In Place of Death

by Craig Robertson

‘Sure? Okay. Well last night I got called to the Gray Dunn biscuit factory. Maybe half an hour after you’d taken your photographs and left. Someone had the sense to realize that the location fitted with my investigation. I had the pleasure of dealing with that little shit Denny Kelbie but he was the least of my worries. I had another urbexing death. At least number three, possibly number six. The pressure I’ve been under ratcheted up another notch. But even that wasn’t my biggest problem.’

  His stomach fell a couple of feet and he wasn’t sure he could swallow.

  ‘I managed to get a couple of hours’ sleep and got back in this morning to find the nightshift had called in all the CCTV we could get our hands on. The interesting images were of three men walking, separately and at different times, towards the factory in the hour or so before the services were called. The images weren’t great quality but one of them was recognizable. If you knew them very well.’

  He said nothing. He couldn’t speak.

  ‘I think it was the fleece that gave it away. I bought that for you last Christmas.’

  He found a small voice. ‘Rachel . . .’

  ‘Still, lots of those fleeces, I’m sure. And probably lots of people on urbexing websites that might call themselves Metinides. You know how it is though. I’m a stubborn cow. So I listened to the tape of the call that Toshney took, the man who phoned in to say that Remy Feeks was the Molendinar witness. The caller had tried to disguise his voice a bit. Couldn’t hide it from me though. Could you?’

  ‘No.’

  She took in a lungful of air and he recognized the sign. She was composing herself, or trying to, doing her best to keep her temper in check. It was barely working.

  ‘So you’ll understand then why I’d quite like to know just what exactly is going on. I’d like to know what the fuck you’ve done. And why. And I’d like to hear it right now or I’ll have to walk out of here for good and drive to the station to tell what I know.’

  His skin was tingling as if someone had set it on fire and he wasn’t sure his throat was connected to his lungs any longer. He said a prayer to a God he didn’t believe in and began.

  ‘I’ll tell you but I need to work out how to do it. I need to tell you this properly.’

  ‘Damn right you do. But first I’m going to ask you a question that you won’t need time to think how to answer. Did you kill Remy Feeks?’

  She saw his reaction. It was as if she’d slapped him or punched him in the stomach. His mouth bobbed open in shock and his eyes widened. He couldn’t believe she’d asked. It was written all over his face.

  ‘No. No, Rach. I didn’t.’

  She stared hard at him, looking deep into his eyes and searching for signs of a lie. She didn’t want to see any but nor would she be fooled into just seeing what she wanted. She needed the truth from him, whatever it was.

  How long had she known him? Six years. You had to know someone by that length of time. Know their nature and their mannerisms. He was holding her gaze, not trying to look away or dodge her.

  ‘I didn’t kill Remy Feeks, Rachel. I didn’t - couldn’t - kill anyone. You should know that.’

  She did. She was sure she did. Yet she needed more from him than that. Much more.

  ‘Tell me where you were last night.’

  He hesitated and she didn’t like that. She didn’t want him to think, she wanted him to talk. He didn’t get to decide how much of anything he told her. She had to make sure he really knew that.

  ‘Okay, wait. I’m not sure you’re getting this, Tony, and that’s where we’re going to have a problem. Because you only telling me half a story or some edited version is not going to work for me. And if it doesn’t work for me then you’d better start understanding that it’s not going to work for you either. Do you get what I’m saying, Tony?’

  ‘You want to know everything. I get that.’

  ‘No! I need to know everything. And if you and I are going to have any chance of getting through this then that’s what’s going to have to happen. You lie to me here or hold back on me then we are in big trouble. The kind of trouble that means I can’t do my job. The kind of trouble that means I could lose it. The kind of trouble that means we’re done or you go to jail. Do you get that?’

  He did. Suddenly and forcefully, she saw that he did. There was a flash of fear in his eyes and that scared her too. He nodded.

  ‘Okay, where were you last night?’

