‘Yes! He’s very dead. Been dead for ages. Not years but weeks or months. Look, I need to go.’
‘How did you find the body? You were in this tunnel?’
‘I was just . . . I was just exploring. You need to get him out of there.’
‘Please, stay on the line—’
He hung up. And ran like a coward.
He actually started the engine to drive home but he didn’t move. Driving home was the sensible thing but he didn’t do it. He wasn’t sure why but it was like when he made that first step into the tunnel or up a ladder or through a fence. No going back. He wanted to see what happened. Had to, really.
For the longest time, he thought they hadn’t believed him. They got a lot of hoax calls and this must have sounded like one. A body in the tunnel under Wishart Street. Right, sure thing. And he’d been down there for a walk. Sure. Of course they didn’t believe him.
What would he do? Go back down there and drag the body out himself? He didn’t have the balls for that. Maybe he could go down and take a photograph of it, send it to the cops and make them believe him. Maybe he’d just wait and see.
It must have been forty minutes before he saw the police car pull up. It was dark now and he saw the car’s lights as it turned and parked on the other side of the street near where the Molendinar was exposed. Two cops got out, their yellow hi-vis sparking under the street lights. Neither seemed in a hurry. One of them was pointing and shaking his head. Now they were both shaking their heads, not happy.
They pulled waders out of the boot of their car, heaved them on and made their way very reluctantly to the bank. The two cops, one tall and broad, the other smaller and most probably a woman, although he couldn’t be sure from this distance, disappeared from sight.
It was like they’d never been there apart from the sight of the car sitting lonely in the dark. He was tempted to go over, tell them about the tunnel and what they’d find if they went in there. He didn’t. He sat and fretted.
Every few minutes he turned the ignition key over once and watched the time flash about on the dashboard display. He was scared of doing it too often because the battery on his old heap wasn’t in the best of shape. He didn’t want to get stuck there: that would be too tough to explain. The time crawled by and he tried to work out in his head where they might be, how far down the tunnel they’d managed to get. The bigger cop was maybe too big to get all the way to where the body was without getting stuck. The lady cop would need to go on her own. That was a bit unfair.
There they were. Both of them climbing back over the fencing and onto the street again. They were moving a lot quicker than when they’d gone in and one of them was on the radio. They were both still shaking their heads though.
It was just ten more minutes before the road in front of the old Great Eastern was flooded with flashing lights, police cars, an ambulance and some unmarked cars. Two minutes after that, the area was taped off and people had started to gather to gawp. He still just sat there in the dark and shivered some more.
When there were maybe twenty to thirty people on his side of the tape, Remy slid quietly out of the car and joined them. He was just another rubbernecker. Not a witness. Not the person who found the body.
There was a lot of chat behind the tape. It’ll be a junkie. Bound to be, man. Remy knew it wasn’t a junkie. Some’dy try to drown themselves? In that wee burn, don’t be stupid. I heard some’dy was shot. No they weren’t. It’ll be gangsters, man. Yeah, maybe. Maybe.
Chapter 3
There’s a phenomenon in astronomy called light echo. When a rapidly brightening object such as a nova is reflected off interstellar dust, the echo is seen shortly after the initial flash. It produces an illusion, of an echo expanding faster than the speed of light.
Tony Winter didn’t know all that much about astronomy but after years of photographing dead bodies, he knew all about the differences between light and dark.
The echoes of the flash from his camera bounced from wall to wall in the close confines of the Molendinar Tunnel, reverberating from brick to opposing brick in a heartbeat. Even if he cared, he couldn’t tell which flash was a reflection of the other. All he knew was that they were lighting up death and giving its ugliness a sheen of undeserved beauty.
