Snapshot

by Craig Robertson

  Rosaleen McKendrick’s mystery visitor. The person who was able to get in and copy his pictures. Whoever it was that could take snaps at the crime scene.

  It all seemed to add up to the C-word. The question was, which cop was the cunt in question? The answer was in the photographs, he was sure of it.

  He looked at Central Station first. The poor pictures he’d taken on his mobile when he made such an arse of himself. There was Campbell Baxter, Daz McKean, Harkins and Simpson, Paul Burke and Rachel. It was before the Nightjar team had been put together so it was just whoever had been on duty and got the call.

  His eyes lingered on the wound in Cairns Caldwell’s skull, the dark puncture that oozed dark life. The Nokia hadn’t done too bad a job, picking out the hole in his head that he had disappeared into. He had to stop looking though. There was no time for wallowing in that any more.

  Nightjar at Harthill. Alex Shirley. Jan McConachie. Addison. Monteith. Cat Fitzpatrick. The uniforms that he didn’t recognize. The bodies of Strathie and Sturrock. Pools of rioja and rufous.

  Glasgow Harbour. Addison. McConachie. Monteith. Two Soups. Uniforms. Gee Gee Adamson in rosso corso and his leather shroud. Andrew Haddow in a black pinstripe with soft hands and terrified eyes. The black Beamer.

  Dixon Blazes. Carnage. Forrest crucified to the front door with blood money stuffed in his mouth. The Temple. Jim Boyle and Sandy Murray. Paddy Swanson. Lucy Stark. It was a real party all right. The four stiffs were there too. Jake Arnold, Ginger George Faichney, Benjo Honeyman and Harvey Houston. McConachie and Addison lying shot, one dead, one dying.

  Smeaton Drive. The images behind those he’d seen on TV. Caroline Sanchez. Paul Burke. Rachel. The Temple. Iain Williamson. Baxter. A whole host of bunny suits and uniformed cops making up a one-ring circus.

  Blood and people. Death and crowds. Watchers and the watched. The guilty and the innocent and the guilty. Blood and snot and tears. Everything and nothing. Twelve souls separated from their mortal coils in one easy shuffle and two men who almost managed to dodge a bullet. He scanned every face, every expression, looking in the shadows of the eyes of the dead and the grimaces of the living. Looking for something, anything, aware he might only know what it was once he saw it.

  Then it struck him. It wasn’t about what he could see. It was about who he couldn’t.

  Winter had never read any Sherlock Holmes but he’d seen the films and he knew the lines. Well, two of them. ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’, of course was one. The other was, ‘Once you eliminate the impossible, then whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.’

  Eliminate. Take away. Deduct. He wasn’t a cop, he was certainly no detective but that didn’t mean he knew nothing.

  He looked through every photo again, moving them quickly from one hand to another, faster and faster. Harthill, Dixon, Central, Dixon again, Smeaton Drive. From the first to the last then back again. His brain was ahead of his eyes and his hands, jumping from photograph to photograph and to a conclusion.

  The most blindingly obvious thing of all was the one that had escaped him till then. The one person that wasn’t in the photos at Dixon Blazes and Smeaton Drive was the person behind the camera. He looked at them again and again and again, ticking off names on a list in his head. He wiped the whole lot from his brain and began going through them again from the beginning, coming up with the same name as before.

  He pushed past the desk, sending some of the photographs spinning, and back to his computer. He brought up his pictures file and clicked on the entire set that he’d downloaded from the industrial estate. Sixty-two photos in all. He calmed himself as much as he could and began working his way through them, frame by frame.

  A scene-setter as soon as he got out of the car. A group shot of Shirley, Rachel, McConachie, Boyle, Murray, three other CID and two other uniform. Open mouths and anxious glances. Distance shots of Graeme Forrest standing against the warehouse door. Close-ups of nails through his hands and feet. McConachie and Addison lying sprawled. Shock and fear on so many faces. Quickly past his frames of Addison to the butchery inside. Jake Arnold’s battered corpse with Sandy Murray standing behind him as if he’d never seen anything like it in his life. On past the bloodless ginger ghost, the bloody gutted stomach and finally the broken bones of the man in the hood. Alex Shirley and Colin Monteith stood by the last of the four, angry and spellbound.

