxter – the precognitive – put us in contact with before. He might have some insight.’

‘I’m not sure about that.’ Valentine put the key in the ignition and reached for his seat belt.