The tunnel was bathed in it, the bricks glowing golden and warm and making the corpse with the wide, empty eyes seem even colder by comparison. Winter was tight against the bricks now, feeling their rough edges against his skin and clothing as he fought to get enough room to capture the body from every angle he could without disturbing it. The head, what was left of it after the tunnel creatures had gnawed and nibbled, filled his viewfinder. Dead for a month or so, he guessed. A patchwork face of pale purples and washed-out reds on a canvas of dirty beige. Most definitely not a pretty sight but an irresistible one.
The gaping, festering wound to the throat had been a clean cut once. A sharp blade had let life rush out, just as surprise had escaped from the mouth and terror from the eyes. Whoever he was, he quite literally hadn’t seen this coming. There was something else about him though, something that Winter couldn’t quite . . .
‘What do you see, Tony?’
The shout from twenty yards or so behind him came from Rachel. Newly promoted Detective Inspector Rachel Narey. His significant other. His girlfriend. His partner. Rachel.
They both had new jobs, on paper at least. She’d become part of the West’s Major Investigation Team while his paymasters had been rebranded from the Scottish Police Services Authority to the snappier Forensic Services. The truth was that this brave new world was much the same as the bad old one. She investigated murders, he photographed them.
The difference for Narey was that killer-chasing was now more of a full-time occupation. The MIT was part of Police Scotland’s newly formed Serious Crime Division and they’d taken responsibility for all homicide inquiries. There would still be other crimes on the sheet but the murders were theirs.
There was an average of a murder a week in the West of Scotland, more than enough to keep a squad on its toes. If they got backed up then the new regime meant MITs could be brought in from the other two Scottish areas to help out with cases. Inevitably, those being shipped in were about as welcome as a clown at a funeral. This time though, it was as local as it could get. It belonged to Glasgow, dear old Glasgow toon.
Narey and Winter had been meant to be going out for dinner before the call came in. It was to have been a rare and, for him, encouraging venture out together as a couple. She still wanted their relationship to be kept from her colleagues in the force but she was less agitated about that than she had been. He wasn’t what you might call an expert on relationships, particularly his own, but he was sure they were in a good place. Well, they were but for the fact they were in a damp tunnel in the dark. No one could say he didn’t know how to show a girl a good time.
Her voice came to him again, sharper this time. ‘What do you see, Tony?’
‘Just what the uniforms said. Dead guy. Throat cut.’
‘Hurry up, will you?’ The more distant voice was the pathologist, Angie Morton. ‘I don’t want to be down here any longer than I need to be.’
It had been like the start of a very bad joke. A cop, a photographer and a pathologist go into a tunnel. The difference was everyone knew the punchline.
Normal procedure hadn’t been an option. There was no way a team of forensics could have gone in there and done their stuff. Instead it had been decided to send in a mini task force of talents instead. They were to do what they could and then get the body the hell out of there.
Winter had gone first, as was always the way. At any crime scene, photographs had to get done before anything else. It had to be recorded as was. Not as was after forensics had brushed, scraped, daubed and dusted. The photographer’s work was always primary but in Winter’s case it was also primal.
‘I’ll be as long as it takes.’
His voice rolled back down the Molendinar
towards where Narey and, a bit further back, Morton were waiting, obviously impatiently, to take their turn. He had to do his job first though and do it thoroughly. It was down to him to record the scene and take it back above ground so that it could be re-created by everyone that needed a bit of it.
‘Yes, well, don’t enjoy yourself too much. Get your snaps and get back out.’
Enjoy yourself. The jibe hurt more when it came from Rachel.
Winter’s liking for his work was well known and not particularly approved of by the cops. He had an enthusiasm for it that they and forensics regarded as unhealthy. Or else they just thought he was weird. Maybe he was but they didn’t get it because they simply didn’t understand.
Maybe he didn’t either.
He’d been trying to change, trying to be less . . . less like he was. Or at least be less obvious about it, he wasn’t sure which. He’d never shake it but he could handle it better.
How could you not find this interesting though? He had been buzzing with anticipation from the moment the tunnel walls had started to shrink in on them. Dead. Down here. Throat cut. It set off old feelings and memories that ran deep.
