Witness the Dead

by Robertson, Craig

  After a quick drive through the ghost of a Sunday-morning city, he parked his Honda Civic on Caledonia Road in the shadows of the tower blocks and directly across from the Gothic gatehouse that formed the entrance to the Southern Necropolis. The imposing sandstone edifice, looking for all the world like the gateway to a medieval castle that was no longer there, was guarded by two of Scotland’s finest and a line of police tape.

  The gatehouse was dwarfed by its modern neighbours on the other side of the street, yet managed to retain its own sense of size and an odd, almost surreal, grandeur. The twenty-foot-high archway and the avenue of trees beyond it were the entry point to another world, one where the residents, two hundred and fifty thousand of them, were all dead.

  After taking his camera bag from the boot of the car, he crossed the road and flashed his ID at the cops. They nodded him on without a word and he crossed through the archway into the city that always sleeps.

  The cobbled roadway that ducked under the bowed arches of ancient yew trees was bordered by verdigris headstones, most nearly two hundred years old, each of them winking at Winter as he marched deeper into the bowels of the cemetery in search of the urgent voices he could hear within. It was another damp morning, and a rising mist clung mournfully to the crypts, lending the Southern Necropolis an eerie air that it didn’t need.

  The cemetery was huge – space enough to hold an endless array of football pitches, studded with teeth of headstone granite. Pathways were guarded by twisted arboreal sentries, their gnarled arms reaching down to touch gravestones choked with ivy or crumbling under years of neglect. It was death on a grand scale.

  Winter followed the distant voices and the scent of death that tickled his nose, winding his way down grey paths amid the green until he came upon a gaggle of crime-scene officers and cops wrapped up in bunny-suit white. They faced him as he advanced down the cobbled track, one or two with hands on hips, including a diminutive figure at their heart who rocked from side to side with impatience.

  Denny Kelbie stood little more than five foot five and probably weighed no more than ten stone when soaking wet. Yet he was a carnaptious wee sod who was continually growling at people around him like a Jack Russell with distemper. Sure enough, he barked at Winter as soon he arrived.

  ‘And where the hell have you been? It’s been twenty minutes since I called you, get her photographed and get the fuck out of my way.’

  Kelbie was bristling, as if looking for a fight. His eyes were daring Winter to respond, the corners of his mouth already curling back to deliver his next putdown. To his annoyance, Winter took no offence and offered no rebuttal. Instead, he walked straight past the DCI and stepped into the breach as the crowd parted to reveal the reason that they were all there.

  She was clinging onto the base of the monument, her head resting against the cool of the stone as if sleeping off the effects of a hard night before. If that was the case, then it was the hangover from hell.

  His camera came up to eye level instinctively and he popped off shot after shot, his fingers curling, adjusting, moulding, capturing.

  Her hair was dark and short, bobbed, framing her pretty young face. Early, maybe mid-twenties. She was tall and long, her bare legs stretched away from her, one knee tucked crookedly under the other, her single black high heel scraped with dirt and grass. Her mouth hung open, flycatcher wide, lipstick smudged. Her skin was ivory white, bloodless and cold, kissed by the early-morning chill. Her hands were clasped together in front of her, in prayer or contemplation. At first look, her eyes seemed captivated by the grassy verge at the statue’s feet, but a closer examination showed she was glassily uninterested.

  The right side of her head was broken and bloodied. Vivid stains of firebrick red, occasionally speckled with pale fragments of flesh, streaked down the statue’s base, showing where the two had come into violent and fatal contact with each other. His camera picked out passive blood drops on the foliage and a spray of impact spatter on the granite. It seemed her head had been battered again and again against the stone.

  The young woman’s Saturday-night clothes looked cheap and incongruous draped over her Sunday-morning deathbed. Her black cotton top plunged in a cowl towards her cleavage and left her shoulders uncovered and dappled in dew. Her short black skirt was round her waist.

  Winter made his lens retreat so that it took in the statue that the girl hung onto, saying a silent apology for revelling in the vivid counterpoint it offered. The weathered figure of a woman, her head veiled and bowed, looked down sadly, curiously, at the girl who lay dead at her feet. The statue’s hands were missing, the victims of time or vandals, and an evergreen climbing plant had made her right side its own. She made a poor excuse for a guardian angel.

