Snapshot

by Craig Robertson

  Apart from coke, he ran hookers and security firms, private taxi hires and nightclubs. It was grey money – the dirty dosh funded the clean cash and it funded more dirty stuff. The snow laundered money till it was as clean as the driven slush fund.

  Caldwell was untouchable of course; hard cash made sure of that. He supposedly earned deference from the lowlifes that worked for him by putting an axe through the head of a hard nut named Barney Reid who at one time fancied his chances of muscling him out of the way. That kind of thing tends to buy you respect.

  It was reckoned he cleared four million a year. Spent his life putting two fingers up to the cops and coke up the noses of everyone he could.

  Untouchable until someone put a bullet through his head. Twenty-nine years old and the brains educated at Glasgow’s finest were spilled over a pavement. Not so clever now.

  ‘What do you reckon is going to happen?’ Winter asked her.

  ‘Shit, I don’t know. You know the old Sean Connery film line about “they put one of yours in the hospital so you put one of theirs in the morgue”? Well, they’ve started off with the morgue so I hate to think where this is going to end up. One thing’s for sure, there’s no way his people are going to sit back and take it. Unless they did it but that seems unlikely.’

  ‘Why not? A man like that has as many dodgy friends as enemies, surely?’

  ‘For a start they never want to bite the hand that feeds them. And if they did then they would have a million opportunities to knife him, strangle him, push him off a high building. Shooting him from a mile away seems to be going to a lot of unnecessary trouble. Couldn’t rule it out but I’d say it wasn’t one of his.’

  ‘So who?’

  ‘Who knows? Could be anybody.’

  ‘And who cares?’

  ‘Never said that. I don’t care that he’s dead apart from the fact that all hell is going to break loose and we are going to have to deal with the shit. I do care about who killed him. So don’t start.’

  Her eyes flared at him and Winter liked it.

  ‘Oh, calm down. You know I’m winding you up. You shouldn’t be so easy.’

  ‘Oh, easy is it? I won’t be so easy then, see how you like that.’

  She ducked away from him with a giggle but he wrestled with her, pulling her back towards him. She fought for a bit and just as he was thinking how perfect her breasts were, her mouth fell onto his and her body disappeared from his view. All talk of murdered gangsters went out of sight. For half an hour at least. It was hard to worry about things like that when her dark hair tumbled over his face and her smooth curves locked onto his body. When her hands teased and taunted and worked their magic. When he rose to meet her and she smiled with satisfaction.

  It was only when she fell off him again, laughing and panting, her hair sticking to the side of her glistening face in a way that reminded him of the woman who stared at Caldwell’s dead body, that it started again. He knew it would because she couldn’t leave it at that. She could never leave it.

  ‘So just what were you doing at Central Station?’

  ‘Christ, Rachel. You know what I was doing.’

  ‘Okay. I know what you were doing. Let me rephrase. Why the fuck were you doing it?’

  ‘Is this where you get the rubber hoses out?’

  ‘Only if it turns you on. Come on, why?’

  ‘Again, you know why. We’ve been through it before.’

  ‘Fucksake, Tony. What the hell are you worried about? It’s me. I know most of it. Spill the rest.’

  He sighed. He really didn’t want to get into this. He didn’t want to get into it because he didn’t really understand it himself, so how could he expect her to.

  ‘It’s my thing. I like photographing accidents and the people. You know that.’

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t know you had it as bad as that.’

  The bitch was as persistent as she was sexy, he thought.

  ‘How did you get into this anyway?’

  Rachel had an annoying habit of asking questions she already knew the answer to. It was the price he paid for sleeping with a detective, even if one look at her was enough to know it was a price worth paying.

  She knew all about Enrique Metinides and the exhibition that Tony had attended in London back in 2003 at the Photographers’ Gallery, just two minutes from Oxford Circus. He’d gone with a blonde named Jodi, a London girl. He didn’t really have much interest in going to a gallery or an exhibition but she was keen and he was keen on her. As soon as he was in the gallery, though, Metinides’s photographs blew him away. They were like nothing he’d seen before and tapped right into something deep inside him.