  Finally he logged into the Return to Scene images from all the crime scenes and viewed the virtual copies of who was where and when. He was pretty sure but he needed to be certain and it suddenly struck him how he could be.

  CHAPTER 44

  When Danny had finished telling Winter that he would look after Narey and that he had convinced her to get off the streets and stay somewhere safe, he turned and looked her in the eye.

  ‘Happy?’ he asked her.

  ‘No, I’d hardly say that. I don’t like lying to him any more than you do. But I don’t see that we’ve got any choice.’

  ‘There’s always a choice, Rachel.’

  ‘Yes, and I’m choosing to do it this way.’

  ‘Tony thinks you are in serious danger and he thinks I’ve got you somewhere safe. At least one of these things isn’t true.’

  ‘Hopefully both of them.’ She tried a laugh but he didn’t buy it.

  ‘He says this Dark Angel guy knows where you live and that you’re on his hit list. You sure you want to be out there and give him the chance to shoot you?’

  ‘Danny, with all due respect I’m a cop, not a kid. I don’t need a babysitter and I don’t need the advice of the halfwit that happens to be my . . . boyfriend. Christ, I don’t think I’ve ever called him that before.’

  ‘So this Dark Angel, he thinks your name is in some drug dealer’s mobile phone?’

  ‘He knows it is.’

  ‘Uh huh.’

  ‘I’m not corrupt, Danny. Never have been.’

  He nodded.

  ‘I know you’re not. But I can see why it looks bad. That why Tony can’t take this shit to Alex Shirley or someone else in Strathclyde?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘No, I don’t know how he knows what he does but I’m sure that somehow Tony’s got a handle on what’s going on. For all that he’s a halfwit, I think he’s managed to work out the same thing as me.’

  ‘Which is what?’

  Narey held her head in her hands for a moment or two, suddenly feeling very tired.

  ‘The call to the Nightjar operation room from the Dark Angel came in at 6.04 but wasn’t picked up by the admin assistant until she started at 7.00. Every available CID officer was roused out of their beds and got there as fast as they could. By the time they got there all five men were dead but the bodies were still warm. You with me?’

  Danny nodded slowly.

  ‘If the call had been picked up right away,’ he said, ‘and the cops were there an hour sooner, then the Dark Angel might not have finished his work and wouldn’t have been in place to make the shots. Whoever placed the call knew the shift system and knew he had that hour to spare.’

  Narey smiled.

  ‘Tony always says you are the smartest person he ever knew.’

  ‘Yeah but he’s a halfwit so what the fuck does he know?’ he laughed. ‘You sure you shouldn’t stay somewhere safe?’

  ‘No chance,’ she replied. ‘Would you?’

  ‘No. Okay, so what are we going to do?’

  ‘We’re going out and we’re going now. This could be a long night.’

  CHAPTER 45

  Winter took all the photographs that had been spread across his desk, put them back into the drawer and stuck the prints that he’d made of the storage cupboard copies in beside them. On top of them he stuck a piece of paper with a single name written on it. Insurance. Just in case.

  The thought of locking the drawer crossed his mind but so did thoughts of stable doors and bolted horses. He should have done it before. Anyway, there was a good chance that
he’d need someone to be able to find what was in there.

  He logged off and shut down his PC, knowing that the tech guys could get in there no problem without his password if it came to it. Once inside, it would take them all of two minutes to find the explanatory file he’d left for them.

  He walked out of his own office and down the corridor to the stores where the various items of hardware that he needed were kept. During the day it was guarded over by the stores manager and nothing went in or out without his say so. Nights were different though and he had a swipe card that got him in if he was short of equipment and needed replacements in a hurry. Lenny Lewis, the stores Nazi, hated it when anyone did that but he was the least of Winter’s worries right now.