They’d tried to keep the darkness at bay with jokes as they’d walked, the kind of whistling through the graveyard stuff that was the default for those who had to see and do things that most would run a mile from. Through all the nonsense, Winter’s nose had twitched. He doubted the other two were so different though. You couldn’t, wouldn’t, get into the game if crazy stuff like this didn’t get your blood flowing. Winter’s arteries had a tsunami pumping through them.
The wide-eyed screamer in front of him was perhaps in his late twenties or early thirties. So difficult to tell beneath the decay. The damp denims that held his legs in place were soaked from the knees down and looked set to disintegrate. He wore a light blue cagoule over a white T-shirt and a navy-blue fleece, decent walking shoes on his feet, and a backpack that threatened to pitch him head first into the burn. His scalp, scarred with tracks and bites, was visible below dirty reddish-blond hair.
Winter stared at him, his mind itching with something he couldn’t place. Dots were joining somewhere deep inside him and he didn’t like it. He swore under his breath, telling himself to get on with it, and edged back to fire off a succession of closing shots. The poor bastard, sitting in his own River Styx waiting for a call that had already come. He doubted that there was a coin to be found in the man’s mouth, no payment for the ferryman.
‘Okay. I’m finished.’ He shuffled backwards down the tunnel, Narey and Morton doing the same until the space was large enough for all three to stand, crouching slightly, under the ceiling. The two women looked at him but he just nodded in return as he spoke behind the protective mask on his face. ‘Job done.’
Angie Morton blew out air anxiously. ‘How bad is it down there?’
‘The space or the body?’
‘The space. I’m hardly going to be bothered by the body. That’s my job.’
‘Pretty tight. I didn’t know you were claustro phobic.’
‘Neither did I till now. Okay, wish me luck.’
She ducked and crept forward warily, her back receding into the near distance until Winter and Narey were left standing alone. His hoarse whisper was tinged with annoyance.
‘Don’t enjoy myself too much?’
‘Sorry. It just came out. Old habits. You know I didn’t mean it, right?’
‘Right.’
She lifted her face mask from her mouth and did the same with his. Raising her head, she leaned forward to kiss him firmly on the lips. ‘Am I forgiven?’
‘You are. Are you not taking a chance on being seen or heard? Angie’s not far away.’
She shrugged. ‘I’ll live dangerously. Anyway, maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. You look hot without a mask.’
‘Careful, Rach. You almost sound like someone who could deal with this the way normal people would.’
‘Oops, my mask slipped.’ She eased the protective cover back down over her mouth. ‘You had your chance . . .’
He grinned at her, liking it. Claustrophobic tunnel or not, they were in a good place.
She smiled back with her eyes then snapped into professional mode. ‘What did you make of the victim?’
‘What’s left of him? Looks like he was set for a day on the hills. No sign of his hands having been tied. No obvious injuries at all except the cut throat.’
Narey shook her head slowly. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance it could have been suicide?’
He laughed. ‘Can’t see it. There’s no knife lying around for a start. And anyway, why would you? Come down here to kill yourself, I mean.’
Narey looked round. ‘Why would you come down here to kill? Or be killed? Or at all? I mean, look at this place.’
‘Wherever there’s places other people won’t go, there will always be people who want to go there.’
She narrowed her eyes. ‘Did you get that from an episode of The Twilight Zone? Or somewhere even darker? Like inside yourself?’
‘One of those. Getting this guy out is going to be a barrel of laughs. He’s ready for falling to pieces.’
‘So is Angie,’ she grinned wickedly behind her mask. ‘I’m betting this will be the shortest examination she’s ever done. We’re going to have to get a team down here and do an inch by inch of the tunnel once we’re finished. Ha. Here she comes now.’
Morton was lifting and wriggling her shoulders. ‘That freaked me out. It was the thought of getting stuck there even though I knew I wouldn’t. It’s beyond me why anyone would choose to come down here.’