  The images messed with his head, being truly brutal and yet truly beautiful at the same time. Car crashes. Floods. Suicides. Train crashes. Plane crashes. Fires. Murders. Accidents. Anything bad that resulted in death or destruction in Mexico City for over fifty years, Metinides was there and had photographed it for their red-top tabloids. Metinides started out taking photographs when he was just eleven. Chasing ambulances, running to fires and hanging out in front of the local cop shop waiting for criminals to be dragged in or out. The reporters and the other photo graphers called him El Niño, the kid, and the nickname stuck.

  His photographs were intimate and unsettling, poetic and haunting. The critics said that he found humanity in catastrophe.

  It was the faces that got to Winter, not the flames or the tangled wreckage. Nor was it just the faces of the dead but also those that had turned up to gawp at them. Metinides was the rubberneckers’ rubbernecker.

  It was Mexico City and much of it was decades ago but to Winter it could have as easily been Maryhill or Mount Vernon right here, right now. The photographs reached the dark places inside him and Narey knew that too, although neither of them had ever said it. She knew how Metinides had inspired him, she just didn’t quite know why. That was why she teased and tormented him to try and get to the bottom of it.

  ‘Don’t be shy about it,’ she mocked now. ‘It’s cool that you are so into something. The passion is a turn-on. Tell me more.’

  Part of him wanted to tell her to fuck off. Not in a bad way, just in a leave-it-alone kind of way. He reached an arm around, pulling her close and feeling her body yield to his touch.

  ‘A turn-on, is it? Come here then.’

  ‘I want to hear more first,’ she continued. ‘You’ve never really told me why you are so into it.’

  Yeah well, there’s a reason for that, he thought. Guilty secrets. They’d played this game too often though, and he wasn’t ready to offer up any more of himself just yet.

  ‘There’s something you haven’t told me about either,’ he tried, to change the subject.

  ‘Oh yes?’ She looked doubtful. ‘What’s that then?’

  ‘The hooker that was found murdered in Wellington Lane. What’s happening with her?’

  Rachel’s eyes narrowed and it was obvious she didn’t want to go there, which suited him just fine.

  ‘You’re right,’ she conceded. ‘I didn’t tell you about it.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘There’s not a lot happening,’ she admitted. ‘Our enquiries are continuing, as they say.’

  Her tone was changing, warning him off, but it wouldn’t have been the first time he’d taken a kicking to veer her away from places he didn’t want her to go.

  ‘What is this? The ten o’clock news? That’s all I get?’

  ‘We’re getting nowhere with it, okay? The poor girl was left dead with her knickers round her ankles. It’s been the shittiest part of an already shitty week and I don’t want to go over it all again.’

  She paused and Winter sensed a counter-punch coming.

  ‘I bet your creepy Mexican guy would have loved to have photographed her though . . .’

  ‘He wasn’t cree—’

  Damn her. She was grinning at him and he was annoyed at himself for falling for it.

  ‘Come on,’ she continued. ‘Photograph
ing dead bodies? What else would you call it?’

  ‘Ha bloody ha. Fuck off.’

  She giggled.

  ‘Come on, tell me about him, then. What was his thing? And why is his thing your thing?’

  No, he thought, enough was enough.

  ‘Forget it. Talking time is over. Playtime again.’

  He made a grab at her but she easily ducked away from him, twisting her body out of reach and asking again. ‘And why have you got it so bad?’

  He grabbed her, placing a hand over her mouth but she playfully bit it. He pulled her on top of him, happy to wrestle rather than talk any more. Just as he was thinking that they were heading for round two, her mobile rang and she rolled off him to answer it, laughing as she picked up the receiver.

  ‘Hello? Oh, hi. What’s . . .’

  The smile froze on her face.

  ‘Shit . . . No way . . . Fuck. What happened? Uh huh . . . Right, okay. Soon as I can.’