  The place was like a warehouse and held everything that the different departments within the SPSA needed. Lewis kept it like a maze so that only he knew where everything was in an effort to hold on to his silly little power base. It didn’t matter though; even if it took him a bit of time Winter would find what he needed.

  He went past evidence bags, batteries, bunny suits, nitrile gloves, casting kits, lifting tape, tweezers, swabs. He saw dictaphones, tents, ink-remover towels, UV inks, release sprays and feather dusters. It was an Aladdin’s Cave for forensics. At last, at the far end of the second aisle, he found what he was looking for. Motion sensor cameras.

  It maybe wasn’t the best plan in the world but it was all he had. He’d go back down into the bowels of the city and place one of these little beauties somewhere it couldn’t be seen. The sensor nodes would do the rest, triggering the camera and hopefully proving his theory. It needed to work because there was no plan B.

  He hadn’t used these things much because there was generally no need but he knew a thing or two about them. In the early days they had video camera tubes as sensors but now they were more likely to have a CCD, a charge-coupled device, or a CMOS, a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor, basically active pixel sensors. Those evening classes had come in useful after all.

  The office issue had a five gig CMOS sensor chip, a wireless USB receiver and it was small. Perfect, in fact. He could set it up so that it ran to the laptop and because it was wireless he could hide the lappy somewhere else away from the camera. It would even have sent to his mobile phone but for the fact that he’d be so far below street level.

  The beauty of it for Grahamston was that it had built-in infra red LED. It took colour pictures during the day – or outdoors – but at night or down in the gloom below Central Station it would photograph in black and white. But colour or mono made no difference to what he wanted. He only needed to see the fucker and to capture him. On film at least.

  He liberated the camera from the store. For something as expensive as that, he should have filled out forms and sent in a request but somehow he didn’t see either Lewis or Baxter okaying a midnight requisition demand. But the important thing was that he needed it to catch a bad man and that was what the job was all about. If Baxter understood that then he’d have said yes so it was all good. Lenny Lewis would explode but he could go screw himself.

  The temptation was to wait till morning before going down into Grahamston and the little common sense that Winter had left told him that attempting to find his way back to the cupboard where McKendrick’s body was stowed was going to be difficult enough with the little daylight that filtered through but nigh on impossible in the dark. The key was to get the first few turns right and he knew he probably needed the initial help from the glass walkways above.

  He was knackered too. It was a toss-up whether his legs or his eyes were heavier and his energy levels were as drained as his emotions. Adrenalin could only take you so far.

  But for all that, he wasn’t for waiting. Too much at stake, too much that could go so badly wrong if he did wait. Addison, Rachel, too many people that he owed to put things right. It was now or never.

  Anyway, night was the one time that Winter figured he could be fairly sure not to bump into the shooter if he went down there. Sure it was possible that he’d be there overnight but he doubted it. McKendrick needed to hide there but he didn’t. Quite the opposite, he needed to be seen, needed to be visible in his everyday world, above ground and above suspicion.

  He still had a job to do after all. He had shifts to fill and villains to catch. He was the cop chasing the killer and the killer chasing the cops. Winter was going to catch this bastard or . . .

  The thought stopped him in his tracks. Catch him or die trying. That was what he doing here, that was the gamble he was taking. But he wasn’t afraid of it. It was all about death to him so what could there be to fear?

  No, whatever the sense of it, he wasn’t for waiting. How would he sleep anyway with his head full of Rachel and worry? He wondered about calling her, hearing her voice but she would just demand that he abandoned his half-arsed plan and let the professionals do it. He’d tell her how they hadn’t exactly done a good job of it so far and that would start an argument. No, tempting as that was, he wouldn’t do it. That really could wait till morning.

  He put the stores back into darkness and slipped out again, back along the corridor and straight past his own office towards the exit. The guy on the desk looked up half-heartedly and gave him a disinterested nod.

  ‘See you later,’ he mumbled.

  Hopefully, Winter thought.