  ‘I was in the Gray Dunn factory. I had gone there to meet Remy Feeks. He’d messaged me to be there and I turned up. Someone else was there too though. I don’t know who he was but he murdered Remy. He also called the police and I ran.’

  She had done this for a long time and knew truth and lies when she heard them. Sometimes though, the truth was still bad news.

  ‘Why? Why were you there? What the hell did you think you were doing?’

  ‘What I had to!’

  He knew he probably had no right to shout back at her but he couldn’t help it. Her being right just made him more annoyed for being wrong. More than that, it was all falling on top of him. Euan, Remy, the guy that had attacked him in the factory. All of it.

  ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean? Don’t give me any cryptic shit. Tell me. Now!’

  ‘I wanted to find out what happened to Euan Hepburn. I owed it to him. Yes, I shouldn’t have stuck my nose in but I did. I’ll deal with the fall-out from that. I don’t want any of that fall-out to be me and you.’

  He paused, waiting for a response to that, but she didn’t indulge him beyond a hard stare.

  ‘I knew Euan better than I let you think. He was my friend. For a while, he was my best friend.’

  He saw the disappointment in her face and it hurt him. She wasn’t impressed and he knew it was about to get worse.

  ‘So you lied to me.’

  ‘It wasn’t so much a lie as not telling you everything.’

  ‘Sounds like a lie to me. How did you know him?’

  ‘I didn’t mean not to tell you. When you told me the dead guy was Euan . . . I panicked. And I was shocked. It brought lots of old memories back and I didn’t know what to tell you.’

  ‘But you knew you should have.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell me now.’

  So he did. And she didn’t like it.

  Knowing someone so well that you are on the point of committing to spending the rest of your life with them. Then finding out something. She wasn’t sure she could take many more surprises for one day and it wasn’t yet noon.

  ‘Why did you never tell me that you went urbexing?’

  ‘Because I’d stopped. There didn’t seem much point in telling you, seeing I didn’t do it any more. And it didn’t finish well. Euan and I fell out badly and I hated the idea of urbexing. Hated to think about it, far less talk about it. The longer we were together, the harder it was to mention it. It was much easier not to.’

  ‘And that’s it?’

  ‘That and guilt. It was my fault that Euan and I stopped talking but I put it all on him. I hate myself for that. If we hadn’t stopped then he might still be alive.’

  She was mad at him but loved him. She was mad at him but felt his pain.

  ‘You can’t know that.’

  ‘No. Not for sure. But it doesn’t stop me feeling it, thinking it. That’s why I had to do it. For him. To make up for what I’d done in letting him down.’

  He wasn’t getting away with this. Guilt and self-pity couldn’t be an excuse for fucking everything up.

  ‘You did it for you. You got right in the middle of a police investigation, my investigation, for yourself. Your guilty conscience isn’t a passport to playing at being a policeman. Or to screwing up everything between us.’

  ‘What if I did? What if I fucking did do it for me? Am I not allowed to do something for myself?’

  ‘Not if it messes with us. It can’t just be about you. Can’t you see that?’

  ‘I had to do it, Rachel. And you need to se
e that. If you can’t understand that I had to help my friend, that I had to get this out of my system before it fucked me up completely, then we are in trouble. Of course it’s not just about me but it is about me too.’

  They were nose to nose now, both shouting. They were standing on the same tightrope and if one fell then they both would.

  ‘I did this for us as much as for me. Look, I couldn’t live with knowing that he’d died and I could have been in a place to have stopped it if I hadn’t been such a prick to him. I had to put that right so that I could be right for us. And because it was the right thing to do.’

  ‘Right thing? You think you did the right thing? Christ, Tony, that’s crazy talk. I need to know you’re with me. That you understand what can and can’t happen. I need to be able to trust you.’

  ‘And you need to know me. Euan was murdered. From the minute the body was found in the Odeon, I knew both were connected and both were connected to urbexing. I know that world and I could use that. I could do something about it. What kind of friend, what kind of man would I be if I didn’t want to help make it right for him?’