  ‘The White Lady,’ a familiar voice shouted out from behind him, breaking his dark reverie. ‘Careful she doesn’t look at you or you’ll turn to stone.’

  ‘What the fuck are you doing here, Addison?’ DCI Denny Kelbie sounded as if the vein on his forehead was going to burst. ‘You get lost looking for Stewart Street?’

  Addison feigned puzzlement. Narey was at his shoulder, the merest hint of a smile directed at Winter. Both of them were already suited up in uniform white.

  ‘No, sir, I didn’t,’ Addison told Kelbie pleasantly. ‘Do you know the story about the White Lady? It’s your patch, I’m sure you must.’

  Kelbie glared back incredulously, eyes bulging. He began to answer but Addison continued, seemingly oblivious to the DCI’s indignant fury but, in fact, simply talking over it.

  ‘Two women from Langside Avenue, a carpet manufacturer’s wife and her housekeeper. They were coming back from church in the pouring rain. Chucking it down it was, so they had their umbrella up and crossed the road straight into the path of a tram. The wife, Magdalene, died before she got to hospital and the housekeeper, Mrs McNaughton, followed two weeks later. A terrible thing. Local legend has it that, when you walk past the White Lady, her head turns and follows you. But if you look her in the eye then you’ll turn to stone.’

  ‘Look, Addison . . .’ Kelbie’s fury was rising.

  ‘But you can guard against that by running round her three times, shouting “White Lady, White Lady”. Think you should maybe give it a go to be on the safe side, sir?’

  Kelbie, his cheeks flushing, marched right up to Addison until his head was, almost comically, level with the DI’s chin. Winter knew there was no love between the two men and had heard there had been a falling-out a few years before, when they were both detective sergeants. Addison had never talked to him about it but the word was that punches had been thrown – although, as they now faced each other, it struck Winter that Kelbie would have had to stand on a box to land one on Addison’s chin.

  ‘Are you forgetting who you’re talking to?’ Kelbie demanded.

  Addison made a poor attempt at innocence. ‘No, sir, not at all. What makes you think that? How is your wife, anyway?’

  ‘I asked you a question already, dickhead. What the fuck are you doing here?’

  ‘Deid body, sir. It’s my job.’

  ‘Not in New Gorbals, it isn’t. And how did you know about it?’ With that, Kelbie turned his head to fire a look at Winter, knowing full well that he and Addison were mates.

  ‘Not guilty,’ Winter protested. ‘I jumped in the car and headed straight here without calling anyone.’

  ‘Aye, and about that,’ Addison replied, without taking his eyes off Kelbie. ‘Why the hell didn’t you call me? You must have seen the connection to the other girl right away.’

  ‘Christ, I can’t win,’ Winter groaned. ‘Look, why don’t you two argue about it while I take some photographs.’

  ‘What connection?’ Kelbie interrupted, sneering. ‘You’ve been watching too much television, Addison. You have a murder vic and I have a murder vic. That’s it. Stewart Street isn’t hijacking this case.’

  Addison lowered his head and his voice. ‘You sure about that? Sir.’

  The
DI was looking down at his superior officer, nearly a foot below him and smiling, fully knowing the risk and reward of doing so. The reward was immediate. Kelbie’s lips curled back behind his incisors and he snarled again as both of them moved even closer until each could feel the other man’s breath on his face.

  ‘I’m going to do what I should have done years ago,’ Kelbie growled. Addison smiled again.

  ‘What are you two muppets frigging playing at?’ barked a voice from farther down the path. The wide, muscular frame of Detective Superintendent Alex Shirley was bearing down on them, his close-cropped, steel-grey hair worn like a halo in the early-morning mist. ‘Do I need to remind you there’s a dead girl at the foot of that statue?’

  Kelbie groaned at the sight of the Stewart Street Detective Super, known to all and sundry as the Temple. He glared again at Addison’s taunting face before turning to Shirley.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘This is our case now, Denny. I know you’re not going to like it but I’ve already spoken to your guvnor and it’s been sorted. Phone Billy Devlin and he’ll fill you in.’