  It took him all of three minutes to drive from Pitt Street to where he parked outside Fat Boab’s on Dixon Street and the same again on foot to McDonald’s. Late as it was, there were still plenty of people around, having tumbled out of pubs or clubs, but they weren’t paying him much attention. CCTV cameras crossed his mind but if anything he’d be happy enough if they’d picked up on him.

  He didn’t even bother looking around when he got to the end of the lane, just walked straight through the bush-strewn entrance like a late-night drunk who was looking for a piss stop. It was virtually pitch-black down there with little in the way of either neon or moonlight finding their way down into the alley. As well as the camera, Winter had also liberated a torch from the stores but he was keeping that until he was below decks; there was no point in drawing unwanted attention.

  It meant he couldn’t see where he was going but it was narrow enough that there was nowhere to go but forward with a hand on either wall for balance. His feet crunched over glass and squelched on God knows what as thorns pulled at his trouser legs. He was going slower than he’d done the previous time when there had been some light in the passage, edging ahead a shuffled step at a time. The different pace and the darkness made it harder to judge how far he’d gone . . .

  Shit. His left foot suddenly dropped from beneath him, causing him to pitch forward and down, bumping off a succession of stairs, his right knee crashing down onto the edge of the metal sheet that now only half covered the opening and sending an almighty bang reverberating round the narrow passage and down into the depths below. He was left dangling, one leg a few feet below him, pain shooting through his kneecap. He eased himself back up onto his arse and nursed the torn scraps at his knee, feeling blood oozing through the skin. He couldn’t see it in the dark but he was guessing it seeped candy-apple red. His left ankle also throbbed and he might have sprained it. He cursed himself for being such an idiot; it wasn’t as if he hadn’t known the hole was there. The pain was bad enough but the noise that he’d made was even worse. He could definitely have done without that.

  Fuck it. If anyone was coming to investigate from Jamaica Street then it was better he wasn’t there when they had a nosey. He dropped down through the opening, ignoring the pain in both legs, and made his way down the wooden stairs into the tiny hallway below. He stood there for a bit, waiting for noises from above that meant someone was in the passage but there was nothing. Glasgow either didn’t hear or didn’t care.

  He could see next to nothing down there but with a bit of memory and groping around, he located the corridor that headed off to the right towards what he had thought was north. A
s soon as he was in the corridor, he switched on the torch, glad of the comfort it brought him, glad even to see the grubby asylum yellow walls and ceramic tiles. When the wash of neon appeared in front of him, oozing down from the walkways above, he hastily put the torch off again although who the fuck he thought was going to notice it staggering along Union Street was beyond him.

  He went through the first set of double doors, then the second and the third, becoming more confident that he knew where he was going. The two flights of stairs down rang more bells and so did the cold and the damp that attacked his nostrils. The thought occurred to him that there might be areas of this underground maze that mirrored each other and that one wrong turn could have taken him to somewhere that looked just the same but was hundreds of yards away. For all he knew, he was getting further away from McKendrick and the storage cupboard with every step he took.

  But his self-doubt washed away when the recess with the generator suddenly appeared at his left. There might have been more than one such space down there but the assembly of polystyrene and wood were exactly the same. He was on the right track after all. That realization made him emboldened and wary all in one go. His sgriob wasn’t tingling but the hairs on the back of his neck were disco dancing.

  This time the increase in cold and damp came as no surprise: he was getting deeper and darker into Grahamston or the Central foundations or whatever it was. The low brick walls, the boiler supports, the rough ground, the arches, the running water and the years of dust. He was getting close.

  He found himself looking out for the discarded Diet Coke bottle. That would be his landmark, the X that marked the spot. The narrow corridors had gone and it was all open and dark with unseen horizons. Close, very close. The bit he was in now looked familiar but then lots of it did in the dark. He switched the light from left to right, picking out what was around him as much as what was in front. There it was! Two empty litres of sugar-free soft drink with aspartame. He moved the torchlight to his left and sure enough it found the contours of the storage cupboard that he was looking for.