  She wanted to slap him, shake him, grab him and send them both falling off the rope without a safety net.

  ‘You’d be my man if you just told me what you knew rather than buggering about on your own. You’d be on my side.’

  ‘Of course I’m on your side. Always am, always will be.’

  ‘Christ, Tony, you don’t know what you’re doing or what you’re talking about. You say Hepburn and Cairns are connected but we don’t know they’re related to each other. All I know is that they’re connected to urbexing.’

  ‘Yes we do. I do.’

  She stopped breathing for a second. It wasn’t just what he said, it was how he said it. Certainty.

  ‘What? How can you know that?’

  ‘I went into his flat.’

  ‘Hepburn’s flat? You broke in?’

  ‘Yes. Like I said, I had to.’

  ‘We searched the place. There was nothing to see.’

  ‘You didn’t look hard enough or in the right places. I knew what I was looking for.’

  She didn’t like the sound of that on any grounds. ‘Which was what?’

  ‘Euan’s second camera. He used two. I figured whoever killed him had one of them. I wanted to see the other and I found it. It had photographs taken at the old Odeon.

  She held her breath again and said nothing. She thought he could hear both their hearts beating over the silence in the room.

  ‘The Odeon? Photographs that he took at the Odeon?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You think Euan Hepburn . . .’ She was trying to take it all in. ‘Are you telling me he killed Jennifer Cairns?’

  ‘Well . . .’ He paused, not quite sure where to go next. ‘Maybe you should take a look at the photographs.’

  Chapter 51

  Winter opened his laptop and brought up a file of images that he’d copied from the memory card on Hepburn’s camera. He set the laptop on the table in front of them and began to slowly scroll through what was there. Her eyes were wide.

  He could see why the building had drawn Euan: a part of Glasgow history that was about to be demolished and a small window of time in which to do it. It was a perfect urbexing location, intriguing and forbidden and right in the heart of the city centre. The kind of site that would have had him itching to explore back in the day and the sort that Euan would have found irresistible.

  Winter worked his way through a series of images showing the inside of the cinema, nothing particularly exciting but enough to let her see that that was indeed where it was. The call to the discovery of Jennifer Cairns’ body was all too fresh and left no doubt that the narrow corridors, steeply banked rooms and wide staircases in front of them were the Renfield Street site.

  He moved on to what looked like an entry shot, a window that didn’t seem to have any merit but showed how Euan had got in.

  Then back further through the timeline. A couple of exterior shots. One highlighting what might have been the other side of the same window, a few feet above a red-metal exterior door that itself sat at the top of a fire escape, perhaps round the rear of the building. Winter himself would have looked at that as a likely entrance. Places with nothing in them weren’t as secure as they might otherwise have been.

  Back another frame. The same fire escape, the same door and unguarded window. But this time there was someone making their way down the stairs. Winter had checked the digital time stamp and knew this was just a few minutes before Euan had gone inside. He’d taken two photographs of this other person, one at the top of the stairs then another halfway down, then had entered the building once the mystery figure had left. The person walking down the stairs was wearing a dark hooded sweatshirt and jeans. The hood was up, covering their face.

  His face. It was a man. A second look had made him sure of it and Rachel no doubt thought the same now. The width of the shoulders, the size. Euan had photographed this man leaving via the fire escape then had gone inside by the same route.

  The photographs were all dated 10 September. Right on the money for the time they thought Jennifer Cairns was murdered.

  He watched her rub at her cheekbone as she processed what she was seeing. Her eyebrows were knotted in concentration and he wondered if she was debating the same things he had.

  ‘Okay,’ she said at last. ‘I’ll repeat my question while I try to make sense of this. Do you think Euan Hepburn killed Jennifer Cairns? And who is that in the hoodie?’

  ‘Well . . . first of all you’ll have noticed the date on these.’

  ‘Of course I have! It could be coincidental but let’s assume that it’s not. It’s when Jen Cairns was murdered.’