  ‘What?’ The exclamation came not from Kelbie but his DS, a moaning, nasally, ginger named Ferry. ‘That’s not on.’

  ‘Too fucking right it isn’t,’ Kelbie howled. ‘It’s bang out of order.’

  It was now Shirley’s turn to go face to face with Kelbie, Addison grinning infuriatingly as he stepped away and wandered towards the girl’s body.

  ‘The decision has been made, Chief Inspector.’ Shirley’s voice hardened, expecting no further argument. He got one, anyway.

  ‘I’m not having this. I’m not having him take my fucking case.’

  ‘Sorry, Kelbie, but this is ours. And watch your language. I don’t know how much you know about the Necropolis killing but it’s too pat for it not to be linked. If it’s unrelated you can have it back.’

  ‘Sloppy Stewart Street seconds? Cheers. And it’s way too early to say this girl was killed by whoever did yours. Other part of the city, no necklace used to strangle her. No forensics in yet. Sir, I have to insist that we wait until—’

  ‘DCI Kelbie,’ Addison interrupted, his voice heavily spiced with something that Winter couldn’t identify, ‘you were saying?’

  Addison was crouched by the side of the girl’s body, his gloved hand holding the bottom of her black cotton top with its distinctive cowl. He was signalling Kelbie and the others closer, beckoning them with a single cocked finger. When they were within a few feet, Addison paused. Stony-faced, he eased the top up to expose the girl’s pale midriff.

  To his credit, if he took any satisfaction from seeing Kelbie’s jaw drop, Addison never showed it. Instead he carefully smoothed the girl’s top back into place and stood up to move aside to let Winter and his camera in instead.

  If there had been any merit to Kelbie’s argument that her murder was not related to the body found in another cemetery just two miles away, just twenty-four hours earlier, then that argument had been lost. The scrawled lipstick lettering on her torso made certain of it.

  Chapter 8

  SIN

  The same heavy, bludgeoned lettering in violent, waxy red. The wording identical.

  The only sounds in the cemetery were now coming from Winter’s camera. The clicks, whirrs and fizzes of buttons, motors and flashes punctuated a morbid silence that consumed the handful of people who stood behind him. He had a front-row view on the three letters that they were all staring at, so close that the word filled his vision and not just his viewfinder.

  So close that he saw the contours of the lipstick as it smeared her soft, pallid skin, tainting it in daubs of pigments, waxes and oils. So close that he could see the fury that it had been written in. So close that he could see the jagged edges where it met her flesh. So close that he could smell it.

  The girl had been branded by her killer. With just three letters, he had labelled her, disparaged her and declared her as one of his. With one word he had laid claim over her. She was his second victim and no one could doubt it.

  The picture he had taken barely a day before, the image on the girl’s stomach high on the hill above Glasgow Cathedral, filled Winter’s mind. Addison’s words at seeing the first one came back to him too, about how it was ‘psycho stuff’. Winter knew that this didn’t just make it doubly bad: this was much more than the sum of two parts.

  He stood up and away from the body, his movement the signal for the remaining cast to stir and sound to erupt. Alex Shirley swore under his breath before barking orders at the Stewart Street squad who had arrived in the cemetery: the crime-scene manager, Brem Dawson, steering his own team more quietly but no less feverishly; uniforms, detectives and forensics going where they were told and doing what they knew best.

  Narey stood to the side of the stage, her expression set and her eyes fixed on the girl. Winter tried to catch her eye but she was lost. In a rookie cop or someone more faint-hearted than Rachel, he might have taken it for weakness or sentimentality but he knew her better than that. She was angry.

  The Temple summoned Kelbie and his DS, Jim Ferry, plus Addison, Narey, Winter and Brem Dawson to him with energetic sweeps of his arm. They formed an impromptu huddle yards from the White Lady and the girl she’d so poorly guarded.

  ‘I want an information lockdown on what we’ve got here. Bare minimum goes out to the press. Girl’s body found, suspicious circumstances, family to be informed et cetera. Nothing, and I mean nothing, about that word. It does not leave this cemetery. I do not want one single person knowing that doesn’t have to. You all understand? DCI Kelbie, your officers that were here fall into the category of not having to know.’