Narey looked at Winter and raised her eyebrows. ‘Ask Tony. He’ll get all deep and meaningful about it. Anyway, my turn.’
With that she made her way further down the tunnel, the plastic covers over her shoes singing dolefully as they slipped through the shallow water of the burn.
‘Does nothing bother her?’ Morton was looking at Narey’s retreating figure with what seemed to be a mixture of respect and irritation.
Winter hesitated. Rachel had seemingly given him some hint that maybe their relationship didn’t have to be as secret as she’d previously demanded. At least he thought she had. Still, he knew better than to answer anything other than carefully. Not too defensively or protectively.
‘Plenty, I’m sure. But not enough to stop her doing her job. I guess she just shuts out what she needs to.’
‘Well I get that. You have to when you’re dealing with the dead. Unless you’re you and actively enjoy it.’
Winter groaned loudly. ‘Give me peace. Did you go through his clothing?’
Morton shook her head. ‘Too risky. I’ll do it once I can get him laid out in the morgue. We will be able to move him easily enough. Hopefully it won’t be in bits. Will you do it?’
‘What? That’s not exactly . . . You’re kidding me, right?’
‘There’s only room for one person down there and I’d really rather it wasn’t me. You’ve just got to—’
‘Yeah I know. We’ve been through it. You could ask Rachel.’
‘I’d rather not. Please.’
Winter breathed out hard. ‘Yeah, okay. Just don’t make any crack about how it’s going to be some kind of fun.’
‘I won’t. I know it’s not.’
Fun was the last thing it was going to be. Rigor had been and gone from the victim’s body, leaving it as limp as he was when his lights and his life had been turned off. There was still enough density in the bones to keep him upright but whether that would stand the test of movement they’d only know when they tried. When he tried.
The plan was to ease him back onto the light stretcher they’d brought with them, hopefully causing as little damage as possible, then float him back down the burn until the ceiling lifted again. Then they’d carry him the rest of the way. More like Baby Moses on bulrushes than a corpse ferried from the battlefield.
He looked up from his thoughts
to see Narey beginning to stand up from the crouch that had carried her back through the lower part of the tunnel.
‘Anything?’ Angie Morton asked her.
Narey shrugged. ‘Whoever he is, he was left here thinking that he’d never be found. No attempt to hide him. No point when the body’s already well out of sight. The killer must have thought this guy would be dust by the time anyone found him. If anyone ever did.’
‘Maybe that’s why he was here in the first place,’ Winter suggested.
‘Maybe,’ she agreed. ‘But came here or brought here? And why would you come to a place like this with someone who might do that to you?’
‘Do you have an answer?’
She shrugged again. ‘No but I did find this.’
Narey held up a blue-gloved hand and they strained to see what it was she was holding between finger and thumb. It was wooden and rectangular, the size of a matchbox but thinner with a metal ring on the end.
‘What is that, Rachel?’
She held the object slightly higher so they could see. ‘A key ring. With . . .’ She held it higher. ‘The letters RH on it.’
Chapter 4
Remy watched four men in white paper suits, the hoods over their heads, pitching a tent near the fence where the body would come back up. How the hell were they going to get it out of there without destroying evidence? Evidence. The word hit him over the head. It wasn’t just that the dead guy’s DNA was on him. His DNA, his clothing fibres or whatever, were all over the dead guy.
He wanted to step backwards like he did in the tunnel. But he couldn’t. There was a whole new lot of people in behind him. He was trapped just like the dead guy. It felt claustrophobic all of a sudden and he wanted to tell them all to get the hell out of his way. They just kept talking, leaning into him to get a better view, crowding him.
He could smell them, their sweat and their curiosity. Blood lust, that’s what they had. They wanted to see the body, wouldn’t leave till they did. He’d seen it though and could tell them it wasn’t nice, not nice at all. What’s going on? someone near him shouted to the cops. His some’dy been shot? Huv they?
In Place of Death Page 2