  ‘Yes. So there’s two potential scenarios here. Basically either that Euan was with this guy or he wasn’t. It could be that the other man was checking out a possible entry and then gave the thumbs-up and Euan went in too. If that’s what happened then yes, maybe he killed her or helped kill her.’

  ‘Or?’

  ‘Or Euan photographs him, just out of curiosity or his sense of mischief. Thinks, this guy’s been in there and I’ll be doing the same. Probably thinks nothing more of it. But maybe the other guy turned for one last look before he left and saw Euan go in, camera in hand?’

  She was nodding. ‘If he saw Euan go in then maybe he’d be worried about what he might find in there. And he’d be scared that Euan had almost certainly seen him.’

  ‘And then it would have been easy enough to track Euan down. Wait for him to come out maybe. Or place a message on the forum asking about the Odeon, drawing out anyone with even the slightest temptation to brag about being inside. Euan would have come running. He wouldn’t have been able to help himself.’

  ‘This mystery man befriends him, goes urbexing with him. Persuades him to explore the Molendinar Burn. Then cuts his throat.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She stared at the screen for a while longer. ‘Who’s the man in the hoodie?’

  Winter didn’t reply but brought up an image from the black building at Gartnavel, the photograph showing the pale blue room and the wooden-panelled walls. The one showing the photographer and his companion reflected on the glass doors. The other person wore a dark hooded sweatshirt and jeans.

  ‘That’s all you have?’

  ‘It’s all there was. One, probably accidental, photograph. Dated ten days after the ones taken at the Odeon. And a few days before Euan was killed.’

  ‘So why do you think Hepburn wasn’t involved in killing Cairns? Seeing as he seemed to be there.’

  ‘A few things. First, I just don’t think Euan was capable of something like that, murdering a woman. Second, it doesn’t add up that he’d hide and photograph while his pal checked out the entry. That’s not what he would do. Third, there is no sign of him knowing this other guy until after the Odeon. But also, most of all—’

  ‘The killing hasn’t stopped.’
/>   ‘Yes. I’m sure this guy’ - he jabbed a finger at the laptop screen - ‘killed Jennifer Cairns then killed Euan to cover it up.’

  She didn’t take her eyes off the screen, seeing the similarity between the hooded figure and the third man heading for the factory the night before. She finished off the picture. ‘And Remy Feeks stumbled across the body that hoodie guy thought would never be found. Then he - and you - went sticking his nose in. And Feeks got himself killed.’

  There was recrimination in her voice. Anger and fear too. It could as easily have been him. She just looked at him for an age. He curled up inside under her gaze and felt her unpicking him at the seams.

  ‘How long have you had these photographs?’

  ‘Just a few days.’

  ‘A few minutes was long enough. You should have given them to me.’

  ‘I couldn’t have told you how I got them. It would have put you in a bad position.’

  She couldn’t help but laugh. ‘And I’m not now? Have you any idea how much pressure I’m under and how many people are just dying for me to fall flat on my face? Forget that though, forget that I could lose my job and the case. Think about what this could do to you and me. Have you stopped to think about that at all?’

  ‘Yes! Of course I have.’

  ‘Good, because, God help me, I love you. If I had to choose between you and keeping my job, then, even though it probably makes me crazy, I’d choose you. But I’d really rather not have to choose. You understand that, right?’

  He was stunned. He honestly didn’t think she would choose anyone or anything over her job with the possible exception of her dad and his health. He nodded without being sure he really did understand.

  She put her hand against his injured side and pushed, hard enough for it to hurt. It showed on his face and she nodded in satisfaction.

  ‘Remember how much it hurts. People are getting killed, Tony. You can’t put yourself in the way of that.’

  ‘It’s because they’ve been killed that I’ve got to do this.’

  ‘No, no way. You’re not going all John Wayne on me. I’ve no time for a dead hero right now. I need you alive and well and I need you to remember what I’ve said. This is about us. Do not mess it up. Do not do something so stupid that we can’t get back from it.’