  Kelbie chewed agitatedly on his lip before nodding thoughtfully.

  ‘It looks to me as if I’m back on this case, then, sir. I’d say that necessity dictates it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re right, sir. We obviously can’t take the chance on this wording getting into the press. We don’t want to give the killer the oxygen of publicity and we don’t want to run the risk of copycats. The best way to ensure that nothing leaks out is to keep us on the inside.’

  Shirley’s eyes widened and flashed in anger.

  ‘Are you saying that I can’t trust you to obey frigging orders and follow protocol if you aren’t on the case?’

  ‘Not at all, sir. Of course not. But it will be much easier for me to keep a lid on whatever rumours float through New Gorbals if the team there aren’t pissed off at having nothing to do with a case on our turf. Put me and Ferry on your team and everyone wins. I’m sure Superintendent Devlin will okay it.’

  ‘Rubbish!’ Addison broke in, his jaw jutting towards Kelbie. ‘You just tell your people to keep their mouths shut. Simple as that.’

  ‘He’s right, Derek,’ Shirley sighed, cutting off Kelbie’s reply. ‘DCI Kelbie and DS Ferry are now part of the investigation team. It’s the only practical decision.’

  ‘And, as DCI,’ Kelbie sneered in Addison’s direction, ‘I assume I will be senior investigating officer.’

  Shirley shook his head wearily. ‘You assume wrong, Kelbie. I’ll be SIO. I’m taking charge of this myself, I’m not risking you two idiots behaving like children. You will keep me fully informed of every development. Understood?’

  ‘Sir.’ Kelbie managed to puff and preen at the same time.

  ‘Good. Strategy meeting in Pitt Street at three this afternoon. Now get to work.’

  Kelbie allowed himself a final triumphant glance at Addison before taking his DS by the arm and turning away from the group. Addison opened his mouth to speak but Shirley pre-empted him.

  ‘Save your breath. I’d rather have Kelbie on the inside pissing out than on the outside pissing in. At least this way we can keep him under control. And for chrissake, Derek, remember that he is your superior officer, whether you like it or not.’

  ‘That will be not, sir.’

  ‘I don’t give a toss. What we have here is even bigger than you
r ego. Now go catch the bastard that did this. All of you.’

  Brem Dawson was the first to leave, corralling his forensic troops and ordering them to begin the painstaking task of examining the site for evidence and removing the girl’s body to the morgue. A clear path had already been made to allow access to the scene, but now every other inch had to be checked and rechecked.

  Winter fell into an uncomfortable threesome on the secured path to the crime scene, Narey and Addison at either side. It was uncomfortable for him at least: Narey refused to catch his eye and Addison was consumed with his fury at Denny Kelbie.

  ‘It’s my own fault,’ the DI cursed. ‘I could have kept the lettering back until we’d got that nasty wee shite and his plods off the premises.’

  ‘So why didn’t you?’ Narey demanded.

  ‘Because I wanted to rub his snotty nose in it, obviously.’

  The three of them stood and watched the forensics work, perversely fascinated by the sight of the bunny suits picking their way assiduously over the cemetery’s green and cobbled skin. Winter had his camera at his waist now but his trigger finger kept popping off discreet shots, knowing that a fair few would hit their unsuspecting targets.

  ‘How do you know so much about this place?’ Narey asked Addison. ‘All that White Lady stuff.’

  ‘My dad used to bring me here when I was a nipper. He was brought up just a couple of streets away. The place has always given me the creeps. You’ll be loving it, though, wee man. Right up your street.’

  Winter ignored the jibe.

  ‘You ever heard of the Gorbals Vampire?’ Addison continued.

  Winter shrugged but his curiosity was obvious.

  ‘It was long before our time. Nineteen fifty-four. The story went round among the local kids that there was a vampire on the loose and that he’d already kidnapped and eaten two boys. I know it sounds stupid but the whole city was gripped with the idea. The vampire was supposed to be seven feet tall and had iron teeth. You’d maybe think that would be enough to scare kids, but not if they came from the Gorbals.