  The look on her face as she hung up left Winter in no doubt that there wouldn’t be a second round. She sat looking vaguely at the wardrobe but he knew she was looking much farther away.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘That was Addison. Malky Quinn has been shot. Through the head. By a sniper.’

  CHAPTER 8

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘That’s pretty much what I said,’ Narey intoned, her eyes briefly closed. ‘Right, I’ve got to go in. Happened half an hour ago. Quinn stepped out of his car to go into his converted ranch thing in Kinnear Road and bang. Place is going fucking mental.’

  ‘Retaliation for Caldwell?’

  ‘Maybe. Seems the obvious thing. Need to go see what they are saying. Love you and leave you.’

  The L word hung awkwardly between them for a second until she pulled her top over her head and poked her tongue out at him.

  ‘Figure of speech. You be here when I get back?’

  ‘I was thinking I could come with you.’

  ‘Aye right. How are we going to explain that one, Einstein? You show up without Addy giving you a call. What you been doing, listening in to police scanners? That’s an offence, you know.’

  ‘Well . . .’ The thought that she could actually tell people that they had a relationship clearly wasn’t obvious to her at that moment. And maybe it wasn’t the time to discuss it.

  ‘Well, let me know what’s going on. Maybe see you when you get back, depends how long you will be.’

  Rachel planted a quick kiss on his lips, at the same time grabbing at his cock under the covers. With a fleeting grin she stood up and left, closing the door behind her.

  Cairns Caldwell. Malky Quinn. Either somebody had it in for the bad boys or they had it in for each other.

  The man they called the Mighty Quinn was an old school thug. Not renowned for his brains but well known for his ruthlessness, he and his family ruled the east end the hard way, breaking heads and legs as he saw fit. They had the bulk of the city’s heroin trade locked up through links to Turkish gangs, a dirty business that didn’t bother them for a second. What did it matter to them if anyone was stupid enough to inject that shit into their veins?

  Now Malky was lying somewhere in Kinnear Road in the east end, a hole in his head and blood on the pavement. Some lucky bastard would be photographing it, Winter thought. Probably some scene examiner who wouldn’t value it, wouldn’t see it for what it was. Would just be thinking evidence and court, dispassion and objectivity.

  He wanted to follow Rachel. Sneak out of the window like a teenager and head for Kinnear Road. No point though. He knew he’d already shat on his copybook enough for one day and, anyway, it was pitch black outside. The only way he’d get any worthwhile picture was to be standing right over the body. And Two Soups or whoever was on duty was never going to allow that.

  Pitch black. If a sniper took out Quinn in the dark then it was one serious motherfucker. If he took him out from the same kind of distance as they reckoned the shooter took Caldwell from then it was a professional motherfucker.

  Winter turned on both the television and the radio in search of news. Nothing.

  Cairns Caldwell and Malky Quinn. Even if this stopped right now it was enough to have the gutterbelly shitting golf balls for months. So much about it said it wouldn’t stop. Two of the biggest, hardest, most untouchable villains had been nailed in the most vengeful, macho-ridden city on the planet. It never stops there. There is always another one who wants his name above the door. An eye for an eye, a life for a life, somebody must die for the death of my strife. Someone else was going to be killed, he’d lay money on it.

  Never mind golf balls, there would be people all over Glasgow who would be shitting bowling balls at the thought of what might happen next.

  For an hour and a half he flipped between TV and radio, trying to find any mention of the shooting. It came in a trickle: police incident, reports of a shot being fired, man seriously injured. The media was way behind. His itch had subsided a bit, knowing that he’d missed the photograph and that there was nothing he could do about it, but he was still keen to know what had happened and why. Winter knew he’d get his balls in his hands if he phoned Rachel. Addison and the other cops whose names were in his phone were out too because he couldn’t explain or justify calling them. There was someone else who might know and could certainly find out though. He reached for his mobile and waited till a gravelly voice growled hello.

  ‘Hi, Uncle Danny? It’s Tony.’

  ‘Jeezus, is it Christmas already?’

  ‘Aye, I know. Sorry it’s been so long since I called.’

  ‘Aye, that’s what you always say. Don’t worry about it, son. How you doing anyway? Still photographing the ones that can’t run away?’

  ‘It’s the only way I can get them to sit still, Dan.’

  ‘Very good. Okay, enough of the small talk. What do you want?’

  Winter laughed quietly.

  ‘That obvious, huh?’

  ‘Christ, son. It’s after two in the morning, you haven’t called for weeks and you sound like you’ve seen the ghost of Jinky Johnstone wearing a Rangers top. Aye, it’s that obvious.’

  Danny Neilson was ex-police. He was in the job for thirty years, man and boy, and could never quite stop being a cop. He never rose higher than a detective sergeant even though he had twice the brains of most of the men above him. Most of his career he was happy just catching crooks even though Auntie Janette was always on at him to go for a promotion. By the time she had finally convinced him of the idea, he was too old. Suited him fine though, he always said he was born a sergeant and would die one.

  These days he worked even though he didn’t have to. His police pension was better than a decent wage and Danny was kicking on to sixty-five but he couldn’t or wouldn’t sit on his arse and collect the money. He worked as a superintendent on the taxi rank at Central Station, keeping drunken wasters from jumping queues and battering lumps out of each other. Winter had given up asking Danny why he wanted to stand outside in the rain dealing with the arseholes of the morning hours. Too young to watch Coronation Street and drink milk was the only answer Uncle Danny ever gave him but they both knew it wasn’t the truth.

  ‘You’re right, Dan. There is something. I wanted to know if you’d heard about the shooting in the east end. Malky Quinn.’

  There was a slight pause and then a deadpan answer.

  ‘I heard.’

  ‘It’s not on the news. Not his name, anyway, so how did you . . .’

  ‘Fucksake, Tony. If you wanted to know what was on the news then you’d have put the fucking telly on rather than phoned me.’

  ‘Aye. True.’

  ‘So ask me what you want to ask for and stop dancing with me. I’m tired and you know I’ve no time for that shite.’

  Big Danny Neilson wasn’t much for small talk or ceremony and always made a point of calling a spade a shovel.

  ‘What have you heard, Dan? Has one of Caldwell’s boys shot Malky Quinn in retaliation for shoot
ing their gaffer?’

  There was a long sigh on the other end of the phone before Neilson’s gruff tones responded.

  ‘Not from what I’m hearing, no. It could be. You couldn’t rule anything out with these cunts but it’s not looking that way right now.’

  ‘How come? It’s surely the most obvious thing?’

  ‘That’s right, Anthony. And how many times have I told you not to jump to the obvious conclusion?’

  ‘More than once. What are they saying, then?’

  ‘Mate of mine says that they are spooked by how similar it is to the Caldwell shooting. If Caldwell’s guys wanted to take out Quinn then there’s a hundred, a thousand ways they could have done it but this was near as dammit the same.’

  ‘Same guy, same gun?’

  ‘Fucksake, Tony. Did we not just have the jumping to conclusions conversation?’

  Winter ignored him and ploughed on regardless.

  ‘So what have we got then, Uncle Danny? Claim jumpers? Someone wanting to huckle these guys and move in on their operations?’

  ‘Christ. Do you know how long I was out in the pishing rain tonight, son? Do you know how tired my bones are? I finally get in and think I can get on the outside of a glass of Jura and listen to a bit of Dean Martin but instead I get one half of the Hardy Boys on the phone asking me all kinds of shite. How the fuck do I know, Tony? Eh? How the fuck do I know?’

  Because you always know more than you are letting on, Uncle Danny, Winter thought but didn’t say. Instead he pushed his luck a bit further.

  ‘Alex Kirkwood? Think he might be behind it? I know he’s banged up but these guys can pull any strings they want from the nick. Maybe he just wants a bigger cake to cut from when he gets out.’